The Unspeakable

by Meghan Daum

  When I try to piece together exactly how this happened, my best guess is that I’d started off in the passenger seat (apparently we’d achieved the level of intimacy signified by one person feeling comfortable driving the other’s car) but reached behind me to find a dropped item and, not locating it, actually crawled into the backseat. By the time I found whatever it was (my cell phone, if I had to bet on it), we had exited the airport and were merging onto the freeway. And though I should have simply climbed back into the passenger seat without announcement I instead asked for permission (in a “will it distract you if I step over the console now?” kind of way), and Desk Chair told me it wasn’t safe to move around in a speeding car. When I asked if he meant that I should remain in the backseat for the rest of the forty-minute drive he said something to the effect of “I guess so.” And so I rode in my own backseat going east on the 105 freeway and north on the 110 past the L.A. Convention Center and the luminous, blocky skyscrapers of downtown. I rode in my own backseat as we headed northwest toward Hollywood on the 101 freeway and then exited onto the dark, scabrous streets of the then still-a-little-funky, still-gentrifying neighborhood where we both lived because we were single and “creative” and this was where single, creative people lived if they wanted to surround themselves with—and potentially date and possibly marry—like-minded folk.

  Desk Chair and I parted ways shortly after that. He found a woman who liked circles, married her, and had a child. I took a year off from dating after that, during which time I cut my hair even shorter than it had been previously and proceeded to look a great deal like a lesbian even though I had little interest in actually being one. When I grew tired of that racket I slowly began growing my hair out, holding back my shaggy bangs with little bobby pins1 and, almost overnight, attracting men again. In relatively quick succession, I dated a lawyer, a film producer, a medical resident, and a couple writers. Then I met my husband. In less than a week, I knew he was the person I was supposed to marry. I knew this because of a certain (somewhat tasteless, though delicious to me) joke he cracked during our very first conversation and the way his apartment was taken up mostly by surfboards and old copies of The New York Review of Books. I also knew that I wouldn’t have wanted to meet him even a day earlier than I did. I wouldn’t have been ready. I was at that time thirty-six years old.

  You might be thinking that I had a severe case of arrested development. Thirty-six (my husband was a tender thirty-five) is a fairly geriatric age at which to decide you’re mature enough to settle down (and in fact we didn’t feel mature enough to actually get engaged until more than three years later, at which point we had a bittersweet incentive to not drag our feet, because my mother was dying). You might also be thinking, based on my rather astonishing lack of agency in the relationship with Desk Chair, that I was relatively inexperienced with men at the time.

  But here was the thing about my dating life. I spent most of it with absolutely no eye toward making a permanent commitment. What I was in it for, what I was about, was the fieldwork aspect. I wasn’t looking to be delivered from the lonely haze of bachelorettehood into the smug embrace of coupledom. I was looking for experiences, for characters, for people who paid other people to chant and beat drums while they lay on massage tables wearing flashing LED sunglasses. I regarded my love interests less as potential life mates than as characters in a movie I happened to have wandered into. I suppose that I had some version of a physical type (Roman nose, Eastern European descent, a predilection toward plaid flannel shirts) but for every man who checked these boxes there were others who veered off the page entirely. I dated an airline pilot (conservative Catholic, ex-military, resident of Florida) who said “mind-bothering” when he actually meant “mind-boggling.” I lived for nearly three years with a wannabe mountain man who subsisted on what he earned from odd jobs and did not have a bank account. I also, despite the seemingly large number of men I’ve referred to, spent a whole lot of time not dating anyone at all—more time, I daresay, than most of the other single people I knew. (A cast of characters this plentiful is less a function of being promiscuous than of not meeting your future spouse until you are thirty-six.)

  These experiences brought about many headaches and arguments and lectures from friends—“But he’s so limited!” “You can’t bring him anywhere!” “He believes the earth is three thousand years old!” My friends were often right. Some of these relationships were slightly ridiculous, but I am certain that they made me a more interesting person than I would have been if I’d limited my dating pool to more conventionally suitable men. As for the conventionally suitable men I did spend time with, I’ve peered at enough of their lives through the rosy portal of Facebook to get a sense of what could have been had I not dispatched them (or, just as often, they dispatched me) over some real or imagined evidence of incompatibility. And though I’ve admired their beaming children and their comely, accomplished wives and the stainless-steel appliances and apron-front sinks that make quiet, satisfied appearances in the backgrounds of photos snapped spontaneously at the family breakfast table, I’ve never come away feeling anything other than happiness for their apparent happiness.

  The way I’m wired, I was never going to settle down before I did. If I had met my soul mate at twenty-four or even twenty-nine or thirty-three, I would have left him before things got too serious. I had boxes to check that I believed were bigger than any relationship. I wanted to get far enough in New York City to live without roommates. I wanted to leave New York City and move someplace very unlikely. I wanted to wring as many experiences as I could out of the unlikely place and then move to Los Angeles, where I would buy a house by myself and live in it with my dog and no one else. Upon reaching this point, I reasoned, I would be exponentially more fascinating than I’d been at any of the earlier junctures and therefore able to attract a similarly fascinating person. To have stopped at any point along the way would have been to quit the race too soon. It would have caused me to be an inferior person living an inferior life. This is what I tell myself, anyway. This is what I tell my husband when he says he wishes we had met earlier. This is an integral part of my personal mythology and I’m sticking to it.

  * * *

  A few years ago I was asked to take part in a panel discussion on the subject of marriage. The central questions had to do with what might be considered the best time to get married and whether nuptial-delaying heathens like myself represent a trend that may be good for us as individuals but ultimately Bad For America. The panel was being organized by the director of an outfit called the National Marriage Project, a research initiative designed to study marriage and its relationship to society and public policy (and then advocate for it strongly). The Project was trying to promote a new report called “Knot Yet: The Benefits and Costs of Delayed Marriage in America” and, as the director put it, to “start a dialogue.” The participants in this dialogue would be two of the report’s authors, one of whom directed the National Marriage Project itself, and two woman writers from L.A., one of whom was me. Each speaker would present ten to fifteen minutes of remarks before the panel discussion began. As the report’s authors were both family men with religious leanings and other red state sensibilities (not that they announced themselves as such), my job was to comment on their findings and represent the “female point of view” or the “urban point of view” or, at the very least, “another perspective.” For this I would be paid a generous and un-turn-down-able sum of $2,500.

  The perspective on which I was supposed to provide some kind of alternative was the theory posited by the Marriage Project that “delayed marriage” (they cited the statistic that the average age of first marriage is twenty-seven for women and after twenty-nine for men) was beneficial to the educated middle and upper middle classes, especially women in these classes, but had deleterious effects on the non-college-educated population. The reason was that less-educated people (defined as those with only high school and some college and referred to in the report a
s “Middle Americans”) were skipping the marriage step but going ahead and having children anyway. The report identified two models of marriage. There was the “capstone” model, which sees marriage as a kind of reward for accomplishing any number of personal and professional goals, or, as they put it, “having your ducks in a row.” And then there was the “cornerstone” model, which sees marriage as the foundation and starting point from which you build a life.

  The capstone model is fine, the research suggested, if you’re talking about people who are going to follow through and actually get married when they finish law school or get that Ph.D. The problem is that only a third of the nation’s population has a four-year college degree. The other two thirds might aspire to a capstone marriage, but never quite get around to it because they can’t rise out of their low-wage jobs. They often go ahead and have children, though.

  The National Marriage Project thought this was a very bad thing indeed. The “Knot Yet” report cited statistics showing that unmarried people drank more alcohol and reported being less satisfied with their lives than married people. It brought up the usual findings about children born out of wedlock experiencing more emotional instability and more problems in school than kids with married parents. It did not devote even one syllable to the subject of gay marriage.

  The other writer from L.A., who I won’t name even though you could figure out who she is on Google in two seconds, was the author of a bestselling book enjoining marriage-seeking women to set aside their pickiness and “settle” for men who don’t necessarily meet every item on their towering list of requirements. The basis of her book had been a long article she’d published in a major national magazine. She’d taken some flak for her article, not least of all from me in my newspaper column. Admittedly, there were probably more pressing topics in the news that week for me to tackle and admittedly there was nothing inherently offensive about the author’s premise in and of itself, which is that some women overlook men who’d make good husbands and fathers simply because those men aren’t rich, tall, or graduates of the Ivy League. Still, with sentences on the order of “Every woman I know—no matter how successful and ambitious, how financially and emotionally secure—feels panic, occasionally coupled with desperation, if she hits thirty and finds herself unmarried” and “All I can say is, if you say you’re not worried, either you’re in denial or you’re lying,” I could no more have kept myself from smacking her down than I could have kept myself from squeezing an enormous, ripe pimple on my chin.

  I’d actually known the author for years. I put us in the category of “friendly acquaintances.” Or at least we’d been friendly until I took her to task in my column for setting age thirty as a sell-by date and thereby assuming that all women, no matter how successful and ambitious and secure, want marriage and children above all else. In retrospect, I see that my response was a bit off point. The article wasn’t talking about people like me, who, at age thirty, happily embarked on the “adventure” of living in a lopsided, shacklike farmhouse in the rural Midwest with a guy who was about as marriageable as an electric fence. It was talking about normal people who wanted normal things. It was talking about people who get their adventuring out of the way in college or even in high school by partying so hard that by their early twenties they just want to sit on the couch watching TV with the same person for the next sixty years. It was talking about the fear and heartbreak of not finding that person as time goes on and about the realities of biological clocks. Unsurprisingly, the article was eventually expanded into the aforementioned bestselling book and the author became a therapist and highly paid speaker and life coach.

  You could see why the author was a highly paid speaker; she was a damn good one. I knew this from watching her on The Today Show and hearing her on National Public Radio debating, for instance, another lady writer who’d published a long article about her work-life balance in the same magazine and also scored a massive book deal from it. So good a speaker was the bestselling author and so irritating and spurious was the “Knot Yet” report that I spent many, many hours preparing my presentation. I wanted to earn my $2,500 in good faith and I also wanted to make a meaningful connection with the audience, which I’d been told would be a large crowd of varying ages and political and religious persuasions from Los Angeles’s well-heeled west side.

  * * *

  It is typical of my work pattern to devote the most time and effort to projects that have the smallest audiences and pay the least money. This is especially true of public-speaking situations, where my fear of walking up to a podium with less than three times the amount of material I need to fill the allotted time outweighs my commonsense knowledge that I’m hardly being paid anything and that very few people will show up. I once spent months preparing a lecture on “journaling” that I was asked to give as part of a wellness outreach program run by the general hospital in Lincoln, Nebraska. I pored over the diaries of Simone de Beauvoir and Virginia Woolf and Lewis and Clark. I mounted a big argument for “the journal as the fieldwork of the unconscious” and gave pointers for keeping journals that “aren’t merely self-reflective but serve as a springboard for inquiry into the outside world.”

  I rambled on like this for forty minutes until, during the question-and-answer period, people started asking which had better deals on leather-bound diaries, Barnes and Noble or the local stationers. They asked for advice on what to do if someone reads your diary and then becomes angry with you. I was paid U.S. $0.00 for this presentation, which was appropriate because that’s about how much value I added to the wellness outreach program. I told myself (and, indeed, had taken the gig because I believed) that I could use the lecture again, maybe even turning it into something that I could deliver on college campuses for generous fees. This is what I tell myself every time I agree to give a lecture, even if the lecture is tailored so specifically to the occasion (see: “Mary McCarthy at Vassar: A Centennial Celebration”) that I might as well drop my one and only copy of the speech into a recycling bin as I exit the auditorium. I tell myself that it’s okay that I have spent four months researching, writing, and rehearsing this speech because I can do it as a TED Talk someday. It’s okay, I say, because someday it will go viral on Facebook and people will leave comments to the effect of “This will f*cking blow your mind” and “OMG: genius!”

  And so it went with my fifteen-minute response to the “Knot Yet” report, a response born of my “personal mythology,” which in turn was born of my family mythology. I guess the operative word here is mythology. The values and assumptions I’m about to describe are grievously limited in what they suggest about the wrong and right ways to live a life. Nonetheless, they are the values I grew up with and the ones that still shape my attitudes and judgments and reactions. I am ruled by them even though I no longer fully believe them, which I guess is to say that even though I can see the folly of imposing them on others, there’s never going to be a day of my life that I don’t breathe them in and out like oxygen itself.

  The basic rundown is this. Thanks to some combination of class, generation, personal baggage, and innate temperament, my parents raised my brother and me to believe that relationships (at least the romantically and/or legally partnered kind) were for the weak. Time-consuming, physically and emotionally risky, and total nonstarters in the way of résumé building or the accumulation of A.P. credits, they were little more than distractions from the Big Life Project that was work. And though “work” tended to be murkily defined in our household (as it happened, there weren’t a whole lot of A.P. credits flying around), it was clear that its opposite—domestic life, family life, the kind of life where adult concerns and interests are perpetually subsumed by a tide of parent-teacher conferences and sticky surfaces and meltdowns in the toy aisle—put a major cramp in any thinking person’s style and should be put off as long as possible if not avoided entirely. That my parents were themselves living such a life—in the suburbs, no less—was a stinging irony I fully absorbed only later.


  Every December, a pile of Christmas cards accumulated in a basket in the dining room. They were from faraway relatives and people my parents had known in previous lives. Many contained portrait-studio family photos or newsletters bragging about various accomplishments and/or lamenting various medical ailments. These missives were read and commented upon in depth by my parents, often with the derisive implication that if winning a Little League trophy was big-enough news to make the annual Christmas letter, this family must not have accomplished a whole lot else. But of all the nonachievements presented, none were subject to more scorn than the news that someone was getting married, especially if that person was in some way deemed too young, too nascent in his or her career, too undeveloped as a person to withstand the identity-erasing effects of formally attaching yourself to another (possibly similarly undeveloped) person.

  “Jackie Harris is getting married,” my mother would say. She would say this in the same tone as she might say Jackie Harris got a tattoo. Or Jackie Harris has dropped out of that applied physics Ph.D. program and enrolled in beauty school.

  Translation: Early marriage is for the unambitious. Successful people stay single for a long time and when they’ve achieved everything they possibly can on their own they marry equally if not more successful people. Then their weddings are announced in The New York Times. Translation: If you are not important or successful enough to get your wedding announced in The New York Times you’re not ready to get married.

  * * *

  The “Knot Yet” debate was in April. The invitation to participate had come in December. Two weeks before the event, there was still no venue. One week before the event, I was told that it would take place at a Modern Orthodox synagogue in Beverly Hills. Two days before the event, a phone conference was held among the participants, at which time the Marriage Project director asked if it was too late to do any publicity or advertising. The rabbi who led the synagogue was also on the phone and said that he would put a notice on the website and alert the members of the shul’s singles’ group. The Marriage Project director said he anticipated there could be as many as five hundred people in attendance and the rabbi said there was a larger auditorium we could use if the numbers exceeded the capacity of the hall we’d originally planned on.