All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

by Traister, Rebecca

  Stay-at-home dads are still a rarity, but have become more common than they once were, especially in the upper economic echelons where women are slowly making their way to the top as exceptions, and where wealth allows one parent to stay home. According to the New York Times, the number of women working Wall Street jobs whose spouses stay home to take care of home and children has climbed by a factor of almost ten, from 2,980 in 1980 to 21,617 in 2011.

  Across classes, the number of stay-at-home fathers in the United States almost doubled in the first decade of the twenty-first century.26 One census study showed that among men married to wage-earning women with children under five, 20 percent of fathers served as primary caretakers. Those numbers have swelled thanks both to more mothers entering the paid labor force, and to fathers out of work as the result of the recession and the shrinking blue-collar labor force. Critics may dismiss the rise of primary caretaking dads as being simply symptomatic of economic distress, but high unemployment rates do not make those fathers any less fathers, just as generations of gendered prejudice that kept middle-class women out of workplaces didn’t make them any less mothers.

  Adjustment to new norms is more than possible; it’s happening. Researchers from the University of Barcelona recently pored over census data from fifty-six countries, spanning 1968 to 2009, and determined that marriage patterns are, in fact, adjusting to the higher numbers of women attaining higher education, with more women marrying more men with lower education levels, a recent reversal of modern trends that had, until recently, left high-achieving women and low-achieving men single.27 As researcher Albert Esteve said of the study, “What we see is that the composition of couples adapts quite well to these structural changes and that if these changes take place, sooner or later they will have an effect on the marriage market.”

  Old Maids and Gay Marriage

  In June 2013, after the Supreme Court overturned the Defense of Marriage Act, journalist Jess Oxfeld wrote a newspaper column entitled “Yesterday, An Oppressed Minority, Today, an Old Maid.” Oxfeld’s relationship with his boyfriend had ended the same week as the ruling. “I’m thirty-seven, single,” wrote Oxfeld, “and I do want a husband.” More than that, he argued, “all this heteronormativization is only encouraging my dull, heteronormative urges: I don’t just want a husband, I want a husband while I’m at a marriageable age. . . . I want a wedding to be near the start of a life together, not near the end of it.”28

  In a Slate piece headlined, “Don’t Be a Wife,” commentator June Thomas produced an equally plaintive cry against the imposition of marital expectations on gay couples, specifically citing the feminist case against marriage as the reason for her discontent. “I’ve been in a blissfully happy monogamous relationship for going on 16 years,” wrote Thomas. “We own property and are raising a cat together. I just don’t want to be a wife—and I don’t want a wife of my own.” Thomas recalled her young adulthood in the women’s movement: “although we didn’t have marriage itself in the cross-hairs, on a certain level the institution represented the patriarchy and the tendency of some men to act as though they ‘owned’ their wives and could control their lives.” Watching young lesbians and gays talk of marrying now that it’s legal, she wrote, confused her. “Are they really going to mate for life, like swans in sensible shoes? That seems attractive at 35, but at 25 it’s positively Amish.”29

  The recent, successful fight of homosexual couples to enter the institution from which so many women have struggled to distance themselves may appear counter to the progress we’ve made away from marriage as the only normative adult path. Stories like Oxfeld’s and Thomas’s seem to bolster the prediction of conservative columnist Megan McCardle, who wrote that the legalization of gay marriage would prove a “victory for the forces of staid, bourgeois sexual morality. Once gays can marry, they’ll be expected to marry.”

  But the radical thing about gay marriage—well, there are many radical things about gay marriage—but, surely, one of the most crucial is that it reframes the power structure of the entire institution, disabling the gendered mechanism by which it historically exerted its oppressive power.

  It is fully fitting that anarchist Emma Goldman, a woman far ahead of her time in her defense of homosexual connection, was also the person to predict, in 1911, of straight marriage, that “some day men and women will rise, they will reach the mountain peak, they will meet big and strong and free, ready to receive, to partake, and to bask in the golden rays of love . . . If the world is ever to give birth to true companionship and oneness, not marriage, but love will be the parent.”30

  Gay marriage, inherently and ideally based on love and companionship, and not on gender-defined social and economic power, will be key to our ability to re-imagine straight marriage.

  Sure, individuals in all kinds of unions will continue to exert power over their mates. Spouses will be cruel and cold and passive and sad. They will grow bored with each other and manipulate each other and split. But the identity of the subjugated and the dominated will not be determined quite so reliably by the body into which a particular spouse is born. So, while marriage will never be perfect, it will become far more just and free for the women who enter it, both with other women and with men.

  So profoundly has the notion of marriage’s suddenly blunted inequities begun to sink in that, in 2013, New York magazine reported on straight couples who, anxious to find readings or text that represent the equitable unions they want to form, have chosen to read at their weddings from the Massachusetts Supreme Court case Goodrich v Department of Public Health, the first of its kind to legalize gay marriage.31

  “Civil marriage is at once a deeply personal commitment to another human being and a highly public celebration of the ideals of mutuality, companionship, intimacy, fidelity, and family,” reads the decision, in part. “Because it fulfills yearnings for security, safe haven, and connection that expressed our common humanity, civil marriage is an esteemed institution, and the decision of whether and whom to marry is among life’s momentous acts of self-determination.”

  In this legal vision of marriage’s nature and purpose, there is no hint of one power higher than another, no honor nor obeisance. There is mutuality, companionship, and the glorious choice, not only about whom to marry, but about whether to marry. In this new connubial world, there is a self, and it is determined.

  That Is Him

  Ada Li was nineteen, living in Canton, China, when she met her first boyfriend. Now forty-one, she remembers him as a “very nice, nice boy.” Her friends and family liked him, assured her that he was a good guy; it was obvious that he and Ada loved each other. After just a year of dating, he asked her to marry him. “Too young,” recalled Ada. “I tell him I’m not ready. I say no.”

  Her boyfriend was devastated. She tried to explain that, in a few years, she might be ready. But he was so upset that he stopped speaking to her or returning her calls. Three months later, Ada learned that he had married someone else. “Then, I was so upset,” she said. “He is a good guy, really nice. Why couldn’t he wait?”

  Ada, crushed, didn’t want to risk further heartbreak with any of the other men who approached her in the wake of her breakup. “That feeling is horrible,” she said. “You can’t sleep, you can’t eat.” Three years later, she saw her ex on the street. He approached her and confessed that he was unhappy in his marriage. Ada asked him why he hadn’t waited for her and he explained that the government company where he worked had been offering apartments to couples who married. So, Ada told me, almost two decades later, “He got married for an apartment. That is why. It was horrible. And that is why he doesn’t feel happy. Because he knows [his wife] is not too good. They just want to marry for an apartment. That is stupid.” Ada never saw him again, but her heartache lifted because, as she said, “After he tells me this story, I am not interested ever again.”

  As she got older, Ada faced tremendous pressure to marry. In her province in the 1990s, she said, being a single woman
deep into her twenties was unusual. Her mother began worrying about her at twenty-five. She and her aunts directed young men her way. “They think maybe I am sick. Maybe she doesn’t like man. It’s like something is wrong when girl gets old and is still single.” Ada was firm in her wish to not marry unless she was in love. “I don’t want to marry a guy I don’t love, just to marry with him,” said Ada. “I don’t care if he’s handsome, I just want [that] I love him and he is good to me. That is what I want. But my parents and my aunt, they just want me married.”

  When Ada moved to New York in 2001 and worked as a seamstress, one of her coworkers kept trying to set her up with her nephew. Ada wasn’t interested. The coworker suggested it again. Finally, Ada said, she agreed to call this man, since “sometimes, you need people to talk to.”

  She called him. “He is nice, talking,” she remembered. She told him that if he wanted to meet her, he would have to take the train from Queens to Brooklyn; they planned to wear special jackets so that they would recognize each other on the street. When Ada saw the man in the long coat emerge from the subway, she thought, “That is him, maybe the person I want to marry. I just feel like that guy is nice. Maybe I will marry with him.”

  The man had married early and had two children; his wife had left him for another man. He had been raising his kids, then eleven and eight, by himself. Ada said she knew, immediately. “That man is good. It is really hard to take care of the two children.” The two began dating, and Ada became pregnant. Despite obstacles with his mother, who worried that Chinese astrology portended poorly for the union, they married. They have been married for ten years and have a son together.

  Recently, Ada’s mother, sixty-two, and her father, sixty-eight, moved from China to live with her family in Queens. Her mother, born on a rice farm, educated only through the tenth grade, had entered her arranged marriage when she was nineteen, and later had two children. In New York, Ada said, her mother quickly blossomed. Her father, however, hated it, and quickly wanted to return to China. “My mom said, ‘If you go back, you go back by yourself,’ ” said Ada. He did.

  Now, Ada said, her mother looks happier, younger. In her first months in New York, Ada’s mother, who does not read or speak any English, often got lost in the city’s subway system. Now, said Ada, she takes buses and subways, zipping around Brooklyn, in and out of Chinatown. She has a job as a home-health aide.

  “Now, she is so happy because she makes the money by herself,” said Ada. The fact that she’d never had her own income, Ada suspects, had enabled her father to act meanly toward her mother. “When my mom would make breakfast for him, he would say, ‘No, I don’t want that!’ That is not nice. It’s why I sometimes say, ‘Mom made it, just eat it, don’t complain.’ But that’s why he went back to China. I always say to my mother, you need a change. Father, you need to change. The world is changed.”

  Mostly, Ada said, she is happy for her mother. “Her life is better,” she said. “I think if time came back, she would want to do another thing, go to the school, don’t get married early.”

  Today, Ada tells her twenty-two-year-old stepdaughter, Jennifer, “If you want to have power, do not just be thinking about getting married. You want your life to get better? Don’t just think about being a wife.” Ada credits her own decade of single life for her happiness. “Single time is when I learn how to take care of myself, how I know what I want,” she said. “We have to understand that nobody can give you the best except for yourself. That is what I always tell Jennifer. I tell Jennifer don’t get married too young. Make sure your boyfriend is nice, and that he push you to go the right way, not the wrong way.”

  Her stepdaughter, Ada tells me, often replies, “I am not that stupid. Don’t worry.”

  Ada’s story, her mother’s history, and her stepdaughter’s future, illustrate how, for all the statistics and numbers and data we can throw at the questions of marriage, singlehood, and how women move between the two, neither state is fixed. Transitions are fraught, complicated, unexpected. A doggedly single woman’s mind can change with the emergence of a nice-looking man from a subway station; a lifetime of identifying as a dependent wife can be thrown off at sixty-two.

  Or earlier.

  Marriage, Divorce, and In Between

  Molly, a public defender in New York City, got married in her twenties to a kind man, whom she adored. Molly was raised in Utah, which, thanks to its large population of Mormons, has the lowest marriage age in the nation. Though she herself is not Mormon, Molly had absorbed some of the norms of the place where she grew up. When she met someone stable about whom she cared deeply, she married him. But, very soon into their union, she found herself feeling stifled. She and her husband shared professional and social passions, but she felt immobilized by their marriage. She recalled a night in which she tried to explain how she felt to her husband. “You’re clipping my wings!” she wailed at him miserably. They divorced.

  Molly’s husband loved being married. In fact, he is married again, with children. He and Molly share custody of their dog and, until very recently, they shared office space. Molly, thirty-seven, did not love being married. She remains single.

  While the improvements in marriage may make it more appealing to more women, they don’t make it appealing to all women, who balk at its limitations, not just in advance of it but from inside it.

  Heidi Sieck, forty-two, grew up in rural Nebraska, where most people got married early; she had a boyfriend whose parents hoped they’d marry. “I just didn’t want to,” she said. “I knew I needed to get out of Nebraska.” She went off to college, and then to Washington, D.C., where she met a law student whom she described as being “out of a fairytale: tall and handsome and he went to Harvard and he was on Law Review and he played basketball and had a great family and was gregarious and fun.” Sieck felt marriage was her guarantee of economic security and social status; she pushed to get engaged. However, as soon as she began planning the wedding, an eating disorder from high school reappeared, she began drinking too much, and stopped having sex with her fiancé. After their beautiful wedding, she had what she called “a full scale nervous breakdown.”

  Heidi began to understand that she had made “choices about marriage out of fear and economic insecurity and also out of scarcity—the fear that no man will ever love me.” As it turned out, despite marrying a man who should have been the “perfect” partner, she hated being married. The union disintegrated. After five years of marriage and two years in couples’ therapy, she asked for a divorce. They mediated a settlement without dispute within six months.

  For the past twelve years, Heidi said, she has chosen to be single and self-sufficient. “I chose it, very specifically,” she said. After the divorce, she quit drinking, pursued therapy, and earned a master’s degree from Harvard, the institution that she used to brag about her husband having attended. “I’d thought I needed to marry into it, but my year there showed me that I could own it for myself,” she said.

  Heidi’s husband loved being married. He is remarried, with children. Heidi and her ex remain friends; he was her lawyer for a business she started with some classmates from Harvard.

  Through many lenses, the normalization of divorce has been terrifically liberating for women. It has allowed them to escape bad marriages, thus reducing rates of domestic violence; it has reduced the incidence of wives murdering their husbands and of children growing up in the shadow of miserably riven, but permanently bound, parents. For women like Molly and Heidi, divorce has been key to liberation.

  It’s also true, however, that divorce is among the most dangerous direct consequences of marriage. As numerous studies have shown, divorce leaves many women more unhappy, unhealthy, and impoverished than not marrying at all.

  Thus, it is good news that women are marrying later and less frequently. The divorce rate, which skyrocketed in the 1970s, has been declining, slightly but steadily, since 1980, the years during which women increasingly opted to forego early marriage
.32 More strikingly, the people for whom the rates have plunged most dramatically are those who are staying single longest.

  Interestingly, the segment of the population for whom the divorce rate has risen over the past twenty years is baby boomers (those born between 1946 and 1964), who married, often young, and at a moment before marriage had begun to be reformed.33

  For those who are somewhere between single and married, or are unsure when or where or if they ever will land on one marital identity or another, there are millions of in-betweens. Hanna Rosin has described her realization that “we’ve invented this third kind of relationship which is sexually satisfying, emotionally satisfying, has a lot of intimacy and isn’t on the road to marriage. It’s hard to imagine, but it’s a different kind of thing.”34

  I don’t find it at all hard to imagine! It’s how most of the people I’ve known of my generation have lived our lives: moving in and out of relationships of varying quality and duration. We have fallen in and out of love, in and out of lust. We’ve had great relationships that took us to new places, emotionally and sometimes geographically, and gruesome duds that have taught us volumes about what we don’t want from life or partnerships.