Bachelor Girl

by Betsy Israel

  BABY BRIDES AND BABY BOOM BUSTERS

  If you suffer, as I do, from a lifelong tendency to listen to three conversations simultaneously in public, “graduate-level eavesdropping” as I think of it, then you must have noticed, circa 1998, a shift in lunchtime conversations and those of women friends out for drinks and dinner. Suddenly they weren’t just discussing men. They were discussing marriage. And they seemed young. I’d gotten married in 1989 at age thirty, and was one of the first of my peers to do so. (Two friends, separately, had spoken to me, asking if I would promise not to have a baby right away; it was too much, too distant and unthinkable; I’d… disappear. And besides, I was too young.)

  For the generation below me, all those for whom “women’s lib” is as archaic a term as “abolitionist” or “freedom rider,” postponed marriage and childbearing is a laughable notion. It has been a long, long while since men were legally empowered oppressors and wifery the well-traveled path to madness. The conditions that made marriage so difficult for women—and spurred the protective notion of waiting to develop one’s “full self” before leaping—had disappeared. There were more reasons to marry young, or whenever one could, than to wait. Many young women had lived what Rose, twenty-eight, a book editor, calls

  a totally new untraditional life featuring the whole range of experiences starting from a very young age and your parents separating. I mean we had step-siblings on top of step-siblings. We had pot and drinking and sex, even if that was deemphasized because of disease. There was a lot of worry and denial. Oh, I mean, by twenty-one you had done… everything…. And I think everything was too much for that age. I think our view was—I mean, my friends—if the opportunity was there, why not get married?… No, I’m not married, but I would definitely like to be married. A lot of my friends are married…. To be honest, I’m tired of being the odd girl out. It’s a big pain in the butt.

  During the early nineties the short-lived Married Woman magazine ran a story called “Old Friends, New Friends.” The subtitle read, “Don’t Feel Guilty if You Want to Put Your Single Friends on Hold and Reserve a Table for Four”; elsewhere in the piece we learned, “It’s only natural to feel a strong urge to edit your address book.”

  This might have been written in 1953. But to intended readers, the totalitarian marital outlook of the fifties—an all-new “togetherness”—had nothing at all to do with their own lives in the 1990s. They were, to quote many TV commercials and newsmagazine segments, free single women devising creative solutions to their lives and problems, primarily to the unsettling state of “singleness” in such an unsettled world. They were not “slaves to societal custom… and not cruel to our friends who are not married yet,” explains Tara, who did not get engaged until twenty-six. “I thought through my options and waited…. No one was pushing me to do it. Well, perhaps a little, because that’s what society expects…. But what I wanted was someone in my life to go out with, permanently, and what is wrong with that? Someone to take with you out into life? Just think about what life is these days. Why wouldn’t you want a partner?… Having your friends goes only so far.”

  More than one million young couples between the ages of twenty-two and twenty-five, last year agreed.

  “There’s just something so very right about confronting the world and your job and the hostility of everything, knowing that there’s someone who is legally and emotionally attached to you,” says Mrs. Caitlin Cardozo, the only young subject who did not wish to have her name changed. “I’m proud of what I’ve achieved in my personal life,” she says. Although she admits that there is “a tiny bit of a stigma connected to marrying at a young age,” she thinks “the people who object or have a problem with this are people in their thirties who have put a lot of emphasis on career, and now don’t know what to think or do about marriage.” She speculates, “Maybe someone like me is threatening to them. Maybe I make them concerned that their own way of doing things, all that cool late-night-at-the-office life, was not very well thought out.”

  This view is most wonderfully captured in a 1997 piece in New York magazine about young wealthy girls racing around to weddings as if it were 1952. The piece begins on Park Avenue and features young college graduates, onetime private-school cliques, in Vera Wang’s and Bergdorf’s, looking impatient with the women crouched on the floor fixing the hems of their gowns. One young woman, twenty-one, explains, and I paraphrase, We’re city-bred girls and we’ve had our share of wild times and drugs and fooling around. Getting married is a way to move beyond that phase in life and not to get stuck, in another one, alone.

  And as author Sara Bernard assesses things, “The circle of women who seem to be skipping their Mary Tyler Moore Murphy bed phase… is bigger than just the waspy-preppy circuit.” Many others out there had upsetting personal histories that read like that of Rose quoted above, the “untraditional… range of experiences starting… [with] your parents separating.” Many want to marry early or whenever it’s right and, like Mrs. Caitlin Cardozo, believe that it is only older Others who have problems with this scenario.

  But now and then someone acknowledges the unique tensions and ambiguities of younger wifehood, many of these conflicts directly related to youth—to the inescapable feeling that a twenty-one-year-old wife has in some sense skipped out on a vital part of her young life. These tensions seem to simmer and sometimes explode when doing housework. As one twenty-four-year-old puts it, “Others are having TGIF-fucking Friday and I’m having to vacuum—rugs and the floors and tiles—because, look, I’m not fucking mopping, thank you, and his parents are coming over in twenty minutes and we both work.”

  Vacuuming. Dishes. Laundry. Many younger married women say it seems to be more difficult to do housework as a married person than as a single. “I’ll be vacuuming or changing the beds or the sheets and I’ll get this creeped-out feeling,” says “Jennifer,” twenty-three. “When I was doing those things for myself, I did them because I wanted to, not because I had to—it felt like part of the fun of living on your own, out of your mother’s house. Now there is a sense of ‘I have to do this,’ like there’s something instinctual in my doing this, and I don’t like it. Even if my husband helps, I don’t feel comfortable with it.”

  An acquaintance of hers, “Veronica or Betty,” agrees. “I have this strange antipathy to housework, which seems to have to do with this 1950s notion of what is a wife…. I’m really very surprised by this, but it’s almost like I have this Stepford Wives fear of deep cleaning. That’s the true reason I got a maid to help. It wasn’t because I was too busy. I was wondering, What am I doing?”

  Part of this discomfort is the natural adjustment to plain life after weddings that are only several steps removed from the grandiosity of Cher in Las Vegas.[15] And part of it is a genuine ambivalence about so huge a commitment coming so soon after another major life event—graduation—and with very little time off between.

  But ultimately housework is a small and manageable part of the bargain.

  There is only one word that comes up again and again during conversations with baby brides, and it is not dishes or vacuuming; it is safe. Safe is a shorthand way of saying, “Go out into the world two by two.” And it’s the desire to consecrate and guarantee this safety that lies at the heart of monster weddings. The bigger and more complicated the official ceremony, the more tangibly serious and safe the marriage.

  Go into any Barnes & Noble, find the display coffee-table wedding books, and take a look at how many pages are stained with coffee and/or greasy pastries. Last year, based on research at three separate branches and two independent stores, I determined that a special significance had been attached to page 127 of the original Martha Stewart wedding book. Always folded back and/or heavily smeared, the double spread shows a bride, all complex white angles, rushing across a busy Tribeca street holding calla lilies. In ways, it’s just a typical fashion shot—fabulous dress stands out on dingy street. But this picture tells another story. At the moment of the pho
to, the single woman is outside, alone, dodging trucks on a filthy street. But up ahead is the restaurant—a chic sanctuary, where she will be “the star of her own wedding,” to quote 1960s author Rebecca Greer. She will also be safe. If she doesn’t scurry off to that wedding, however, if she waits, whether intentionally or because her life moves in other directions, she may confront obstacles beyond a lack of desirable partners. No longer scared and unsafe, she may develop a chronic marital ambivalence.

  In a 1999 Esquire piece, “The Independent Woman and Other Lies,” Katie Roiphe wrote about young independent women attempting to reconcile their longing for a traditional man and a free life of their own. She envisioned this male savior as “the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit,” or any suit, a gentleman lawyer who’d instinctively pay for her drinks and bring flowers to the brownstone he’d bought for her, where she was at work on her novel and, alternately, taking bubble baths. It’s a fantasy that anyone could pick up and play around with. But Roiphe herself, a published author and Ph.D., already had a great apartment and a life that allowed her to run around New York City at all hours and come home when she felt like it. And, as she thought about it, it was actually difficult to imagine sharing the space, and the life, with someone else. She realized that she had been indoctrinated into the Cult of Independence (my phrase). “It may be one of the bad jokes history plays on us,” she wrote, “…the independence my mother’s generation wanted so much for their daughters was something we could not entirely appreciate or want. It was like a birthday present from a distant relative—wrong size, wrong color, wrong style.” And the “dark and unsettling truth” was that the gift could not be returned. The situation would forever be difficult to reconcile: the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit versus Her.

  THE SPINSTER AS BEMUSED SLACKER

  The premiere single archetype of the new century is someone who, like Roiphe, probably assumed in college she’d get married, then had a serious career, then had relationships, then… well, it gets hard to say, exactly, in a day-to-day recounting, but one can say life seemed to get very busy. Many boyfriends. Many major projects. Many drinks and events and then, oh, well, you know, it gets to be Christmas and, now, oh, God, not again, she’s sort of rambling… but, hey, she’s a cleverly scripted fictional single who, an amalgam of many real thirtyish never-weds, stands as the latest in singular icons.

  There are two primary exemplars of this highly competent but still dithering archetype: Ally McBeal (of David Kelley and former Fox-TV fame) and Bridget Jones (of British journalist Helen Fielding/Renée Zellweger fame). To sketch them, let’s borrow icons from the 1970s, first decade of the modern single working woman. Specifically, imagine cross-pollinating the hyper TV executive Faye Dunaway played in Network with Woody Allen’s Annie Hall.

  That’s just a cartoonish idea. What makes Ally and Bridget special types, the essential single icons of the moment, is their ability to find the humor—corny as it sounds, the “humanity”—in some fairly unbearable social situations. Deadpan and highly self-aware, they can laugh at themselves without becoming self-deprecating and/or snide. They can be sad, sob at their desks, and it’s never pathetic because they get over it and go back to work. Emotional states that women are usually punished for—rage, pathos, lust—are here just naturally occurring parts of the character and, by extension, parts of life.

  The recently departed Ally McBeal was not terribly appealing at first, with her micromini suits, improbable Gumby body, and the supposed Harvard law education we never actually saw in evidence. But she grew on you. She was beautiful, successful, she could sing, but there were also the basic and unglamorous facts of her life.

  She worked horrible hours, during which she tried, without great success, to be one of the guys. She worked, knowing that she also had to share the bathroom, aka “the unisex,” with these guys. Some of whom she had slept with. While they’d been involved with her colleagues. Of course she met men elsewhere—in court (one of them accused her, loudly, right there, of treating him as a sex object), while out buying coffee (one of these, much later, told her he was bisexual), or at the car wash, where she dreamily followed a cute guy inside… the car wash itself, where he happened to work. She arrived at her own office soaking wet. Once she arrived in court with a bowling ball stuck on her finger. Once she was arrested for tripping a woman in a supermarket. And on and on.

  As much as she looked like an L.A. Law alumnas, she had distinct elements of Lucille Ball, or Lucille Ball on LSD. As part of almost every script, Ally hallucinated. For a while she saw singer Al Green in many peculiar situations; of course there was the dancing baby, the diapered metaphor of female failure that appeared in her living room. (She was a good sport and danced with it.) Her sex fantasies took up most of her mental life—a much more realistic approach than the Sex and the City model, in which professional single urban women have sex at least four times a day.

  Women loved Ally because she tried yet couldn’t pull all of this together, couldn’t make herself any emotionally or intellectually neater, resolved. She was always in flux—as if flux were a physical condition—and she couldn’t imagine, like most women, what personal earthquake might occur to make it better.

  Her British counterpart, Bridget Jones, is less professionally accomplished; in fact, she hasn’t done much to speak of at all, but she has the ability to see and understand every nuance of single social life, and to record her observations in the now notorious diary. Women love her slangy comments on “smug marrieds” and “fuckwit” men. And they love that she can’t do anything more to change the social order than can Ally McBeal. And Ally McBeal is cute. Bridget Jones is overweight. But unlike previous chubby single icons, for example, Rhoda Morgenstern, Mary Tyler’s Moore’s old housemate, she doesn’t work the obvious fact into every sentence (the Phyllis Diller school of self-appraisal). Bridget simply records it, along with her cigarette and alcohol intake, and gets on with her life, which often consists of sorting dirty clothes in order to find clean ones. Like Ally, she is self-possessed and funny about her singleton status (an eighteenth-century term updated). She also defends it. One of my favorite scenes in the recent movie adaptation occurs when after a wretched workday Bridget has to attend a dinner party with a horrifying posse of “smug marrieds.” That means a long table full of couples pressed up next to each other in units of two. She’s placed at the head—the evening’s sociological specimen. A man points to his wife’s pregnant belly and makes a tick-tock sound; another man asks why so many career women in their thirties are still not married. She says (I paraphrase), “Maybe it’s because of the fact that their bodies are covered in hideous scales.” No one laughs.

  I use the term “slacker spinsters” because these two, like so many women I know in their thirties, seem to be kind of hanging out in the lives that have evolved around them, making sporadic efforts to connect with men, then retreating back to the couch, the TV, or the phone or into an elaborate fantasy. They believe in the possibilities of love, though it’s not clear they fully believe in the beautiful possibilities of marriage. They’ve lived through the same kind of chaos that baby brides list on their résumés. But they’ve come to different conclusions. Primarily, getting married will never guarantee a feeling of safety.

  Not that they won’t try. Try hard. Christ, in a desperate situation, they might even read The Rules, or its sort-of sequel, the new “Surrendered Single,” conduct guides for the twenty-first century, as if interpreted by Helen Gurley Brown. But chances are they’d just crack up and throw those books across the room. Where they would land either on the dry cleaning or on a pile of unsorted clothes.

  A SINGULAR FURY

  Many real-life single women have read The Rules, and now The Surrendered Single, if only from an “anthropological” point of view, or else as a kind of joke. Because how could any intelligent life-form take this best-selling advice as less than hilarious?

  Act as if you were born happy!… don’t leave the house without wearing m
ake-up. Put lipstick on even if you’re jogging! If you have a bad nose, get a nose job! Grow your hair long. Men prefer long hair…. Men like women. Don’t act like a man, even if you are the head of your own company…. Don’t tell sarcastic jokes. Don’t be a loud knee-slapping girl.

  The Rules and Rules mentality—manipulate, grovel, and lie to get a man—or the Surrendered Single stance—no control, give in, just lie there—does not strike everyone as hilarious or even mildly funny. It makes some women angry. And this angry woman—a New Mad Woman for the Modern Age—gives us a final, more decisive if less adorable archetype than the bemused Ally/Bridget slacker spinster.

  “The concept of a person who is out to land men in a deliberately manipulative manner, suggests a frightening dream world,” says Marjorie, twenty-five, unwed, and “seriously not sorry. I’m a documentary filmmaker. I travel all the time. And as a woman I couldn’t take the time out to plot ‘Getting Men.’ This isn’t junior high. Wear lipstick when you are jogging? If this is to be the basis for a relationship, then you might as well not bother…. At least you’d better stop reading. It is so sickening and unfair.”

  For these women—the documentary filmmakers, med students, marketing executives, serious artists—dodging the media has become a task as basic to everyday life as recycling plastic seltzer bottles.

  For example, there is nothing on the single calendar more irritating than holidays, with all their attendant advice about what it is the single person should do to “survive” them. At least as far as other people are concerned. One particularly annoying festival is the national day of single dread, Valentine’s Day. How many times can a grown woman be expected to read (and I quote from last year, a major newspaper): “Single in New York and Looking for Love: A Special Report on Dating in the New Century,” which here sounds remarkably like the old. A small excerpt: