But were we?
Here’s what actually happened: Empowerment somehow became synonymous with having impossible standards and disregarding the fact that in real life, you can’t get everything you want, when you want it, on your terms only. Which is exactly how many of us empowered ourselves out of a good mate.
I HAD IT ALL—AT 23
According to the most recent Census Bureau report, one-third of men and one-fourth of women between 30 and 34 have never been married. These numbers are four times higher than they were in 1970. At first, this might look like a positive trend—people are more mature at the age of marriage now. But many single women I talked to feel differently. It may seem liberating to look for love when it’s expected that we’ll date a lot of people (and have a lot of choices) before we find The One, but dating all these people ends up being exhausting and painful, not to mention confusing. The cultural pressure to marry later (but not too late!) often hurts us more than it helps us.
Jessica, a 29-year-old communications director for a museum, told me about the night, six years ago, when her college boyfriend, Dave, proposed to her. They were both almost 23 and living in Chicago. He was in medical school. She was applying for her first job. They’d been together for four years, and she was very much in love with Dave, but Jessica turned him down for one reason and one reason only: She thought she was too young to get married.
“I thought, what kind of independent woman gets married before she even has her first job? So I told him I had to grow on my own, and I worried that if we got married so young, I wouldn’t be able to do that. I also thought I shouldn’t marry the first serious boyfriend I ever had. I thought I should have other experiences with men.”
After their breakup, Dave was heartbroken and asked that they have no contact, and Jessica started doing everything she felt she needed to do to “grow as a person.” She moved to a new city, met new people, focused on her work, and went on lots of dates. But she couldn’t stop thinking about Dave.
Over the next two years, she often considered calling him up and telling him what a huge mistake she’d made, but her friends, who were also living the so-called empowered single girl life, would talk her out of it.
“Every time I considered calling him,” she said, “my friends made me doubt myself. ‘What, you’re going to settle down at twenty-four? What about your life?’ I started to wonder, is this life so wonderful? I liked my work, I liked my friends, and I hated dating. I had a couple of boyfriends that I got excited about at first, but I didn’t ultimately feel the way about them that I had about Dave. I didn’t have that comfort level. They didn’t ‘get me’ the way he did. Either I wasn’t into them or they weren’t into me, and I kept thinking, what am I looking for when I already found the guy I want to spend my life with?”
Secretly, Jessica would Google Dave at night, but she didn’t find much information, other than that he was still in medical school.
“I’d sit there on the computer at night, like a junkie, and I’d be thinking, this is pathetic,” she said. “This isn’t the exciting life I was supposed to be having as an empowered single woman in the big city! Dating other people and having more life experience didn’t enrich my life in any substantial way. I loved my work, but I could have gotten a similar job in Chicago. Instead of ordering takeout for myself or going out to dinner with a group of single friends, I wanted to make Dave dinner when he was on call.” But she hid all these feelings because she was embarrassed by them.
Finally, three years after Dave’s proposal, Jessica found his number through the medical school switchboard and got up the nerve to call him. Her heart was pounding when she heard his voice.
“The second he answered,” she said, “it felt like home again. I almost cried.” But then, as she told him why she called, Dave went silent. Now it was Jessica’s turn to have her heart broken. Dave had spent more than two years trying to get over Jessica, and finally, about eight months before, he’d met someone new. They were dating exclusively. She was a year older than Dave—a 27-year-old resident at the hospital—and was looking to meet the man she would marry.
Dave is now married to this woman and both are pediatricians. Jessica learned through a mutual college friend that they recently had a son.
Jessica’s voice cracked as she spoke. “I gave him up because it was drilled into me that first you establish your own life, then you share it with someone else. That first you go out and pursue your dreams. Well, here I am, still dreaming I’ll meet someone as great as Dave.”
I could relate to Jessica’s story. I also grew up believing that my early twenties were a time to experiment with different careers and different men and then suddenly, according my time table, The Guy would arrive on my doorstep. I didn’t even consider looking for a spouse in any serious way in my early or mid-twenties—when I was, in fact, most desirable in the dating pool. The goal was to go out and become “self-actualized” before marriage. I didn’t imagine that one day I’d be self-actualized but regretful.
Nor did Jessica. “I thought the message was, ‘You can have it all—but not at twenty-three,’ ” she said. “But now that I’m twenty-nine and I’m supposed to have it all, I don’t. I had it at twenty-three! The problem is that people judge you if you marry too early, but then if you end up single at thirty or thirty-five, they judge you for not being married.”
She was right: There’s a stigma for not waiting long enough, and there’s a stigma for waiting too long. People may have called me “brave” for having a baby on my own when my biological clock was ticking, but it was always said in the way you might call a cancer patient “brave.” I knew all too well that many people considered me a mildly tragic figure, if not a cautionary tale. For some, I was their biggest nightmare. They may not want to be tied to any old-fashioned rules, but they also want a traditional family. The women I spoke to in their late twenties and thirties seemed baffled by the way the feminist messages they grew up with don’t necessarily reflect what they might want personally. What they’re supposed to want and what they actually want seem at odds.
And that’s how a lot of us get screwed.
NO-STRINGS-ATTACHED DATING
Brooke is a 26-year-old in Boston who’s getting a graduate degree in women’s studies. I told her that I’m all for empowerment—sexual or otherwise—but I was surprised after a lot of young women told me that if you don’t get physically intimate with a guy by the third or fourth date, he’ll think you’re not interested and move on. Since when, I wanted to know, does not being physically intimate with someone you’ve known a total of, say, eight hours, indicate lack of interest?
More important, I wanted to know what’s in it for women, who often get emotionally attached to the men they sleep with, or who for the most part find casual sex unfulfilling. What’s so empowering about a sexual free-for-all?
Brooke sighed like I was an old fuddy-duddy. “It gives us the same choices men have,” she explained matter-of-factly.
“Okay,” I said. “But is casual sex what you want?”
“No,” she admitted. “But I’d want any woman who had that desire to have the freedom to pursue it.”
Meanwhile, Brooke has been living with her boyfriend for two years and confessed that she’s been wondering whether to move out when she turns 27 next month. “I’m ready for a serious relationship,” she said.
I wondered what she meant by a serious relationship. Wasn’t living together pretty serious?
“Everyone’s living together,” she replied. “It’s no big deal.” Indeed, thanks to the “freedom” we now have, half of women 25 to 29 have lived with a guy. What do marriage-minded women get out of spending their most desirable years with a boyfriend instead of a husband? I wondered why Brooke moved into her boyfriend’s apartment in the first place if she wanted marriage instead of cohabitation.
She thought for a minute. “I guess a part of me wanted li
ving together to mean something it doesn’t,” she confessed. “Most people who move in together don’t talk about what it means for the future. I mean, vaguely, but it’s not like they’re engaged. They just move in because they’re in love.”
Love with no future plans: Hooray for freedom! But has this kind of “freedom” made us happier?
D-A-T-E IS A FOUR - LETTER WORD
Take our approach to romance. Today’s singles talk about romance like it’s the Holy Grail, but do we even have romance anymore? What happened to courtship? The very word sounds quaint to the single women I spoke to, who are used to hookups and group dates and friends with benefits. I don’t even know if “dating” would be the right word for what happens today. Somehow d-a-t-e has become a four-letter word (“It’s not a date; it’s just coffee”), and I have no idea what “dating” means in an era when people say, “We’re not in a relationship, we’re just dating,” while spending time and sleeping together. Sometimes there isn’t even an actual “date” involved in a date. You’ll be invited to join a guy and his friends at a party (and to bring attractive girlfriends!), you’ll be called from a cell phone at 9 p.m. and asked to “hang out” and watch a video at his place, or you’ll be asked to meet him for coffee for twenty minutes after his basketball game (which means he shows up reeking of sweat and letting you buy your own latte).
And women are supposed to be cool with all this. There seems to be lack of respect in the dating world but, these women say, we’re supposed to deny any expectations of chivalrous behavior, traditional gender roles, and marriage within a reasonable time frame because that level of detachment or independence supposedly makes us empowered.
Some women say they actually appreciate these non-date dates, and I have to admit, I used to be in that camp. Then an older married friend set me straight.
“Why should I waste time having a two-hour dinner on a first date when I know within thirty seconds of meeting for a quick coffee whether a guy is my type?” I asked her.
“Because you don’t know within thirty seconds whether he might be a person who would make you happy in a marriage,” she said.
And that’s just it. I was so busy trying to “have it all” that I lost sight of what might make me happy in a marriage. Marriage used to be thought of as comfortable and stable, and those were good things. But since women don’t need marriage for economic security and even to have children anymore, the primary purpose of marriage, many singles say today, is to make us happy—immediately and always. We don’t wait to see if connection develops by spending real time with a person. If a relationship takes too much effort, we decide it’s no longer making us happy, and we bail. The One doesn’t get grumpy. The One doesn’t misunderstand us. The One doesn’t want some alone time after work when we want to give him the rundown of our day.
In my mother’s generation, you were “happy” in your marriage because you had a family together, you had companionship, you had a teammate, you had stability and security. Now women say they also need all-consuming passion, stimulation, excitement, and fifty other things our mothers never had on their checklists. And yet, according to data on marital satisfaction compiled by David Popenoe at the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University, women in those early marriages were happier.
But because I had a twisted notion of what being a “feminist” meant, my priorities were all mixed up.
WHAT SHOULD A WOMAN WANT?
Caroline, a 33-year-old fashion buyer, told me that she considers herself a feminist but still wants “a guy to be a guy.”
As she put it, “I don’t need a guy to take care of me, but I wouldn’t be with someone who couldn’t. I want to have a career when I have kids, but I want to have the option not to work if I change my mind.” Interestingly, when I asked what qualities she’s looking for in a relationship, she talked about romance and passion and chemistry, but none of the practical things that would give her the option not to work.
Then there are women like many of my college classmates who, when they were dating, got offended if they were disqualified as relationship material by a guy who wanted to marry a woman who would stay home with the kids. They felt that these modern-seeming guys who also wanted a more traditional family structure reduced the number of eligible men even more—and yet, much to their surprise, most of these same women ended up becoming very happy moms who work part time or not at all. They weren’t as progressive as they once believed themselves to be, and were glad that they weren’t expected to bring in half of the family income.
In a 2006 New York Times column, John Tierney wrote that whereas the age-old question used to be, “What does a woman want?” modern feminists ask instead, “What should a woman want?” He went on to cite a study by two University of Virginia sociologists, Bradford Wilcox and Steven Nock, who looked at the question of what makes a woman happy in her marriage nowadays. It turns out that stay-at-home wives were more satisfied with their husbands and their marriages than working wives—and that even among working wives, those who were happiest had husbands who brought in two-thirds of the income.
“Women today expect more help around the home and more emotional engagement from their husbands,” Wilcox told Tierney. “But they still want their husbands to be providers who give them financial security and freedom.”
And no wonder: The traditional workplace often turns out to be unfulfilling for women after they’ve been at it for fifteen or twenty years. With its inflexible hours, office politics, fifty-hour weeks to stay “on track” for promotions, and later, younger bosses making irrational demands, the whole setup isn’t just a drag, it’s incompatible with the kind of family life many women want.
As the study’s other sociologist, Steven Nock, told Tierney, “A woman wants equity. That’s not necessarily the same as equality.”
WHY MEN CAN’T FIGURE US OUT
Many guys I spoke to say this affects the way people date.
“I have a daughter, and I’m glad she’s growing up in an era when women can run for president,” said Eric, who is 38 and has been married for seven years. “But when I was dating, most women wanted to be able to run for president but didn’t really want the actual job. They just wanted the opportunity to have it. Because now when we men say, ‘Great, go for it,’ our wives tell us they want to work part time or work fewer hours. Our wives want us to do half the child care and half the laundry, but they don’t want to earn half the income. So while I’m all for feminism, I do find it thoroughly confusing.”
My friend Paul, who is a 30-year-old lawyer, told me that while he’d only be interested in dating a smart woman, he’s less interested in how professionally successful she is or what she does for a living.
“Some of my single women friends can’t understand why guys don’t find them unbelievable catches because they made partner in their law firms at thirty, or make a certain amount of money in a business they started,” he explained. “But honestly, the point of being successful for a woman is for personal fulfillment and so that she can support herself. It’s not so that she can attract a man, because men know that we can’t count on women to provide the lion’s share of the income, so we’re more interested in what kind of partner this person is going to be. Do we like being around her? Is she interesting? Will she be a good parent?”
Paul said he was reluctant to talk about this because he worried it would make him sound sexist. Then again, he added, “I wouldn’t pursue a woman just because she was very successful, but I know many women who can find a man attractive based on success or wealth, and still call themselves feminists.”
Paul’s colleague Brandon, who is single and 33, told me that the women in his law firm think guys have it made because they don’t have a biological clock to contend with. That’s true, he said, but at the same time, when he and his friends are ready to get married, women hold them to impossibly high standards.
“You can’t just be a woman�
��s equal—you have to be slightly more successful than she is,” he said. “That rules out most of their colleagues, and many men in general. Then if you are more successful—you’re more senior in the firm than they are—you also have to be tall enough, and funny enough, to be worthy of even a first date.”
Paul, who is 5’7” and starting to lose his hair, told me that when he was dating a shoe store sales clerk (they met when he was trying on loafers), his women friends complained that male lawyers don’t want to date their equals.
Paul says that’s not true. “I was dating her for two reasons: One, I genuinely liked her. And two, she would actually date me! Women say that their equals won’t date them, but they’re the ones who won’t date their equals. They think they’re so empowered or whatever but they just seem standoffish. And I don’t think they’re that happy.”
EMPOWERED OR ALONE?
Paul might be right. I grew up interpreting feminism to be about this idea of empowerment: We aren’t just supposed to be strong and independent—we’re also supposed to be happy about it. We’re supposed to focus on our own lives, and when a partner comes along, that’s gravy, not the main course. We can’t be happy in a relationship until we learn to be happy alone.
For many years, I went along with these notions, but deep down, I didn’t want to learn to be happy alone. No matter how full my life (career and good friends; later, delightful child, career and good friends) I always wanted to go through life with a partner. And while I wasn’t someone who tore out pictures of bridal dresses or dreamed of my wedding day in great detail, I took it for granted that it would happen. It never occurred to me that my life wouldn’t include the husband and the kids and the Little Tikes slide in the backyard. So I certainly wasn’t trying to be a “trailblazer” by having a kid on my own. I simply wanted to be a mother before it was too late.
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