Today’s post was written by Lindsey Keefe, a former student of mine and now a freelance writer in Virginia, who makes insightful as well as unnerving comments about how women in their twenties look at feminism, relationships, and life:
I thought about Nathan last week for the first time in years. He had stunning blue eyes, was a brilliant conversationalist, and, though he had warts covering his hands, was always confident and friendly. I wonder if I should have asked for his phone number, flitted my eyelashes as he carefully scrolled it down with a fat, oversized pencil, writing his 3’s backward. He was my kindergarten classmate.
I wonder if I should have married him.
And why did I start to regret my misappropriated youth — my time creating art and, worse yet, learning to read?
I made the mistake of reading Lori Gottlieb’s “Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough,” in which Gottlieb proposes that a woman who wishes to have a family ought to settle on a man early in her life because the pool of men from which to choose decreases dramatically as years pass, thereby forcing women to make even greater concessions and, it seems, marry someone they’d like even less. For optimal results, Gottlieb recommends women settle in their twenties. But surely one’s options will have already dwindled by then, particularly if all women who want children do as Gottlieb prescribes?
Which brings us back to Nathan. Should I have taken the first good prospect I saw? Should I have taken Nathan, warts and all?
Surely Nathan loved children. Of course he did, he was one.
The most troubling aspect of Gottlieb’s article is that she does not hold before us even the possibility that we will find a man who we actually want to marry of our own volition, without a biological clock held to our ear as one might less menacingly hold a gun. The role of the husband is pared down to provider and person to whom you may pass the children when you’re tired; the role of the wife is to be grateful for her husband’s presence and his “help” with the children, as if they weren’t his responsibility (or pleasure) at all. Is there no one out there who has married for love, had children, and continued to love the man for reasons beyond his role as father of her children?
In the spirit of forfeiting our standards, Gottlieb encourages women to give those men that make us cringe involuntarily — the ones who yell “Bravo!” in the movie theater and have bad breath — another look. But reflexes, I believe, were created for a reason, and that reason is to tell you to stay away. Getting those children, the very purpose of his presence, might be difficult. If when faced with the prospect of going to the movies, to going out to dinner, to venturing out anywhere in public with this man, elicits your hastiest, most insistent and involuntary “Not tonight dear,” how will you ever resist uttering those words in the bedroom? Though perhaps half the positions found in the Kama Sutra were invented by the charmed new wife of the man with halitosis.
And how does one keep this husband in any type of useful or desirable role — that of the father. Does Gottlieb intend to continue having children until she is 85 years old, just so she won’t have to be alone with her husband, halitosis-plagued bore that he is? Will she force her children to live in her basement until they are in their fifties, well past Gottlieb-prescribed marriageable age themselves? At some point you’ll have to face each other, and the choice you’ve made.
I myself am 24 years old, having just gotten out of a years-long relationship with a man I am certain really will be an excellent father. So, too, will he be an excellent husband, but not for me. Our relationship was a revised version of that childhood saying, “I am rubber and you are glue …” except “I am a machete and you are tissue paper.”
I spent years waiting for us to converge into complete happiness; we both wanted to get married and have children, and I knew he’d be great in those roles, so I waited for everything else — all of our differences — not to matter. Of course it never happened. Yet I wonder if Gottlieb knew that he cleaned up without asking, brought me gifts for no reason, and carried the cat two miles to the vet in the middle of August, she’d tell me to go back to him. I just can’t.
I’m spending these years finding out about myself, dating, discovering what I like, and learning about what makes me the person I am, and ultimately what makes me happy. I will not believe that it’s all for nothing.
I will not settle on the first person who will have me. After all, I want to set a good example for my children; I have no room for them in my basement.
