Book Board Chat

The Singular Art of Being a Woman

When I was 28, I broke up with my boyfriend. We had been together for three years, and there was no good reason to end things. Had I made the biggest mistake of my life? Ten years later, I occasionally ask myself the same question. Today I am 39, with too many ex-boyfriends to count. I am told I have two grim-seeming options to face: stay single or settle for a “good enough” mate. The decision to end a stable relationship for abstract rather than concrete reasons, I see now, valued emotional fulfillment above all else and the elevation of independence over coupling.

One of the many ways my generation differed from our mothers’ was in the variety of our interactions with the opposite sex. Men were our classmates and colleagues, our bosses and professors, our students and employees and subordinates—a universe of prospective friends, boyfriends, friends with benefits, and even ex-boyfriends-turned-friends in this brave new world, where boundaries were fluid, and roles constantly changing.

For thousands of years, marriage had been an economic and political contract negotiated among families, church, and community. It took two to make a farm or business thrive, and so a potential mate’s skills, resources, thrift, and industriousness were valued highly. This held true for all classes. In the American colonies, merchants entrusted business matters to their landlocked wives while away. Other seasonal workers relied on their wives’ steady income as a domestic. Two-income families were the norm. Not until the 1950s, were a majority of American families able to actually afford living off a single breadwinner.

Today, a smaller proportion of American women in their 30s are married than at any other point since the 1950s. We are also marrying less. Many think that marriage is becoming obsolete. We no longer need husbands to have children, nor do we have to have children if we don’t want to. Foremost among the reasons for all these changes in family structure are the gains of the women’s movement. Over the past half century, women have steadily gained on and surpassed men in education and employment. Gloria Steinem said, in the 1970s, “We’re becoming the men we wanted to marry,”

But while the rise of women has been good, the decline of males has been bad news for men—and bad news for marriage. What does this portend for the future of the American family? America as a whole currently enjoys a healthy population ratio of 50.8 percent females and 49.2 percent males. But our shrinking pool of traditionally “marriageable” men is dramatically changing the social landscape, and the marriage market, in ways that aren’t immediately apparent. In many cases, the more successful a man is, the less interested he is in commitment.

Today we’re contending with a new “dating gap,” where marriage-minded women are increasingly confronted with either deadbeats or players. What’s happened to the black family is already beginning to happen to the white family. In 1950, 65 percent of African American women were married. By 1965, African American marriage rates had declined precipitously. This erosion of traditional marriage and family structure has played out among low-income groups, both black and white. Increasingly, this extends to the upper-middle class. Successful women are confronted with a shrinking pool of like-minded marriage prospects. When the available women significantly outnumber men, courtship behavior changes in the direction of what men want.

In 2010, the proportion of married households in America dropped to a record low. Fifty percent of the adult population is single (compared with 33 percent in 1950)—and that portion is growing. The median age for getting married has been rising, and for those who are affluent and educated, that number climbs even higher. When I embarked on my own sojourn as a single woman in New York City I was seeking something having to do with finding my own way, and independence. I found all that, but the single woman is very rarely seen for who she is by others, or even by herself Most of us internalize the stigmas that surround our status, though our cultural fixation on the couple is actually a recent development. “Pair-bonding” has been around for a million years.

Now that women are financially independent, and marriage is an option rather than a necessity, we are free to pursue the “pure relationship,” in which intimacy is sought in and of itself and not solely for reproduction. Everywhere I turn, I see couples upending norms and power structures, whether it’s women choosing to be with much younger men, or men choosing to be with women more financially successful than they are (or both at once). We are not designed, as a species, to raise children in nuclear families. Women who try to be “supermoms,” whether single or married and holding down a career, are “swimming upstream. I think about the years I’d spent struggling against the four walls of my apartment, and wondering what my mother’s life would have been like had she divorced my father.

A long article printing out to several pages … the above is just a “taste”

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/11/all-the-single-ladies/8654/4/?single_page=true