Bachelor Girl (33 page)

But the results of these surveys, and others like them, were lost or entirely unknown to a generation of younger women, born in and around 1970. The image of highly successful single career women dragging all these personal crises through their lives seemed slightly ridiculous. In many ways, this older generation of women seemed to have handled their lives, especially their personal lives, irresponsibly. I read the following two paragraphs to all women I interviewed who were under thirty-two. The first, as reprinted from a major newsweekly, circa 1990:

After reading one or sometimes both quotes, almost all of the young women expressed disapproval that ranged from pity to physical disgust.

“No offense to you,” one twenty-three-year-old subject told me firmly, “but I would not want to be your age and not have these ends tied together. That’s really a hopeless way to build a life…. “a mini-mate”? This is so pathetic…. How low can you go?”

It is this generational contempt that gives us the first single archetype of the 1990s and the new century: the young, defiantly post-feminist woman who believes she must take care of the “single situation” in a prompt and businesslike fashion. Before she turns twenty-seven. Or else.

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

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.
*
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 photo, 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.