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I am 37 years old, I'm single, and I have not had children. There you have the trifecta that is supposed to have me standing on a bridge right about now, or not wasting my time talking to you good people when I could be laughing at the stupid screennames on Match.com.
I've been wondering for a while now, why the hate for single women, hmm? So many people seem to stand in line to judge single, especially childless women. It bothers me. It really does. Some married people are unhappy, some single people are annoyingly jubilant, and vice versa. I didn't celebrate Valentine's Day by dressing in black and getting together with friends to listen to depressing music and drink Yellow Tail. I admit it crossed my mind that saying "I love you" and meaning it, and hearing it back, meant, again would be nice, but that's an every day kind of thing. You can't force it, friends.
The sordid, all-too-simple truth is that I'm mostly okay single, but the "no children" part makes me unhappy. Sometimes I am involuntarily very jealous of people with kids, and if you prick me with comments like, "Oh, you'd understand if you were a mom," or "Oh, you're so LUCKY, so free!", yes, I do existentially bleed. But if settling for a substandard life partnership was the only way to avoid this circumstance, as Lori Gottlieb claimed in her article "Marry Him!" in this month's "The Atlantic" online, then this was the way it had to be - for me.
I'd say I won't settle, but it's more like I can't, and what "settling" means for each of us is likely a very different matter. But whatever it is, I shouldn't have done it in my 20s - oh God no, especially not then - as Gottlieb suggests, and I won't now. And although I'm not one to judge, neither should you, or you, or you. And along with detailing how women my age are falling apart and can't be expected to attract a man at all, really, therefore making the pickings even slimmer, she says that's kind of stupid.
My advice is this: Settle! That’s right. Don’t worry about passion or intense connection. Don’t nix a guy based on his annoying habit of yelling “Bravo!” in movie theaters. Overlook his halitosis or abysmal sense of aesthetics. Because if you want to have the infrastructure in place to have a family, settling is the way to go. Based on my observations, in fact, settling will probably make you happier in the long run, since many of those who marry with great expectations become more disillusioned with each passing year. (It’s hard to maintain that level of zing when the conversation morphs into discussions about who’s changing the diapers or balancing the checkbook.)
Now, I have to tell you that I've walked this walk, before I join the disingenuous chorus of denial that Gottlieb shuts down before we even start tuning up. See?
And all I can say is, if you say you’re not worried, either you’re in denial or you’re lying. In fact, take a good look in the mirror and try to convince yourself that you’re not worried, because you’ll see how silly your face looks when you’re being disingenuous.
I might be worried, but that doesn't mean I have to make poor choices. I could have married the man I lived with (Lord help me) ten years ago, who wanted to marry me. I was 28. Oh, and also? I was miserable. I think he was miserable too, maybe just because I was, because living with miserable me? Misery. He was not by any stretch a bad person, but we were totally incompatible, and I really can't even explain how we ended up living in the same apartment. What I can explain, however, is how one day I had such a suffocating fear of living my life with someone who didn't understand what made me tick at all that I had to leave. What I can explain is that every time I hung out with his family I realized that these would be my children's grandparents, and I didn't feel at home with them at all. I realized that I just wasn't feeling it - and that was before he developed the crush on another girl.
But he apologized, and said he loved me and we were still getting married, right? I had missed the proposal if there was one, but wrong.
