Perhaps the sight of Julia Roberts biking about Bali isn’t enough to convince you that a high-performance, career-empowered, smart, single, temporarily celibate (gasp!) woman over 30 can too find love, reclaim her libido and live happily ever after. That’s just a celluloid reenactment of one woman’s truth, after all — and, come on, who doesn’t fall in love with Julia Roberts?
Also debuting on Friday was author and professor Caryl Rivers’s fantastic, fact-fortified screed, published by Women’s eNews and entitled “Smart Women Take Heart: Your Love Life Is Fine,” rallying against the false notion of the “marriage penalty” — the myth that the Elizabeth Gilbert types are unhappy, destined for further unhappiness (which of course means never marrying), and themselves entirely to blame for their alleged unhappiness.
“What should smart ambitious women with some measure of career fulfillment do to prove they’re not miserable and sexless?” Rivers asks. “No matter how many times researchers debunk that story with real facts, it refuses to die. Feminism is always the culprit for women’s alleged unhappiness.”
What sets Rivers off is an Camille Paglia-penned op-ed piece blasting those very women for the nationwide “sexual malaise” that’s been spawned by their “priggish” ways; because “ambitious women postpone recreation,” Paglia opines, American office space is now a place where “physicality is suppressed, voices are lowered and gestures curtailed.”
And if you do become lucky enough to snare a mate and pop out a few kids? Then you’re at fault for emasculating America’s menfolk into “cogs in a domestic machine commanded by women.”
Sheesh.
Rivers’s retort to all this is sweeping and gratifying. It’s worth a read in its entirety, but here are the highlights:
Data collected by the United States General Social Survey since 1972 finds no statistical difference in the overall happiness of adult women compared to adult men. (Men’s happiness average clicks in a half-point higher than women’s, a statistical blip that many media outlets have overblown.)
A certain “The smarter the woman, the less likely she’s married” chestnut is based on data collected in 1921.
Men and women with highly rewarding jobs are more likely to report higher levels of sexual satisfaction.
Your office is not a singles’ club… OK, that one’s mine, but seriously, Paglia — since when do we all meet our future mates at work? Since never.
“But don’t expect these facts to spoil the media’s love affair with the notion of a high-achieving woman sacrificing her sex appeal,” Rivers writes. Seriously. Gelato, anyone?
Keep your man by letting him stray? So, according to CNN, advises Australian memoirist Holly Hill, who writes, “One of the main things that I have learned is that a woman that negotiates infidelity with her partner is far more powerful than a woman who is sitting home wondering why he’s late from the office Christmas party,” she says. Most powerful of all, BG would submit, is the woman who chooses a guy who doesn’t cheat.
Of course, in Hill’s insultingly dim view of the opposite sex, fellas like that are few and far between. (”Men are hard-wired to betray women on the long-term.”) Look, I know cheating is depressingly common. And if a couple makes “an arrangement” that works for them, then geh gezunt a heit. But — yes — monogamy is a choice. So when a couple makes that choice, I’d call that negotiated fidelity. That’s a much better place to start.
Anderson, a Chicago-area psychotherapist and professor, strenuously resists the idea that single women are by definition doing “something wrong,” and in fact advocates a healthy acceptance of whatever relationship status a woman happens to find herself in.
To those readers who are unhappily single, she repeats the title of her book, mantra-like, and assures them it’s not because they’re “too picky,” or not trying hard enough, or trying too hard, or any number of questionable pieces of finger-wagging advice leveled at them from friends, magazine articles, TV shows, and, most egregiously, other self-help books. We caught up with her to hear more:
Did you have any specific self-help books in mind when you wrote this?
I wouldn’t say there was a particular book, but definitely the tone of the genre in general was what I was responding to, and [I was] responding with what I believe to be a counter-message that I think is equally plausible and empowering.
I just didn’t like the suggestion [promoted in other self-help books] that there’s always something amiss, or something that needs to be fixed in order for single women to find happiness. There’s one book that talks about, you know, “what your friends would tell you if they’d be honest with you.” It occurred to me that I know plenty of women who are married who are very happy but very flawed. They didn’t need to fix anything about themselves to get married.
But we have this bias in our society that marriage is good and singleness is bad, and so we feel compelled to come up with some explanation for why single women aren’t married. This need for an explanation is all about control.
You mention the concept of control several times in your book, and how it’s easier to blame someone, or dole out advice, than it is to just sit with the discomfort of not knowing–not knowing how to help, or not knowing the solution to a problem. I’m wondering how you’d counsel a person to be more supportive of a friend who may be unhappily single and looking, without falling into “control” patterns.
In this society, women are very much valued for their relationship status—not by my judgment or your judgment, but that is what we’re dealing with in our culture as a whole, this idea that a single woman is “less-than” because she doesn’t have a husband. Since that’s the case, I would put a lid on any unsolicited comments about relationship status unless the single woman brings it up herself.
So, number one, don’t bring up the subject unless it’s brought up.
Number two, I would really lay off the advice-giving. Just listen, and empathize.
A third thing is: just be a buddy, a wing man. If your friend wants to go somewhere and doesn’t want to go alone—go with her and keep her company. That kind of purely physical support can be really helpful.
What I like about your book is that, while it is very positive and encouraging, it is not blindly optimistic, either. In one of the final chapters, you answer a question from a woman who says, “Well, I’m 45, I never had a kid or got married, and I feel like I’ve missed the opportunity for these things” and your response to her is that, hey, sometimes life doesn’t work out the way we wanted. There’s an attitude of acceptance in your answer, rather than regret or shame, which I find quite rare in a relationship book.
I didn’t want to have a downer message, but I want to be realistic. It’s not easy for women in our generation, who were told we could have it all, when we find that sometimes we can’t. We all expect this linear trajectory, with checkpoints and accomplishments—perfect career, check; perfect mate, check; two children, check—that arrive at certain times.
It’s time for us to realize that, for some women, life can be a linear trajectory, but for some of us it’s a path that twists and turns and goes off on tangents that you didn’t anticipate…but if you take a step back and relax the energy of “It’s supposed to be this way,” and look at your life—it is beautiful in ways you never could have planned for.
That is not easy to do and requires a bit of detachment from our own desires, but at times it’s important to relieve ourselves of that pressure of our desires and timelines and just see the beauty of what is.
To say, “Okay, this isn’t the way I wanted it to be, but when I look back at the last five years at the things I thought I wanted, compared to the things that actually did happen, and if I’m on the path of remaining positive and excited and living life to the fullest, I bet some really cool things will happen.”
What kind of effect do you hope your book will have on people?
I have high hopes that, number one, I can encourage single women who are walking a path they didn’t anticipate and plan for, and who, in my belief system, through no fault of their own, are feeling stalled and thinking, “What happened?!”
Also, if it gets in the hands of some sympathetic friends or family members, I would love to think that it could inspire a moment of enlightenment, for someone to say, “Wow, I wonder if I’ve tried to offer advice, or some ‘cogent’ explanation for why my friend or daughter or cousin hasn’t arrived at where she wants to be in the area of marriage. Maybe I could learn something from this.”
Example #429 of why I quake in terror at the notion of heading to the altar: This guy was so mad that his wife didn’t have dinner on the table when he got home that he burned the house down. He had the clarity of mind to tell her to get out first, thankfully, but that begs the question: Why the house? Because — to my mind — the house represents a life made together, a life (to his mind) become dry tinder that apparently needed very little to go up in flames. He was out to destroy the whole picket-fenced picture.
Perhaps stranger still was his wife’s reaction: “Why did he feel he had to burn down the house. Why?” she asked. “Because it’s not like he can’t cook, he can cook.” (Right, so if he couldn’t it would have been OK to torch the place.) Clearly, we’re dealing with a scary, unbalanced guy here. My guess is this wasn’t his first offense, nor (though of course this wasn’t her fault) her first moment of denial.
Now look, I know that most marriages (or husbands, anyway) don’t deteriorate to this extent. But imagine if you will, this same couple 20 or 30 years ago. Maybe he rides a hog and has a soft spot for bluegrass. She’s a dish – and makes the best cherry pie this side of the Appalachians. They get married on a warm summer day, a lifetime of kisses and shared meals and Jim Beam swirling in their mind’s eye. Then what happens? The same thing you see in a lot of marriages. Her face gets lined and her sweet concern starts to sound more like nagging. He grows hair in weird places and his sexy wild side becomes gruff and tiresome. And so on. I’m not against marriage. I’m just hoping we (if there is ever a “we”) can work together to keep a different kind of home fires burning.
My live-in boyfriend (who’s 30, I’m 41) of three and a half years told me he wanted to ‘just be friends’ this past September. I moved out. He got engaged New Year’s Eve to a woman (she’s 29) with whom he had a brief fling in college and has heard from or had visit him a couple times a year for the past nine years (each time they met, she was all over him like the proverbial cheap suit). They are to be married in May. I have two questions. Will this marriage work? and Why do I still care?
– Patton
Dear Patton,
Why do you care? Of course you care. Are you kidding me? Even Breakup Girl cares, and she doesn’t even know these people. Dumped you in September, engaged in December?! Yeesh. All I can say is, she may have been all over him like a cheap suit, but oddly enough — as the genuine-article fashion zombies from the 70s and 80s attest — sometimes it’s the cheap ones that last.So this thing could be a flimsy rebound, or it could be some solid perma-crease that somehow never got ironed out. Or, gulp, it could be an age thing. So I don’t know if it’s going to last or not, but I do know that you’re not allowed to obsess about it. Write to Breakup Girl, speculate with your friends — but I can trust you not to pull any “I must stop the wedding” Julia Roberts antics, right? Buy your bad self a pricey suit and find some gent who doesn’t have his past mixed up with his future.
I’ve been in a relationship for seven years. And we’ve been through a lot — his stint in the army and subsequent time in rehab (drugs and alcohol and the army, don’t get me started), his messed-up family, and some of my stuff, too. We’ve been living together for a little over a year now, and have even discussed marriage … and then he drops a bomb: “I think I might be gay.”
My husband and I have been married for about a year and a half (together for a total of seven years). Other than a few flings/torrid one night affairs, I was never serious with anyone else. Alright, I’ll cut to the chase. Things are not as I thought they would be. It is not like I grew up with parents that had a fairy tale marriage, the Cleavers we were not. I can’t help but be concerned for my own marriage, things just don’t “seem” right. In my opinion people recently married and in their 20’s should be “hitting the sheets.” I know there isn’t another woman… Yeah yeah I know what they say but I KNOW. Needless to say the bed is far from hot and my thoughts are beginning to wander. My concern is what to do — pretty soon my thoughts won’t be all that are wandering… Any pearls of wisdom?
– Restless Lola
Dear Lola,
As far as hot sex is concerned, I don’t see how any couple can keep up with those crazy Cleavers. That was TV, not reality. Let go of the impossible standards.
Okay, now that I’ve gotten the wisecrack out of my system, let me suggest something the Cleavers didn’t have: counseling. Don’t worry about “should be”s; worry about — and trust — how you feel. If something’s wrong, do try to fix it. But if something’s missing in your bed, don’t look for it in someone else’s. That’s something Eddie Haskell would do, not you.
Frankly, I am losing interest in my husband; he is not the man I married. We have known each other for a number of years and have been married for about two. The passion is gone. We rarely see each other because of his job and mine (about 12 hours a week if we are lucky). We have had numerous discussions and he leads me to believe he is no longer attracted to me because I have have gained weight (30 lbs.) since we married. The reasons for my weight gain are numerous: #1 would be the period of unemployment prior to my current job and the fact that there is absolutely nothing in the town we live in and I have no friends here. My true concern is how do I keep the flame alive? I have tried seduction, homemade meals, talking, time alone — frankly I am fresh out of ideas.
In honor of tax week, it seems apropos to blog this piece from Your Tango which asks the question “Is The Cost of Living Higher For Single Women?” Sure, we understand that single people don’t have some of the financial stresses that married folk do — especially those with children — but could there be economic discrimination against singles that balances it out? This article won’t make you propose or get divorced, but it’s an interesting read.
I’m fascinated by stories of my parents’ courtship, even though it was a bit pedestrian. Meeting in journalism class, the Under The Sea fraternity dance, my mom’s pixie cut. But now I’m fascinated by other people’s parents’ stories, thanks to an adorable piece by Peter Smith at nerve.com. While they were dating, his parents took a long walk — a really long walk, like from Pennsylvania to Wisconsin — and somewhere along this 1200 mile trek (Bucyrus, Ohio, actually) the two decided to get married.
How long had you known each other?
D: For three years. We were beginning to feel that we needed to make a decision of some kind. In fact, while walking, we did decide to get married.
M: Yeah, because we realized that we could do even something stressful - and it was stressful - like that and still want to be with each other most of the time, which is as good as it gets. We also got far enough away from home that it really felt like our decision. It didn’t feel like anybody’s parents peering over our shoulders.
Read the whole piece at nerve.com. Do you know your parents’ story? And have you ever used traveling together as a test of your relationship?
e-mail to a friend in need
Perhaps the sight of Julia Roberts biking about Bali isn’t enough to convince you that a high-performance, career-empowered, smart, single, temporarily celibate (gasp!) woman over 30 can too find love, reclaim her libido and live happily ever after. That’s just a celluloid reenactment of one woman’s truth, after all — and, come on, who doesn’t fall in love with Julia Roberts?
, is a glorious lack of blame, accompanied by a daring refusal to fix anyone’s problems.
Caring too much on 
