The Unspeakable (7 page)

The capstone model is fine, the research suggested, if you're talking about people who are going to follow through and actually get married when they finish law school or get that Ph.D. The problem is that only a third of the nation's population has a four-year college degree. The other two thirds might aspire to a capstone marriage, but never quite get around to it because they can't rise out of their low-wage jobs. They often go ahead and have children, though.

The National Marriage Project thought this was a very bad thing indeed. The “Knot Yet” report cited statistics showing that unmarried people drank more alcohol and reported being less satisfied with their lives than married people. It brought up the usual findings about children born out of wedlock experiencing more emotional instability and more problems in school than kids with married parents. It did not devote even one syllable to the subject of gay marriage.

The other writer from L.A., who I won't name even though you could figure out who she is on Google in two seconds, was the author of a bestselling book enjoining marriage-seeking women to set aside their pickiness and “settle” for men who don't necessarily meet every item on their towering list of requirements. The basis of her book had been a long article she'd published in a major national magazine. She'd taken some flak for her article, not least of all from me in my newspaper column. Admittedly, there were probably more pressing topics in the news that week for me to tackle and admittedly there was nothing inherently offensive about the author's premise in and of itself, which is that some women overlook men who'd make good husbands and fathers simply because those men aren't rich, tall, or graduates of the Ivy League. Still, with sentences on the order of “Every woman I know—no matter how successful and ambitious, how financially and emotionally secure—feels panic, occasionally coupled with desperation, if she hits thirty and finds herself unmarried” and “All I can say is, if you say you're not worried, either you're in denial or you're lying,” I could no more have kept myself from smacking her down than I could have kept myself from squeezing an enormous, ripe pimple on my chin.

I'd actually known the author for years. I put us in the category of “friendly acquaintances.” Or at least we'd been friendly until I took her to task in my column for setting age thirty as a sell-by date and thereby assuming that all women, no matter how successful and ambitious and secure, want marriage and children above all else. In retrospect, I see that my response was a bit off point. The article wasn't talking about people like me, who, at age thirty, happily embarked on the “adventure” of living in a lopsided, shacklike farmhouse in the rural Midwest with a guy who was about as marriageable as an electric fence. It was talking about normal people who wanted normal things. It was talking about people who get their adventuring out of the way in college or even in high school by partying so hard that by their early twenties they just want to sit on the couch watching TV with the same person for the next sixty years. It was talking about the fear and heartbreak of not finding that person as time goes on and about the realities of biological clocks. Unsurprisingly, the article was eventually expanded into the aforementioned bestselling book and the author became a therapist and highly paid speaker and life coach.

You could see why the author was a highly paid speaker; she was a damn good one. I knew this from watching her on
The Today Show
and hearing her on National Public Radio debating, for instance, another lady writer who'd published a long article about her work-life balance in the same magazine and also scored a massive book deal from it. So good a speaker was the bestselling author and so irritating and spurious was the “Knot Yet” report that I spent many, many hours preparing my presentation. I wanted to earn my $2,500 in good faith and I also wanted to make a meaningful connection with the audience, which I'd been told would be a large crowd of varying ages and political and religious persuasions from Los Angeles's well-heeled west side.

*   *   *

It is typical of my work pattern to devote the most time and effort to projects that have the smallest audiences and pay the least money. This is especially true of public-speaking situations, where my fear of walking up to a podium with less than three times the amount of material I need to fill the allotted time outweighs my commonsense knowledge that I'm hardly being paid anything and that very few people will show up. I once spent months preparing a lecture on “journaling” that I was asked to give as part of a wellness outreach program run by the general hospital in Lincoln, Nebraska. I pored over the diaries of Simone de Beauvoir and Virginia Woolf and Lewis and Clark. I mounted a big argument for “the journal as the fieldwork of the unconscious” and gave pointers for keeping journals that “aren't merely self-reflective but serve as a springboard for inquiry into the outside world.”

I rambled on like this for forty minutes until, during the question-and-answer period, people started asking which had better deals on leather-bound diaries, Barnes and Noble or the local stationers. They asked for advice on what to do if someone reads your diary and then becomes angry with you. I was paid U.S. $0.00 for this presentation, which was appropriate because that's about how much value I added to the wellness outreach program. I told myself (and, indeed, had taken the gig because I believed) that I could use the lecture again, maybe even turning it into something that I could deliver on college campuses for generous fees. This is what I tell myself every time I agree to give a lecture, even if the lecture is tailored so specifically to the occasion (see: “Mary McCarthy at Vassar: A Centennial Celebration”) that I might as well drop my one and only copy of the speech into a recycling bin as I exit the auditorium. I tell myself that it's okay that I have spent four months researching, writing, and rehearsing this speech because I can do it as a TED Talk someday. It's okay, I say, because someday it will go viral on Facebook and people will leave comments to the effect of “This will f*cking blow your mind” and “OMG: genius!”

And so it went with my fifteen-minute response to the “Knot Yet” report, a response born of my “personal mythology,” which in turn was born of my family mythology. I guess the operative word here is
mythology
. The values and assumptions I'm about to describe are grievously limited in what they suggest about the wrong and right ways to live a life. Nonetheless, they are the values I grew up with and the ones that still shape my attitudes and judgments and reactions. I am ruled by them even though I no longer fully believe them, which I guess is to say that even though I can see the folly of imposing them on others, there's never going to be a day of my life that I don't breathe them in and out like oxygen itself.

The basic rundown is this. Thanks to some combination of class, generation, personal baggage, and innate temperament, my parents raised my brother and me to believe that relationships (at least the romantically and/or legally partnered kind) were for the weak. Time-consuming, physically and emotionally risky, and total nonstarters in the way of résumé building or the accumulation of A.P. credits, they were little more than distractions from the Big Life Project that was work. And though “work” tended to be murkily defined in our household (as it happened, there weren't a whole lot of A.P. credits flying around), it was clear that its opposite—domestic life, family life, the kind of life where adult concerns and interests are perpetually subsumed by a tide of parent-teacher conferences and sticky surfaces and meltdowns in the toy aisle—put a major cramp in any thinking person's style and should be put off as long as possible if not avoided entirely. That my parents were themselves living such a life—in the suburbs, no less—was a stinging irony I fully absorbed only later.

Every December, a pile of Christmas cards accumulated in a basket in the dining room. They were from faraway relatives and people my parents had known in previous lives. Many contained portrait-studio family photos or newsletters bragging about various accomplishments and/or lamenting various medical ailments. These missives were read and commented upon in depth by my parents, often with the derisive implication that if winning a Little League trophy was big-enough news to make the annual Christmas letter, this family must not have accomplished a whole lot else. But of all the nonachievements presented, none were subject to more scorn than the news that someone was getting married, especially if that person was in some way deemed too young, too nascent in his or her career, too undeveloped as a person to withstand the identity-erasing effects of formally attaching yourself to another (possibly similarly undeveloped) person.

“Jackie Harris is getting
married
,” my mother would say. She would say this in the same tone as she might say
Jackie Harris got a tattoo
. Or
Jackie Harris has dropped out of that applied physics Ph.D. program and enrolled in beauty school
.

Translation: Early marriage is for the unambitious. Successful people stay single for a long time and when they've achieved everything they possibly can on their own they marry equally if not more successful people. Then their weddings are announced in
The New York Times
. Translation: If you are not important or successful enough to get your wedding announced in
The New York Times
you're not ready to get married.

*   *   *

The “Knot Yet” debate was in April. The invitation to participate had come in December. Two weeks before the event, there was still no venue. One week before the event, I was told that it would take place at a Modern Orthodox synagogue in Beverly Hills. Two days before the event, a phone conference was held among the participants, at which time the Marriage Project director asked if it was too late to do any publicity or advertising. The rabbi who led the synagogue was also on the phone and said that he would put a notice on the website and alert the members of the shul's singles' group. The Marriage Project director said he anticipated there could be as many as five hundred people in attendance and the rabbi said there was a larger auditorium we could use if the numbers exceeded the capacity of the hall we'd originally planned on.

When I arrived at the synagogue on the evening of the event, ten minutes before the start time, there was exactly one person in the audience. He was maybe fortyish, skinny and pale and crowned with a yarmulke that was attached to his balding head with painful-looking pins. He was surrounded by no fewer than seventy-four empty chairs. At the back of the room was a table with Chips Ahoy cookies and a large-capacity coffee percolator.

I thought to myself that perhaps the thing would be canceled if no one else showed up. Years ago, on a book tour, I'd arrived at a bookstore in Saint Paul, Minnesota, to find that exactly one person had come to my reading. It seemed that David Sedaris was doing a reading and book signing at the university that very same night, thereby tapping every single literary-minded person in the region and effectively making my reading the equivalent of a barely known sitcom competing with the number-one-rated show airing at the same time on another network. The person who had come turned out to be a big fan. She was a very young woman living on her parents' farm in rural Minnesota and she'd driven an hour to see me. It was obvious that the only decent thing to do was to take her to see David Sedaris. So we got ourselves over to the university, where Sedaris's talk was so packed we had to watch him on a Jumbotron.

Just as I was wondering if the Marriage Project would still pay me if we canceled the show and offered to take our sole audience member to the alternate cultural event of his choice (which he would surely refuse, thereby freeing me to go home), more attendees began trickling in. There was an elderly couple and a young, twenty-something couple and a gaggle of women-of-a-certain-age whose slightly provocative attire (a leopard-print blouse here, a sequined top there) suggested this might be some kind of girls' night out. At least half the women in the audience, which was now numbering into the low double digits, wore wigs or some other kind of head covering. At least a quarter of the entire audience, presumably members of the singles' group, looked like they might be pushing fifty. There were patchy mustaches and ill-fitting electric-blue sweaters that could only have been purchased at T.J. Maxx by septuagenarian mothers holding out hope that their future daughter-in-law was just a J-Date away.

I took my place at the table next to the bestselling author and the rabbi introduced us. The Marriage Project director went to the podium and reported his findings on “rates of marriage satisfaction.” He also talked about how television programs like
Sex and the City
glorified the single life in ultimately damaging ways. Next came the second report author, who said that most people mistakenly believe that physical attraction is the first thing to look for in a partner, when in fact research has shown that the happiest marriages are those in which sexual chemistry arises only after basic compatibility is established. The audience was attentive, if not rapt. By the time I approached the podium, I felt confident that I'd win the evening, even though the bestselling writer was speaking last. I thanked the Marriage Project guys for inviting me and the rabbi for hosting us. Then I fired up my ignition.

I started out by saying that I was glad to see that a conversation about a “trend” was finally addressing the ways in which that trend affected the nonelite classes as well as the wine-sipping,
New York Times
Style-section-reading demographic that usually provides the fodder for grand pronouncements about social phenomena. I talked about how there was truth in the assertion that “Middle Americans” were often putting the baby before the bridal shower—or skipping marriage altogether—but that the reasons were likely more rooted in economics than in a desire to emulate the characters on
Sex and the City
. I talked about how the demise of manufacturing jobs has meant many working-class and lower-class women are the breadwinners in their families and therefore lack the financial incentive to commit to a male partner. I then shifted course slightly and spoke about the way five- and six-figure price tags on weddings and the fetishization of gift registries and lavish honeymoons and bridal paraphernalia had made marriage seem less like the ultimate life choice than the ultimate life
style
. I suggested that if our chief cultural images of marriage are dominated by consumer fantasies, not least of all setting up a household filled with magazine-ready decor and “grown-up furniture,” it should be no shock that less-affluent people are skipping that step altogether.