Reader Liz sent me this rant from a blogger at Modestly, Yours named M. Hayes. Modestly, Yours is the division of the Anti-Feminist Ladies’ Auxiliary dedicated to telling women that we are cows and we need to stop giving the milk away for free. Lest you have any doubts that you are indeed a udder-bearing cow, they have merchandise to remind you:
The blog post is trying to scare women into marrying and having kids young by declining to believe that single people can be happy. In order to do this, Hayes presents single women with a false dilemma.
As a woman who was single for most of my adult life (I married late), proclaiming the singles “couldn’t be happier” is a crock and we all know it. They certainly could be happier, and I bet that each and every one of those allegedly deliriously happy single people would rather NOT be single. But due to a number of societal trends, there are fewer people interested in marrying, which is a shame for these individual people, and it’s unfortunate for the society at large (and for the children they adopt).
False dilemma. Most happily single people are happy to acknowledge that marriage to the right person would make them even happier, but are well aware that a bad marriage would not do so. Believe it or not, many of us have had chances to get married but we didn’t go for it because we realized that it wasn’t what we wanted. If you just want to get married and your standards are low, especially if you’re a woman, it’s extraordinarily simple to do so. So if it’s just a matter of having a marriage, any marriage, you can safely guess that women are in fact happily choosing to be single.
What are the trends? The advent of birth control and the sexual revolution is one, which disassociated sex from marriage and procreation (just like the Vatican said it would back then). There simply isn’t the value placed on marriage that existed 40 years ago, there’s less pressure to get married. Many men are reluctant to commit to marriage, and they can be sexually active without it.
I’m skeptical of the idea that bribing a man you may not want into a marriage he definitely wouldn’t want if you didn’t make sex contigent on it is the road to happiness.
Many women are fearful of losing their “independence” in a marriage. Young women are still told to postpone getting married and having kids until they’re established in their career. (Pretty bad advice for women who do want kids, start young while you’re fertile and energetic). Our culture is vastly more self-absorbed and selfish nowadays. People are more interested in their own individual “self-actualization” than in learning to share their lives with another person.
Blah blah blah typical wingnuttery. The simpler, more likely explanation for the pickiness of my generation is that we grew up during a massive cultural alarm about a 50% divorce rate. We figured we should take the odds seriously before just getting married willy-nilly. For what it’s worth, the 50% divorce rate informed the advice to women to get financial independence, which is very real and doesn’t need scare quotes, before committing to a relationship. Depending on a man for your well-being when there’s a 50% chance of getting “fired” is high risk behavior.
Many of the couples in the article said things like “I’m not willing to settle…” and “It’s going to take one hell of girl.” The other person has to meet high standards, the other person has to be exceptional. We’re talking soul-mate material only! But no one said anything like, “I’m willing to share and compromise, I know there’s give-and-take in any relationship. My relationship with another person might come ahead of my personal desires sometimes, there will be some self-sacrifice.” Blasphemy in these irreligious times! Nothing is more important than the individual, it’s all about me!
Whenever someone starts praising compromise or sacrifice as good in and of themselves, I put my hand over my wallet. This is a classic case. Lowering your standards is good, because compromise is good and so is sacrifice; now hand over the wallet. What she fails to notice is that all these people grasp that compromise would have to happen and are stating that for the person worth compromising for, they will in fact compromise.
But Hayes appears to be dense about a lot of things.
It’s well documented that married people are happier, they do live longer, their finances are better, they’re more altruistic, and their kids are happier, more secure, and also financially better off.
It’s true that a group that self-selects marriage is generally happier with that choice than people who enter into it under duress, I’d imagine. Maybe Hayes thinks these reported numbers are a problem to be solved, and if she can badger people who don’t want to be married into marriage, the happiness of the average married person will thereby be lowered.
Hayes is also in the “do as I say, not as I do” school of wingnuttery. Within this post about how single people need to lower their standards and just get themselves a marriage, even one they’re fairly certain they don’t want, she reveals some stuff about herself, like this:
I’m not saying single people are miserable, I was able to entertain myself quite well in my singleton years.
And:
As a woman who was single for most of my adult life (I married late),
In other words, she sets herself up as someone who was happy being single until such time as she met the right man, and then and only then, which was late in life, she happily married. The rest of us shouldn’t think we’re as deserving of having high standards, I suppose.
But the hand-wringing conclusion is the best part and why I absolutely had to blog this.
Advice: Singles should stop pretending they’re happy and OK with being single, admit that your life would be richer with a mate.
I’ll hold off on that until you tell me if the generic “mate” that I’m supposed to be happy with is John Cusack or Homer Simpson.
Tell yourself that you want a wife or husband, and make that a priority.
Priority over what? Oh yeah, that’s right. Prioritize getting the ring over getting a relationship you actually want.
Drop the New Age “soul mate” obsession (it’s wishful thinking and as baseless as the crushes you had in junior high school.)
I have to admit that I think the idea of “soul mates” is stupid but I also have to admit that I don’t know many single adults who actually believe it. The only time I ever hear it, actually, is coming from the nauseating couples on the eHarmony commercials. Well and Nice Guys® often seem to believe it but even then, most of them wouldn’t say so outright.
Develop your personality and strengths so that you are an exceptional person and companion.
Sounds simple enough, but the tricky part is doing it overnight so you can then get to the important task of marrying the first schlub that will have you.
Relearn how to share and give and compromise. Don’t sleep around, you’re wasting your energies and spirit.
Oh, I don’t know. Sleeping around involves a shitload of sharing, giving, and compromising. But what I never get about this advice is it just doesn’t make a lick of sense. Why keep the candidate pool deliberately small?
Remember where you came from: a married mother and father (for most of us anyway). That institution is the underpinning of our very society, and dispensing with it isn’t likely to be an improvement.
Oh I don’t know. Seems like her advice throughout this piece can be thrown back in her face at this point. Think society couldn’t be better without marriage? I say, don’t knock it until you’ve tried it.
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Here’s what she says: “I bet that each and every one of those allegedly deliriously happy single people would rather NOT be single. But due to a number of societal trends, there are fewer people interested in marrying…”
So every single person longs to be married, but they can’t because there are fewer people interested in getting married. Huh? Who are the people who don’t want to get married, then?
I suppose she’s just upset because it took her so long to find somebody who would agree to marry her, and now she’s taking it out on the rest of us.
Whoops, that was mean. What I meant is that, like more wingnut culture critics, she’s upset about the way her life went and has decided that it’s society’s fault for not making everybody else do what she wants them to do.
What is it with these people who think you must do everything the way they have? Is it that they’re not happy with their own choices so everyone must validate them by choosing the same thing?
That’s sooo junior high.
Whoa! Back the crazy train up:
Many men are reluctant to commit to marriage, and they can be sexually active without it.
Uh, what? Men can be sexually active without marriage, but uh, so can women. I know they all think that women who have sex with men they aren’t married to are whores, but I’ve never heard it stated so baldly before.
Remember where you came from: a married mother and father (for most of us anyway). That institution is the underpinning of our very society, and dispensing with it isn’t likely to be an improvement.
With a fifty percent divorce rate in addition to unwed motherhood, most of us came from divorce or unwed motherhood. Math is hard, I suppose.
Does this woman get paid to be a hypocrite and tell lies?
Don’t sleep around, you’re wasting your energies and spirit.
Because you only have so much sex juice to give out, and there are no refills.
OK, sophronia beat me to it. But how can she write within 2 sentences that “I bet that each and every one of those allegedly deliriously happy single people would rather NOT be single” immediately followed by “But due to a number of societal trends, there are fewer people interested in marrying”?
I mean really. Either they want to get married or they aren’t interested.
All I can figure is she’s trying to say the women are miserable as singles and they can’t marry b/c men no longer want to. Which is crap, but at least would make more sense than what she actually wrote. It’s not backed up by any study (it’s actually refuted) but we know that truthiness just distracts from debates anyway now, don’t we?
Then, of course, she goes into the stupid, evil fallacy that women should marry young and have babies early “while they are fertile”.
One night of spontaneous, birth-control free sex in May, and now this 39 y/o is preggers again. And no, the sex wasn’t any better b/c we were ‘open’ and sharing our whole selves. It was just more stupid than usual.
Every time I have failed to use bc, I’ve gotten pregnant. When I just saw my OB, I mentioned “aging eggs” and “falling fertility with age” to my nurse, who just rolled her eyes and scoffed. Because the office is full of late thirties to late forties women.
30 AND 40-SOMETHINGS GET PREGNANT. EASILY. I become more and more convinced that the “aging eggs” story is a myth fostered by the patriarchy. Cause doesn’t it work great? Scaring young women into marrying before they are ready, then ‘trapping’ them with kids? Works for the patriarchy!
I hate that term “mate”, to me it always conjures up visions of monkeys or something & i am no monkey nor do I want to date one. I also hate the term “compromise”, especially in terms of relationships because men always have used it as a means to their own personal end, i.e. YOU are doing something that displeases ME, therefore YOU must compromise for MY peace of mind. Hello, it’s not compromise if only one person continually benefits. And people wonder why I don’t wanna get married.
This post is still bugging me.
She was single until her 30s, when she apparently settled for someone just in order to get married. Hence the needs to compromise and sacrafice in marriage, and the instructing of the single to give up on “soulmates”. Heaven forbid singles (or worse, Hayes herself) decide that settling is worse than singlehood.
Why do wingnuts feel the need to force others to conform to their belief structure? When most of the time they don’t seem to be able to live that life themselves?
Men - you know, real people, as opposed to the involuntary broodmares they dont want to marry.More & more it amazes me, the s*** these people dribble down their chins.
So, has she gotten on the stick (so to speak) and had a bunch of kids yet? Because she’s got to make up for all that time lost to farting around as a singleton.
Bloody hell, SOMEONE get this woman back in therapy!!!!
And another thing: by the numbers, 50% of marriages end in divorce, and that’s bad enough, but then you’ve got to figure in that for a lot of our parents, divorce was an absolute last resort OR something decent people just didn’t do… so it’s likely that a fairly high percentage of the NON-divorced 50% either were just barely hanging on or would have preferred to be divorced but couldn’t/wouldn’t…. and that doesn’t really make a good testimonial for the wonderful institution of matrimony.
In fact most of the serious solitaires I know come from homes that would have been BETTER had they been “broken.” We’ve been there, we’ve seen it, we ain’t gonna do that to ourselves or someone else we care about….
I’m still trying to find that passage in the NT where Yeshua says “And behold, I have come so that the bigots and the morons shall make your lives miserable, even unto the end of days.” It’s GOTTA be somewhere in Paul, partly because Paul really seems to have gotten off on the misery schtick, and also because Paul never actually met The Man, who never would have said such a thing in real space. So I figger Paul just slipped it in there somewheres.
Why do the Christians hate Jesus, Aunt Amanda?
Ha. So, the conservative men who got married in great part because it got them a live-in servant to take care of them and provide them with all the benefits of children and little of the burden and so forth, were not being selfish?
And yet, for a woman to not want to do all that, is?
The hell with that.
Come off it. There are things more important than the individual; no one’s saying there aren’t. Thing is, a relationship where I give more than I get, where I’m worse off than I was single, for the benefit of someone who doesn’t deserve me (if he did, he’d make sure I was getting as much out of it as he did), is not. Some selfish guy who takes me for granted and decreases my level of happiness and fulfillment from when I’m single, is not more important than my happiness and not worth my time and effort to sustain—and neither is a nonsentient, unfeeling, unthinking relationship. The point of a relationship is to enrich all people involved. If it does not do that, there is no point in it. If it does the opposite to someone, it is harmful and should be ended.
Go back to hell, Hayes. I am happy, and I am OK with being single. My life would be richer with a soul mate* (to use a vaguely off-the-mark but generally accurate term), yes I admit that, but it would not be happier with just any random man (or woman, for that matter). A cut-glass bowl (that’s me) that isn’t broken (is happily single) does not need to be fixed with a hammer (bad relationship). A nice treasure to go in that bowl (soul mate) is worth avoiding hammers for even if it is never placed there.
*I suppose “soul mate” generally translates to some perfect lover whose the only one you’re meant for, made just for you; I use it to describe any very significant love match. Someone who is very obviously worth the various troubles and sacrifices of the relationship, by a wide margin.
More to the point, or worse, Hayes’ husband.
I become more and more convinced that the “aging eggs� story is a myth fostered by the patriarchy.
From what I understand, the increase in birth defects, esp. Downs’ syndrome, is due to aging of the mechanisms that induce a miscarriage if the zygote/fetus ‘isn’t right’, along with a correlation between exposure to radiation(mainly medical, of course) and birth defects in general, which would probably show a correlation with age as well.
FWIW, I asked Professor Avenger the ‘best’ time for a woman to have a child, and he said up until the age of 30, but as we’ve been told, a healthy child is possible for some years afterwards.
Also, if the concern were “aging eggs”, then the logical step would be to have some eggs extracted and frozen by the age of, say, 23, not to get married by 22 so that they start churning them out by 23.
Doesn’t anyone but me remember all those surveys and studies back in the 70’s and 80’s that showed that men flourished in marriages but women didn’t?
Married men, who have some one to talk to, to feed them, to clean up after them and to support them, live longer and are much happier than single men. As I remember, most studies showed that married women were less happy than single women, who had independence, their own money, and (usually) a good family and social network (unlike single men).
And I’ve got to say — the comments to the linked post are, well, surprising. There are several people who have popped up to say largely the same set of things we’re saying here, with the obvious caveat that for them ’single’ also means ‘a celibate virgin’.
I’m single and I’d rather be boiled in Dingo piss than get married. Tried it and ended up broken hearted and borderline suicidal. I’d be happy to find someone I really connect with who is also a blast in the sack, but between my excellent friends and skillful masturbation I’m doing just fine, thankyouverymuch. The right woman might just be able to convince me to try again, but the right woman would not push the issue and would be more than happy with my love, despite the lack of government endorsement.
Actually “Nice Guys®” only say they believe it as a ploy to get sex which is why they are classified as “Nice Guys®”
From what I understand, the increase in birth defects, esp. Downs’ syndrome, is due to aging of the mechanisms that induce a miscarriage if the zygote/fetus ‘isn’t right’, along with a correlation between exposure to radiation(mainly medical, of course) and birth defects in general, which would probably show a correlation with age as well.
Wait, you mean God is an abortionist? How can this be? My worldview is all askew! Why won’t somebody think of the tiny babies that evil God is slaughtering?
The right woman might just be able to convince me to try again, but the right woman would not push the issue and would be more than happy with my love, despite the lack of government endorsement.”
These days most of the married people I know got married well after getting a mortgage together, which, when you think about it, is a longer commitment than many marriages. Given that there really isn’t a social stigma about living together nowadays, I think many people get married
a) so they can have a big party and invite all their friends
b) to take advantage of benefits that may only accrue to a legally married spouse and not a common-law spouse (i.e. depending on the jurisdiction, benefits to a partner through a workplace, tax breaks, spousal visas or eligibility for citizenship if they go abroad, etc).
Honestly, the youngish (25 to 40, roughly) heteroseexual people I know are a lot less hung up on marriage being a big deal than are the queer people. When same-sex marriage came through here a couple of years ago, I knew couples who made a huge deal out of having a wedding even if they’d been together for well over a decade. They took it much more seriously than hetero couples who could’ve gotten married all along and didn’t get around to it because they were saving for a downpayment, or wanted to take a cool vacation or something.
Advice: Singles should stop pretending they’re happy and OK with being single, admit that your life would be richer with a mate.
So I, a happily asexual woman, would be EVEN HAPPIER if I married someone I’m not sexually attracted to and had sex with him anyway. Sure.
Articles like this really piss me off, for all the reasons more eloquent commenters have listed and more. She’s basically one step away from telling me I need therapy.
Whenever someone starts praising compromise or sacrifice as good in and of themselves, I put my hand over my wallet.
Seconded. And notice it’s never sacrifice as a good for, say, making your life simpler and less prone to bankruptcy in response to a bad month? They’re never trumpeting the value of riding a bike and brown-bagging it and making sure to set aside a little each month for a rainy day; no, on the economics front, sacrifice is heresy! It’s practically treasonous not to spend more than you have constantly and consistently!
And yet, as soon as we get around to service to the state, whether that be accepting the draft or not worrying about the loss of your civil liberties or, as in this article, creating the framework for the next generation of consumers, all of a sudden sacrifice is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Funny how that is, huh?
[…] Damn you, Amanda, it’s midnight and I’m tired. But then you had to go and link to this I don’t buy it that these folks who are dying their hair blue or buying fancy appliances are all that happy about their situation. I’m not saying single people are miserable, I was able to entertain myself quite well in my singleton years. But it’s malarkey to say they’re happier. A society with more and more single people living alone in their individual houses doesn’t sound like it’s going in the right direction. Not much of a future there. Who will take care of them in their old age? What will they pass on and to whom? […]
We’re dealing here with the the typical fundie psychopathology - they are people who have chosen a self-limiting lifestyle, and they are looking for validations for those choices. They want to believe that it wasn’t a choice, that it was the only way. They have to believe that the rest of us are miserable and going to hell in order to believe that their own lives and life choices are valid. It’s fear and insecurity, nothing less. Have I made the right choices in my life? Who the hell knows? But I don’t expect people I’ve never met and wouldn’t like if I did to validate my choices. These people do. Weird, isn’t it?
I’m always impressed when people who are so deliriously happy in their marriages can actually find the time and energy to tell the rest of us all about it. Maybe I’m just selfish, but if I were in the same position I’d be too busy shagging all the time.
Seriously, though… this is the harm that comes of interpreting other people’s lifestyles as some kind of big political statement, rather than simply an exercise of personal choice. Some of us get married. Some of us don’t. Some of us want to but never manage to do it. That diversity is what creates a rich and varied society. I have yet to see anyone make a convincing argument that the world would be a better place if we all made exactly the same choices.
Why on earth are these fundies so obsessed with the details of strangers’ lives? Their preoccupation with the marrying age and reproductive practices of people they don’t even know is downright bizarre — you’d think we were all personally carrying the only copy of their genes left on earth.
The ONLY thing that could explain this would be if they themselves were miserable and angry about their own lives — and the only antidote is to convince everyone to join them in their misery. No other explanation makes sense.
What happens if you don’t want to get pregnant, ever? And if the man you love turns out to be just as not-into-marriage as you are? And if you both despise the whole buy-the-cow theory of marital relations, and have no trouble making compromises and being unselfish without any exchange of jewelry and signing a piece of paper whatsoever?
Oops, I think I just popped somebody’s bogus moral paradigm.
Hayes obviously lacks self-esteem.
She chose to marry a guy and instead of being happy about it she still feels the need to feel superior over others. Since she’s married her choice - unmarried people (especially women) - isn’t that surprising.
It’s just another way of telling to people: Look at me, i am a role model and if you don’t act like me you’ll even be more inferior to me than you already are.
She lowers others in order to heighten herself. So if she’s really dependant on this kind of action she deserves my compassion.
Yes, there aren’t so many parents anymore who think of selling her daughter to the guy who bids the highest price.
And yes, there are less women who are financially dependant of a husband who beats and/or rapes them and treats them like sh*t due to more women with vocational training.
But Hayes seems to think that this was bad.
So. Single people are too interested in their own happiness, and the solution to this is for us to get married, which is great because it will make us be…happier…um…
Ok, you lost me.
Believe it or not, many of us have had chances to get married but we didn’t go for it because we realized that it wasn’t what we wanted.
Oh, but it’s a well-known fact, at least in fundie-land, that feminists never get offers of marriage because they scare all the boys away (all feminists are women, by the way). Come on, Amanda!
I’m with Raincitygirl. The only reason(s) I’ve ever seriously contemplated getting married were basically bureaucratic — if you’re dating someone in another country, it simplifies immigration or emigration somewhat to be married to a citizen, and the other governmental perqs are nice. I know of at least two other couples in my immediate sphere who married for bureaucratic reasons as well.
I eventually dumped my fiance, though, because he got addicted to scrip drugs, and I couldn’t take it. How selfish of me, huh? I guess I should have just bucked it up and put up with the whining, cajoling, periodic DTs, his being on the nod all the time, and the odd assault attempt.
I’ve been ever so much happier and saner since becoming technically single again, and now I have a wonderful boyfriend — and no plans to get married.
men have always been sexually active prior to, and outside of marriage, not least in the times and countries where christian supremacy is at its height, with the church effectively dictating social policy for the state.
europe in the middle ages and latin america today have far higher rates of out of wedlock birth than in the modern era of the US. exhortations to abstinence are not merely worthless in the here and now, they are always and everywhere without effect, if not outright counterproductive to the ends they are supposed to achieve.
all they accomplish is stigmatizing women and letting men off the hook entirely, in practice.
“As a woman who was single for most of my adult life (I married late), proclaiming the singles “couldn’t be happierâ€? is a crock and we all know it. They certainly could be happier, and I bet that each and every one of those allegedly deliriously happy single people would rather NOT be single.”
Which I believe translates into: One can prove that people want to get married because they’re not getting married.
Actually, I think it’s more along the lines of: “People who think they don’t want to get married actually do, they’re just too dumb to know their own mind. I, on the other hand, am able to peer into your soul across the internet and know exactly what you really want.”
Also, if the concern were “aging eggs�, then the logical step would be to have some eggs extracted and frozen by the age of, say, 23, not to get married by 22 so that they start churning them out by 23.
Frighteningly, there are companies that offer that service. It’s ~$5000 for the extraction and between $1-3000 annually for storage.
As for your Prof.’s advice about pre-30 baby-making, while it’s true older mother’s fetuses have a higher chance of genetic defect than younger mothers, the chance of an older mother’s fetus having defects is still very very low.
My mom was 29 when she conceived my younger brother, who has Down Syndrome. Most mothers of DS babies are younger, b/c most mothers are younger. It’s just the math. Her odds were great, but that didn’t matter.
According to my OB visit, I at 39 have a 1 in 120 chance (0.8%) of having a child with DS type genetic defects. Yes, less than one percent. The chance of all other defects is 1 in 70 (about 1.5%), but most of those defects cause miscarriage (God is ultimate abortionist). Since we’ve seen the heartbeat, odds of miscarriage are down to 5%.
When you look at those odds, they are pretty damn good. Why the big scare? It’s true that they are better for younger women, but we’re talking about events that happen to less than one percent of pregnant women. Yet Hayes and the patriarchy use this as a means of forcing women to marry before they are ready or to marry less worthy suitors b/c if you want to have teh babi3s, you have to do it before 30!
Don’t compromise. If you don’t believe you’ve found a soulmate*, stay single.
I just celebrated my 17th anniversary, but I can’t imagine 17 years of settling for someone I wasn’t quite happy with. Actually, I can’t imagine 1 month of it. Nor would I want to be a settled-for for someone else. If my partner wasn’t head-over-heels for me, would he put up gracefully with my faults and foibles, which are many?
*Yes, I do believe in soulmates. Sometimes romantic, sometimes platonic– soulmates can be best friends instead of lovers. I’ve had a few, and I don’t think I can be all that unique, although I do believe introverts may have a tendency to look for deeper friendships than extroverts and are therefore more likely to be in a soulmate frame of mind.
It’s true that the woman’s age doesn’t affect the chance of getting a child with Down-Langley Syndrome not to much at the beginning.
The general chance of a disabled child is 3,5-5 % and the cance of getting a child with Down-Langley rises above five percent when the mother is 45 years old. The curve rises exponentially from about 33 years onwards.
So it’s not too dramatic to get a child if your 40 years old or something or generally delay pregnancy as long as you don’t wait until you’re eighty years old…
It’s true that the woman’s age affects the child more than the father’s (though it still plays a role. The chance of getting achondroplasia rises with the father’s age due to the fact that those sperms carrying the mutation are more competitive than their contemporaries (they don’t become faster with proceeding age)) because of the oocytes being generated earlier on and then “stored” while the sperms do get generated regularly.
So pregnancy in later years’s not as severe as many people want to make you think.
Norah, Norah, Norah…don’t you realize that the Good Lord puts an invisible shield around our naughty bits until our future Lord And Master puts the Magic Matrimonial ring on our finger? In Hayes’ world, the hymen is sorta like the paper strip hotels place around the toilet seat whenever new guests move into a room; it shows the female in question is “sanitzed for your protection.” That, or she thinks she’s still in Biblical times, when a virgin who “lay with a man” was either forced to marry him or stoned to death, depending on the location.
Whereas I’m ready to frost Hayes’ shorts on her assertion that marriage was taken more seriously before Vatican II and the advent of reliable birth control (if so then explain why up to a quarter of women in the 1950s pregnant at the time of marriage?) And whereas I go apoplectic over the why-buy-a-cow construction (Jesus Christ, how low an opinion of men, or women, can those people possibly have!) I want to point out that her actual thesis is uncontroversial.
“I’m not saying single people are miserable, I was able to entertain myself quite well in my singleton years. But it’s malarkey to say they’re happier.”
That seems about right, though she omits the corollary that it’s also malarkey to claim that people in relationships are happier.
Long-term happiness doesn’t particularly correlate with simple relationship status outside maybe an 18-24 month blip at the beginning or end. Unless she’s advocating serial monogamy new-relationship euphoria, or post-relationship grief isn’t statistically significant. Over time happiness returns to the mean whether you’re in a relationship or not.
figleaf
I think everyone else has pretty well covered it. Just wanted to chime in here, that I did not meet the right person UNTIL I grew up and stopped waiting for someone to validate my life. I met him after I had decided fuck it, being single was sometimes lonely but better than marrying the wrong person, and started doing the things I wanted to do without reference to whether it increased my chances of husband-catching.
Actually, I almost didn’t meet him at all, because I was so NOT looking that I almost didn’t notice him flirting with me, ha…
And I’ve got to say — the comments to the linked post are, well, surprising. There are several people who have popped up to say largely the same set of things we’re saying here, with the obvious caveat that for them ’single’ also means ‘a celibate virgin’.
You’d be surprised how many of us Pandagon readers like to keep up with the Modesty chicas for the purpose of stirring things up. I take pride in the fact that I can increase the number of comments twofold just by posting a disagreement.
That Mary, though - she’s my nemesis. The most close-minded of the lot.
For what it’s worth I also think that by a) confusing “marriage” with “partnership” and b) overlooking the 50% failure rate for marriage (or the pre-divorce abandonment rate) Hayes is correctly, but completely unhelpfully, arguing that people who are happily married tend to be happily married.
figleaf
I think everyone else has pretty well covered it. Just wanted to chime in here, that I did not meet the right person UNTIL I grew up and stopped waiting for someone to validate my life. I met him after I had decided fuck it, being single was sometimes lonely but better than marrying the wrong person, and started doing the things I wanted to do without reference to whether it increased my chances of husband-catching.
Actually, I almost didn’t meet him at all, because I was so NOT looking that I almost didn’t notice him flirting with me, ha…
Heh. You’re not alone in that. Step one of growing up is coming to terms with the fact that no one validates your life but you, and validating your life involves believing that you can and should do things alone. My husband and I met shortly after we learned to do that. We both have anecdotes of going to the movies and out to dinner alone: I, because I’ve been inclined to enjoy solitude since I was a child (I still on occasion go out of my way to have alone time), him whenever his friends were busy but he wanted to be out and about anyway. The trick is not giving a damn what a room full of strangers might think about that.
That helps in the long run not to make the mistake to glomp onto someone of the opposite sex just because it’s unacceptable to be seen as “alone”, and you start selecting who you spend your time with based on “presence makes own fun time even better” rather than “need a man accessory to go with activity X”.
Don’t sleep around, you’re wasting your energies and spirit.
We must preserve our precious bodily fluids!
europe in the middle ages and latin america today have far higher rates of out of wedlock birth than in the modern era of the US
When Illocano Avenger and I registered out marriage at the Philippine Consulate, I noticed that there were two boxes to indicate if the Philipino is question is legitimate or illegitimate.
Caren, he’s not only my professor, he’s my daddy.
Part of the ‘best time’ consideration is that women tend to be in better condition when they’re younger so that enters into considering when the ‘optimal’ time-frame is for childbirth, and that ignores any genetic factors whatsoever.
Of course, a fit 45-year-old might have a lot better time of it than a 30-year-old couch potato, but the general point that women ‘don’t’ have to get married and whelping future conservatives before the age of 30 if they want children is true, and I should add that I’ve learned something from this thread, though nothing surprising, FWIW.
Toglosh, the phrase “I’d rather be boiled in dingo piss” has made me want to marry you. What are you doing later this week?
Also, anyone who’s wondering why this single woman has no desire whatsoever to get married needs only to read the comments on this blog post to know why. Ugh!
Uh….I was kidding about getting married to toglosh. Didn’t mean to contradict myself within two sentences there.
Me, I graduated from Hickman High, same as Sam Walton and Ken Lay, so feel free to make with the Kewpie jokes. Besides, I went to Westminster, and that’s the Harvard of the Midwest.
And I am Napoleon!
RumbleLizard - actually “I’d rather be boiled in Dingo piss” is one of my standard pickup lines
So, do any of the cows — er, I mean ladies — at Modesty come over here to read comments? Or would that blow their whole paradigm to smithereens?
It never fails to amaze me at how deluded and hateful fundies can be, especially when they feel that their Magical Sky Daddy and “His” rules for living are being dissed. Yet these same children never see just how hateful and disrespectful of their Sky Daddy’s Son’s teachings really are.
There must be a wingnuttery gene that gets passed along, which argues for forced sterilization of anybody who attempts to run someone else’s sex life based on a magical being who lives in the sky and gets petulant when earthlings don’t follow his rules (that the earthlings made up in the first place).
Remember where you came from: a married mother and father
Yeah, I came from a mother and father who married at 19 and divorced, messily, 8 years later because when they finally grew up they each found that the other was a radically different person from who they thought they’d fallen in love with in the first place…
Good lord. Every time I entertain the idea of marriage and kids, I read something like this, and feel like I’ve dodged an Uzi full of bullets.
Lots of interesting points you guys make. Really good stuff here.
Nice post Amanda.