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q_pheevr sent a letter canceling his subscription to Atlantic Monthly.This article caused this cancellation, and I was curious about the article, so I went and read it. There's also an interview with Gottlieb about the article; the interview is much less edgy in tone.
I had expected to find the article infuriating. I can understand why many people did. The largest problem that I have with it? Her assumption that women all want children if they're looking for a husband. But in both this and the earlier article the site links, it's clear that she generalizes a great deal from her own experiences -- and that she's not afraid to be pretty bluntly honest about those.
So, for the purposes of this post, I do not assume that all women want children; I certainly don't assume that you secretly really want children if you say you don't; why would I? My post deals with relationships and since it is somewhat personal, with children. Much of what I say is not relevant if you do not want children, and there are very good reasons for not wanting them -- none of which I cover here. Back to Gottlieb for a moment.
Buried in the article, and assuming you can get past the:
Oh, I know—I’m guessing there are single 30-year-old women reading this right now who will be writing letters to the editor to say that the women I know aren’t widely representative, that I’ve been co-opted by the cult of the feminist backlash, and basically, that I have no idea what I’m talking about. 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.
she makes a good point, which I think might get lost. That point being? In this society, we're conditioned to believe in our One True Love, and we want it desperately.
Raising children is not the same as marrying your "true love". Raising children is not about romantic love at all. Part of the reward of raising children is the process itself -- because we all change while we're doing it. But in this era of Hallmark TV children and instant food and clothing, it's long and grueling. And it's definitely not about each other.
And in this era, still marked by Hollywood and television romance & passion, what we're supposed to be searching for when we get married, regardless of whether we want to start a family or not, is romantic love. We're addicted to being in love. We're trying to find our soul mates, whatever that means, and isn't it kind of strange that in our very, very non-religious society, that has meaning at all? But all of that burning passion, that frenzied illumination -- what does it have to do with raising children? With holding a family together? With aging, and debt, and responsibility? In my opinion, not a whole lot.
I was married when I was twenty-six. I'm a bit of a geek, and I had disavowed romantic love, at the age of seventeen, as something that simply did not exist outside of hormones and neuro-chemical response. People often felt I was somewhat cynical, at that age; it's possible. But what I wanted was only something that I felt could be achieved. I'm a little engineer.
Let me now deal with the word settling, which Gottlieb uses so frequently, one wonders if she thinks it's a simple article. I dislike it because it implies that choosing a life that is not predicated on a perfect true love is somehow both inferior and second-class. What does it mean in the context of real life? What does it mean in the context of my life?
I know damn well that I am not a perfect person; I'm probably much less of a perfect person than most. I cannot realistically look for a perfect person to spend my life with because one of two things would have to be true if I were to do this: One, I would feel that, with effort, I could become a perfect person, and therefore be a worthy partner to the perfect person, or Two, the perfect person could somehow find and love the very imperfect me. I have no reason to believe that someone who's perfect would do this. In fact, it's my suspicion that they wouldn't really require the interdependence of a marriage at all, but that's a different point; the point really is: I do not believe in perfect people. I don't believe they exist. There was no way to talk myself into believing that they did, so I gave up trying.
So... what I felt could be achieved? Well, love. Not in love, but love; they are radically different things, to me. They can co-exist (because we do all have hormones), but I would never confuse them. At seventeen, I made a mental list of what love would look like in our less than ideal world. That list hasn't really changed all that much, and it follows.
1. Consideration
2. Mutual respect
3. Similar Values
4. Honesty
They all sound kind of tepid, I know. And they don't take into consideration (seventeen, remember) things like: Can hold down a job. Can take out the garbage. Can change a diaper and be polite to my mother when she's on a tear. Can walk a screaming, colicky, baby for 2 hours at 4:00 am. But my seventeen year old self reasoned thusly: if these things exist, you can trust the person, and love doesn't exist without trust. In love does. In love can exist without any of these things, so ... I didn't trust the concept of being in love. Not even when I was.
In fact, if you look at the list, you can probably match a lot of people in your life to those qualities -- your friends, for instance. I love my friends.
I married my best friend. It was a bit of shock to the rest of our friends at the time, and it was a bit of surprise to both of us, I admit -- but I already knew that I could spend a lot of time with him, because I already had, for four years of non-dating, no-interest-in-dating, life. I loved him. We had fallen in love, but what was important to me, at the time, was that I knew I could happily live with him if I weren't in love, because in love is tidal, not constant; it was certainly not the first time in my life I had been in love. He was consistently kind to children, and we had many of the same views; we weren't even sure, at the time, that we wanted children.
I think Ms. Gottlieb would classify this as settling. Maybe I had decided at seventeen that I would, in her terminology, settle, because at seventeen I decided that I couldn't believe in what she spent her early life wanting from another person.
I might have tried to build a household and a family with my friends. Because no matter what life you want, and no matter who you choose to live it with, you'll be building something that you hope is strong enough to weather storms -- and most friendships last longer than marriages, these days. There is a striking moment in the interview, in which Gottlieb recalls an earlier conversation.
You know, I was saying to a friend the other day, “I really want to find a guy who’s my best friend”—something ridiculous like that.
Why is that so ridiculous? And why does Gottlieb not consider other, alternate, households? She even hints at as much when she says:
But when I think about marriage nowadays, my role models are the television characters Will and Grace, who, though Will was gay and his relationship with Grace was platonic, were one of the most romantic couples I can think of. What I long for in a marriage is that sense of having a partner in crime. Someone who knows your day-to-day trivia. Someone who both calls you on your bullshit and puts up with your quirks. So what if Will and Grace weren’t having sex with each other? How many long- married couples are having much sex anyway?
You don't need to find a father for your children, but rather, a partner to help you raise them; I don't actually think you need to find a mother, either, if you can adopt. Gender doesn't matter. Commitment does. You don't need to be heteronormative. You don't need to be in love. But you do, I think, need to love. And you need to have mutual goals. But if you've made the commitment, planning for the future is its own joy; it's no longer nebulous; you can start to be concrete.
My husband, often called my long-suffering husband, is a fabulous father, and our family is the centre of his life. He is, in all possible ways, too good for me -- a fact I really didn't appreciate until we had two children. He is not, and has never been, a person for romantic gestures, but when disaster strikes and things fall apart all over the place?
He quietly, steadily, reconstitutes the world, and watching him pick up piece after piece with that sense of affectionate, tired determination, moves me to join him and to try to do the same, time and again. Sometimes it takes me longer. Sometimes he starts -- has to start -- without me. But he knows how to wait, and he believes in me, and in the end, that will always pull me through. I don't always understand what he sees in me, but that's not a bad thing; it keeps me humble. In as much as I am ever going to be humble.
I'm grateful that I stopped believing in The One, because had I been waiting, I would never have this life at all.
And in spite of the way in which the article is couched, I think some of what Gottlieb says, if you sift the words, is right.
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no subject
Date: 2008-03-05 02:34 am (UTC)It's frightening sometimes to get teens to define what "being in love" really means to them. When one gets past the hyperbole, too often one sees some disturbing ideas.
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Date: 2008-03-05 02:42 am (UTC)I think teenage love is hard because we're transitioning from a concept of love that is parental to one that is adult -- and the misunderstandings (because we have a lot of different parenting styles) that arise from this transition cause enormous amounts of pain.
Which is to say: The concept of love itself is still, at base, the idealized parental-non-conditional love, and on some level we have to learn to let go of that.
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Date: 2008-03-05 02:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-05 02:56 am (UTC)That's what I meant by the parental/non-conditional. It is basically what we would get from our ideal mother -- love no matter what, with selfless dedication, and etc. But of course no one wants that from their mother at that age. So we throw it out there into the wild when we start fumbling our way toward love -- and of course it clashes with people who also want the same things, and then there is pain.
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Date: 2008-03-05 02:56 am (UTC)Which is why people who talk about "settling" tend to annoy me, actually--because inherent in the concept is this very notion, that you can't wait around for your best friend--that expecting your partner to be a close friend at all is somehow unrealistic.
And it's my own bias in part, because I don't understand how people build lifelong relationships with anyone who isn't a close friend, but I think calling this unrealistic leads to a lot of people getting into really unhappy marriages in the name of settling and realism, and then telling themselves this is just how the world is.
I don't believe there's only one right person--but I do believe there are some people you can be deeply happy with, some people you can just sort of manage to get by with, and some people you can't be happy with, and I think it's better to live alone than with anyone but the first kind of person.
There's no The One, but it's not the sort of thing where anyone who you can halfway manage with will do, either.
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Date: 2008-03-05 02:59 am (UTC)Yes! I should have said something about this, but it was already a long post -- I was talking with Thomas about the notion of settling and how irritating it is because at base it assumes you are doing this because you are a failure. And, by extension, the person that you are willing to settle for is an emblem of that failure, and an all 'round walking loss, as it is.
I cannot think that many long-term friendships would survive that kind of negativity, and it seemed to me that in her scenario, where friendship is never even considered that you really would be saying "If I can't have it all, I won't have anything! You, Mr. Nothing, marry me."
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Date: 2008-03-06 02:55 pm (UTC)Can I quote you on that? :)
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Date: 2008-03-06 07:13 pm (UTC)Of course :). My husband, oddly enough, didn't have as much issue with the tone of the article as I did-- he thought it was a deliberate glibness on her part that was meant to be merely humorous. Actually, it occurs to me that very few men have commented here; I wonder why that is?
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Date: 2008-03-07 02:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-05 02:58 am (UTC)I've discovered in writing fiction that I come back to this sort of character again and again, by the way. Forget alpha males, forget dark and broken, the boy (because I write YA) who quietly does what needs doing wins my heart every time.
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Date: 2008-03-05 03:07 am (UTC)I don't believe in soul mates, though. I actually find the idea very depressing--in such a large planet with such a large population, there's only one person I can be happy with? Nope. I don't think so. I think there are a lot of people I could be happy with, and just because they may not be highly physically attractive (although I still can't understand how physical attractiveness determines anything beyond nice scenery) or they may not make a lot of money doesn't mean they aren't someone I could wind up being happy with.
I admit I could be completely off-base here because I've never really dated much and my longest "relationship" to date lasted about two weeks, but I've always just looked for someone I thought I could live with and be friends with and who could live with me (a "partner in crime," I guess). And since I haven't found anyone like that yet (although I must admit I haven't really been looking) I'd rather just stay single.
So that's my $.02, I guess.
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Date: 2008-03-05 03:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-05 03:14 am (UTC)And then when the baby gets colic, there's always "I dimly recall that I used to like this person once upon a time, and probably I will again..."
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Date: 2008-03-06 04:15 am (UTC)Oh, I've done that one! Although, to be fair, if he was home, I'd crawl under the bed and try to sleep -- but the early days were long.
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Date: 2008-03-05 03:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-05 04:14 am (UTC)Your list of important traits is not tepid at all. What happens when you set your standards on those pretty darn high? Honesty, set high? Whoo, boy, wait for fireworks.
I found, to my surprise, that I have to respect the person I'm partners with to a rather surprising degree. I have to be able to trust their common sense around my other loved ones, their political opinions, and their patience.
Shoot, I have to be able to trust that they won't let the cats out just because they couldn't be bothered to when a feline is trying to ooze surreptitiously between their feet.
Problem is, of course, that they will probably have high standards likewise.
Some of my friends have what I call a programmer's backbone. Meaning, they don't bend on matters of principle. It's all ones or zeros, there is no gray. There is no telling little fibs to be polite, there are not going to be any painless white lies for social niceties, there is no skimping or cheating or making excuses or passing along *your* excuses for you, or...well, the list is endless.
And when something happens that really whangs off that steel backbone, it makes your molars hum like those cartoon noises. Whaaaananananang.
Ouch.
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Date: 2008-03-05 04:29 am (UTC)Greatly OT, I picked up your book today, and I'm hooked already. <3 Somebody hid it behind a magazine rack at the bookstore, however, and that greatly annoyed me.
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Date: 2008-03-05 06:03 am (UTC)This is, of course, the type of OT that makes authors happy. Well, me, at any rate :D
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Date: 2008-03-06 02:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-06 03:11 am (UTC)Oh, and thank you!
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Date: 2008-03-05 04:36 am (UTC)Romantic ideals are just that, best grown out of and replaced by the richer knowledge of adulthood, but such a cynical and grasping outlook sickens me.
Your concepts are much more in line with my notion of reality; in love is great, but finite, you have to have a stable base on which to build a life. Gottlieb's faint contempt is not that.
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Date: 2008-03-06 04:17 am (UTC)I think it's the contempt -- whether it's self-contempt, or maybe the glib/edgy tone that suggests it -- that doesn't work for me in that article.
But I can't think of a relationship (any) that survives that constant level of contempt, or eye-rolling, or can't-you-take-a-joke interaction.
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Date: 2008-03-05 04:56 am (UTC)"Settling", in my mind, is as much about accepting that we are not perfect as it is accepting that any potential partner will not be perfect. But based on my own experience I would phrase it differently: don't sweat the small stuff. Not coincidentally, I believe the same approach is necessary in building friendships as well as life partners.
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Date: 2008-03-05 04:59 am (UTC)Perfectly said.
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Date: 2008-03-05 06:04 am (UTC)Yes. Well.
Sometimes I wonder if my father realized that the romantic love trip was over, and that was why he started doing terrible things. I do know that my mother was ever searching for romantic love elsewhere after a certain particularly bad incident.
Anyways, I really don't suggest marrying out of romantic love. If only for the sake of not raising kids who'll believe that every relationship is a lie.
Makes it hard to get along in the world.
Although I think I now understand better the relationships that last. Thank you.
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Date: 2008-03-05 06:57 am (UTC)I find that what I value most in my husband is that he is patient and kind. It's not just that I benefit from those things--though I do, very much--but that he teaches me how to be more patient and more kind, qualities that have not always come easily to me. One of the greatest compliments I've ever received from an ex is that after dating me, "kindness" went up on his list of necessary qualities. It took me ten years of dating, I think, before it even occurred to me that kindness might be an important thing to look for; now I don't know how anyone can tolerate relationships in which any party is unkind.
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Date: 2008-03-06 04:20 am (UTC)Yes! Me, too.
Kindness often comes out of consideration -- but regardless, kindness is active, like gentleness; something that is done, rather than something passive, and something that can be learned.
no subject
Date: 2008-03-05 12:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-05 04:33 pm (UTC)And because of these people, I think I could be contentedly alone so long as I have the friendship and support of close friends who love me. I don't need to be wined, dined, flowered, and gifted. I've gotten more emotional satisfaction from a hug with a friend than I have from a passionate kiss with a guy I thought I loved.
The article you linked does bother me on some levels, and I think aside from the "Every woman wants a baby/family" sentiment, a lot of it stems from the negativity associated with "settling" for anything less than the "One True Love." Despite the writer's claims to the contrary, it seems that she's finally gotten bitter or desperate enough that she's trying to talk herself into accepting the notion. I've always believed that if ever settle down with anyone, it would be a "Best friend love" situation, because that's what I really want out of a guy--someone who I can trust, and whose company I enjoy. Sure, there's compatibility issues as well, but I'm willing to compromise on most things, and there's also always the "agree to disagree" way of settling things.
Hollywood continues to provide excellent examples of what happens when people look for Soulmates; most celebrity relationships flare up and fizzle out like firecrackers, and the well-tended hearthfires of long-term, happy relationships are a teeny tiny exception. Perhaps it's because they live so often in the fantasy stories they help to create that they've completely absorbed the "one true love" mentality.
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Date: 2008-03-05 10:56 pm (UTC)While my husband and I fit so well and so closely that I can't say I don't believe in soul mates, I absolutely think there are multiple right people for everyone. Even as happy as I am with my husband, I can think of a couple of other guys I've known right off the top of my head that, if circumstances had been different and I had ended up in a romantic relationship with them, I'd have been able to be quite happy with either. It's part of the whole deal of looking for what is lasting. Responsibility, respect, willing to dig in and keep going when things are tough, the ability to laugh together, that sort of thing.
I'm another one who blinks in surprise at the "ridiculous" notion of being best friends with your partner. If you're not best friends with them, or at least very good friends, why even bother? If you're going to be having that sort of commitment to someone, why wouldn't you want it to be with someone you like and get along with?
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Date: 2008-03-06 01:26 am (UTC)That falls under "consideration", in my book.
See, I would argue that you *did* find True Love - it's just that the media has it wrong. I've been constructing an article on the various things people mean when they say "I love you" - and most of them, to me, are the farthest things from it. That's not settling - that's having your head on straight, and understanding what truly nurtures and nourishes your spirit.
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Date: 2008-03-06 04:23 am (UTC)I would love to see this -- can you link it if and when you put it up/it's published?
I think that "I love you" has so many meanings, it's almost like asking someone "what makes you happy?"
no subject
Date: 2008-03-06 01:31 am (UTC)Yes, I'm describing my own problems. (Whose else would I describe?) It's cheap, emotionally safe, and I have lots of practice distracting myself from the fact that I don't like it.
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Date: 2008-03-06 12:18 pm (UTC)Yes, I'm describing my own problems. (Whose else would I describe?) It's cheap, emotionally safe, and I have lots of practice distracting myself from the fact that I don't like it.
I think you're one of the few men I've seen say much about settling at all, even as defensive cover. But, ummm, is there anything wrong with just saying that you're happy being single (as defensive cover?)
I know people who are happy living alone, fwiw; they love their friends, but don't really want to live with them because it's also a lot of work to live with someone else.
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Date: 2008-03-06 11:04 pm (UTC)Well, maybe he isn't happy being single, but he'd be more miserable settling?
I could say that I have a similar issue, I suppose. Half of me is VERY happy being single, and the other half whines for a partner like you would not believe. Either way, both sides aren't going to be happy, so what do you do?
And as a general rule, people don't believe me when I say I'm happy being single. They are very disturbed at such a concept, actually.
no subject
Date: 2008-03-07 06:27 am (UTC)Nothing wrong with it if it's true. But I said I was describing my problems, not my successes. :)
If you meant to lie as defensive cover for an unpleasant subject, I'd rather not. Avoiding the subject entirely is easy enough, and honest (in cases when I want to avoid it).
I post about the subject because someone (female) told me "Don't settle", thinking that it was advice. This is the response that I was not (at the time) able to verbalize.
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Date: 2008-03-09 06:39 pm (UTC)I've noticed that a) Gottlieb is female and b) most of the people who responded to the advice, in particular, to "settle" are female and I'm wondering what the analogous male advice would be.
settling/don't settle
Date: 2008-03-09 04:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-06 05:00 am (UTC)Something else I'd add to the list of traits I want (and luckily have) is something I can laugh with because life being what it is, sometimes all you can do is laugh.
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Date: 2008-03-06 05:17 am (UTC)Someone upstream suggested Sense of Humor, which I think should be on the list -- I wasn't famous for my sense of humour at seventeen *wry g*.
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Date: 2008-03-13 02:58 pm (UTC)If you're basing your definition of love on what you see in mainstream media, of course you're going to think that marrying your best friend, or someone you are "merely" get along well with, regardless of that "spark," of course you're going to be sorely disappointed.
But it's also something that I don't think a lot of people ever realize. I didn't really realize it until I was dating my husband, and I realized that even though he would never sweep me off my feet in some romantic gesture or do most of the stuff you see in movies or on TV, it didn't matter. He became my best friend, and out of that came love and a "romantic" connection. Romance and love just aren't what a lot of people think they are.