msagara | Possibly a little bit personal; my take on love, marriage and settling (Reply)

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.