About a week ago, ironically on Valentine’s Day, I discovered this article, called “Marry Him!”.
An excerpt:
Whether you acknowledge it or not, there’s good reason to worry. By the time 35th-birthday-brunch celebrations roll around for still-single women, serious, irreversible life issues masquerading as “jokes” creep into public conversation: Well, I don’t feel old, but my eggs sure do! or Maybe this year I’ll marry Todd. I’m not getting any younger! The birthday girl smiles a bit too widely as she delivers these lines, and everyone laughs a little too hard for a little too long, not because we find these sentiments funny, but because we’re awkwardly acknowledging how unfunny they are. At their core, they pose one of the most complicated, painful, and pervasive dilemmas many single women are forced to grapple with nowadays: Is it better to be alone, or to settle?
My advice is this: Settle! That’s right. Don’t worry about passion or intense connection. Don’t nix a guy based on his annoying habit of yelling “Bravo!” in movie theaters. Overlook his halitosis or abysmal sense of aesthetics. Because if you want to have the infrastructure in place to have a family, settling is the way to go. Based on my observations, in fact, settling will probably make you happier in the long run, since many of those who marry with great expectations become more disillusioned with each passing year. (It’s hard to maintain that level of zing when the conversation morphs into discussions about who’s changing the diapers or balancing the checkbook.)
Essentially, she’s telling younger women (those in their 20s and early 30s) to forget about all that “soulmates” stuff and think about men that they would have dismissed on account of lack of “chemistry” or “zing”. She outlines a little further in “The Case for Mr. Not-Quite-Right“.
I find this interesting in a couple of ways. First, she talks about the sense of panic that women start having when they turn 30 and they’re still single… I’ve seen friends of mine do that. Of course, coming from the conservative background that I did, I started panicking pretty early, say around 16 or so, and kept it up until just about when I turned 30. I finally accepted, at that point, that maybe I wouldn’t follow the established pattern (hard for me to do when the established pattern was to marry a man that you found in college… I was definitely beyond that!), and that maybe it was OK to do something else. Oddly, I’ve been coming to terms with the idea of “Kj as a single career woman” over the past couple years in ways that I never anticipated for the preceding 14.
But it still doesn’t make the hard truth feel any better. I do want the sense of partnership that I’d have in a marriage. There are long periods of time where I just have to read books, watch TV, or do other things for the sole purpose of blocking out feeling lonely and purposeless (definitely this is worse when my life is uneventful, which is why I seek out interesting/exciting jobs and such). And yeah, maybe if I’d done things differently, I would have been contentedly paired up with someone by this point, having a life quite different than what I currently have.
On the other hand, some of the choices I made that have gotten me here flowed quite naturally out of who I am. I actually didn’t do much dating (realized much later that it was because I was making it impossible for men to approach me, but it wasn’t intentional!), and every time I took a trip somewhere interesting, it piqued my interest in the world outside. If you’d have asked me at any point from 16 to 30 whether I was ready to give up on my personal dreams (travel, adventure, education, and doing great things) in favor of getting married and starting a family, I would have unhesitatingly told you that I was… And I meant it — sort of. But the opportunity didn’t present itself.
I’m not waiting for a soulmate — I don’t think I’ve ever really bought into that mythology — but perhaps due to the places I’ve lived and the people I’ve met, I haven’t met any man who’s been basically compatible with me and also available. In the military, they marry early, so the people you meet on the job are married 95% of the time. And the men from the outside that you meet, even if they aren’t immediately daunted by your job being more macho and seemingly high-powered than theirs, tend to be less than impressed by the prospects of a future moving around as a military dependent. Though mostly, they’re just daunted. It’s troubling.
So maybe for me, and others in my position, the question is not so much about whether or not to settle, but to make an effort to find prospects to consider! Funny, the quirky dilemmas that a military career has placed on me…
I realize that I sound sort of whiny here, and that’s not really the way it’s meant. I’m actually pretty content with my life, though I definitely do prefer it when I have more going on than when it’s very quiet. And I think I’d like to live in a bigger city, somewhere with a larger pool of single professional people to interact with. But those are things that I do have some control over (though of course the Air Force in its infinite wisdom — spoken with a sense of irony — does have the final say on where I will move), and they’re things that I’ll probably take into account as I look into the future. But maybe the choice of “settling” sometimes includes settling down with the notion that a life alone may be lonely at times, but has its own rewards? I don’t know.
Posted by Kjirstin 
