All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation (42 page)

Yes, as unromantic as it sounds, in a time when options for how to live and how to love have become more varied, the questions of whether and when and why to marry often come down to technicalities: benefits, health care, access, rights, and recognition. In fact, the desire for hospital access, next-of-kin proximity, of inheritance, and of healthcare were part of the root of the gay-rights movement's push for marriage.

Getting hitched remains the best, and often the only, way to secure a visa for someone not born into the United States, the precise problem that novelist Elizabeth Gilbert, who had sworn off marriage after the painful divorce that produced her runaway best-selling memoir,
Eat, Pray, Love
, encountered when her committed partner was barred from reentering the United States. They decided to marry, a circumstance so traumatic that it provoked Gilbert to write a follow-up book,
Committed
, that sifted through her deep ambivalence about the institution.

Until the recent enactment of the Affordable Care Act, people often married to secure health insurance. “I love my husband, live with him, and plan to stay with him indefinitely,” wrote Nona Willis-Aronowitz in 2011, “Also, I wish we had never gotten married.” Nona and her boyfriend got hitched only after an emergency-room visit resulted in questions from a health-insurance administrator about whether she could
legally continue to cover him as her domestic partner. Nona's own parents, feminist cultural critic Ellen Willis and sociologist Stanley Aronowitz, both divorced after very youthful marriages in the mid-twentieth century, married each other “grudgingly” when Nona was fifteen, “only because they were worried that their partnership wouldn't adequately protect their property and assets.” Nona didn't even attend their wedding; she was busy studying.
⁴²
When Nona and her husband married, in order to get him on her health plan, she wore a black dress and flip-flops to Chicago's City Hall.

Here's the thing: for many of us, finding a person whom we want to marry, or move in with, or go on vacation with, or split bills with, is not so easy.

“There are such beings in the World perhaps, one in a Thousand, as the Creature You and I should think perfection,” Jane Austen wrote to a niece. “Where Grace & Spirit are united to Worth, where the Manners are equal to the Heart & Understanding, but such a person may not come your way, or, if he does, he may not be the eldest son of a Man of Fortune, the near relation of your particular friend & belonging to your own Country.”
⁴³
Austen understood that it was not even a matter of finding the right person, but the rather more complicated prospect of finding the right person at the right time under the right conditions.

As it becomes more possible for us to provide for ourselves, it makes sense that our standards might rise even higher—far higher, in fact—than the standards of Austen's day, when alternatives to marriage were so grim. Contemporary women are perhaps likelier to have a full life that requires protection from the potential harm of a
bad
match, even when they badly wish to fall in love.

Elliott, the novelist from Washington, D.C., described herself as deeply sad that she hadn't settled down with anyone, yet acknowledged that she didn't regret not
settling
. “What's complicated,” she said, “is that if I
had
really wanted to marry, I would have settled for one of the not-quite right relationships I had in the last ten years, but I didn't.” On the
one hand, she said, “I'm proud that I never settled for less than I wanted, but it's not like in return I got exactly what I did want.”

Elliott has noted the changing nature of dating. “You don't sort of sweep each other off your feet anymore,” she said. The realities of the world become known and better understood. She recalled going on dates with a man who admitted he was more than $100,000 in debt. “There was a time when that wouldn't have mattered,” said Elliott. “But I don't have any debt, and I have to admit that it's scary, if you've been fiscally responsible and made your way in the world, to think about partnering up with someone who is so in the red.”

Sweep-you-off-your-feet-debt-free potential mates do not grow on trees. And the fact that our lives can now be full enough
without
those spectacular others makes our standards soar even higher. The heightened bar is a side effect of all our independence: Back when women needed a man, truly
needed
one, to earn money, provide social standing and a roof,
needed
to be married in order to enjoy a socially sanctioned sex life or have children who wouldn't be shunned, standards could be lower. They were necessarily lower. A potential mate could more easily get away with offering only a pay check, a penis, and a pulse.

Today, women want much more, and holding out for better partners is part of how we're improving—and thereby saving—marriage.

The lion's share of finding love is luck, in tandem with privilege, since key to propitious circumstance is opportunity: the opportunities on offer to us when we are born, the resources and options made available to us as we grow.

These were the circumstances by which I wound up married: One night I was headed back to my apartment; I was planning to work late. When I got off the subway, I decided to stop at a favorite neighborhood restaurant, a place I frequented with my girlfriends, to get some takeout pasta. After I ordered, I sat at the bar to drink a glass of water, and noticed a handsome man sitting next to me, eating by himself at the bar. He was reading a magazine and drinking a glass of wine. I watched him in the mirror above the bar and felt, suddenly, that I wanted to know him. Unconsciously, I dropped my glass of water and it broke on the bar. He looked up, and we began a conversation.

I was neither looking nor
not
looking for love; I was looking for dinner.

There was no strategy. It might just as easily never have happened. There was nothing special about what I was doing or wearing or how I was acting or my approach to the relationship or whether he called me back. In fact, he was in the late stages of grief and initially hesitant about entering a relationship: If I had listened to the advice from
He's Just Not That Into You
I would never have pursued him, never wound up discovering exactly how easily we fell into each other.

The only action I took in my life that had a direct impact on meeting the man I wound up marrying was that I didn't marry anyone before him. This wasn't on purpose: I had wished many times that I could will myself into non-excellent relationships, because I had little evidence that better ones existed, and I thought that maybe I just needed to come to grips with the fact that if I really wanted to be in love, it wasn't going to be perfect.

But, mostly, I didn't pursue people I wasn't crazy about because I was busy doing other things that I enjoyed more than I enjoyed being with men I wasn't crazy about. That abstention meant that, when a good relationship with someone I
was
crazy about became a possibility, I was free to pursue it.

I wound up happily married because I lived in an era in which I could be happily single.

When she was sixty-six, Gloria Steinem, the feminist leader who said that she didn't want to marry because she couldn't mate in captivity, who said, “We are becoming the men we wanted to marry,” who once called marriage a union of one-and-a-half people and ran away from her collegiate fiancé, got married.

She married David Bale, a South African environmental and animal-rights activist, in rural Oklahoma.

As Steinem tells the story of her long single life before Bale, “I had realized at about the time that feminism entered my life that a) I didn't have
to get married,” that “people (even women) could choose different lives and b) I couldn't marry anyway because I would be giving up my civil rights (credit rating, legal residence, name—etc. etc.)” Her adulthood was filled with relationships she entered “without imagining that they could or should lead to marriage, all the more so because I had discovered I was happy without children.”

The same would have held true with her relationship with Bale, she said. “We loved each other and were together, but at our age—he was 59 and I was 65 when we met—there seemed to be no reason on earth for us to get legally married.”

Except for all those pesky benefits.

Bale had been in the United States on a type of visa recently eliminated by Congress. He was concerned about immigration. The pair consulted with lawyers and was told that the surest way for Bale to secure a green card was through marriage.

Steinem said that she spent time considering how the women's movement had worked to improve marriage laws. She felt she would no longer lose her civil rights by marrying. She consulted with her close friend, Wilma Mankiller, former principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, who considered the question overnight, under the stars, and then advised Steinem to do it.

Steinem and Bale were already scheduled to travel to the Cherokee National Holiday powwow in Oklahoma. Once there, they drove to a small Oklahoma courthouse to get their marriage license. Steinem said that she was given a bag of detergent and various household cleaning samples that local merchants gave with each license. One of Bale's daughters, along with a couple of Steinem's friends who were already present for the Cherokee Reunion, were able to be there.

At dawn, Mankiller's husband, Charlie Soap, performed the marriage ceremony in Cherokee around an outdoor sage fire. Then a female judge and friend of Mankiller's did the legal ceremony. “We had a wonderful breakfast,” said Steinem, “and that was it!”

Steinem said she was surprised by how quickly the press found out about their rural nuptials. Within a day, there was a lot of coverage, including a few bleats of disappointment from women who had wanted
her to hold out, and a couple of hearty exclamations of victory that she had succumbed to the institution she had worked so hard to resist and alter. Mostly, though, reaction was warm; there was no anxiety that, at sixty-six, Steinem had forsaken any part of her independence, and people seemed happy that, for whatever reason, she had decided to do this thing she had not previously wanted to do.

When
O, The Oprah Magazine
, asked to print a wedding photo, she even sent a few in. “I got a message back: No, we want a
wedding
photo—you're wearing jeans in these.” But, Steinem explained, “They were my
best
jeans!”

Before and during her marriage to Bale, Steinem recounted, he would attend campus events and speeches with her, and always wound up talking to the students for hours afterward. Steinem noticed how eager these students, mostly young women, were to “talk to a man who—because of our relationship and also because of who he was—showed [them] that you could be loved by a man without giving up yourself.” Steinem hadn't realized, she said, “just how deep that hunger was, and how few the examples to feed it.”

As it turned out, getting married was the right decision for Steinem and for Bale. “If we had not been married, David would not have been covered by my health insurance,” she pointed out. “When he became ill with what was finally diagnosed as brain lymphoma about two years later—and was hospitalized or in a nursing home for almost a year—it would have financially broken everyone, including his children.”

Bale died three years after marrying Steinem.

Retrospectively, Steinem said that, “the intensity of that time profoundly changed all of us.” In a way, she continued, Bale's illness made her realize “what people mean when they say about a painful and tragic event:
But I wouldn't have had it any other way
. I think I was sent into his life to help him enjoy it more before leaving it. He was sent into mine to help me live intensely in the present.”

Steinem's experience with marriage, she said, made her understand what she feels to be “the biggest remnant of old thinking” about the institution: idealizing and valuing it above all other types of loving relationships.

“Some people still assume that, because we got legally married, he was the love of my life—and I was his,” said Steinem. “That's such a misunderstanding of human uniqueness. He had been married twice before and he had wonderful grown children. I had been happily in love with men who are still my friends and chosen family. Some people have one partner for life, but most don't—and each of our loves is crucial and unique.”

Amanda Neville is a brand-and-content strategist, who was raised in Germany and Virginia, and now lives in New York City. In her early thirties, she got out of a serious relationship. Amanda had been interested in adoption ever since she'd seen a 2003 CBS special about older kids who needed homes, struck by the children's descriptions of what it felt like to go to adoption fairs, hoping that somebody picks you. “It broke my heart and planted a seed,” she said. “I couldn't stand the thought of somebody not having a family or feeling like they have to do something to make somebody love them.” Married very briefly to her college sweetheart in her early twenties, Amanda had discussed the possibility of adoption with her husband, but they had split before the plan grew serious.

She and the boyfriend she'd had into her thirties had already started the process of looking into adoption. She didn't intend to let a breakup stop her. “I haven't made any decisions in my life based on having a partner or not having a partner. Why would I make this one? It makes no sense.” Single in her thirties, and eager not to let the absence of a partner derail her, she continued the adoption application process for Ethiopia, which permitted single-parent adoption at the time. While waiting for a match, she received a message from her adoption agent, telling her of a special child in Russia. Amanda visited Russia three times. She was thirty-five when she brought four-year-old Nina, who is deaf, home to New York with her.