Spinster (35 page)

“But you are marriage material,” he said. “You can't deny that you strive for self-realization, and to be substantial, and being substantial is what makes someone marriageable. Nobody actually wants to marry a boring person, even if so many do. Didn't Jane Austen write in
Emma
something like, ‘Men of sense, whatever you may choose to say, do not want silly wives'?

“The odd dilemma of the spinster,” he continued professorially, “is, she's the most marriage-inspiring, and the less she wants it, the more coveted she becomes—at least until the moment it's too late!”

We laughed and then sank for a second into a mutual sulk. One of our ongoing arguments is whether, on the dating market, aging is worse for straight women or gay men.

“Also,” he said, “no matter how hard you look for something else—some way of being in a committed relationship with a man that isn't marriage—there
is
nothing else. Not in the minds of most straight men, at least.”

That part rang true. I'd noticed a pattern: usually if a man and I made it all the way through seven dates, we became girlfriend and boyfriend; at six months—the longest amount of time a person can remain on her/his best behavior, I've concluded from ample field research—there was a big fight, accusations of being misunderstood, etc.; if that didn't sink us, we'd have another three good months before the pressure started to mount, like a weather front, and we exploded—whether bang or whimper, game over.

After Thanksgiving, back in New York, as D scrolled through his phone, showing me pictures of his own holiday with his family, a photo of an antique diamond ring flashed past. I think. I pretended not to see it. Who knows? Maybe I really didn't.

That Christmas, his parents brought us to a luxurious eco-resort in Mexico. D and I had our own hacienda with a massive bed draped in white mosquito netting, as romantic as a honeymoon.

I was sick with a sense of duplicity. I didn't know why, but I just didn't want this—this being part of a family. It didn't make sense: I love my family. I loved D's. I envied my brother's wholehearted commitment to his wife, and her certainty that she wanted children. I suspected (and still do) that I would love being a mother—which, I realized, as we trooped
en famille
down to the beach each afternoon, was part of the problem.

Shielded by an umbrella, I peered over the rim of
Middlemarch
and watched as a woman my age hoisted her toddler onto her hip, the child's dimpled legs tawny from the sun, her hair a beautiful frenzy of caramel curls—the most ethereal of cherubs. My arms ached to hold the girl, feel that soft, plump cheek rest against my shoulder, let my nose graze the top of her head.

But the knowing was visceral: if I became a mother, I'd lose myself. I wouldn't become a “real” writer. This was irrational. The way my mother's freelance writing career made her so available to me was a firsthand lesson that someday I, too, could do the same; indeed, all around me were women who wrote and also had children, from friends to world-famous award-winning authors I read about in magazines. And yet still, for me, making such a significant decision seemed improbable. I'd be erased by pregnancy, sleep deprivation, teething rings, diapers; sippy cups, car seats, strollers, Legos; day care, other kids' birthday parties, pumpkin farms, bouncy houses; ballet recitals, soccer practice, summer camp, temper tantrums; all-consuming love and eternal worry (“Now my heart lives outside of me,” a friend said about her
small twins). In comparison, my current work schedule would be a cakewalk.

Meanwhile, watching D's parents, I saw that they embodied the very best of the traditional male-breadwinner model. D's mother had always worked as an interior designer, but only on projects she wanted, free to follow her creativity beyond the demands of the marketplace. They were obviously still very much in love and had an enviable closeness, a blend of mutual respect and shared adventure.

But still, I couldn't do it. I
wanted
to want a man who wanted to support me, along with all the possibilities such an arrangement suggests: being able to afford a nanny so I could write full-time and also raise children; traveling wherever we liked; maybe even fulfilling my adolescent dream of designing and building my own house, à la Edith (albeit different)—but I kept tripping up over that tiny construction, “my own.” My own, my own.

That afternoon, after lunch, D and his brothers and I played in the pool like a pack of unhinged otters, dunking and bonking one another's heads with foam bats. The sky was clear; the sea spangled. Our laughter rang out. So much beauty—handed to me, a gift on a platter. Suddenly there I was again, back during my first year with R in Brooklyn Heights, smothered by the sensation of having been handed a prize I'd yet to earn.

Later, at the hacienda, I told D I didn't want to shower together and spent a long time in the bathroom washing my hair and combing through the conditioner. Was it possible, I wondered, that being self-supporting wasn't just a “goal” I wanted to achieve but a state of being that was integral to my motivation and sense of personal achievement? That, in my father's words, I needed the “pull” of financial necessity along with the “push” of my own drive to feel alive? Or, a variation on that: I needed to create my own security. Abandoning my struggle, and slipping into an easier life, meant abandoning myself.

It was a depressing thought, no matter how I looked at it. If true, it meant I might never have children, for the simple reason that I couldn't know when I'd be ready to take on the responsibility of caring for another human being. And even if I reached that point while still in my childbearing years, I couldn't guarantee I'd be able to provide the material support to which a child is entitled. After showering I put on my favorite red cotton dress for dinner—red, the color of danger.

“Always do what you are afraid to do,” urged Ralph Waldo Emerson, according to landfills physical and digital, overflowing with greeting cards, posters, blogs, and Facebook posts. As with many a popular adage, the meaning changes when you return the quote to its context. From his 1841 essay “Heroism”:

Be true to your own act, and congratulate yourself if you have done something strange and extravagant, and broken the monotony of a decorous age. It was a high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, “Always do what you are afraid to do.”

He doesn't elucidate. But the passage clearly celebrates fidelity to individuality and unconventionality, which is many degrees different from the equally famous “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” as Franklin D. Roosevelt announced in his 1932 inaugural address (paraphrasing Francis Bacon). What does it mean that even I, a congenital optimist, detect a whiff of that infamous American will to prevail, against all odds, in that rousing, pleasingly counterintuitive, rather macho, and imminently quotable sentiment?

I prefer how Jane Addams put it (likely in direct response to
the Emerson quote, which she'd recorded three years prior in her journal): “To do what you are afraid to do is to guide your life by fear. How much better not to be afraid to do what you believe in doing! Keep one main idea, and you will never be lost.”

She wrote that around 1880, while an undergraduate at Rockford Female Seminary, for the student magazine. Her plan was to be a doctor, so she could live and work among the poor; instead, she had to undergo a spinal operation, suffered a nervous breakdown, dropped out of medical school, and spent much of her twenties in despair. But she'd meant what she wrote.

In 1888 Addams traveled to see Toynbee Hall, a Gothic complex in the East End of London that united men of all backgrounds to provide social and educational opportunities for the working classes. The next year, at age twenty-nine, she and a friend founded their own female-centered version in Chicago, called Hull-House. By 1920, there were almost five hundred settlement houses across the country, run predominantly by single women—those who had the most time to devote to the cause.

Addams never married or had children, but she launched the social-reform movement, essentially the precursor to the social-welfare programs started by the federal government in the 1930s. In 1931 she was the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize.

On the last day of the Mexico trip D's mother and I went for a long walk on the beach. She's tall and thin, with short, dyed-red hair, possibly the most serenely free-spirited person I've ever met.

“My husband is the most important thing in the world to me,” she said.

We'd never spoken intimately; I liked that the walk was bringing this out of her. But I wasn't sure where she was headed.

She got right to the point. “Kate, I would love to have you as
my daughter-in-law. D loves you. We all love you. But I want you to know that you should only marry someone if he is the most important thing in the world to you, more important than anyone or anything else.”

It was the kindest thing she could have done for any of us.

Back in New York, D and I broke up.

I was very, very sad. But not frightened. I could be alone again.