Morning Reflections on Marriage

I've thought of another reason to get married.  

Most mornings, when I first sit up in bed, I'm greeted by my reflection in the large mirror on the dresser at the foot of my bed.  And my first impression of myself is that of a blurry Medusa.  Blurry because, without my contacts or glasses, I'm as blind as the proverbial bat (though not, as I read recently, as actual bats).  And Medusa because, left to its own devices overnight, my naturally curly hair becomes a snarled mess of snake-like curls.

However, yesterday morning, my first-thing-in-the-morning reflection was more frightening than usual.  I have a lamp on my dresser that is set (via timer) to turn on a few minutes before my alarm clock goes off, in order to ease me closer to consciousness.  With the recent end of Daylight Saving Time, the timer was all messed up, and the night before, I had pulled one corner of the dresser out from the wall in order to reach and reset the timer.  I left the dresser askew because A) it is heavy, B) I was tired, and C) if the timer was still inaccurate, I didn't want to have to move the dresser again.  

Therefore, yesterday when I awoke and sat up in bed, I was greeted with the reflection of...nothing.  The dresser was at a slightly different angle, and the mirror showed me only the empty half of my bed.  Naturally, being an intelligent and well-educated person, I concluded---for one sleep-addled moment, at least---that I had been turned into a vampire.

Now, I don't anticipate this being a regular problem, but do you see how easily this could have been solved?  The solution, clearly, is marriage.

If I were married, this never would have happened, for one of three reasons:  

1) Being the considerate husband that he is, he would have replaced the heavy dresser for me, thus restoring the usual angle of the reflection.  

2) The mirror would have shown him in the other half of the bed, which, I'm assuming, is the main advantage to having a husband in your bed.  (Right?)  

3) If he were already up and about in the house, he would have reassured me of my non-vampiric status and restricted my chocolate intake before bed as a guard against future flights of fancy.

So, really, it's a simple solution.

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All By Myself

At a dinner party I attended last night, I found myself the subject of scrutiny as the conversation turned to my single status.  My dinner companions found my life choices very odd, were not afraid to tell me this, wondered what was the matter with me, and proceeded to pelt me with questions about why I was still single.

I took no offense.  In fact, I found their interest delightful.  Probably because I was dining with five of my nieces and nephews, ages 2 through 6.

The conversation went something like this:

Davy, age 4:  "Do you have a kid?"

Me, age 39:  "Nope."

Davy:  "Why?"

Me:  "Well, I'm not married, so I don't have any kids yet."

Molly, age 5:  "Our mom got married.  To our dad.  That's why he's our dad."

Davy:  "Do you have a dad?"

This caused a great deal of confusion, because I answered that his Papa Bob is my dad, the same as Papa Bob is their dad's dad.  Rather blank stares.  Discussion of siblings, brothers and sisters, etc.  J.J., age 6, got it.  He even remembered that Uncle Greg is also his dad's brother and my brother.

However, I finally figured out that, by "a dad," Davy meant "an adult male father-figure who lives with you and helps raise your kids."  That I do not have.  We continued...

May, age 4:  "So you're alone?"

Me:  "Well, I have my kitties in my house, but, yes, otherwise, I live by myself."

Molly:  "Why are you alone?"

Me:  "Beats the crap out of me."  No, what I actually said was...

Me:  "Oh, honey, if I knew the answer to that...!  Hee hee hee!" 

J.J. had an idea and a possible solution to this mystery:  "Are you a kid?"

This actually makes a lot of sense from their perspective.  When they usually see me, I'm at their Grandma Vicki's and Papa Bob's house or I've arrived at their own house in the same car as my parents.  I do often feel like a "boomerang child" or even a "special" child who has never quite grown up and will never leave home.

Grandma Vicki, age redacted, jumped into the fray:  "No, she's a grown up.  She went to college, and she has a job and her own house..."

May:  "All by herself."  with sorrow?  with awe?

I'm going to go with awe.

Me:  "That's right, darn it!  All by myself!"

And that's what I'm going to hold to.  Sure, I'd rather have had a boyfriend/fiance/husband by my side through this life so far.  It might have been a bit easier, and it surely would have been more fun. 

But I did go to college, moving in and out of the dorm most semesters by myself.  And I have taught in three different high schools.  I moved 1,600 miles across the country to a city where I knew no one and earned my Master's degree.  Then I moved 1,900 miles back across the country to another city where I knew no one.  I've dealt with car trouble and power outages, investigated mysterious noises in the night, and filed my tax returns.

All by myself.  And proud of it. 


  

Why is Being Single Still Taboo?

Today we turn over the keyboard to a guest author.  In an Slate article from 2012, journalism professor and author Katie Roiphe examines the world's fascination with single people, noting that even though Still Singles have become more common in the world, society still treats them as exotic creatures to be studied.  

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Singled Out:  Why are Americans still so obsessed with single people—and so scared by them?

By Katie Roiphe

The averagely nonjudgmental person may wonder why, in 2012, being single should be a radical act, an interesting topic of discussion, a viable subject for a spate of new books and magazine covers. Why is this relatively ordinary or banal mode of life even worth commenting on? Why, in short, all the fuss? (See the Atlanticcover, “All the Single Ladies,” the Boston Magazine cover, “Single by Choice,” the New York Times travel section cover, “Single in the Caribbean,” and the book by Eric KlinenbergGoing Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone, to name only a few.)

It has now been 50 long and eventful years since the publication of Helen Gurley Brown’s feminist classic, Sex and the Single Girl, in which she made the groundbreaking observation: “I think a single woman’s biggest problem is coping with the people who are trying to marry her off.”

And it’s disconcerting that living alone, especially for a woman, is still something of a taboo; that vast swaths of the population still foster only barely submerged fantasies of spinsters and cat ladies; that children still sit cross-legged on the floor playing games of “old maid.” In a recent, highly rational exploration of the subject in the New York Times, Klinenberg, a sociologist, points out that nearly half the households in Manhattan and Washington, D.C. consist of a single person, and yet we continue to view the lifestyle of people who live outside of a couple to be as worthy of cover stories as that of rare leopards prowling across the front of National Geographic.

It is not surprising that in 1962, in pre-awakened, pre-sexual revolution America, Helen Gurley Brown would feel called upon to justify affairs, and the exotic or offbeat pleasures of single life.

In the hot pink, 75-cent paperback edition, she writes about the single experience: “You see enough picture stories in national publications about couples and families to make you feel like the sole occupant of a life raft. To further depress you, the couples and families are always blueberry-pie normal, as industrious as gophers, as much at home in the world as an egg in custard. We know the married state is the normal one in our culture, and anybody who deviates from 'normal' has a price to pay in nonacceptance and nonglorification.”

Helen Gurley Brown was, of course, writing to career girls of the pre-feminist '60s (post-Simone de Beauvoir, but pre-Betty Friedan). She was writing to girls who might be considering buying new white gloves for a date, who mixed highballs and made innovative deserts out of canned peaches, and who wore capris, and yet that world bears a very unsettling resemblance to our world in certain important ways.

The cover of Sex and the Single Girl has a quote calling it “the sensational best seller that torpedoes the myth that a girl must be married to enjoy a satisfying life,” and it is disheartening that people still seem to be torpedoing that very same myth, that anyone deviating from “normal,” or living an unconventional romantic life should be a topic of cultural curiosity and conversation. (And the idea that being single should be considered unconventional is itself a sign of the deep, unacknowledged conservatism that runs through even our blue states. In an election year we like dividing ourselves into the right-thinking and the wrong-thinking, but the right-thinking are not examining the alarming traditionalism at home.)

This cultural obsession with living alone is a sign or symptom. It fascinates and enthralls us and arouses our curiosity because the general wisdom about how to live life, even in liberal circles, is so narrow, so respectable, so uninspired. (Or as Helen Gurley Brown put it, “There are a lot of half-alive people running around in the world.”)

All the public drumrolling about deciding not to get married, or to live alone, or to have a baby on one’s own, is in direct proportion to the resistance single people still feel from the culture, the curiously old-fashioned outsider status they seem to enjoy. It is testimony to how much truth still holds in Helen Gurley Brown’s statement that the single woman’s “whole existence seems to be an apology for not being married.” Why, one might wonder, should single women still be apologizing to anyone, explaining, elaborating, elucidating, as though they are stuck between the pages of an Austen or Trollope novel? These articles would not continue to appear and we would not continue to read them if the choices they described were simply the boring, private choices they should be. (Or as Helen Gurley Brown wrote to the single girl, “You may marry or you may not. In today’s world that is no longer the big question for women.”)

This weekend the indomitable Helen Gurley Brown will be celebrating her 90^th birthday, and I think we can safely say she has seen in those 90 years a vast amount of change, and not enough.

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Wait = No

As someone who has attended church faithfully since birth (or four days after birth), 
I have heard the "How God Answers Prayer" sermon many, many times.

The preacher usually explains that God hears all prayers and answers them in one of three possible ways:  Yes, No, or Wait a While.  (Funny preachers will throw in the "Are you kidding me?!" answer as a fourth option.)

It never fails that the preacher uses praying for a spouse as an example of a prayer that might be answered with "Wait a While."  (The preacher himself is always married.  Bonus irony points if he was married before age twenty-two.) 

The problem with that example is that "Wait" in this case looks an awfully lot like "No."

That's because marriage isn't a one-time thing.  It is on-going.  So being told to "Wait" to get married is almost like a series of "No"s:

     Can I have a husband at 25?     No.

     At 30?     No.

     35?     No.

     When my siblings are all married?     No.

     When they all have kids?     No.

     When my friends are all married?     No.

     When I have to face that my parents are aging?     No.

     When I deal with tragedies?     No.

     When something really great happens to me and I want to share it?     No



And I know some singletons have had to accept even harder "No"s:

     Can I have a spouse by my side as I undergo treatment for cancer?     No.

     Can I be married before my parents are gone?     No.

     Before it's too late for me to have children of my own?     No.

Singles are told:  

     Embrace this time God has given you.  

     Wait for the right person to be brought to you by God.


Honestly, I've grown weary of waiting.  

I'm tired of "Wait"s that feel like "No"s.  

But I keep praying. 


     God, when will you answer something other than "Wait"?   

                                                                                                         My child, just wait. 

Singles vs. Marrieds

Today's entry is brought to you from the scientific minds at Glamour magazine.  (Keep that in mind as you read.)

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There’s scientific proof that smug couples really are trying to make you feel bad

No matter how many times you try to tell yourself it's all in your head and that your couple friends don't pity you, you don't quite believe it. And that’s because they really do. On the other hand, you can be kind of a jerk to them, too, so get off your high horse, lady.

By Glamour

Obviously, saying that all couples pity single people is an overly simplistic statement, but there is scientific truth behind the general sentiment. It’s called “normative idealization,” and it means that people have a tendency to idealize their own lifestyle and believe it’s better for other people too. According to research done at Stanford University and the University of Waterloo, the more people feel “stuck” in their current status, the more threatened they feel by the idea of people enjoying the opposite lifestyle.

Thus, if a woman in a couple thinks it would be very hard to leave her relationship, she’s more likely to think that people in long-term romantic relationships have more meaningful and fulfilling lives. That’s right, your coupled-up friends all think your life is sad, sad, sad, you poor single thing.

But before my fellow single girls get all huffy, let’s look at the other side of this whole “normative idealization” thing. The reverse is that a single woman who feels like it would be more difficult to enter a relationship is more likely to think that people would prefer to be independent but feel pressured to enter relationships. That’s right, you think all your couple friends are just bowing to societal pressure and are secretly miserable.

Rude, everybody! OK, we’re not really so bad as that, I hope. But basically, the reality is that we all employ defense mechanisms to validate our own lifestyle, especially if we feel like our lifestyle wouldn’t be easy to change. It’s understandable to want to feel validated by your own choices, but it’s a good idea for us all to keep in mind that we don’t have to tear down others to feel good about our own lives. Let’s all agree to want the best for one another but acknowledge that one particular way of life doesn’t have to be the right one for all of us.

Source:  http://living.msn.com/love-relationships/love-sex/there%E2%80%99s-scientific-proof-that-smug-couples-really-are-trying-to-make-you-feel-bad

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Something to remember when we find ourselves comparing lives.  

(My favorite comment left by a reader of the article:  If single life is so bad and miserable, then how come Jesus was single?  Now, how do you argue with that??) 

Single at Work

I am a high school English teacher, but some days I feel as though my title should be "Professional Committee Member."  I serve on several different committees for my school district.  Last week alone, I had five meetings before or after school, on top of my regular teaching duties.

At a recent Technology Team meeting, our superintendent asked who would be interested in attending a national technology conference in Atlanta over the summer.  Mildly interested, I checked the dates to discover that the conference begins a mere two days after I'm scheduled to have all four wisdom teeth removed.  Um....no.  Not going to happen.

However, what interested me most at that moment was the response of a few of my colleagues:  "I'll have to check with my husband."  

Yeah, that statement always makes the feminist in me kind of cringe in a "Are we still in the 50s?!" kind of way.  But they are exactly correct:  they can't commit to traveling for work until they check with their partner-in-child-raising.  Even without kids, a four-day business trip is a family decision.  That's only fair.

Ironically, were it not for my vestigial wisdom teeth, I would be the perfect candidate for such a business trip.  I don't have any children to arrange care for.  I don't have a husband who might prefer I not be missing for a week.  My two cats will be fine on their own for a few days.  And as I sat in this meeting, I almost felt as though I had to defend my decision to NOT go, as if my superintendent and everyone else were sitting there thinking, "Come on, Cathlina; take one for the team."  

Actually, I feel frequently as though I have to explain my unavailability for events.  Others will say, "I can't make that meeting," and everyone takes that as an answer.  I say it, and there's an expectant pause, as if to say, "What else could you possibly have to do?"

This happens with my friends and family, of course, when we're planning events.  I'm frequently not even asked about my availability for a specific date; it's just assumed that I'm always free.  But somehow it's more galling when it happens at work.  In my first teaching job, my principal would call me at home to come work the ticket booth at various sporting events.  He knew I didn't have a family to abandon at short notice, and the common attitude across the school was, "Ask Cathlina.  She's got nothing else going on."

More recently, a colleague told me she preferred me over another teacher for a promotion (department head) because I'm unmarried and "not going anywhere" whereas the other colleague is recently married and hopes to start a family soon.  Um...thanks?

I get their point, and yep, it's true; I do have a more flexible schedule because I'm still single.  But don't assume I have no life because I have no family of my own.  And we're all getting paid to do the same job.  I shouldn't have to take on more of the shared duties as some sort of "natural consequence" for not getting married.

Here's what Wally from Dilbert says on the subject:  

So, maybe Wally isn't the best role model of singles at work, but he has a point.

Singles don't take sick days because our children are sick.

We probably aren't sick as often ourselves because we don't have children.  (Though nieces and nephews can share germs pretty well, too, I've discovered.)

Singles don't have to rush out to pick up kids from school.

We have no one waiting at home for supper; it's easier for us to work late or attend those unexpected meetings.  

We don't have to consult with anyone about our schedules.

So...if singles are taking on more of the collective work with our "laser-like focus," as Wally says, and saving our employers money, how about sharing a little of that wealth??  Just a thought.


And as I write this, I'm supervising a group of my Advanced Placement English students who are taking a 3-hour practice exam.  On a Saturday.  Do I do it because I'm single?  No.  I do it for the same reason I was recently promoted to department head:  because I'm very good at my job.

Quotable Quotes #4

I came across this great line while reading Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie with my senior AP English students:  


Former belle-of-the-ball Amanda tells her shy, wallflower daughter Laura, 

"Girls that aren't cut out for business careers usually wind up married to some nice man."


Darn my good business skills! :)