Are women settling in their relationships in order to achieve the Ameriwoman dream of having it all? A high rising professional career, 2 kids, sous chef with a cooking show on the side and actually reading 50 shades of boring for book club in order to get that damned diamond whether we have to scratch, claw, and bleed ourselves crazy?
I recently read an article about a women in NYC on the DailyMail.UK (a reputable source of celebrity reporting) that made me stop and reflect on my own life. “A 35-year-old advertising executive plunged 17 floors to her death this morning after the railing of her NYC apartment gave way. The woman went outside for a cigarette with her date who she met online, at 12:50am when the railing collapsed after she propped her leg on it to stretch.” Holy shit, like online dating when you’re 35 isn’t hard enough? First date awkwardness now includes: a man 10 years older, 20 pounds heavier, awkward enough to tease fate with a cigarette and the old “stretching the leg at 1am lie”, and now DEATH? However it was the few quotes found from her employer that identified not who she was, but what she did at the office that were most upsetting. Online advertising startup TripleLift offered, “Her tremendous energy and humor brought so much joy to the office.” (Quote taken from Fox news in order to validate authenticity with a secondary reputable news source.) Where were the quotes from her friends, family, neighbors or 2am pizza delivery man? The people who could actually capture who she was outside of work, the small quirks that made this individual different than all the other cogs in the machine. I’ve been that woman in some form, while the age and outlet of dating differ from my own life, I identify with her. I know what it’s like to work crazy hours that leave you with barely enough energy to stumble home and over to the take out drawer where the one bright spot of the day is the extra ginger the delivery man threw in with your sushi which almost not quite makes up for the fact that your client is Satan, the guy from sales is a perv and for the last time it’s not two chopsticks anymore but one.
At the heart of it, it’s the continual search to complete the Ameriwoman dream that keeps us going, as we move from cringe to carefree grin outside a packed bar that you think you should go to in the hopes of discovering “The One” hitting on an underage girl in a faux Herve dress, or the breakup you didn’t quite get over because you didn’t have the biological time to, or the guy you keep seeing who just isn’t quite right but for some reason you’re going to make it right. Because you’ve made it right before. Woman of this era are masters of squeezing a circle into a square, turning bri into brioche and doing whatever it takes to do it all. While Sheryl Sandberg is encouraging women “to lean in” at all costs, she doesn’t realize that the women who read her books and religiously subscribe to her ideology are already leaning in so far that they’re bent halfway over with the weight of the world on their shoulders. The last thing they need is someone else telling them to race their hunchback bodies over to their ambitiously over insured cars and “put your foot on that gas pedal and keep it there.”
President of Barnard Debors Spar writes, “Expectations are now sky-high. Women have to not just get a job and keep it but rise through the ranks—while maintaining a partner and children, staying awake for sex, and looking like Beyoncé. Doing it all, as is expected of women today, is not doable. A woman can’t work a 60-hour week and go to every school play. Yet we berate ourselves for failing at the balancing act. Do I think women should walk away from fast-paced jobs, or stop leaning in? Of course not. Every woman at the top has to make trade-offs. Only Wonder Woman can do it all, and all at once. And she isn’t real.” Which brings me to my main point- Women’s priorities have steadily shifted. The average age of marriage in the United States is now 27 for women and 29 for men, up from 23 for women and 26 for men in 1990 and 20 and 22 (!) in 1960. Women are waiting longer to get married in order to fit in a hefty career before they hit the breaks and produce offspring or buy embarrassingly small dogs.
Andrew Cherlin’s new book —The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today, states that “People are more concerned with their own self-development than they used to be. People are postponing marriage until everything in their lives is working in order. The order means after you’ve finished your education, perhaps after beginning your career, and increasingly after you’ve lived with your partner.” By the time women start gaining steady traction on a career ladder they’re hit with 3 overwhelming thoughts: 1- I can’t believe he’s this old and still has Toy Story sheets. 2.- I guess it’s about time to tie Buzz Light Year down 3- At least we can repurpose those sheets in 9 months when we starting having kids.
It’s this feeling of anxiety and panic surrounding marriage that older women are falling prey to that concern me. The internet has opened up an unprecedented flood of facebook, twitter, Instagram, Vine, and Snapchat engagement, wedding, and baby photos. Our peers are now documenting every stage of committed life (child labor facebook posts?) and it’s pouring down the throats of single women in order to constantly remind them that we’re not yet accomplished. We haven’t done it all, we have yet to really lean into this aspect of our lives. If only we could lean into relationships as well as we lean into all the bikram yoga, wine and paint classes and mobile marketing projects thrown our way. If only we could bottle up all the effort of leaning in that single women do in search of “The One” we could power Miami’s tanning beds for eternity.
In keeping with the credible news examples already presented in this article, I want to take a look at the stunning, earth shaking Bachelorette that aired. I have been a Bachelorette fan for many years. As boyfriends, roommates and pets have come and gone the Bachelor has remained the constant unrealistic saccharine comfort in my life. I know every season Chris Harris will say “Never before in bachelor history….” and I’ll smile endearingly because he says that every year. However this season was actually different. In the bachelor’s spirit of relevance and truth, 8 years into the show viewers were finally confronted with actual reality tv and it blew us all away. In no other season have we watched such a true to life relationship be presented to the masses, and it was fucking depressing.
Desiree our Bachelorette, got rejected by Brooks, the man of her dreams. The man she dreamed of planning a life with, a man she said that she loved on national TV (breaking all Bachelor rules to never utter the 3 words until you’ve got him down on one knee with a Neil Lane ring for the season finale). She sobbingly admits to him “I was conflicted throughout the entire season, because you were the man I wanted to give my heart to, the only one I wanted to go on dates with, the one I wanted to marry.” Brooks played it straight and told her she just wasn’t the one for him, that they didn’t have that extra special spark, that he had more time to find it and he couldn’t be pressured to settle. Heart broken, Des decides to give love another shot with the one contestant still left. Sobbingly she tells the camera “I’ve never met anyone like Chris, I just feel so lucky to be receiving his love. I’ve never felt that anyone has loved me as much as I’ve loved him.” How does one come back from a blow like this in the span of 48 hours to decide she will marry the runner up? Grit. The lean in approach. The foot on the gas pedal, stuff yourself into that faux herve dress because you took that extra bikram class that you drive heave after because the dripping sweat from the ceiling makes you sick, type of grit. It’s the weight of the expectations, the ticking clock and the sense of panic lurking on stage right that gets you up in the morning and out on that rebound date. And it’s what makes us decide that this is right, even though all signs point to settling. Did Des give in to internal pressures as well as the expectations of millions of viewers to end the season with a Chris and Neil Lane? Would our advertising executive have settled with that man she met on a online dating site if she hadn’t tragically fallen off a balcony? Or maybe they would’ve accepted the complacent comfort that these men might not be “The One”, but most importantly they are “The Right One” right now.
In the end we have to realize that relationships are actually “The One” thing we have to take our foot off the gas pedal for, the one thing we can’t “lean into”. We either have to accept the notion of settling (and subsequent rising divorce rate), or realize that maybe the way to lean in, is to lean back; push aside ticking clocks and be content with watching our Ameriwoman walk away.
About Mali Rose
Mali Rose is a writer for Rookerville. She enjoys binge watching Scandal, doing random activities that produce a very strange life resume, eating a copious amount of Skinny Pop and going to empty dive bars. Rose dreams of giving up the corporate life and moving to Maine or Thailand but fears that the internet accessibility would affect her monogamous relationship with Netflix. Rose lives with Justine Kolsky in Manhattan. They have 1 dead and 2 questionably living plants together.