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.

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You think you know me as you sit across from me in the subway your bored gaze sliding up from the floor to my perfectly manicured toes festooned in a brilliant shade of Mai Tai Pink. But you don’t. You don’t know how often those toes have curled in frustration, straining out of towering heels with an unyielding desire to be back on solid footing, running through grass or jumping off piers into water and feeling nothing below, just air whooshing in between the gaps. You don’t know how the littlest toe hides slightly behind the others and when I truly felt the most comfortable and the most loved I would jokingly rest my feet on his lap and ask him to stretch out the littlest one so it could stand out from behind the rest.

You think you know me as you glance at my legs in a short summer skirt as we stride down  the street on the way to a meeting, but as your gaze slides up my legs you don’t pause on the one inch scar below my right knee but continue upward without hesitation. You flicker right past the permanent mark of the moment I thought I was invincible. You missed an exciting story of a varsity sport, a rival college, and my family’s first rugby game ending in a hospital visit with a torn ACL and 6 months of rehab. But most of all you missed the surprising love I have of a dirty, vicious and competitive sport which you might not have gathered from the immaculately pressed skirt and smooth legs I trounced by on. You missed the legs that took me to foreign places, into the fields of Ecuador where my relatives told me stories of our heritage amidst fields of wildflowers and poverty. Or the time these legs carried me through the streets of Jerusalem and into a tiny tented shop where 4 girls prayed over a mezuzah with a stranger who taught them more about religion than any other lesson before. You missed the feelings of strength and invincibility in which these legs can propel me in a race alongside my brother or weaving through the backwoods and farms of Maine.

You think you know me as your eyes asses the flatness of my stomach as I slide into a chair of a packed meeting, and as I sense your scrutiny I suck in slightly my belt sagging with newfound room. I feel your smirk and I sense my insecurities flooding back. I mentally ensure everything is in place, clean and immaculate. Because I know you expect that, for me to not only be outwardly perfect but to also be everything you can check off in a neat square box. To sit at that table I need to be someone who has wit, charm, grace and intelligence. For I know that if my outward appearance was unkempt, or unflattering the intangible would be less valuable and shine a little less bright. You don’t know that I get so stressed sitting in that damn office chair that I end up eating 5 peanut butter cups in a row and then feeling sick with pressure and an upset stomach. You don’t know the weight I feel from having to be a charming hostess but also a cunning businesswoman. You don’t know that inside I’m really an introvert. That growing up I would sneak away from my friends to read alone in the library and that I hate staying out late with clients, and pray for the moments they decide not to grab that drink after dinner. You would never know, because there’s no way to tell.

You think you know me as you stare at my sparkling Yurman ring of twisted gold as I softly trace a trail of condensation down the side of a wine glass during our first date. You don’t know that while I’m sitting here with you, my mind is actually travelling back to a time when I worked 14 hour days in a glass studio making pieces of hand blown art and falling in love with my Czechoslovakian teacher. You don’t know that when he kissed me that summer it was like the world stopped in that sugary movie moment, and that I feel as though it never started turning quite the same way again. You don’t know that these hands have braided the hair of girls sold on the sex trade in Thailand, or held dusty chalk to cement walls in dark classrooms in Kenya while singing the alphabet to children who would never use it. You don’t know that when I get nervous I rip at my nails, attacking them and that when my father sees me the first thing he looks at are my hands in order to see the state of my heart.

You think you know me as you play with my dark hair, wrapping it around your fist trying to entangle yourself in me, trying to get as close as possible, and for that moment I feel safe because I think you really know all of me, and I know all that is you. But the silky strands slip through your fingers like grains of sand and you don’t know that I try to give you everything, while my body shuts down and my hair starts falling out under the weight of it all.

You think you know me as you avoid eye contact or advanced warning, packing your things, our memories and my hope away into cardboard boxes with the words fragile scribbled across the top. You stop suddenly and throw an explanation over your shoulder- “I never saw you cry, I never saw you vulnerable, I guess I never really saw you.” Which is crazy I think, because if you knew me, you must know I would rip open my chest for you to peer into my soul, if only you had just told me that you needed me to. Your eyes light on mine for the last time, and I see such love and truth it hurts to look away, and in that moment I know the internal battle to which Orpheous lost, but then I’m forced to look away because I’m staring at the back of a closed door.

I thought I knew you, but I never did. Perhaps in the end you never knew yourself and I didn’t know enough to ask and neither did you.

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Rookerville welcomes its newest writer to the team, Mali Rose.  Enjoy.

Be your own hero and Close the Damn Chapter 

Is there a difference between external closure (that which we get from others or circumstance) and internal closure (that which we make for ourselves)? Is one perhaps better than the other?  If we often can never attain the “Notebook” movie-ending closure that we crave, can we create our own closure through introspection, self-confidence, a little bit of grit and a whole lot of Kelly Clarkson?

The topic of closure has continually come up in my life in the past few weeks in various forms. Whether it’s through conversations with a friend who still dreams about running over her ex boyfriend’s fiance with a pick-up truck and then strangling her (because you can never be too sure), or my mother who lost both her parents at a young age, we humans seem to be continually searching for some type of closure. Is closure in its most basic form a way to say that the good in the goodbye just wasn’t good enough? (Thank you for introducing inadequacy to the masses Beyonce.) That we need something else to justify, explain or derive meaning from a traumatic departure or break in our lives?

To understand the value and desire for “closure”, (and because I’m from New York and where else would I go to understand my feelings besides my mother and Pinkberry), I schedule an appointment with a therapist. I find myself looking for answers in her green carpet, worn through in spots where clients anxiously swing their feet, desperately concentrating as if this map of scattered holes can connect the dots between my chaotic thoughts and feelings.  I think of all her past clients perched atop that cracked and stained leather couch picking at scabs of wounds that no longer bear resemblance to the actual event, who find themselves years later left only with a hefty bill and unanswered questions to events that now seem like faded and blurred memories that happened to a close friend or witnessed in a sad movie.

I discuss my need for closure with this certified stranger in a comfortably contrived room with tissues placed conveniently close at hand to force intimacy with someone you see once a week  for 42 exact minutes. I force my eyes away from the ticking money clock, and discuss the idea of getting in touch with the love of my life who woke me up one morning after living together for years and told me he was leaving and has since never looked back. What value, I argue, would I need to get from this person who is so utterly lost, that I could not in fact get from myself? What scares me, I confess, is that I’m still looking for answers, but what terrifies me is that maybe at the heart of this romanticized notion of closure, I just want to see him again. To form another memory that doesn’t involve the cloying sweet smell of dead roses left on the table while he moved out on Valentines day, or the feeling of my insides being ripped out as I find forgotten love notes tucked into unexpected crevices around our apartment, or the continual fear I have of receiving mail and seeing his name on the envelope.

My need for closure is just another way to identify that I’m still in the grieving process, though the silver lining is that this is the last phase. I’m still searching to fill a void, as a gaping hole was ripped open to reveal that I now need to get to know and accept the new me and realize all the ways this devastation has changed me irrevocably. I’ve found that I’m not who I was, and I never will get back to being that person. And I think that’s okay. I realize this phase is both an end and a beginning: the end of the internal negotiations and turmoil that preceded it, and the beginning of a new perspective. This new outlook is only available to veterans of the earlier phases; there is no shortcut. You have to drag yourself through these stages before you learn to crawl, stand up and eventually limp away. I’ve already had to learn how to wake up alone on a lazy Sunday and not reach for him, but I still have to relearn the things that make me happy, or the mundane everyday tasks that label me as independent like knowing the most efficient subway route, what to do on weeknights when ordering takeout for one doesn’t get you above the delivery minimum, how to reach things on the top shelf and how to stop searching for him on the streets of Manhattan.

However this resolve won’t stop me or any of us from continually seeking a shortcut. We live in an over medicated fast food nation of high speed internet and Tinder dating apps. Many of us will hang suspended and stuck in the gray matter praying for the possibility of an externally-mediated closure scenario that will deliver us from this agonizingly stagnant void. Desperate for any excuse to “Eat Pray Love” all over Europe and find The One to deliver the big C in a sexy accent over copious amounts of spaghetti and chocolate.

However “The desire for external endings is accompanied by the recognition that closure scenarios are usually unattainable, or, if attained, would almost certainly fail to deliver the imagined satisfaction.” He won’t ever say the things I need him to in order to justify or eradicate the hurt. Those wounds have already scarred.  By staring down the barrel of the darkest and weakest part of my soul- I realize that closure won’t get him back; and if it did, it would never be the same, because I can’t forgive what happened. Those wounds can too easily be reopened to risk the razor sharp edge that rekindled relationships precariously perch. I also won’t get closure by running off to foreign places and gorging myself on foreign food with foreign men. I would just gain weight instead of deep introspection, and perhaps even contract an STD. Juggling the immensely powerful desire to close a chapter and the rational understanding that it can never be externally granted, I will suffer horribly on this journey towards acceptance until I finally realize that it’s possible to just halt the cycle. It’s not easy, but at some point I can actively choose not to be the victim anymore. We all possess the ability to make our own decision to close a chapter, to find sense of self which leads to happiness and thus the closure we so desperately yearn for. It’s at that point that we realize we’ve finally gotten tired of reading the same fucking book with the same tired characters and we take a deep soul changing breath and move on.

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