Americans
can learn a lot from their indifference.
Slate, Katie Roiphe, October 30, 2013
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| Being single in the Netherlands is pretty great. (Photo by Ferdy Damman/AFP/ Getty Images) |
The Dutch
attitude, which I like, is that marriage is not for everyone; it is a personal
choice, an option, a pleasant possibility, but not marrying is not a failure, a
great blot on your achievements in life, a critical rite of passage you have
missed. Sometimes people get around to getting married, and sometimes they
don’t. Several Dutch women in their 40s, with children and rich romantic
histories, tell me about marriage, “It just wasn’t something that mattered to
me.”
 |
Katie Roiphe, professor
at the Arthur L. Carter
Journalism Institute at
New York University
|
I try to
describe to a couple of audiences in Amsterdam the against-the-grainness of
someone, especially a woman, who has not married in America. I try to explain
how having children outside of marriage is still considered an alternative, and
essentially inferior life choice. I mention that an American writer wrote a coverstory in the Atlantic on the remarkable and exotic fact that she was in her
late 30s and had never married. This sort of blew their minds. Who could
possibly care? It seemed like a crazy American thing for marriage to matter so
much. To them this obsession, this nagging necessity for weddings, the lack of
general acceptance toward other pretty common ways of living, is so foreign, so
uniquely American, such a quaint narrowness, that it’s incomprehensible as an
actual mode of modern life.
At first I
started fantasizing about whether I could move to a steep little Dutch house,
and if I could balance a child on a bicycle. But it also seems to me it would
be a great thing if we could absorb some of the Dutch attitude toward conjugal
life. I am not here arguing against marriage, but against marriage as a rite of
passage, against the assumption of all little girls that they will one day be
married in a white dress on a green lawn, against the socially engraved
absolute of it, the impossible-to-evade shining ideal.
What would
it mean to end the centuries-long American fixation on traditional family
structures? Would we be able to look at families living outside of convention
without as much judgment, as much toxic condescension? Would the “smug
marrieds” Helen Fielding wrote about in Bridget Jones’ Diary be less smug and
just married?
If we woke
up one morning and discovered that in America marriage was suddenly regarded as
a choice, a way, a possibility, but not a definite and essential phase of life,
think how many people would suddenly be living above board, think of the stress
removed, the pressures lifted, the stigmas dissolving. Think how many people
living unhappily would see their way to living less unhappily. In Edwardian
England, the cultural critic Rebecca West wrote about the “dinginess that come
between us and the reality of love” and the “gross, destructive mutual raids on
personality that often form marriages.”
Whatever
one thinks about the institution, the truth is that marriage is increasingly not
the way Americans are living. If one goes strictly by the facts—that the
majority of babies born to women under 30 are born to single mothers, or that
about 51 percent of American adults are married—one has to admit that marriage
can’t be taken for granted, assumed as a rite of passage, a towering symbol of
our way of life. But somehow this hasn’t dimmed our solid sense of marriage as
the American normal.
If we
suddenly stopped being in thrall to the rigid, old-fashioned ideal of marriage,
we could stop worrying about low marriage rates and high divorce rates. We
could stop worrying about single mothers and the decline of marriage as an
institution, especially in the lower middle class, and the wasteful industry of wedding planning. We could instead focus on actual relationships, on
intimacies, on substance over form; we could focus on love in its myriad,
unpredictable varieties. We could see life here in the amber waves of grain not
for what it should be, but for what it is.
Katie
Roiphe, professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York
University, is the author most recently of Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Marriages, and In Praise of Messy Lives.
Related Article:
Question: Dear
Kryon, how do we know when a divorce is appropriate or not?
Answer: It’s
appropriate when the energy and consciousness of the one is on a different reality
from the other, and it’s obvious that it will never change.
This isn’t
about enlightenment, either. It’s about your individual paths. Although
contrary to your society, the rules of the church, and what your family wishes
for you, sometimes you go through "partnership stages" that are
appropriate but temporary. It can also be between two enlightened souls who
simply needed to be together for a while.
So if
you’re going to separate a partnership, do it with integrity. Do it in a way
where you offer friendship. Do it with wisdom and maturity. Never slam the
door. Offer the other person your maturity all your life, and always give them
the opportunity for forgiveness and discussion.
As you grow
older, you’ll eventually see the dynamics of growth, and why a temporary
partnership might have been needed in your own personal path, or in theirs.
Sometimes it’s only about being a time placeholder, keeping each other in a
place so that something else could happen. Each path is different, and there
are as many who will stay together until they stand and hold hands on the other
side of the veil. Then they’ll do it again the next time around! Don’t pass
judgment either way. There is appropriateness in many things that result in
growth and maturity for either or both of those involved.
As I
discussed before, your cultural rules are often designed to look like they’re
also the "rules of God," but often they’re just the rules of Humans
who are doing their best, without full understanding of how big God really is.
