Happily ever after
I remember reading an interview with Martha Stewart once where the reporter asked her if she planned to remarry. “I was married for 25 years,” she snapped. “Isn’t that enough?”
Her remark made me laugh, because it seemed to me that Stewart was impatiently expressing a shift in attitude among older women that had surfaced in the zeitgeist but had yet to be consciously acknowledged. Now that I’m single again, the exchange has even more resonance. Christ, I think. Even she gets asked!
I know how she felt. After I split up a few years ago, a dear friend asked if I was seeing anybody yet. I knew he had my best interests at heart, but his question prompted a visceral reaction, even though, at the time, I’d have been hard pressed to articulate why. Now I know that what bothered me about it was its underlying assumption, that I — indeed anyone in my position — would naturally want to get back in the game. Not only did I find the assumption strangely irksome, I felt powerless to reject it without seeming defensive.
I’ve been asked that question many times since then, and although I’ve known the pleasures an intimate relationship can afford, and believe that coupledom can be lovely for those who thrive within its domain, that is largely beside the point. What I’m questioning here is the deeply embedded assumption in our culture that throughout their lives, women all have the same goals in this regard, and an unattached female is merely just marking time until she’s paired up and the order of the universe is restored.
Ditching the fairy tale for reality
For me, and for many women I know who are in their fifties or older, that’s not the way it is. If we think about it at all, which we almost never do, we’re certain that the only kind of pairing of interest now is one in which we don’t have to compromise our freedom. Sure, a companionable life sounds appealing at times — unless we have to share it under the same roof, or with alien stepchildren, in which case, not so much.
Maybe our feelings will change, and maybe not. And yet, it’s impossible to take three steps without somebody asking a newly single woman, whatever her age, “Are you dating yet?” However well intentioned that query may be — or not (often it’s asked by unhappily married women who prefer to pity a single woman rather than feel threatened by her relaxed independence) — its socially sanctioned subtext is always the same: “Enough already. When are you going to get back on the horse?”
But what if that horse has left the barn — and you no longer have any interest in chasing it? More importantly, what if it’s time to retire that question altogether, because its quaint time has passed?
