Grudgingly, Notes on Love

So I’ve written a few love notes over the past couple of days - a continuation of the blog-stallment I began way back in June: “Love Notes/Notes on Love.” Love itself being a notion that I’ve been particularly willing to leave alone as of late, I hadn’t planned on or wanted to include any “Notes on Love” this time around - just the love notes themselves. But then I read THIS ARTICLE in the Atlantic, by Lori Gottlieb. It’s called “Marry Him!”

Since reading through Gottlieb’s diatribe a few times, I’ve cycled through a whole bunch of emotions - all of them being negative. It started in the first paragraph with something like vague boredom over an anecdote about surveying happily-complete families strolling through an idyllic park. Here we go again, I thought, another woeful tale of the unhappily single mother. But as the article continued, the increasing brashness of Gottlieb’s seemingly anti-feminist statements - “ask any soul-baring 40-year-old single heterosexual woman what she most longs for in life . . . she’ll say that what she really wants is a husband (and, by extension, a child)” - my boredom turned first into irritation, then ignited into anger.

“Every woman I know,” writes Gottlieb, “—no matter how successful and ambitious, how financially and emotionally secure—feels panic, occasionally coupled with desperation, if she hits 30 and finds herself unmarried.” What the fuck is this? I blurted aloud to my empty apartment, questioning no one in particular. Is she actually trying to convince me that I require a husband to be happy? I asked angrily, though silently this time. I was incensed. But before I could vocalize my opinion that Lori “Knock-Me-Up-Now!” Gottlieb didn’t know what the hell she was talking about, she preemptively retorted with a surprisingly catty comeback: “And all I can say is, if you say you’re not worried [about finding a husband], either you’re in denial or you’re lying. In fact, take a good look in the mirror and try to convince yourself that you’re not worried, because you’ll see how silly your face looks when you’re being disingenuous.”

I inhaled sharply through my clenched teeth. Anger curdled into a kind of nauseated, disbelieving woundedness.

I’ve since forwarded this article to my two fellow lady-AIR’s, both of whom were equally upset by it. Arielle replied, “How dare you send me this,” and asked, somewhat sarcastically, if I was trying to urge her further toward suicide. And Derya passed along Jezebel’s responses to the article (see here and here), one of which seems to be simply a lazy attempt to distract from the true issue at hand by bringing up Gottlieb’s struggle with eating disorders, and the other (though it made me feel slightly better) which in my opinion misconstrues Gottlieb’s argument (saying that Gottlieb encourages women to settle for men who are not good enough for them, rather than for men who they are not in love with). Anyways, the point is that the three of us have since discussed, in stereotypical female fashion, our feelings about the article. To rehash the whole discussion here, frankly, would be overkill, and I would like to believe that it would be granting Gottlieb more credit than she deserves. But, the moral of the story: there is not a single aspect of this article that fails to depress me. Not one.

I consider myself lucky to have grown up in a home with both of my parents, who (despite more than their fair share of ups and downs) are embarking on their fourth decade of marriage. And in spite of my intense shyness as a child, they somehow managed to instill a bit of aplomb in me, which, in my adult years, has allowed me a certain confidence in my pursuit of romantic relationships with men. For these reasons, I’ve always sort of assumed that things would eventually work out for me, at least romantically - that I was smart enough and confident enough to one day stumble into the stereotypical intoxication of “true love,” whatever that might be. I’ve always just assumed that I would be able to get married to someone who I was really in love with, if I wanted to. Well, what Gottlieb’s article forced me to consider was whether this belief might simply be deeply naive. What if I end up marrying someone I’m not madly in love with? What if I am actually the kind of girl who “settles” for a loveless, business-like marriage? What, I wondered after reading this article, if everything is not going to be okay?

Then, of course, I got depressed that Gottlieb had somehow tricked me into thinking like this at all. I returned to the mantra that I repeated so often last year, at times when anything in my life felt too serious: I’m 22! (In this context, I’m 22! translates to something like, I have years and years before I need to even consider getting married! and also, to a lesser extent, I don’t want to get married anyway!) But the final depressing reality that Gottlieb’s article illustrates is how little we can actually know about our future selves. At twenty-two years old, full of feminist ideals, what I really want to be able to say to Gottlieb is that she is wrong, that time is a non-issue, that I do not and will not need a marriage or children to be happy. But after saying this, behind my closed eyes I still see Gottlieb’s shrewd, middle-aged face smirking back at me. “You say that now,” I hear her say smugly, “but you will. You will.”