What are women waiting for?

When I was sixteen my parents split up. I had spent most of my young life wondering how they ever got married in the first place, and one of the strangest repercussions of their divorce was the unraveling of the 25 year web of matrimonial secrets that had been buried beneath my parents best efforts to keep their kids out of, what turns out, was a pretty disastrous relationship. Somewhere between my junior year of high school and my first encounter with adulthood, I asked my mom to tell me honestly how she ended up with my father. And of course, even when you know a relationship ends in the worst of ways, something about our romantic socialization suggests that every story has, at the very least, a happy beginning. I was struck by a moment of resolution and clarity when my mom finally admitted that more than anything else, my parent's marriage was a product of her resignation to his persistence. That's right ladies and gentlemen, my mom raised the white flag of surrender and my dad said I do. And perhaps the worst part of the entire story is that she actually used the phrase, "felt sorry for him" while explaining her justification for a union that never made sense in the first place.

I don't bring it up to shed light on my own personal and relational dysfunction, but rather to illuminate an example of a woman, not unlike many in this culture of young individualism and future two-somes, that got married for some reason outside the scope of passionate romance and life-long partnership that we have all come to regard as the beating heart of marital bliss. Whenever I think about all twenty-five years of my parent's marriage, I think about how many other people get into, and perhaps more importantly, stay involved in, marriages that are less than the living incarnations of our fairy tale expectations. Even more relevant to this particular moment of inquiry, is my investigation of the idea that while countless marriages end in some combination of divorce, heartache, infidelity and disappointment, young women in their years of prime fertility remain utterly consumed by the marriage manhunt.

I live in a world where women are educated, powerful and ambitious. My female friends and peers are products of revolution, feminism and decades of advocacy and sacrifice. We are the elite members of a unique sphere of privilege who comprise the poster image of the women's movement. Compared to the diverse political, economic and social struggles that confront women in so many different contexts worldwide, we seem to have unlimited access, resources and potential to become whomever we want. Without a doubt, our success represents the fusion of social reproduction and generations of heroine predecessors. And yet, at the point where I sit on the human-age number line, where two years behind me, young college women are still fascinated and liberated by the art of the one night stand, and two years in front of me, my older brother attends a wedding of a friend every other weekend, I seem to be surrounded by a culture of women obsessed.

Obsessed with their careers, their latest promotion or the workload of their professional schooling, you ask? I wish. These women are in hot pursuit of a husband, and nothing else taking place in their educational, personal or occupational lives seems to matter. Just outside of my immediate social network of women who are a rare hybrid of independent, cynical and ambitious, I have encountered innumerable young, intelligent women who seem preoccupied by either their current relationship or the prospect of securing one. I wonder if all of these women are products of parents who have beautiful, committed relationships shaped by partnership, trust and equity; or as I suspect, they are trapped by the delusion, either subconciously or otherwise, that marriage is a sign of success, desirability as well as a source of security, stability and validation. Why is it that the value of womanhood is determined by which man you marry and when? The shape of our lives is defined by the lines drawn from relationship to relationship, and of course the image is only completed when marked by an engagement ring and a wedding date.

As I finished my bachelor's degree, I had a righteous image of post-college women in their twenties taking on the world without reservation, bound only by self-limitation and financial obligation, concerned with the realm of holy matrimony only in terms of the rejection or avoidance of it. My disappointing post-college reality has revealed all sorts of variations on the age-old plight of the single woman. Most frequently, I listened to my older friends lament the fact that they " didn't find a husband" while they were in school and have been painfully confronted by the abyssmal selection of men in their off-campus lifestyles since then. Initially I was the first person to pass the information on to other women who were still in pursuit of higher education, warning them of the depths of despair that lingered just beyond the horizon-line of graduation.

When I took a step back for a minute (and re-examined the meaning of this wisdom), I wondered why anyone who had just been empowered by their entire future opening up in front of them, would be even remotely concerned with finding a mate. Of course a bachelor's degree doesn't exactly set you up with a one way ticket to the top of the world, but it certainly gives women, who in previous generations had no scope of a livlihood beyond their domestic identity, a broad spectrum of professional and personal opportunties that don't carry a husband-required clause. So why is it exactly that women are seeking the holy grail of matrimony? Why do women obsess about when, where and how to meet a husband so that they can go ahead and settle down before the rest of their life gets away from them? Aren't we getting it backwards? Shouldn't we be more concerned about our personally concieved and achieved happiness before we worry about identifying someone to share it with? Wouldn't it make more sense to pursue the goals that apply to us before we start incorporating the objectives of someone else's dreams?

Perhaps I'm the one who's looking at it all wrong. Maybe all of those personal ambitions I've been rambling about are tied to or (worse yet) defined by the men we hope to marry. The most disturbing and discouraging aspect of this observation is that the race down the proverbial alter is by no means a forum or space for gender equity. Most men of education and privilege remain devotedly on track to professional perfection while the women in their lives chase them from promotion to promotion, desperately clinging to the hope that they'll find a break between board meetings to return their phone call.

And all of this for what? When one out of ever two marriages end in divorce, and many people remain unhappily married for multiple decades without satisfaction or solace, why are women still in hot pursuit of the legal definition of heterosexual commitment? Last time I checked, the unemployment rate was lower than the divorce rate and we might all be better off taking a chance on our career investments than playing the fifty-fifty odds of marital bliss.

I don't intend to persuade women to avoid marriage, dating and heterosexual partnership altogether. I do however, encourage women to be critical of an institution created and perpetuated to serve the various means of capitalism, christianity and patriarchy. I also hope to witness a generation transformed by the power of their own potential and relishing the freedom of pursuing their own ambition. Rock on ladies, because while professional opportunities may come and go, the institution of marriage will likely always be around for you to fall back on.