You know you\u2019re in extremis<\/em> as far as marriageability goes when you find yourself composing sonnets to the memories of women you met and knew \u2014 against your own wishes, exclusively \u2014 through social media:<\/p>\n The first \u201cLike\u201d after each posting is mine; Like many poems, good and bad, this one contains a germ of wishful thinking. In actual fact, the second person to \u201cLike\u201d my posts is usually my editor. Still, you get the idea. <\/p>\n Serious questions of taste come into play whenever a writer decides to present his own life for inspection, either for its entertainment value, or as a kind of sociological artifact. Admittedly, I\u2019ve done it before, but never without the fear that I was committing a foul. I risk it now because \u2014 well, because aging singles are suddenly hot. No one can hear too much from us. Katie Bolick started it, so if I\u2019m sending myself to the dock, I hope to see her there with me.<\/p>\n In an essay published last month in the Atlantic,<\/em><\/strong><\/a> Bolick cops to a certain ambivalence over the habits of thought that have left her single at the age of 39. Raised to believe that life would present her with \u201cendless possibilities,\u201d she avoided committing to any of her \u201clong string\u201d of ex-boyfriends. Now, advised by well-wishers to either stay single or find a \u201cgood enough\u201d mate, she chooses instead to see herself on the cutting edge of a seismic cultural shift. That is, Bolick takes some satisfaction in belonging to a society where imperatives to marry, both biological and social, are fading into irrelevance. Like historian Stephanie Coontz, she finds it \u201cimmensely liberating and immensely scary.\u201d <\/p>\n Here, Bolick interrogates herself:<\/p>\n Of course, between the diminishing external pressure to have children and the common misperception that our biology is ours to control, some of us don\u2019t deal with the matter in a timely fashion. Like me, for instance. Do I want children? My answer is: I don\u2019t know. But somewhere along the way, I decided to not let my biology dictate my romantic life. If I find someone I really like being with, and if he and I decide we want a child together, and it\u2019s too late for me to conceive naturally, I\u2019ll consider whatever technological aid is currently available, or adopt (and if he\u2019s not open to adoption, he\u2019s not the kind of man I want to be with). <\/p><\/blockquote>\n In an interview with National Review Online<\/em> columnist Kathryn Jean Lopez,<\/strong><\/a> Jennifer Marshall, author of Now and Not Yet: Making Sense of the Single Life in the 21st Century<\/em>, dissects Bolick\u2018s essay. Marshall comes out in favor of restoring \u201cmore family, congregational, and social support for helping young people discern the path to marriage,\u201d explaining, \u201cThat takes a willingness to be in a community where we know others and are willing to be known \u2014 really known \u2014 by them.\u201d She\u2019s also glad to hear from William Bennett, who blames the current trend, by which women are outnumbering men in higher education, on men themselves. In Bennett\u2019s view,<\/strong><\/a> men, having received \u201cdifferent and conflicting signals,\u201d \u201crefuse to get good jobs,\u201d and \u201crefuse to take responsibility in relationships.\u201d It\u2019s a failure of will, and nothing more. <\/p>\n I presume to speak here because my own view of the world splits the difference between Bolick\u2019s on one hand, and Marshall\u2019s and Bennett\u2019s on the other. Like Bolick, I\u2019m 39 and single. Also like her, I know the odds of my pairing off decrease with every passing day. To be coldly realistic, I can look forward to getting uglier, but probably not much richer. I suspect I mourn my fading chance for domesticity a little more acutely than Bolick does, but for selfish reasons. After all, she and I were both raised with what she calls \u201cthe post-boomer ideology that values emotional fulfillment above all else.\u201d That my marital status might affect the Republic, and maybe cost me my Legion of Honor, never crossed my mind. <\/p>\n But here\u2019s the twist: the reason I never married has nothing to do with any mixture of signals on which qualities were worth cultivating. On the contrary, I grew up with a very Bennett-like set of ideals. Forgive the Freudian lingo, but if a police artist were to sketch my superego, he\u2019d emerge on paper with Bennett\u2019s jowls, Reagan\u2019s pompadour, and Kitchener\u2019s mustache. This may surprise some of my regular readers, who know I was raised mainly by my mother. Well, the lady was smart enough \u2014 or, if anyone insists, traditional enough \u2014 to date men who were reliable, ambitious and open to commitment. She\u2019s been with the best of them for 27 years, ever since they met on jury duty, which I always took as a plug for civic-mindedness. <\/p>\n No, what kept me on the margins of the marriage market was my growing awareness that I\u2019d never realize those ideals, the first of which is that a man should be a have a career. I never have. My LSAT scores were awful; the grad program I entered turned out to be one for which I had no aptitude. I did endure a decade of misadventures in what eventually became infamous as the subprime mortgage industry, but it was not a field where I\u2019d fain have planted my flag. At 37, after writing off a successful corporate future as a lost cause, I made the risky (if you must, frivolous) move of turning to writing full time. Earning enough to provide well for a family seemed unlikely in any event, so I opted to hang for a sheep instead of a lamb. <\/p>\n The Marshalls and Bennetts and Lopezes will read this as nothing more than post-boomer, follow-your-dreams twaddle. Indeed, given Marshall\u2019s \u201cfamily, congregational, and social support\u201d for marriage as an end in itself, I might have entombed myself in a low-paying (and insecure) job I hated, and entombed others along with me. Over the years, I\u2019ve met a number of women who seemed to want me, meager prospects and all. Most of them lacked self-esteem. They\u2019d been treated foully \u2014 some by ex-husbands or ex-boyfriends, others by parents or life in general. As a result, they expected little. Their resignation frankly repelled me; I didn\u2019t want to be anyone\u2019s little. Either I\u2019d be a lot, or I\u2019d be nothing \u2014 Aut Caesar aut Nullus,<\/em> as a real go-getter<\/strong><\/a> used to say.<\/p>\n Here again, I may reveal myself as a product of my age. In truth, I find myself most attracted to women who seem to have been raised, as Bolick was, to pattern themselves after Atalanta or Artemis, or some other avatar of girl power. (These are the ones who\u2019ve dumped me, earning my grudging respect for their powers of discrimination.) If I\u2019d grown up under different circumstances, maybe I\u2019d have looked more kindly on the frantic nesting instinct these other women showed. Well, I\u2019ve learned through the grapevine that three-quarters of them have married men anyone would consider far more suitable than I was. Chalk up three victories for Western Civ. <\/p>\n But Marshall and Bennett would be wrong to suppose that the life I\u2019ve backed into, and have ultimately chosen, is a life free from sacrifice. I\u2019ve given up a lot \u2014 not only the comforts of marriage itself, but any ease in being able to move among married couples with any measure of self-respect. Maybe New York hipsters like Katie Bolick have throngs of engaging and attractive single friends, but the late 30-something singles I meet out here in Real America tend to depress or frighten me. <\/p>\n
\nA blogger self-promotion makes or breaks.
\nFar more than talent, moxie\u2019s what it takes.
\nNeglected posts are pickled as by brine \u2014
\nPreserved and yet grotesque, in time confined:
\nAll sapient pretensions shown for fakes,
\nAll judgments stripped and branded as mistakes,
\nSuch boo-boos as the trolls thrill to enshrine.
\nThe second \u201cLike\u201d is yours, you fickle thing.
\nI rightly blocked you from my Facebook page.
\nPerhaps your marble conscience feels a sting
\nYou mean by sylphlike haunting to assuage?
\nTo my disgrace I dursn\u2019t break that string;
\nIn this mug\u2019s game, I need your patronage.<\/em><\/p>\n