“Everywhere I turn, I see couples upending existing norms and power structures,” she says, citing a friend who fell in love with her dog walker, a man 12 years younger, with whom she stayed for three years “and are best friends today.”
Well, everywhere I turn in Kate’s essay I see women doing the best they can to celebrate the best they feel they can get, and it’s unbearably sad.
The truth is celebrating singleness””i.e., celebrating “not doing something”””makes no sense. Loving is better than not loving. Choosing to love and commit to a husband or a child is a much higher ideal than choosing not to; that’s why it needs to be celebrated and idealized.
Thanks for posting this, Kendall. Another superb Maggie Gallagher essay, debunking (in her usual, cogent style) the deadly cultural myths so prevalent in our time.
Marriage and family are the bedrock institutions of any society. Any culture that tampers with them does so at great peril. There is such a thing as Natural Law, and it is flouted at great risk.
My concern is that this is an area where the Church is far too conformed to the world around us. We need to do much, much better at fostering and supporting healthy, lasting marriages and encouraging strong families that can survive this sort of sick, immoral cultural environment. Toward that end, I especially commend the [b]Marriage Savers[/b] movement, founded and led by ex-Episcopalians Mike and Harriet McManus. I also recommend [b]The Marriage Course[/b] put out by the folks who gave us Alpha.
David Handy+
I am 75 now and through many years of moving about the country and living in different cultural settings, I have met very few people the like of Kate Bolick. I have kids and grand kids who have not fallen into “the binge drinking and hooking up” trap. They must be among the 80% who are sitting it out.
No, sorry. Those of you who celebrate Maggie Gallagher’s condemnation of single people are guilty of the same extremism, IMO, as those who celebrate Katie’s drivel. It is quite clear that Maggie doesn’t understand the vocation of singlehood or its intrinsic value.
That we singles should be “grateful” and revere those who made it possible for us to be aunts, cousins, etc. etc. is really quite condescending. The blessing of singlehood is this — that we have the time and the lack of demands to love and minister and work where we are called or needed. That could be within our blood families or it could be among strangers, with our spiritual families, in our neighborhoods, etc.
And, yes, this should be celebrated. Most of the time, it’s not — rather, it’s taken for granted. Maggie seems to be operating on the same old tired stereotypes about singleness being primarily about selfishness and sexual liberation. For many of us, it’s not like that at all.
And she needs to wake up and realize that not all people are called to marry. Perhaps she finds that fact threatening? Some marrieds do, and I really don’t understand why that is. Unless I (and other singles I know) met a very particular sort of person, we would be rubbish at marriage, for a variety of reasons. So, when it seems as though people such as Maggie insist that everyone should be married and those who aren’t must be selfish and “sexually liberated,” we bristle.
Now, you would think that Maggie and her kind would be glad that those of us with some very real issues would think enough of the institution to not enter into it. After all, it’s not difficult to find some bloke to marry. It really isn’t. And, I’ll admit, it’s been tempting on more than one occasion if for no other reason than to prove that you can and to shut up the Maggies of the world. That’s wrong, though, isn’t it? I think it is. Many other people don’t, though. So, they marry and put up/shut up/become content or wildly unhappy. Or they cheat, fight, divorce, even kill. Is this better than being single? Are we singles really that wretched to the Maggies?
But the singles often make it possible for the marrieds with children to take that time off when their kids are sick. Or to leave early when they have to go to a parent conference. Singles are called upon to pick up the slack or do extra duty when needed because, after all, they don’t have anyone at home depending on them. They’re able to volunteer because they do indeed have more time to care about LOTS of people rather than focusing solely on a spouse and/or kids.
So, from this single’s point of view, Katie doesn’t speak for me but I also think Maggie needs to get over herself and her singlephobia. If it’s any consolation to her, most of us aren’t living fabulous, crazy-fun, Hollywood-inspiring lives. We’re just doing the best we can, day by day, like everyone else.
This seems a good place to repeat, from an article that’s on Anglican Mainstream:
[blockquote]In 1922 Lenin called a meeting of Marxist intellectuals to study why the Bolshevik Revolution had not spread to the West. According to the major conservative thinker Ralph de Toledano “this meeting was perhaps more harmful to Western civilization than the Bolshevik Revolution itself’â€. The two key strategic objectives decided upon at the meeting were:
• Judeo-Christian belief was to be erased by the use of sexual instinct.
• The family and its rights over education were to be eradicated.
These intellectuals moved to Frankfurt becoming known as the ‘Frankfurt School’ and then to the United States…..[/blockquote]
They settled down to work in Berkeley IIRC, Marcuse and friends, in the 1960s. And others helped, like Kinsey. By over-emphasizing the role of sexual instinct in mores of civilized society, this school of subterfuge set a match that has left American societal institutions such as marriage in flames. But some escaped the conflagration. Women such as Kate demonstrate 50 years later the Marxist-Leninist strategy’s long-term effectiveness, but we should thank God for those who saw through the whole scheme and have showed another way to those looking for one. I am not sure Maggie Gallagher’s is the only appropriate ‘rebuttal’ to Kate’s sordid saga, as there are other ways women serve and love, but to do so the support of some community is crucial. By distorting the place of sexual instinct the Marxist-Leninist campaign tragically undermined the ability to be authentically intimate and thus able to make commitments (‘vows’) and be in this needed community (or communion).
I do agree that sex without permanent commitment should not be celebrated. And if we define the “New Singleness” as that, then I certainly do not celebrate it.
But I do agree with Teatime — we should probably have *more* single people, not fewer, and of course we should have more *committed* married people as well. I expect that there are a whole lot more people who should probably remain single rather than trampling off after Yet Another Man or Yet Another Woman.
I have no problem with single, celibate and obedient people living under a rule.:)
This subject can make for interesting discussion. I’m not the best “scanner” and wanted to spend more time with the Kate commentary, which I’ll try to do today. At first glance, it struck me as raging neurotic; overanalyzing the meaning right out of lifelong commitment.
The Maggie rebuttal, to me, is rather an incoherent rant. Both appear too extreme; one characterizing singlehood as a confused sex-fest and the other trashing singles as wrong and somehow not fulfilling their ultimate potential–unfair, in my view, to people who may be going about their own business simply because they have not met the right person to marry. One of the Dr. Phil phrases is a good one–“I’d rather be healthy alone than unhealthy with somebody else”…yeah, what’s wrong with that?
Is it correct to state that any or every date or budding relationship leads to sex? Well, I hope not because so far I’ve never seen mega-partners make anyone very happy; male or female or single or married; ie attempting to commit to one person after relations with way too many(addiction or not).
Relationships are tough–people are individuals, in a marriage, too and it’s not real hard for one person’s music to be or become someone else’s noise. My peon opinion isn’t or doesn’t need to be worth anything, but I believe people on the road to lifelong commitment do better with similar interests, energy levels, and worldviews because those create instances where there is a lot LESS to argue about or even discuss.
The movie “It’s Complicated” has one of the best titles on Earth… 🙂
Another huge key is FLEXIBILITY because marriage is not a one-way street and those who are ruthlessly unyielding or thrive on conflict will not make good marriage partners. And if there’s kids in the picture, they don’t need to spend their lives in a combat zone.
I’ve said before that when I attended my 10th HS reunion, of my girlfriends, probably 1/3 were happily married(with luck, I was one of those), 1/3 were single, and 1/3 had already gone through their first divorce. A lot of the singles seemed freaked out they were still single at 28, but the divorcees were wiser. There was even a friendly discussion going on about this in the ladies’ room. One of the girls was being really defensive about not being married but “having a boyfriend”…the attitude of others was, “Well, who cares whether you have a boyfriend or not”?! I said, “Isn’t it better to be single than be with a jerk”?!! And then they all looked like bobblehead dolls…and thankfully, I’m not with a jerk. We have our druthers, but he’s very kind and thoughtful. I like to say that problems result not from our “interior” relationship, but because of all the difficult forces that act on the marriage from the “outside”; like job stress, idiotic family members, kids acting crazy, etc. And those external forces are the reasons your union needs to be solid in the first place, because it has to be strong enough to weather such things. And it will not be strong enough if either one of you in it is a jerk; so, me too–I’d much rather be single than with a jerk; or someone with whom I’m completely incompatible.
I think it is utterly wrong to judge singlehood, but I hope people are not lonely. As a character says in the movie “Autumn in New York”, “you don’t want to die in your own arms”. There’s truth to that, but one does not want to die in an abusive nightmare, either. And one never knows–Maggie can spout off about singlehood, but what does she really know? One of my friends is single/divorced, a very nice woman with two kids who was married to a pastor. The pastor decided that sin was ok and developed a different definition of the word “fidelity”. What was she supposed to do? And thus, she’s not single by choice–so maybe people like Maggie should just shut up and stick to working on the issues in their own sphere.