Ephron Continued

 . . . You enter a certain amount of madness when you marry a person with pets, but I didn't care. When Charlie and I were married, I was 25 years and 11 months old, and I was such a ninny I thought: Thank God I'm getting married now, before I'm 26 and washed up.  

Nora Ephron, Heartburn

I was chatting with my late-married friend about the modern orthodox "dating crisis," and she said that 25 is considered the threshold. To be honest, it was the same for me. A quarter-life crisis, if you will. 

Even though we are living, longer better lives now, with the means to keep ourselves perfectly preserved well into our 40s, we better be with our life partner by 25. It's all doom from there. 

Ephron's point is: sure, you could theoretically get married to beat an imagined deadline. But don't expect it to be everything you've dreamed of. You can't get both—unless it's a rom-com where she realizes the guy she can't stand that she's been fake-dating for some ridiculously mutual beneficial reason is her soulmate. 

Keep in mind, since relationships involve two people, in order to coax a man into a proposal for the purpose of "settling" probably involves some acting on her part: fake laughter at his bad jokes, batting eyelashes, "I love your mother!" There would be no authenticity. It's kinda hard to maintain duplicity in the long run. 

If one's goal is to "just be married," that's fine! But we "just being married" is not the goal for a lot of people.   

Ephron's Epiphanies

So in my last post I said that the state of marriage is in flux. 

I recently read Nora Ephron's autobiographical novel, Heartburn. Her character in the book, Rachel, is heavily pregnant with her second child with her second husband. She is 38. She discovers that he is having an affair. (This was Ephron's experience.) The year is 1983.

In the book, most of the couples she knows have struggled with infidelity and divorce. The one lovely marriage is between her therapist and her husband. Everyone else is divorcing or divorced or remarrying. Curious, I googled the peak for divorce in the United States, and it was in 1980. 

Her therapist Vera wisely intones that Rachel subconsciously chose her husband knowing he was unreliable. Rachel pushes against that analysis: 

"You picked him," Vera said, "because his neuroses meshed perfectly with yours." I love Vera, I truly do, but doesn't anything happen to you that you don't intend? "You picked him because you knew it wouldn't work out." "You picked him because his neuroses meshed perfectly with yours." "You picked him because you knew he'd deprive you the way your mother or your father did." That's what they're always telling you, one way or another, but the truth is that no matter whom you pick, it doesn't work out; the truth is, no matter whom you pick, your neuroses mesh perfectly and horribly; the truth is that no matter whom you pick, he deprives you the way your mother or your father did. "You picked the one person on earth you could have problems with." "You picked the one person on earth you shouldn't be involved with." There's nothing brilliant about that—that's life. Every time you turn around you get involved with the one person on earth you shouldn't get involved with.  

And what's all this about picking, anyway? Who's picking? When I was in college, I had a list of what I wanted in a husband. A long list. I wanted a registered Democrat, a bridge player, a linguist with particular fluency in French, a subscriber to The New Republic, a tennis player. I wanted a man who wasn't bald, who wasn't fat, who wasn't covered with too much body hair. I wanted a man with long legs and laugh wrinkles around the eyes. Then I grew up and settled for a low-grade lunatic who kept hamsters.* At first I thought he was charming and eccentric. And then I didn't. Then I wanted to kill him.

*Her first husband.   

"Doesn't anything happen to you that you don't intend?"

Right here is the struggle of the single. That if one is single, one is being ridiculously selective; if one's relationship failed, it's because she subconsciously chose badly. The burden is all on her, the individual, even though relationships involve two people, not just one calling the shots.  

(Although, in the book her second husband cheated on her before proposing. Ladies, take notes: don't take him back.)  

The confusion over marriage is evident here. She thought she was being realistic and settled. That blew up in her face.   

I once heard a shiur where the rabbi was complaining that back in the old country, divorce was practically unheard of, as opposed to today. Yes, because back then, the stigma of divorce and the struggle to survive made it a near impossibility. It doesn't mean the marriages were any happier or fulfilling. 

Crisis or Change?

We were sitting around the table, and invariably the "shidduch crisis" came up. I launched into an unofficial TED talk, listing all the factors that created a struggling dating culture in the yeshivish world. 

"But what about the modern Orthodox shidduch crisis?" she asked. 

"There's a modern Orthodox shidduch crisis?" 

"Oh, very much so!" 

"I'm surprised by that. Everyone says that the reason why there's a yeshivish shidduch crisis is because singles can't socialize organically, but you're saying there is one anyway in a culture with organic socialization." 

I was telling over this conversation to Han, and he laughed. "There's a shidduch crisis all over! It's not just Jews!" Which is true. Open a newspaper. 

One of my objections to the term "shidduch crisis" is that we're being very simplistic about the problem. It's framed as strictly an issue about meeting someone and marrying them. Yet what about a divorce crisis? What about the unhappy marriage crisis? 

A childhood friend of mine married at the "ideal" age of 20. She's now divorced with children. How many of those years was she unhappy? Just because she married a decade before me doesn't mean she avoided a crisis. 

A reel popped into my feed about The Gilded Age, the HBO show that takes place in the early 1880s. The nouveau riche Mrs. Russel is determined to dominate the old money New York society that attempts to ostracize her. When an impoverished Duke comes to town, she plots to buy him to marry her daughter, Gladys. Teenage Gladys, however, is "in love" with someone else. 

Mrs. Russel tells her daughter that Billy is a "worthless non-entity" who will grow to resent Gladys. Gladys is not convinced, yet eventually is browbeaten into marrying the Duke, who is a rather nice guy despite the fact he starts a bidding war over who gets to be his Duchess.  

The woman who did the reel (don't remember her name) was saying that while the popular audience reaction is horror at Gladys's fate, considering the times . . .? Women had little to no rights. If a young woman married while young and stupid and in love, there was a strong possibility that man would turn out to be a disappointment. If he was, it wasn't like divorce was easily accessible. She could be trapped for life. So it was of the reel maker's opinion that by marrying the Duke, who could guarantee her status and influence and perhaps a chance of "love" in the future, Gladys would be making a smarter choice.  

This is a very different world than we know of today. 

People want more from marriage. Women don't need to be supported; they can support themself. Men don't need women to keep a functioning home. The state of marriage itself is in flux. 

Singles want more out of marriage. That can mean waiting longer for it.