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Article about all a single lady:
I can’t begin to count the number of conversations I’ve had in my adult life about my lack of enthusiasm to marry. Though I’ve often (perhaps too often, by my mother’s estimation) become entangled in multi-year relationships with men that eventually reached their expiration dates, the subject of getting wed has, since my early 20s, been a non-starter – both for my significant others while things were good and for my nosy relatives, regardless of my relationship status. For years, I have had to marshal arguments – emotional, intellectual, economic, sociological – to explain to everyone from those who truly love me to those who barely know me how I’ve managed to spend my life in proximity to the wedding industrial complex and the institutionalised relationships it spawns and somehow, through either logical thought or some missing piece of my girlish heart, thought that it was not for me.
āž¤ ā–ŗ šŸŒšŸ“ŗšŸ“±šŸ‘‰ Click here for all a single lady
Thankfully, with the publication of Rebecca Traister’s All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation, I can stop explaining and buy her book for all the busybodies in my happily unmarried life. Traister blends history, reportage and personal memoir to propose that the notion of marriage in American life has been and will be written by unmarried women. ā€œSingle female life is not prescription, but its opposite: liberation,†she writes in the introduction. I’ve seen, and experienced while dating, the loss of individual identity Traister describes by quoting the feminist Karen Durbin in 1976: ā€œThere are worse things than losing a man, all right: there’s losing yourself.†I’ve found myself having to care for emotional freeloaders, without ever bearing or adopting a child – which her subjects, young and old, note often comes with relationships and marriages. I’ve realised – and texted to girlfriends – that, as Gloria Steinem says in the book: ā€œWe are becoming the men we wanted to marry.†I noticed long ago that marriage felt seemingly designed to benefit men at the social, intellectual, financial, emotional and often physical expense of women. When women have access to education and their own jobs, when marriage is no guarantee of romantic stability and divorce is more expensive and emotionally destabilising than most other break-ups, and when nearly every one of the myriad legal benefits that stems from marriage can be neatly accomplished by another contract, it’s difficult to see how the state’s sanction of a relationship provides any benefit. It simply guarantees more grinding bureaucracy and a public accounting of failure if a relationship did not work out. As Traister writes, my thoughts are hardly unique: it was for these reasons and many more that heterosexual women young and old, rich and poor, white and those of colour didn’t just fail to marry or make bad choices not to marry, but looked at their lives and the institution and said no thanks, that’s not for me . It’s easy to notice that marriage doesn’t always work, given how high the divorce rate is in the US, but it’s harder to get past the conditioning that the problem is with those couples rather than the institution itself. And that’s where Traister’s book provides an important service: none of the women in it are pathologised. Their stories are not woven into a familiar tapestry of feminine failure.
Every single lady
Singleladies
All a single lady
Allthesingleladies
Article about all a single lady:
I can’t begin to count the number of conversations I’ve had in my adult life about my lack of enthusiasm to marry. Though I’ve often (perhaps too often, by my mother’s estimation) become entangled in multi-year relationships with men that eventually reached their expiration dates, the subject of getting wed has, since my early 20s, been a non-starter – both for my significant others while things were good and for my nosy relatives, regardless of my relationship status. For years, I have had to marshal arguments – emotional, intellectual, economic, sociological – to explain to everyone from those who truly love me to those who barely know me how I’ve managed to spend my life in proximity to the wedding industrial complex and the institutionalised relationships it spawns and somehow, through either logical thought or some missing piece of my girlish heart, thought that it was not for me.
āž¤ ā–ŗ šŸŒšŸ“ŗšŸ“±šŸ‘‰ Click here for all a single lady
Thankfully, with the publication of Rebecca Traister’s All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation, I can stop explaining and buy her book for all the busybodies in my happily unmarried life. Traister blends history, reportage and personal memoir to propose that the notion of marriage in American life has been and will be written by unmarried women. ā€œSingle female life is not prescription, but its opposite: liberation,†she writes in the introduction. I’ve seen, and experienced while dating, the loss of individual identity Traister describes by quoting the feminist Karen Durbin in 1976: ā€œThere are worse things than losing a man, all right: there’s losing yourself.†I’ve found myself having to care for emotional freeloaders, without ever bearing or adopting a child – which her subjects, young and old, note often comes with relationships and marriages. I’ve realised – and texted to girlfriends – that, as Gloria Steinem says in the book: ā€œWe are becoming the men we wanted to marry.†I noticed long ago that marriage felt seemingly designed to benefit men at the social, intellectual, financial, emotional and often physical expense of women. When women have access to education and their own jobs, when marriage is no guarantee of romantic stability and divorce is more expensive and emotionally destabilising than most other break-ups, and when nearly every one of the myriad legal benefits that stems from marriage can be neatly accomplished by another contract, it’s difficult to see how the state’s sanction of a relationship provides any benefit. It simply guarantees more grinding bureaucracy and a public accounting of failure if a relationship did not work out. As Traister writes, my thoughts are hardly unique: it was for these reasons and many more that heterosexual women young and old, rich and poor, white and those of colour didn’t just fail to marry or make bad choices not to marry, but looked at their lives and the institution and said no thanks, that’s not for me . It’s easy to notice that marriage doesn’t always work, given how high the divorce rate is in the US, but it’s harder to get past the conditioning that the problem is with those couples rather than the institution itself. And that’s where Traister’s book provides an important service: none of the women in it are pathologised. Their stories are not woven into a familiar tapestry of feminine failure.
Every single lady
Singleladies
All a single lady
Allthesingleladies
