I had lunch today with some friends in Dallas. They are young; one woman is nearly 30 and the other is in her mid-twenties. They are friends I met at my old job, and it was nice to catch up with them.
I like talking with these women because they are smart, educated, and completely different from me. One is married and the other has a steady boyfriend of three years. They are interesting and seem to enjoy me. :)
Today, though, I couldn't get out of my head the silliness at Pandagon the last couple of days with shrewish posts on "marriage not being the default for women."
While talking with my friends, it was interesting to note the differences in their lives versus mine. Married people with kids spend a lot of their time caring for said family members and, in my case, I also care for my elderly father. My friends have no children and their parents are probably not much older than I am now.
One confessed she has no desire to have children and joked that it was because of her siblings. I told her that she was smart not to have them if she didn't want them. What I found sad was that she wouldn't want them.
Children aren't always easy to deal with, I will admit. Family, in general, can be stressful and demanding. But I never envisioned life without them, and that there are people walking around who have no desire whatsoever to have a spouse, children, and other relatives around is really quite foreign to me.
On the drive back, I was thinking about my friends and how different their lives and expectations are when I heard Rush Limbaugh discussing this story from the New York Times which states that 51% of women are now living without a spouse. What struck me most was how many of the women had been in long term (30 or more years) marriages that ended after the children were gone.
They say there's a transition period (we can't call it an "empty nest" anymore) in marriage after the children leave and the couple must refocus their time and energy on each other instead of the kids. Evidently, the strain from that helped propel so many of the women in the story to seek divorce.
I couldn't imagine saying things like this:
Carol Crenshaw, 57, of Roswell, Ga., was divorced in 2005 after 33 years and says she is in no hurry to marry again.
"I’m in a place in my life where I’m comfortable," said Ms. Crenshaw, who has two grown sons. "I can do what I want, when I want, with whom I want. I was a wife and a mother. I don’t feel like I need to do that again."
I thought that sharing one's life with another person was the most beautiful thing there is. But the stories of why women were remaining single continued.
Elissa B. Terris, 59, of Marietta, Ga., divorced in 2005 after being married for 34 years and raising a daughter, who is now an adult.
"A gentleman asked me to marry him and I said no," she recalled. "I told him, ‘I’m just beginning to fly again, I’m just beginning to be me. Don’t take that away.’"
"Marriage kind of aged me because there weren’t options," Ms. Terris said. "There was only one way to go. Now I have choices. One night I slept on the other side of the bed, and I thought, I like this side."
I guess she never could have asked her spouse to switch sides.
UPDATE: For a different take on the NYT article, check out PajamasMedia.
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