What Does Marriage Ask Us to Give Up? By Kaitlyn Greenidge
(Link): What Does Marriage Ask Us to Give Up? By Kaitlyn Greenidge
Excerpts:
January 4, 2022
[The author discusses how she didn’t get married until around her late 30s, but then she got divorced, and she lives in a noisy home with many family members]
…What has not materialized is the intense loneliness that people warned me would come with divorce.
…It’s a different world from the one my parents inhabited when they divorced, one in which many people treated their separation as if it were an infectious disease and shunned us for a number of years.
…Marriage, of course, can be all those things to many people, but my own brought something different, which has led to this desire to be alone again.
There is a lot of hand-wringing currently about the decline of marriage in America. No matter that divorce rates have also gone down, and that when people are marrying, it is at later ages.
Our culture may have changed to allow other ways for people to chart their lives, but whole industries and institutions — banking, real estate, health care, insurance, advertising and most important, taxation — revolve around assumptions of marriage as the norm.
Without that base assumption, the logic of many of those transactions is thrown out.
… I had never before read such a precise description of what marriage asks some people to give up.
Those who panic over the rise in the number of single Americans do not see that this statistic includes lives of hard-won independence — lives that still intersect with a community, with a home, with a belief in something wider than oneself.
The people clinging to old narratives around singledom and marriage can’t yet see these lives for what they are because, as Ms. di Prima [poet and author] puts it, they are not “an objectively valuable commodity.” Their meaning is “a currency that cannot cross borders.”
Related:
(Link): Society Has It Wrong: Married People Shouldn’t Get Benefits That Single People do Not by V. Larson
(Link): Unmarried and Childless Women Are the Happiest, Happiness Expert Claims
(Link): Nearly 4 in 10 American Adults Live Without Spouse or Partner As Single Population Grows: Pew
(Link): Fewer Americans See Their Romantic Partners As a Source of Life’s Meaning
(Link): Do You Need a Partner to Have a Happy Life? by D. LaBier
(Link): Fewer Americans Think Marriage is Needed To Create Strong Families, New Poll Suggest
(Link): Jesus Christ Removed the Stigma, Shame From Being Single and Childless – by David Instone Brewer
(Link): Why We Thought Marriage Made Us Healthier, and Why We Were Wrong by Bella DePaulo
(Link): Marriage & Motherhood Are No Longer The Milestones Of Adulthood. Now What? by J. Filipovic
(Link): I Married Young. I Was Widowed Young. I Never Want A Long-Term Partner Again by R. Woolf
(Link): Adult Singles Do Not Need A Marital Partner to Be Whole or Complete
(Link): Single Adult Christian Pressured Into Marriage by Her Church – And Regrets It
(Link): Getting Married Is Not an Accomplishment by N. Brooke
(Link): The Nuclear Family Was A Mistake – by David Brooks – and Related Links
(Link): My Marriage Broke Down Around Age 30 — And So Did Most of My Friends’ Relationships by E. Woods
(Link): The single life: Some people never find the love of their lives. And live to tell about it.
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