Woman Hollerin': Marriage more likely than terrorism after all

Twenty years ago my husband anonymously sent the news that white, college-educated, single women of 35 were more likely to be attacked by a terrorist than to get married to one of my grad-school friends who was white, college-educated, single and 25.

He thought this was funny.

I reported to him her distress about the anonymous harassment that had come by campus mail. He ‘fessed up and apologized.

She explained to him that being condemned to a lonely life by a person who was afraid to reveal his identity was far from humorous. He never truly understood her fear, but he realized that he had hurt her deeply and did all that he could to make amends. Some years later, he even helped her learn to drive, riding with her for hours after she bought her first car. (She was the daughter of a big city who maintained a drivers’ license but hadn’t used the privilege much.)

Last week, Newsweek magazine recanted the prediction. Demographic research now shows that the vast majority of women born in the early 1960s will, in fact, marry, just not in the same patterns as our foremothers and aunts. One study suggests that 97 percent of us will marry, as will most people of any generation currently living in the United States who really want to.

The new research also shows that educated, professional women aren’t forced to choose between professional and personal success. Jessica Yellin used her interview with Liz Tuccillo, one of the authors of He’s Just Not That Into You, for a New York Times Week in Review piece (Single, Female an Desperate No More) to reveal just how deeply some professional women believed that society would be unwilling to provide its traditional comforts to them. According to the Times reporter, Tuccillo took a few moments to absorb the new findings before saying, “I had no idea how much that old statistic was living in me until you gave me the new one.”

Although my husband died some years ago, the “wisdom” he passed on to my grad-school friend outlived him in my unconscious. Of course, having married once already, I am already part of the 97 percent of my age cohort who will make it down the aisle.

Having married for the first time at 24, I actually was one of the earliest in my age group to tie the knot (in spite of my grandmother, aunts and cousins who thought I was a late bloomer because I finished college before taking a mate). Although the latest Newsweek articles don’t deal with marriages that end in widowhood, the current studies do find that early marriages end in divorce more often than the marriages people enter into later in life.

Before I took up life in small-town Texas, I didn’t think much about my prospects for (re)marriage. In fact, I believed that I had educated myself out of love and didn’t much worry about it. I was leading a rewarding life and besides, experience had taught me that banking on independence was a smarter move than banking on a man. I got a rash the day I married, and look how it all turned out anyway.

In cities, no one asked me why I wasn’t married, but in Seguin, I found myself answering that question frequently and hearing well meaning people say it was great to have me around and now we just had to find me a great guy. One of my colleagues told me that my acceptance of the idea that educated women were unlikely to find mates amounted to making myself into a victim.

I couldn’t understand why it bothered him so much that I was comfortable being single. I guess he couldn’t believe that I was, truly, comfortable being single (he had contributed a number of marriages to the statistical profile of Baby Boomers).

The single life appeals to me much more than the frantic search for a partner that I have watched in some single people I know. Dancing, writing, taking pictures, traveling and any of the other things I do with my time interest me far more than joining in the panic that leads some people to use the Internet to dig up a new prospect every week.

Maybe the women who have devoted their lives to the search will be able to relax in light of the new studies that show Americans have become far more flexible in their marital behavior. Older women marry younger men. Men marry women who are as accomplished as they are or even more.

Given all that I think about myself and the circumstances of my own life, I’m amazed how different the world feels to me now that I know Newsweek was wrong.