Within hours of meeting my now-husband, I told him I would never get married. It wasn’t part of a serious conversation, but an aside in a getting-to-know-you activity we played as a group of journalists on a reporting trip in Malawi: name a song that influenced you, and explain why. I said Billy Idol’s “White Wedding” – it was the first music video I ever watched, sneaking in a little MTV at a neighbor’s house, and it so terrified me that, I said jokingly, I was put off marriage forever.
The truth is that it wasn’t the music video but my own cynicism, bolstered by feminist theory, that put me squarely in the marriage-free camp throughout my 20s. It’s not that I thought marriage was a universally bad institution; to the contrary, I wrote often about how feminism was making it a better one. But it was the seeming compulsoriness of it, the way in which I watched couples around me slide into it as a marker of responsible adulthood, that turned me off.
There was, it seemed to me, still a pervasive sell-by marital age that dogged even the most progressive women in the most liberal cities. In more conservative pockets of the United States, getting married at 22 might still be in the norm, but in New York, where I lived for nearly the entirety of my young adulthood, we prided ourselves in not adhering to the social convention that women should spend their 20s husband-hunting, instead choosing to date a variety of men, foster female friendships, travel widely, and focus on our careers. At least in my circle of largely college-educated, feminist-minded friends, women who married before 30 were something akin to child brides, strange and somewhat pitiable curiosities – how, we wondered somewhat condescendingly, could a 25-year-old even fully know who she was, let alone know who she wanted to attach herself to? So it wasn’t as if there was pressure to get married or some social convention I was bucking.
But there was a sense that, by your early 30s, it was time to make a move, which meant spending your late 20s evaluating men in terms of their marriageability. This wasn’t a bad lens to bring to a relationship – it more or less meant asking whether the guy was fundamentally kind and self-sufficient, whether he acted as an equal partner, and whether you had similar goals for your lives. I watched women a few years older than me settle down with boyfriends they loved but with whom there seemed little spark or passion; their partnership seemed to be primarily a catalyst to security and the kind of nuclear family arrangement they ultimately desired. They choose good men, if not great love affairs. Often, a kid came a year or so after the wedding.
These marriages also scared me.
Like a lot of other ambitious middle-class girls, I grew up a people-pleaser, which meant making sensible decisions: Get As in school, go to college, get a law degree, work at a big firm to pay back my loans. In the second half of my 20s, though, physically ill from stress and deeply unsatisfied, I decided the well-hewn path I was on wasn’t leading me anywhere I wanted to be. I quit practicing law and started writing, cobbling together barely enough from freelancing to continue paying down my nearly quarter-million dollars in student loan debt and my rent in a Brooklyn studio.
It was a thoroughly irresponsible career choice, flinging me head-on into the anxiety of financial uncertainty and job instability, as I pursued an ill-defined professional life that meant forging my own way and more or less just saying yes to whatever sounded interesting (this was six years ago; there weren’t a lot of models for feminist bloggers turned columnists-slash-international women’s rights reporters).
It was also one of the best decisions I ever made. And once I broke that chain of responsible if lackluster life-decision-making, I felt even freer to bring that ethos to my romantic life.
I had long been lukewarm on marriage, largely for feminist reasons. I knew at the very least I wouldn’t marry a man when same-sex marriage remained illegal in most of the United States, and I was skeptical of whether heterosexual marriage could ever be fully egalitarian. Marriage is, after all, an institution that has for almost the entirety of its history been about male ownership of and authority over women, wherein a woman cedes her identity and folds herself into a man. By the time I was born, that had changed, at least legally – married women could own property and have their own bank accounts. But socially, that folding-in remained depressingly standard, symbolized most jarringly by the overwhelming majority of married women taking their husband’s names. One’s name is the marker of one’s identity – I was disturbed to see so many women in my cohort quite literally erasing their own identities to meld with his.
I also perceived social and professional costs to marriage. I saw how employers and colleagues sometimes looked skeptically at women who were engaged, expecting that they would get pregnant and either slow down or drop out of the workforce. I saw that too often, those fears came to fruition. And sure, women typically dropped out or scaled back because of inhospitable workplaces and a domestic policy landscape that doesn’t support mothers, but it was nonetheless reality: Marriage, and certainly children, often meant a step back career-wise. This seemed to be made worse by marriages in which a once-equal partner seemed to shirk his parental duties; I watched equally ambitious newlyweds become starkly imbalanced parents, as dad’s career rose exponentially, and mom’s stagnated as she took on the bulk of childcare responsibilities (and this isn’t just my perception; it’s backed up by research). Working at a law firm, I noticed that the older male attorneys who came out for after-work drinks were both married and single, fathers and not; the women who came out after work, though, were almost to a one unmarried and not parents; I almost never saw a female attorney who was also a mom hanging out socially after work, and even the married women seemed to shy away from going out.
It seemed that for men, marriage was just one thing they could do and expect their lives to remain more or less the same. For women, it was a move not so much backward as inward – after getting married, and especially after having kids, a woman’s universe seemed to center on her home and family. I liked my outward-looking life, and the thought of getting married, buying a house, and raising kids – even cool New York kids in a Brooklyn brownstone.
So in my mid-20s, I took marriage off the list entirely. If I didn’t have the desire for the nuclear family and domesticity that seemed to accompany it, why should I get married? Removing marriage as an option also made dating a whole lot more fun: I could date thoroughly unsuitable men for as long as it was enjoyable without trying to mold them into "marriage material," as if convincing an attractive and engaging but otherwise pretty deficient man to commit to you was some sort of personal victory, a bizarre pattern I increasingly observed around me. It also gave me permission to end relationships with men who were “marriage material” but with whom I felt something was missing. I dated a lot of these men, who were kind and smart and would make great husbands, and I was inevitably struck by a heap of self-loathing for wanting to leave. It would have been one thing if I wanted to go because they were lacking in some way, but it was always for a reason that was decidedly not their fault: I just didn’t feel the intense, glowing thing I wanted to feel. This thing is thoroughly romanticized, but in practice, women who pursue it at the expense of the feelings and desires of good men are treated like selfish creatures who fail to live up to their end of the romantic bargain, which promises men that if they’re nice to women, they deserve the reward of her unquestioning affection. The idea that I wouldn’t marry anyone provided me a convenient out – I was never a party to that bad deal in the first place.
You already know how this story ends: I got married two weeks ago (and contrary to other feminist narratives, we did it for love, not health insurance). Funnily enough, it was my no-marriage rule that eventually got me involved with the man I married. We met on a journalism junket in southern Africa, stayed friends for the next year or so, and reconnected when he was living in Belfast and visited New York. Spending time with him felt unlike anything I had ever experienced – life was brighter, better with him in the room – and since I had no expectations or anxieties about the relationship going to a particular place, it was easy enough to put responsibility and pragmatism aside and follow that initial attraction where it led: to weekends in Beirut and drives along the coast of Northern Ireland, to the decision, just a few months into dating, to move to Nairobi, Kenya, together. It sounded like an adventure, I told skeptical friends. And worst-case scenario, I hate living in Nairobi or we break up, and I buy a plane ticket home. I was not making a choice that couldn’t be undone.
It was that last part that eventually lost its appeal. The relationship was vibrant and exciting, but we were also improbably aligned on our values and our hopes for unconventional lives; he was all the things I never imagined I would find. With someone I could finally see myself being happy with forever, I ultimately found myself wanting the depth and gravity that comes with profound dedication. Not that that came easily. After a little less than a year of dating, while we were eating sushi in Uganda on Valentine’s Day in the midst of that country’s presidential elections, Ty, my now-husband who had also previously declared himself a never-wedder (mostly to avoid the pressure of marital expectations), brought up marriage – that maybe this relationship was different, that maybe it was something we should think about. For months, we thought and we talked (and I talked and talked with friends and trusted confidantes) about whether marriage made sense for us; about whether we could get married and have a relationship that reflected our values as individuals; about what marriage even meant to both of us, and why we would want to do it, if we did decide to do it. I didn’t doubt that he was the person I wanted to be with for the rest of my life, and making that kind of long-term commitment didn’t scare me. Where I hedged was marriage as an institution, with its history of sexism, with the heap of outside expectations that seem to come down on you as soon as you’re someone’s wife.
Eventually, it came down to the question of family, and of wanting social validation for the relationship, within the bounds of the admittedly paltry forms of recognition our culture offers. It’s silly that marriage is the clearest path to that validation, but in the United States, it is – my relationship with Ty felt different and more important than previous ones, and it felt ridiculous to keep him in the same “boyfriend” category as the guy I dated at 16. Neither of us sees marriage as an achievement, but instead as a mechanism we’ve chosen to bind us closer. Marriage makes you family, which was especially important to us, since neither of us particularly want children; and family means sticking together through the tough spots, and coming out with a love that is deeper and stronger for it. That felt like a big, difficult, fascinating experiment – a challenge and an adventure. I felt lucky, having entered the relationship open primarily to him as a person, rather than evaluating him as a potential husband, to feel that I saw him with a clarity that might have been absent had I been trying to slot him into a preconceived role. By the time we decided to get married, I didn’t feel like I needed him to complete me or to offer some tangible thing I couldn’t secure myself, but simply that my life was at its best when we were each other’s companions, champions, and great loves.
For the record, I still think marriage is a sexist institution. But I voluntarily sign on to all kinds of silly, sexist behaviors every day, from makeup to high heels, because I would rather live a life that brings me pleasure, however imperfect, than one that is fully in line with strict feminist ideals (I also think there’s something positive, if not always feminist, about women choosing to honor their desires ). I have no doubt that marriage will test me personally and politically in ways that it simply won’t test my husband – starting with the wedding cards addressed to “Mr. and Mrs. McCormick.”
But the truth, also, is that I am overwhelmingly happy to be married to him, and our wedding day was one of the most fun and joyful days I’ve ever had – in part, I suspect, because I had no grand vision and no expectation that it be The Best Day Ever.
I’m a feminist writer; it probably comes as no surprise that I also have a thing for feminist poets. Mary Oliver remains one of my favorites, and a few years ago, right around the time I met Ty, I read and bookmarked one of her poems, called “Not Anyone Who Says”:
Not anyone who says, “I’m going to be
careful and smart in matters of love,”
who says, “I’m going to choose slowly,”
but only those lovers who didn’t choose at all
but were, as it were, chosen by something invisible and powerful and uncontrollable
and beautiful and possibly even
unsuitable —
only those know what I’m talking about
in this talking about love.
We read it at our wedding.
Jill Filipovic is the author of The H-Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness.Follow her on Twitter.
Photos provided by Gary He.
Jill Filipovic is a contributing writer for cosmopolitan.com. She is the author of OK Boomer, Let's Talk: How My Generation Got Left Behind and The H-Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness. A weekly CNN columnist and a contributing writer for the New York Times, she is also a lawyer.
