And I think many married people have private regrets. Some get divorced and some stay in unhappy marriages. Many wonder what would have happened if they’d stayed with an earlier love or just stayed single or hadn’t compromised their dreams to live with their spouse.
How about many people – whether single or married – have regrets.
Also I do think the column was offensive. And it’s offensive to me that you are dismissing others reactions to it by stating “Agreed, the column wasn’t offensive” without the “to me” at the end. It was a big fat glaring example of white male patriarchy to me. Also very gross to my LGBTQ Gen Z kids. (We discussed it.)
I agree. I know many married women (and some divorced) who regret dialing back their career ambition (just to take one example) at some point after having kids…me included. Was it better for the kids that I could be around more? Who knows? Was it the greatest family utility (we talk that way in my house lol) that I was around more? Yes. Was it good for me? 100% the wrong decision.
@Mwfan1921 - same here. And I am still happily married. It’s a worse situation for the women I know who gave up careers and ended up divorced after several decades of marriage. Or stayed in a bad marriage for financial reasons.
I think marriage is a great. At the same time, I don’t think there is anything wrong with being single. You don’t have to get married. Marriage is NOT a requirement for a happy life. It becomes a big problem when we act like marriage is the be all and the end all. Being married doesn’t make you better then others. And we don’t want people to get married just because they feel like they have to…
It’s never a good idea to make things the be all and the end all.
The Brooks piece on the importance of marriage to happiness is really nothing new. Sure, a relationship doesn’t necessarily need to be called marriage, and it doesn’t apply to everyone (for many reasons), but survival of the species depends on these relationships, so it is quite natural for people to pursue them, and to be excited for the relationship prospects of others. Being interested in the relationships of others, and encouraging such relationships, is rooted in evolution, so the interest is never going to change, nor should it.
Survival of the species depends on procreation. Marriage is a social and religious construct. The species can survive without marriage. Just wanted to point that out.
I am a happy grandmother to a 13 yr old and one on the way. We have a large extended family with many little ones under 4. BUT, if my daughters had not wanted to have children, I would have kept my feelings to myself. On the other side of the coin, I have a friend who constantly use to tell her kids, how they could do so much more if they didn’t have kids. I always thought her kids had to wonder if they were wanted. So far, one grandchild for her but I know she thought the child hurt her daughter’s career. It just makes me sad because the vibe is noticeable.
I wasn’t dismissing others’ reactions, just expressing my own. The “agreed” suggests a personal opinion — I didn’t flatly state “the column wasn’t offensive” because clearly some took offense, and were well within their rights to do so. I just agreed with another poster, personally, that it wasn’t offensive.
You raise a good point about regret not being the sole province of the single, and I didn’t mean to imply that it was. I was just sharing an anecdote. There are many anecdotes I could share about terrible marriages, many about happy single mothers, many about happy people who are entirely unattached. Overall, I think a respectful committed relationship of some sort is a good thing to strive for, and I think society benefits from such relationships and should encourage them through policy. These need not be traditional, patriarchal or heteronormative, of course. It is offensive (to me) that marriage equality had to be such a protracted fight and rested precariously on one swing justice’s view. I have a high-school classmate who’s part of a long-term polycule, and while I think binary relationships tend to have a better chance of stability, I warmly wish her and them the very best as long as she and they are happy with one another. Love, as they say, is love, in my personal opinion, and we should have more of it.
Single motherhood may be a good choice for some, but it is often not. Poverty, depression, and feeling overwhelmed are sadly too common.
Women, in general, are struggling. 1 out of 4 on an antidepressant, 60% rise in suicide, etc. It is ok for a woman to need a man, and for her to express that to people without being guilted into feeling that she doesn’t need a man. Evolution will steamroll people that fight it.
Bro! This is…um, wow. I’m kind of at a loss for words.
Before, you were talking about the survival of the species depending on marriage and similar relationships
(and that is Just. Not. True. At. All.)
Where did all this about “single motherhood” or “a woman needing a man” (yeeeech, what decade are you from??) come from?
I said that plenty of single parents will tell you that nobody needs to be married for the species to continue. That means single DADs too. They are parents. Likewise marriage does not have to be only between heterosexual couples now. We have a law that lets gay people get married, too, and they can even have kids! Shocking, I know.
There are almost 11 million single parent families in the US. This is not counting people who divorced and remarried and are step parents. There are 37.9 single person households in the US. That is almost 30% of US households. This is up from 13% of households in the 1960s so contrary to your assertion that things are
pretty sure they already have.
And 34% of people ages 15 and over have never been married - about 1/3 of the adult population. In 2021 50.4% adults over 18 lived with a spouse and 8% with an unmarried partner, 41.6% lived with neither. (All those people not living with a spouse or romantic partner are not sad and lonely and needing a man around, btw.)
(BTW, suicide rates are far, far higher in men than women.)
No one is saying that marriage is bad. I would love for my kids to get married if they want to, but I certainly would not feel sad if they don’t want to get married and don’t (whether they are in a relationship or not), or if they want to stay single and do.
I just want them to be happy.
If they want to be single but feel trapped in a relationship I would be sad, and if they want to be in a relationship but can’t find the right person I would also feel sad for them.
I just want them to be happy however they want to be happy and hopefully do some good in the world. I definitely do not need them to get married or have kids for me to be happy.
I want them pursue their dreams and I want them to surround themselves with people that lift them up whether that is in a romantic relationship, friendship, or our family.
My mother used to tell my brother and me not to have kids- ‘you waste your young life on them and then they grow up and leave you’. It was more about her than about my advancement. I had 2 kids- brother had none because his young wife died of cancer. My mother (first generation) was raised in an old school family culture. I could go on- but my father (also first generation but very different culture) was the one that encouraged my education and career as well as my kids careers.
I don’t know if that’s the general rule, but those who I know who come from home were they see loving relationships between their parents want to have the same for themselves.
Wanting or being open to the idea of marriage is different than needing it to be happy. You can be a product of the world’s happiest family yet lead a perfectly wonderful life if you don’t find a life partner and/or have children.
I do hope you realize that many – I would venture to guess most – women who are single parents are not in that position because they are “too ashamed to admit they need a man”. It is quite often a reluctant choice. The single women parents I’ve known over the years are so because the men, who they would very much like to have in their lives, are either unwilling or unable to be adequate partners and co-parents.
These include the men who, at the first sign of an unplanned or inconvenient pregnancy pull a vanishing act, those who turn out to be alcoholics who can’t hold a job and can’t or won’t get treatment, the serial philanderers, and the ones who interpret “stay-at-home-mom” to mean she will be solely responsible for 100% of the childcare and household duties, 24 hours a day (all actual examples from women I know). These women decided that they were, for all practical purposes, single parents already, and so freed themselves for the future possibility of meeting a man who would actually be a responsible partner, father, and role model for their children.
Again, speaking from my own experiences, the only women I’ve ever met who are adamant that they do not want a man happen to be lesbians.