Bachelor Girl

until twenty-six. “I thought through my options and waited…. No one was pushing me to do it. Well, perhaps a little, because that’s what society expects…. But what I wanted was someone in my life to go out with, permanently, and what is wrong with that? Someone to take with you out into life? Just think about what life is these days. Why wouldn’t you want a partner?… Having your friends goes only so far.”

More than one million young couples between the ages of twenty-two and twenty-five, last year agreed.

“There’s just something so very right about confronting the world and your job and the hostility of everything, knowing that there’s someone who is legally and emotionally attached to you,” says Mrs. Caitlin Cardozo, the only young subject who did not wish to have her name changed. “I’m proud of what I’ve achieved in my personal life,” she says. Although she admits that there is “a tiny bit of a stigma connected to marrying at a young age,” she thinks “the people who object or have a problem with this are people in their thirties who have put a lot of emphasis on career, and now don’t know what to think or do about marriage.” She speculates, “Maybe someone like me is threatening to them. Maybe I make them concerned that their own way of doing things, all that cool late-night-at-the-office life, was not very well thought out.”

This view is most wonderfully captured in a 1997 piece in New York magazine about young wealthy girls racing around to weddings as if it were 1952. The piece begins on Park Avenue and features young college graduates, onetime private-school cliques, in Vera Wang’s and Bergdorf’s, looking impatient with the women crouched on the floor fixing the hems of their gowns. One young woman, twenty-one, explains, and I paraphrase, We’re city-bred girls and we’ve had our share of wild times and drugs and fooling around. Getting married is a way to move beyond that phase in life and not to get stuck, in another one, alone.

And as author Sara Bernard assesses things, “The circle of women who seem to be skipping their Mary Tyler Moore Murphy bed phase… is bigger than just the waspy-preppy circuit.” Many others out there had upsetting personal histories that read like that of Rose quoted above, the “untraditional… range of experiences starting… [with] your parents separating.” Many want to marry early or whenever it’s right and, like Mrs. Caitlin Cardozo, believe that it is only older Others who have problems with this scenario.

But now and then someone acknowledges the unique tensions and ambiguities of younger wifehood, many of these conflicts directly related to youth—to the inescapable feeling that a twenty-one-year-old wife has in some sense skipped out on a vital part of her young life. These tensions seem to simmer and sometimes explode when doing housework. As one twenty-four-year-old puts it, “Others are having TGIF-fucking Friday and I’m having to vacuum—rugs and the floors and tiles—because, look, I’m not fucking mopping, thank you, and his parents are coming over in twenty minutes and we both work.”

Vacuuming. Dishes. Laundry. Many younger married women say it seems to be more difficult to do housework as a married person than as a single. “I’ll be vacuuming or changing the beds or the sheets and I’ll get this creeped-out feeling,” says “Jennifer,” twenty-three. “When I was doing those things for myself, I did them because I wanted to, not because I had to—it felt like part of the fun of living on your own, out of your mother’s house. Now there is a sense of ‘I have to do this,’ like there’s something instinctual in my doing this, and I don’t like it. Even if my husband helps, I don’t feel comfortable with it.”

An acquaintance of hers, “Veronica or Betty,” agrees. “I have this strange antipathy to housework, which seems to have to do with this 1950s notion of what is a wife…. I’m really very surprised by this, but it’s almost like I have this Stepford Wives fear of deep cleaning. That’s the true reason I got a maid to help. It wasn’t because I was too busy. I was wondering, What am I doing?”

Part of this discomfort is the natural adjustment to plain life after weddings that are only several steps removed from the grandiosity of Cher in Las Vegas.[15] And part of it is a genuine ambivalence about so huge a commitment coming so soon after another major life event—graduation—and with very little time off between.

But ultimately housework is a small and manageable part of the bargain.

There is only one word that comes up again and again during conversations with baby brides, and it is not dishes or vacuuming; it is safe. Safe is a shorthand way of saying, “Go out into the world two by two.” And it’s the desire to consecrate and guarantee this safety that lies at the heart of monster weddings. The bigger and more complicated the official ceremony, the more tangibly serious and safe the marriage.

Go into any Barnes & Noble, find the display coffee-table wedding books, and take a look at how many pages are stained with coffee and/or greasy pastries. Last year, based on research at three separate branches and two independent stores, I determined that a special significance had been attached to page 127 of the original Martha Stewart wedding book. Always folded back and/or heavily smeared, the double spread shows a bride, all complex white angles, rushing across a busy Tribeca street holding calla lilies. In ways, it’s just a typical fashion shot—fabulous dress stands out on dingy street. But this picture tells another story. At the moment of the photo, the single woman is outside, alone, dodging trucks on a filthy street. But up ahead is the restaurant—a chic sanctuary, where she will be “the star of her own wedding,” to quote 1960s author Rebecca Greer. She will also be safe. If she doesn’t scurry off to that wedding, however, if she waits, whether intentionally or because her life moves in other directions, she may confront obstacles beyond a lack of desirable partners. No longer scared and unsafe, she may develop a chronic marital ambivalence.

In a 1999 Esquire piece, “The Independent Woman and Other Lies,” Katie Roiphe wrote about young independent women attempting to reconcile their longing for a traditional man and a free life of their own. She envisioned this male savior as “the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit,” or any suit, a gentleman lawyer who’d instinctively pay for her drinks and bring flowers to the brownstone he’d bought for her, where she was at work on her novel and, alternately, taking bubble baths. It’s a fantasy that anyone could pick up and play around with. But Roiphe herself, a published author and Ph.D., already had a great apartment and a life that allowed her to run around New York City at all hours and come home when she felt like it. And, as she thought about it, it was actually difficult to imagine sharing the space, and the life, with someone else. She realized that she had been indoctrinated into the Cult of Independence (my phrase). “It may be one of the bad jokes history plays on us,” she wrote, “…the independence my mother’s generation wanted so much for their daughters was something we could not entirely appreciate or want. It was like a birthday present from a distant relative—wrong size, wrong color, wrong style.” And the “dark and unsettling truth” was that the gift could not be returned. The situation would forever be difficult to reconcile: the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit versus Her.

THE SPINSTER AS BEMUSED SLACKER

The premiere single archetype of the new century is someone who, like Roiphe, probably assumed in college she’d get married, then had a serious career, then had relationships, then… well, it gets hard to say, exactly, in a day-to-day recounting, but one can say life seemed to get very busy. Many boyfriends. Many major projects. Many drinks and events and then, oh, well, you know, it gets to be Christmas and, now, oh, God, not again, she’s sort of rambling… but, hey, she’s a cleverly scripted fictional single who, an amalgam of many real thirtyish never-weds, stands as the latest in singular icons.

There are two primary exemplars of this highly competent but still dithering archetype: Ally McBeal (of David Kelley and former Fox-TV fame) and Bridget Jones (of British journalist Helen Fielding/Renee Zellweger fame). To sketch them, let’s borrow icons from the 1970s, first decade of the modern single working woman. Specifically, imagine cross-pollinating the hyper TV executive Faye Dunaway played in Network with Woody Allen’s Annie Hall.

That’s just a cartoonish idea. What makes Ally and Bridget special types, the essential single icons of the moment, is their ability to find the humor—corny as it sounds, the “humanity”—in some fairly unbearable social situations. Deadpan and highly self-aware, they can laugh at themselves without becoming self-deprecating and/or snide. They can be sad, sob at their desks, and it’s never pathetic because they get over it and go back to work. Emotional states that women are usually punished for—rage, pathos, lust—are here just naturally occurring parts of the character and, by extension, parts of life.

The recently departed Ally McBeal was not terribly appealing at first, with her micromini suits, improbable Gumby body, and the supposed Harvard law education we never actually saw in evidence. But she grew on you. She