Why Aren't You Married?

Obviously, these people are not deviants.

 

This is one of the many stupefying comments we spinstas hear with regularity about our lifestyles.  The question nearly always implies that we have done something “wrong” which has caused us to not be married.  (Apparently marriage is the result of doing things “right.”)  The implication is that marriage is the standard and any deviation from it must involve deviance and/or deviants. Somehow, we spinstas are expected to have a pat explanation for our single state.

After years and years of hearing this question and trying to find an answer that would make sense to the questioner without going into a big essay on the socio-cultural and personal influences on my marital status, I think I have finally generated a good answer to this question:

Why are you married? 

Really, I am interested.  What was the series of events that led to your being a married person?  Because the answer to why I am not married is simply that that very series of events that led to marriage for you didn’t happen to me.  I did not meet someone in kindergarten who has loved me ever since we were 5. (I don’t actually know anyone from kindergarten since we moved when I was in second grade.)

I didn’t meet anyone in high school or college either. On the latter point, I would like to state that there are many, many, many people with whom I went to a woman-centered/centered-woman’s (tm) college who did meet someone to marry.  They even have an alumni group just for the women who married men from the guys’ college down the road. So for those who claim I should have expected spinsta-hood since I went to a women’s college, I would like to point out that the vast majority of my classmates have MRS degrees.

I haven’t met anyone at work to marry either.  Or at any of the activities, classes and clubs I have participated in.  No friends or relatives have set me up with someone they think would be a good partner for me.  (Which is how my parents met) I have been to numerous weddings and funerals too.  Nothing. No one.

Et tu Padre?

I even know of a couple who met when he was the rector of a seminary and she was a nun who worked there.  You would hardly expect a seminary to be the place for people to find their life partner, would you?  Especially with that emphasis on celibacy that is so big there.

I have friends in wonderful partnerships and marriages that came after they accepted that they are gay.   It took them a while to get there—dating and even marrying people of a sex they weren’t particularly attracted to.  That didn’t happen to me either. Women don’t smell good to me the way men do.

It wasn’t for lack of trying either. Just how much effort did you put into finding someone?  Or were you just living your life and there they were?  For me, there was no one at singles groups and no one on line.  eHarmony promised someone for everyone, but they had no one for me. When I complained, they told me to change some of my answers—specifically the ones about whether I wanted children and what my religious beliefs are.

This is a crepe pan. See? No lid. Not even possible.

That didn’t make sense to me considering how important those two particular issues are to me and in most relationships.  It was then that I formulated the idea that while there may be a lid for every pot, some of us are crepe pans.  There are no lids for crepe pans.

For a while, I was explaining my spinstahood that way: I am a crepe pan. 

I sometimes like to imagine that the grandfather of a man I might have married died during WW I and never had kids—who never had the grandkid who would have been my husband.  My spinstahood began some time in the late 19-teens on Flanders fields.

Flanders Field where poppies grow, but not my husband's grandfathers.

But the truth is, I am a spinsta because that series of events that led to your being a married person did not happen in my life.  I guarantee you that is the very reason every other unmarried person is unmarried as well. So you can stop asking.  Now you know.

Everyone loves a love story.  It's hard to make non-love a story. Much less a story everyone would love. How do you come up with a recognizable narrative? A through-line of action in the inaction? 

In the meantime, I am asking. Why are you married? Did something happen in your life that I could have replicated in my life so it would have happened for me too?

Spinsters Unite!

I had started a blog on AOL, but that is gone. My treatise remains much the same.

10/16/06

We are the last minority: Never-Married Women with (or without) cats. There is no PAC, "Save the Spinsters" movement or support group for us. We are each on our own. Completely on our own.

There is no character in a movie or on tv that expresses our life experience. Our dreams are the same as anyone's, except for the part where they do not come true. No matter what we've tried. (And some of us have really tried)

SPINSTERS UNITE!

I am convinced there are a lot more of us than we realize. My guess is that we all share a lot in common that is never mentioned in the media, in public, or even in private. We must live with an anachronistic sense of shame in our failure to marry and/or procreate.

How hard it is to distinguish between cultural shame and our own personal sense of loss. How do you grieve not what has happened, but what has not?

How do you watch your friends (and frenemies) get married and have families (and screw up and get divorced and then remarried) while standing on the sidelines as if trying to figure out how to jump in to a double dutch jump rope?

How in the world is it possible that the most unique, difficult and odd folks manage to find someone who shares their very specific worldview and life while we, who are bright, compassionate, articulate and passionate can not come across (randomly or intentionally) someone to share our lives with? (Particularly when we are not asking for someone exactly like us. Just someone who appreciates us and whom we appreciate?)

What is there to do when the Love of Your Life (tm) comes along, goes away and comes back again, but still doesn't reciprocate? How do you find someone to shop with at Costco? How do you explain to the attached what it is like to be eternally unattached?

I am not alone because my standards are too high. Or because I haven't really tried. Look around you at happy couples. How different are their standards? How many of them even had to make an effort of any kind to find someone? Look around you. Everyone else has met someone at work, at school, at a wedding, or even a funeral, at singles events in real life or on line....

I have tried all of those things and more. But there is simply no one for me. Every pot may have its lid, but what about the crepe pans? Tired of being shoved to the back of a dusty cabinet and forgotten, I am here to at least make this invisible life visible.

I won't have a husband, kids or grandkids to show for it. But I will leave behind this record. And of course, the prerequisite cats. (Just 2. I am a spinster, but not a "Cat Lady")