I am not married. I have never been married. I am single and childless and thirty-nine years old. It’s 2009 and I’m still looking for someone I won’t lose. For now, though, my life is just me. Me and no one. Me and no one at a dinner party. Me and no one at a wedding. Me and no one at a funeral. People ask why I’m not married, tell me I should get married, or say how lucky I am that I never married. All strange things to say to a person with no one to marry, not only because it’s predicated on the idea that I’m deficient as I am, but because it suggests marriage is a product, an item on eBay I neglected to bid on. I’m not against marriage; marriage would be nice. At the very least, it would give me a reason to list someone other than my mother as my emergency contact. A family, I think, is what I’m after.
My siblings, friends, and acquaintances seem to have effortlessly found their right someones. But for me, finding love, and the family that follows, feels like the NYC housing lottery. Every time I go to fill out an application, I’ve missed the deadline by a day.
I’ve had plenty of horrible boyfriends and have twice escaped marrying those bad choices. Yet, despite not making the mistake of marrying the wrong person, single people are still looked down upon, even by the unhappily wed.
* * *
People who were once single right alongside me have now coupled off away from me, as though they’ve suddenly realized I’m contagious. Now they’re on the other side of the divide: inadvertently making single people feel ashamed, egging me on to entertain them with dating stories, the bad ones especially, because it’s been so long. Thing is, they mean well, which is why I don’t tell them how much it hurts. The longest relationship I’ve ever had is with my therapist.
I want a child. I want a family. I want to be like everyone else. I thought I’d have that with Peter the Literary Agent; at one point I even thought it about Caleb the Clown, whom I followed to Europe when he was cast in the Cirque du Soleil. All I’ve ever wanted is to feel like I belong to this world. I want to raise a child who feels like she belongs here, too, a child who doesn’t worry I’ll die or disappear, who trusts I know how to take care of her because she sees I know how to take care of myself, who knows I can teach her to manage her fears, push her to face and conquer reality, and to rely not on me, but on herself. The longer I remain without a family, the more I feel I don’t belong anywhere, and I’ve grown so tired of that feeling.
People tell me, “If you really want a family, you’ll get a family,” and that “it happens when you’re ready, when you least expect it, when you love yourself.” I disagree with that point of view, but the world has a fixed timeline, and I’m incompatible with its system; just like the growth charts of my childhood, there’s no space left for me to be plotted.
While I’ve been close to marriage, anxiety makes losing harder than loving, and I’ve lost more than I’ve been able to love. I haven’t let go when I should have; I’ve pushed when I should have pulled, and I waited when I knew to run, and I’ve always known, right from the start, whether or not a particular guy is the one. But once I’m connected, separation feels too harrowing, even if all my love has turned sour. Somewhere early on I learned that attachment meant love, and now I can’t find my way out.
I want something I don’t even remember having—a family I can trust to stay. I am trying to return to a place I can’t recall and I’m being driven by memories I don’t have—by unconscious urges so ancient they crumble at my touch. All my efforts to make a family fail. I’m inadequate, and I’m afraid. My anxiety is so deeply embedded, I’m scared I’ll never be free.
I worry anxiety has been keeping me from the pieces of my life lying in wait underneath me. Have I been allowing the happiness that should have been mine to move on to someone else? What if all this time I’ve accidentally been donating the life I’ve been too afraid to live to someone less frightened?