Barring the tragic, it’s likely I will live a long time. A life-expectancy calculator on the website of the US Social Security Administration predicts that I’ll make it to 85.7, a distant milepost determined from my sex and date of birth. Only, the calculator doesn’t know that three of my four grandparents easily surpassed that mark, nor that I commute by bicycle over the Brooklyn Bridge and eat a largely organic diet high in omega fats. The calculator doesn’t need to know these things because of the simple fact of my birth’s accordant time and place, which say plenty on their own.
I have other reasons to feel cocksure of a vast terrain ahead. As a paler-skinned millennial woman bouncing between the two wealthy nations of Canada and the United States in the twenty-first century, my life is one of historically anomalous comfort. I am able to support myself without the once-mandatory impositions of marriage and reproduction. I have disposable income and expendable time, which I squander on Pilates classes and stick-and-poke tattoos. By the time they were my age, my grandmothers each had four children. On the weekends, I’ll often sleep until noon.
Instead of playing matriarch to a nuclear-family household, I share a cozy brownstone apartment on a maple-canopied street with a single woman my age and a pair of Ontario rescue tabbies I U-Hauled over the border. Across the street is the elementary school where I vote in elections, and around the corner is a café whose drip coffee is somehow worth its inflated charge. My boyfriend of a few years lives three stops east on the C train line.
My younger self who so dreaded the unknown future would be pleased to see where I ended up. My present iteration frets less.
Relative security lightens the burden of choice. I lucked into a culture and class whose central invocation is a life of one’s own choosing, but my greatest, least probable fortune came in somehow obtaining an adequate inflow of capital that would feasibly finance the dream. Where the formlessness of my life’s eventual destination had once felt oppressive, I now understand it as a gift. My freedom to craft a life entirely in service of my personal will is a likely unprecedented privilege among my family’s women, and one most women currently living will never have the unearned luxury of knowing firsthand.
If I sound optimistic, it’s because I’ve yielded to the sybaritic thrall of false confidence. I could be laid off at any moment, and at some point I probably will be. I work in a fickle industry where even scalpel-sharp minds have been subject to closed-door meetings laying out their diminished labour market value. As many in my generation know too well, labour market value is a relative currency.
I earned my liberal arts degree mere months after the global market collapse of 2008. My final undergraduate year was so economically ominous that I couldn’t even find a part-time job working retail or thawing hamburger patties for minimum wage – poverty-class employment that I felt indignantly entitled to. I’d spend most of the following year working sporadically or not at all, scavenging for babysitting gigs in between temp-agency placements and the odd, ill-suited contract. I moved in with my boyfriend my first post-grad winter, and he subsidized my share of the rent.
Though it seems that everyone these days identifies as a member of the middle class, those with the bank accounts to match the designation are the likeliest to tie the knot. Though I was born to middle-class parents, at the age of twenty-four I could not personally be counted among its ranks. It’s possible that I would have been more decisive had my circumstances been different. Maybe I would have gotten married. Maybe I would have gone on a backpacking adventure and left my partner behind.
Today’s dominant conversations about coupling and family formation orbit the gravitational entity of choice. Marriage is no longer a prerequisite for child-rearing, and child-rearing is no longer a given altogether. Even within the many subsets of society whose conservative values govern an adherence to a nuclear-family model, personal satisfaction is framed as the central facet of the package deal. Less often discussed is the reality of money: a political-economic structure that benefits dual-income households, and institutions designed to accommodate individuals ensconced in heterosexual domestic partnerships.
A 2011 study found that for every 1 per cent increase in the unemployment rate, the divorce rate proportionately goes down. This is not because unhappy couples somehow, in the face of adversity, rediscover their spark; on the contrary, nearly a quarter of the couples surveyed in the study reported that their relationships had become even worse, while a majority reported no change in either direction. But survival supersedes contentment. In exchange for economic security, people will endure marital strife.
The reasons why are obvious. Married couples continue to have a higher net worth than unmarried couples. Divorced couples fare worse than those who stay single, and people without a base level of economic security are less likely to marry at all.
The women whose partnerships are happiest and longest-lasting are university-educated and don’t report financial security as a primary objective for getting involved. Intimacy, companionship, and a modicum of stability are the drivers for partnerships that work, wherein ‘working’ connotes a provision of emotional support and security – with the non-trivial perk of having an extra set of hands to help wash the dishes and pay the bills.
And yet, women in heterosexual marriages are less happy than our partners. We find ourselves bearing the brunt of household labour, managing schedules and appointments and the logistics of keeping everyone clothed and fed. Women are likeliest to file for divorce, and those of us who do are happier afterwards. (The opposite is true of men.)
Women, by and large, have been socialized to fend for ourselves for centuries. Even as our domain has expanded beyond the home, we continue to possess a disproportionate command over the skills required to maintain it. We know what we want and how to take care of ourselves, and we are less inclined than our mothers and grandmothers were to pull that load for our partners. In an age of MRAs and white-supremacist man-mobs, it appears that our needs have outpaced the patriarchy.
The women of my generation are living longer, and are less constrained by ostracism for premarital sex or having children out of wedlock. In greater numbers, we are prioritizing our careers and our friendships over settling down. And a greater number of us are racing the proverbial clock to have children before having found a suitable mate.
Our present conundrum leaves us in a bind: as women have amassed economic and political capital, men have failed to socially and emotionally adjust in stride. Because of this skewed gender dynamic, women’s standards are deservedly high, but our expectations are not. For some of us, the solution is to settle: to cultivate patience as we accept that a tremendous burden of emotional labour is the price we must pay for a heterosexual lifestyle. We can’t all be at the social vanguard. Sometimes, exercising a freedom of choice just means more work.
The alternative, perhaps, is that more and more of us will think beyond the confines of the nuclear-family unit and relish in fostering communities. Maybe we will be at the forefront of a trend toward extended familial networks of friends and partners that more manageably fulfill our many needs. Maybe we will recognize the value in different types of close relationships in a way that lifts the existential pressure currently bearing down on romantic partnerships. Breaking up might be no less hard to do, but we could find ourselves better equipped to forge forward with the whole of our hearts.