Certainly, many Becker’s brides are still taking the old-fashioned route; marrying young and then starting families. But others are adhering to trends playing out nationally. Americans are having children out of wedlock at eight times the rate they did in 1960. More than 40 percent of those born in the United States each day are the offspring of unmarried women; that compares to 2 percent in Japan.
Meanwhile, more women are marrying later—or not at all.
The annual number of weddings in America, which peaked in 1984 at 2.48 million, has declined every year since then. In 2009, there were only 2.08 million weddings recorded. Those in the large “echo boom” generation—the children of baby boomers—are now of marital age, but they are less eager to marry than the generations before them. For women, the average age of first marriage has risen to twenty-six years old from twenty-one in 1970. For men, it has risen to twenty-eight from twenty-three.
In the wedding business, it used to be an accepted fact that nine out of ten Americans would marry at least once by age forty. Bridal shops could assume that a woman who isn’t shopping for a dress today will need one eventually. (In 1980, the percentage of forty-year-olds married at least once hit a high of 93 percent. Now, it’s 81 percent, and is expected to fall further.) How many of today’s unmarried twenty- and thirtysomethings will someday marry? When Shelley talks with other bridal-shop owners at design showcases in New York, the state of the unions in America is a perennial topic. Assumptions that were once taken for granted have been thrown away.
There are many reasons for young people’s reluctance to marry today.
There’s no longer much stigma for those who live together or have children outside of marriage. And millions of echo boomers have seen their parents’ marriages fail, which gives them pause. Yes, they appreciate that their grandparents understood the idea of couples suffering through difficult times, hoping things would get better. But there’s no going back to that. Tolerance for imperfect relationships has gotten so low that giving up early seems to be the American Way. (Forget the seven-year itch. University of Minnesota researchers have found that more divorces now happen in the fourth year of marriage than any other.) It’s not really a surprise, then, that some echo boomers are deciding to skip the wedding, which makes the inevitable breakup less complicated.
Marriage is just “not as necessary as it used to be,” a 2010 Pew Research study concluded. The study found that 39 percent of survey respondents believe that marriage is “becoming obsolete”; that’s up from 28 percent who felt that way in 1979.
That sounds like a harsh statistic. And yet here Shelley is, day after day, catering to the 61 percent who still believe in the possibilities of marriage. These customers tell her in words and actions that their dreams are still alive, even if their dreams are not the same as their mothers’. Shelley also has plenty of customers who might define themselves as the 39 per-centers; they wonder (or worry) about marriage becoming obsolete. But they’re here too, trying on dresses, hoping they’ll buck the odds. “I still believe there’s magic in the institution of marriage,” Shelley says.
There’s an old Jewish saying: “Every time a marriage takes place, a new world is created.” Each day at the store, Shelley witnesses pieces of those transitions from old world to new in the interactions of the brides with their parents—and in the chatter about the brides’ fiancés, and their plans for the future.
Shelley’s a driven saleswoman, yes, like her grandmother. But she’s a romantic, too, and she tries to wish a good outcome for every woman who walks through her door. She says she wishes for peace and happiness in each new world she helps create.
In her own life, Shelley has seen how love can fade, and how children can be hurt by a troubled marriage. She doesn’t talk about her life or marriage when she’s dealing with brides. It’s almost a relief that they’re usually too hyperfocused on their own issues to ask Shelley any questions about herself. But when she thinks of the path her own life has taken, her wish for each of these brides is that their journey will be easier.
Chapter Four
Meredith
Before arriving at Becker’s on a Thursday evening, Meredith
Maitner had visited other dress stores, including David’s Bridal, the three-hundred-store chain that claims 35 percent of America’s bridal business today.
Meredith is thirty-nine years old, marrying for the first time, and David’s had not been an easy experience for her. “I had to share a pedestal with a girl half my size and half my age,” she says.
The prices at David’s were lower than elsewhere, which was a plus. But Meredith didn’t receive much attention, and there certainly wasn’t a special room with soft lights and an air of magic. “Just a big mirror and that pedestal,” she says again, for emphasis, “and you had to share it with little skinny girls. It was kind of awful.”
Meredith is a woman with a full laugh, an easy sense of humor, and a willingness to discuss her long path to the Magic Room. Blond, buxom, and sophisticated, she also exudes a Midwestern softness that allows her to place her life until now into a meaningful context. She’ll turn forty right before her wedding day.
“Growing up, you see there’s an order to things,” she explains. “You go to grade school then high school then college—and then you get married. That’s what my parents did. That’s how I thought the world worked. And I somehow got off track.”
Sixteen years ago, on the day before Meredith’s twenty-fourth birthday, her mother had called her. At one point while they were talking, her mom nonchalantly said, “You know, the night before I turned twenty-four, I was getting married.” Meredith certainly knew that her mom and dad—a first-grade teacher and a school principal, now both retired—had gotten married the evening before her mom’s birthday. All her life, her parents’ anniversary was August ninth; her mom’s birthday was August tenth. But for her mother to pick this moment, the day before Meredith turned twenty-four, to make this comment, well, it felt like a judgmental slap in the face.
“That kind of stings,” Meredith said to her mother.
“It made me feel like a failure,” she now recalls. “I know my mother was just making conversation, but the message was: ‘When I was your age, my life was progressing. I was getting married. And you’re not.’ It could be she was just marking time: ‘This is where I was on my timeline. You’re not in the same place on your timeline.’ Or it could be that there’s something in everything that mothers say.”
Parents don’t always realize how their nonchalant observations sound to adult children. (Meredith’s story brings to mind research done by Jane Isay, author of Walking on Eggshells, about the delicate relationships between adult children and their parents. “A parent’s voice, even when whispered, is louder than anyone else’s voice in their grown kids’ ears,” Isay says. She counsels parents to temper criticisms: “The idea that your kids need you to tell them what’s wrong with them is a canard. They know what’s wrong with them. What they want from parents is support for what’s right with them.”)
Meredith’s mother knew as soon as she spoke those words that she shouldn’t have said them. “It kind of came out,” she says. “I didn’t mean to sound as if I was asking ‘What’s the matter with you? Why aren’t you married yet?’ I was talking about how my life followed a different path.”
Meredith in 1992, at age twenty-one, as a young career woman in Japan
Meredith’s path diverged as she was finishing college and noticed a flyer on a bulletin board, looking for young people to go to Japan and teach English as a second language. On a whim, she applied, and lived there for a glorious year. She embraced the culture and expat life, and had fun socializing with Marines stationed there. She realized she wanted a career in international business, and when she returned to the States, she first worked for a company that owned theaters and radio stations. Then she moved to a national footwear company in Rockford, Michigan, where she has spent fourteen years, traveling the world—to E
ngland, Russia, Turkey, Germany—as director of planning and operations for three brands of shoes. Along the way, she got her master’s degree.
While her professional life progressed, she had a mixed record in her love life. She dated some men who were nice but there was no chemistry. She was bored with them. She dated others who weren’t greatly interested in her. And she also was involved with a couple of guys she refers to as “my horror stories.”
She dated one man for three months who was in public relations. Things seemed to be going well. He met her family; they liked him. “He was doing and saying the right things,” she recalls. “And he was spending a lot of money on me, always picking up the tab for dinner, drinks, whatever.”
Then she discovered he had stolen her Social Security number and used it to get a credit card under his first name and her last name. He charged $5,000 to the card before he was caught. The romance turned into a police matter. Prosecutors charged him with identity theft and filing false information with a financial institution, both felonies. Meredith told the court she wanted no contact with him, and has never seen him again.
There was another man she dated for a year. They lived together, but he was often depressed. One morning they got in an argument after Meredith told him he needed to take better charge of his life and finances. Later that day, he took several boxes of sleeping tablets in a suicide attempt. Meredith discovered him when she came home from work. She called 911, frantically giving the story: “He’s having seizures on my couch!” The call got disconnected. She had to call back and start over.
Her boyfriend was asleep for four days and hospitalized for a week, but he survived. After he spent another week at a mental health center, Meredith took him home to her apartment. She helped him put together a résumé, typed his cover letter, boosted his spirits, and then she helped him find a job in California. He moved out there on the day before her birthday, and she was relieved to see him go.
“I started doing background checks on every single guy I dated,” Meredith says, wearily. “I checked the police and court websites. I could see if they’ve been divorced, arrested, gotten speeding tickets, everything.”
She ended up dating another man—“a decent guy”—for four years, but he wouldn’t commit. Six months after they broke up, he was engaged to a woman much younger than Meredith.
Through the years, there were times when Meredith loved being single and independent. But she was frustrated, too. She recognized that she wasn’t single because she preferred it that way. She was single because she wanted to find someone, but couldn’t.
She found it helpful to focus on the positives. “I could have dinner when I wanted, see friends when I wanted. I realized I would rather be home, drinking wine and reading a good book, than being on a date with a jackass.”
Her mother started to look at the matter philosophically. “As the years went by,” her mom says, “I thought maybe it’s not God’s will for her to be married. Maybe she’s supposed to be single. A lot of single people are very happy. And you hear so much about divorce. Maybe it’s good that she didn’t get married and then divorced.”
Meredith realizes that she arrived at her chronically single status via her own unique set of circumstances. And yet, over the years, when she would share her story with women she’d meet, her experiences sounded familiar to a lot of them—including those two or three decades older than she is.
The women from the generation ahead of Meredith say they were the first to be branded hopelessly single—as a group. And what they went through has been instructional for Meredith.
In 1986, when Meredith was fifteen, Newsweek magazine caused a stir with a story titled “Too Late for Prince Charming?” For unmarried women over age thirty, the story contained bad news, and America took great pity on them.
The article showcased a study by Yale and Harvard researchers suggesting that thirty-year-old white, college-educated single women had only a 20 percent chance of finding husbands. At age forty, the probability fell to 2.6 percent. Using hyperbole and humor that became infamous then, and sounds far more awful today, Newsweek said those forty-year-olds were “more likely to be killed by a terrorist” than land a mate.
Meredith was finishing up tenth grade that summer. It didn’t occur to her then that she would one day fit exactly into this demographic. And so she didn’t pay much attention to all the hand-wringing over that study, the countless articles and talk-show debates, the tearful conversations between single women and their mothers.
Looking back, Meredith identifies in some ways with the unmarried older women of that generation. They feared being alone. They questioned what they did “wrong.” They listened to downbeat voices in the culture designed to make them feel insecure.
In 1986, insecurity had been especially rampant. Gail Prince, a Chicago dating coach quoted in that Newsweek piece, now recalls that many women found the Harvard-Yale study “perversely reassuring,” because it suggested that societal issues, rather than their own inadequacies, were behind their struggles to find men. In Newsweek, Prince had advised women “to carry conversation openers, like a feather boa or a copy of Sports Illustrated.” Such ploys would feel hokey by the time Meredith reached her thirties, in the new century, but they are a reminder of the urgency with which people back then were seeking direction. (Some would argue that the urgency remains today, only in different forms. “Conversation starters” now are risqué photos posted on Facebook, or online “pokes” meant to lure men into poking back.)
In any case, the Newsweek statistics would later be challenged by a US Census Bureau demographer, who calculated that those thirty-year-olds actually had about a 62 percent likelihood of finding a husband. For forty-year-olds it was 20 percent. But the Harvard-Yale study’s core message—that educated, career-focused women risk spending their lives alone—continued to reverberate as Meredith entered her thirties.
So what became of those unmarried, college-educated forty-year-olds from 1986? They’re in their mid-sixties now, and census data shows that less than 10 percent of them have never been married. Newsweek, Harvard, and Yale got it wrong. Meanwhile, new research suggests that women today who are highly educated are actually more likely to get and stay married.
Of course, for Meredith in her late thirties, these relatively upbeat statistics could give her hope, but they didn’t tell the full story. She saw that traditional forces, so much stronger years ago, have less power to create a marriage today. Religions used to push people down the aisle through guilt, threats of damnation, and calls to behave responsibly. Now religions don’t exert the same kind of pressure. Parents used to insist that their sons do the right thing and marry the girl. Parents aren’t as insistent anymore.
And so, in the end, studies, statistics, changes in social mores, and screaming media reports couldn’t explain everything, or help Meredith. As she saw it, the facts were very simple: She was one woman. She needed to find one man. And it wasn’t happening.
Eventually, Meredith told her parents that she’d given up on love. Twenty-five years of dating had not produced a life partner. “It’s likely I’ll never have a husband,” she said, “and so I need to take care of myself well. That’s my goal.” She could afford to buy herself jewelry, and she did so. “The thing about necklaces and bracelets is that you’ll have them forever and they’ll fit you forever, even on fat days.” She tried to embrace the idea that she didn’t need a husband. “It’s nice to believe you can do it alone.”
As for the possibility that she’d never have children, she became philosophical: “My brother and sister-in-law have always been good about letting me love their kids, and so I’m very close with my nephews and my niece. I love them so much. And if I don’t have children of my own, I’ll love them even more.”
To her credit, Meredith’s mother found ways to focus on the silver linings. “I felt selfish in a way,” she says. “If she wasn’t going to get married, we’d get to spend more time with her.” Meredith a
nd her parents planned regular international cuisine nights. After work, Meredith would pick up unfamiliar dishes from all kinds of offbeat restaurants and bring them to her parents’ house. They celebrated Ethiopian Night, Turkish Night, Indian Night, and more.
Perhaps life might have gone on like that, pleasantly, but then one evening Meredith went to a Polish social hall during Pulaski Days in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The annual citywide event is a celebration of Revolutionary War hero Casimir Pulaski, who died in battle in 1779, at age thirty-two. A Polish immigrant, the father of the US Calvary, and a friend of Ben Franklin’s, he’s celebrated by American Poles as a freedom fighter. They salute him with a good deal of drinking, polka-dancing, parades, and pageants.
Meredith had finally sworn off dating (it had been seven months) but agreed to join friends at this Polish hall, where she ended up sitting next to a friend of a friend of a friend, a forty-two-year-old man—a freelance illustrator and graphic designer—who also had never been married. His name was Ron.
She thought he was sweet, funny, and attractive—they conversed so easily with each other—but she assumed he was “totally gay.” He had two earrings in one ear and one earring in the other. “There was the whole artist thing,” she says, “plus he wore Doc Martens. And he was very attentive to me.” She hadn’t seen such attentiveness from a straight guy in years. She also wondered how, if he wasn’t gay, he’d made it to age forty-two without being snatched up. She was taken with his big brown eyes, his full head of hair, his straight white teeth.
Ron, meanwhile, thought Meredith was attractive too, and he enjoyed listening to her banter with others at the table. She got in an argument with someone about which port was America’s busiest. (Meredith was right: Los Angeles/Long Beach.)
The Magic Room: A Story About the Love We Wish for Our Daughters Page 4
