The Fame Lunches

by Daphne Merkin

  Ah, but surely everything is different now, you’re thinking. Surely women are no longer imprisoned by gender—“Content in the tight hot cell of their hearts,” as Bogan wrote in that same poem, “to eat dusty bread”—and my daughter’s response is indicative of nothing more than an adolescent’s cruel pity for her divorced and unremarried mother. Look at all the empowering strides we’ve made—from sending female astronauts into space to launching forest-destroying amounts of chick lit into the marketplace, featuring maritally challenged but intrepid twenty- and thirtysomethings who conquer towering professions in a single bound and treat the opposite sex as fungible bedmates in the tried-and-true male manner, all the while dressing in red-carpet-ready ensembles.

  Take Bridget Jones, who was among the first—not to mention the funniest, feistiest, and bestsellingest—of the chick-lit heroines to appear on the scene. Bridget has a degree in English, and she’s given to consulting her strident inner feminist for guidance (“We are a pioneer generation daring to refuse to compromise in love”) when she feels especially faltering. She works in swanky settings, looks to women like Goldie Hawn and Susan Sarandon for inspiration, and has a seductive way with interoffice e-mails. She is also—most crucially—over thirty, and when she’s not worrying about her caloric or alcoholic consumption, she’s pent up with chronic anxiety about the stark plight of being a Singleton in a world of Smug Marrieds. More specifically, she has terrorized herself with the bone-chilling final act that awaits all who tarry at the marriage threshold: “dying alone and being found three weeks later half-eaten by an Alsatian.”

  Whether or not young women have substantially changed their views about the prospect of taking on life without the net of a partner, they are marrying later (the average age is twenty-five—higher for college-educated gals) and worrying longer about what their future holds—hearth and home, or death by wild dogs. The sociologist E. Kay Trimberger’s The New Single Woman is but the latest in a series of efforts to put a positive spin on the “stigma of being single” in a society that continues to promote “the cultural ideal of the couple as the only route to happiness, as the only protection against loneliness.” The last book in this vein that I read closely, hoping to glimpse my destiny outlined on its pages, was Marcelle Clements’s The Improvised Woman: Single Women Reinventing Single Life, in 1998, which dilated upon the many wonders (and the few reluctantly admitted-to trials) of singleness as experienced by roughly a hundred women of all ages. I remember coming away with a new appreciation for the significance of a high thread count in bed linens and an abiding sense that, unlike some of the women interviewed, I didn’t make productive enough use of my free time—what Clements calls “creative solitude.”

  Like that earlier study, Trimberger’s book is a mixture of sociological tidbits (statistics and poll data and such), personal reflections, and impressionistic reporting. Notwithstanding a discernible seriousness of purpose, these books share an emphasis on optimistic assertions rather than rigorous data. The twenty-seven women Trimberger talked to range in age from thirty to sixty—the never married, the divorced, the childless, single mothers, heterosexuals, bisexuals, and lesbians. Those who have adapted successfully to an unpartnered life can lay claim to some or all of the “six pillars of support” that Trimberger defines as being crucial to the “new type of single woman, one quite different from the traditional spinster or single girl in her twenties”: a nurturing home environment (presumably one outfitted with Egyptian-cotton sheets); satisfying work; involvement with the next generation, through blood ties or volunteer work or mentoring; a network of friends who are there to help in times of trouble; a rewarding role in a community; and an unconflicted sexuality—meaning that one has either found a means of gratifying one’s erotic needs or has embraced something Trimberger calls “sensual celibacy.” Although she takes pains to distinguish this state from virginity and chastity (or, lest you think she is trading in high-flying euphemisms, masturbation) in its ability to replace the joys of “genital sexuality,” the concept struck me not only as vague but as more than a bit oxymoronic. The author has herself been celibate for more than twenty years, and the strongest case she makes for the sublimated pleasures of sensual celibacy rests on one woman’s passion for flamenco dancing.

  It’s with her insistence on the consolations of community—described, in a curiously dated (not to mention sexist) Cheeveresque image, as being the sort of loosely connected realm in which “a friend from church knows your golf buddy”—that Trimberger begins to lose me, just as she did on the issue of sensual celibacy. I’m not convinced, when it comes down to it, that she has figured out the life project of being single all that well, but perhaps the problem lies less with her than with the myth, propagated by Helen Gurley Brown’s sex-and-the-single-Cosmo-woman on a gullible female public, that it’s possible to have it all. The un-American truth is that most of us can’t, if only because options are often mutually exclusive, a matter of opening one door and closing another. Trimberger, being a sociologist and not a zeitgeist shaper, allows this piece of sobering realpolitik to appear between the lines, if only for the benefit of those who are paying very close attention. “It may be impossible for most single women,” she admits in passing, “to simultaneously maximize autonomy, intimacy, and sensuality.” To which I can only add: You can say that again.

  All the same, with Trimberger’s six building blocks in place, you have at least a hope of flouting your mother’s dreams of a doctor husband for you, as well as the conventional female mandates of motherhood and nurturing that prevail in spite of Roe v. Wade and the emergence of support groups with names—such as Single Mothers by Choice—that sound as if they were lifted straight from About a Boy. (Remember Hugh Grant’s frenziedly chanting “Single parents alone together” with a bunch of bedraggled women in his search for a new babe to bed?) In other words, you have a hope of making single life a choice, a road deliberately taken, rather than a default fate or a compensatory strategy.

  The most thought-provoking aspect of Trimberger’s account—and one I wish she had devoted more space to—is her decoding of the cultural imperative that posits coupled love as the only route to personal happiness, especially “the romantic ideal of finding a soul mate.” She points out that this uncompromising (and largely unrealizable) conception holds sway over women who have not yet found a partner, allowing them to present their single lives to others and themselves as a temporary problem awaiting a permanent solution in the form of Mr. Other Half. She quotes the psychologist Stephanie Dowrick on the benefits of freeing oneself from this terrorizing ideal of intimacy: “a life not shadowed by myths and longing for what might never happen, but shaped instead by less ambitious pleasure in what is.”

  In the years between Clements’s and Trimberger’s books, we have been hit by any number of new sociocultural developments—some good and some bad—but most of all we have had six seasons of the HBO hit show Sex and the City, which probably did more to move forward the idea of female bonding as the new urban family than all the research projects and surveys in the world. The show gets its share of credit in The New Single Woman for fostering an affirmative view of the single life.

  * * *

  This month, as it happens, Candace Bushnell, whose columns in The New York Observer provided the inspiration for the Manolo Blahnik–shod world of Carrie & Co., is out with a new novel. Lipstick Jungle features three fast friends who scale their way to the tops of their respective mediagenic Manhattan empires with nary a concern about soul mates or sensual celibacy—or anything, for that matter, that smacks of meaningfulness (how unhip can you get?)—to snag their seamless journey to personal and professional dominance.

  In its own profoundly superficial, cosmetically enhanced way, Lipstick Jungle depicts the sort of having-it-all world the “new single woman” might have wished into existence if she came equipped with the right sort of plastic organ for a heart: post-coupled, post-intimate, post-maternal, post-nurturing, post-auto
nomous, and post-sagging. Bushnell’s three glossy fortysomething heroines look great, their bodies kept on a tight leash of exercise and nibbling, and they can outsmart any man they meet. Victory is a brilliant fashion designer who dates a Mr. Big–type tycoon whom she improbably charms by treating him like a dirtbag. Wendy, a movie executive, is married to a househusband who has delusions of becoming a screenwriter while she supports their family in the lifestyle to which he has grown accustomed in return for his staying at home and looking after their three kids. And Nico, a magazine editor, is also married to a nonessential man with whom she hasn’t had “decent sex” in years (thus providing an excuse for her to hook up with a gorgeous young model–cum–aspiring actor for some trendy rear-entry intercourse) but who tends to their town house and cocktail parties in wifely fashion, leaving her quality time to spend with their ten-year-old horse-riding, preppy daughter.

  This is the kind of preposterously posh fictional milieu where all earthly desires have become commodified for instant charge-and-send—a strangely glittering planet on which the only restaurant worth name-dropping is Cipriani; the only champagne is Cristal; the only SUV is a Cadillac Escalade; and freedom’s just another word for having enough moxie and cash to buy your own bling at a Sotheby’s jewelry auction rather than waiting for some soul mate with chest hair to come along and do it. I tended to confuse the three women until their final collectively engineered triumph, but I trust I’m not casting undue aspersions if I point out that this is not the kind of novel you read for nuances of character or perception so much as for the ludicrous but smile-inducing stiletto-heeled escapism of it.

  By chance I recently got a glimpse of how women coped before people talked about their feelings, much less their orgasms, when I came across Live Alone and Like It by Marjorie Hillis. Billed as “the classic guide for the single woman,” it was originally published here in 1936 and has just been reissued in Britain. It speaks to a radically eclipsed moment when doctors still made house calls and no woman worth knowing would be caught without a wardrobe of bed jackets and “at least one nice seductive tea gown” to wear when dining alone or entertaining gentlemen visitors. All the same, you could do worse than borrow some of its insouciant but vigilant attitude, which merrily endorses ladylike feints and delicate gestures as long as they don’t compromise one’s indubitably high character.

  Still, whether the year is 1936 or 2036, it’s my guess that sleeping alone will never become truly fashionable, not because we can’t live without sex or without being part of a couple, but because there is nothing more consoling at three o’clock in the morning than body warmth—what one of Clements’s interviewees calls “the cuddle thing.” Another sentient, sensate human being to rub up against during the night: now, that’s hard to do without over the long stretch of a lifetime, no matter how true-blue your friends or how downy soft your sheets.

  CAN THIS DIVORCE BE SAVED?

  2002

  It’s late at night, and I’m reading E. Mavis Hetherington and John Kelly’s For Better or for Worse—billed as “the most comprehensive study of divorce in America”—trying to figure out where and how I fit into the book’s madly taxonomic universe. Lost in a sea of nomenclature, infinitely titrated statistics, and “points to remember,” I feel my identity slowly slipping away from me. I’m a divorced woman who has not remarried and is the mother of a twelve-year-old daughter. What does that say about me? And, more important, what does my divorced state, this closely studied yet elusive condition, augur for my daughter?

  Hetherington, a professor emerita of psychology at the University of Virginia who has conducted interviews and gathered data for the past three decades, clearly knows her material. She launched her research project, called the Virginia Longitudinal Study, in 1972, as a way of exploring “postnuclear family pathways.” And she set about answering a basic question: “Was there a unique developmental dynamic—perhaps even a uniquely harmful dynamic—in divorced families?”

  To this end, she scrutinized nearly fourteen hundred families, including more than twenty-five hundred children, from every angle possible; her team of investigators used standard tools such as questionnaires and tests, but they also observed the families in their homes “as they solved problems, as they chatted over dinner, and in the hours between the child’s arrival at home and bedtime.” A designated “target child” in each family was assessed at the playground, in school, and in the eponymous Hetherington Laboratory. The parents in the study kept diaries, where they jotted down the intimate details of their daily lives at half-hour intervals three days a week. Finally, Hetherington worked all the data into a paint-by-numbers typology, which is where things get sticky.

  For starters, I’m having trouble determining what kind of marriage—there are five models to choose from—I had before I got divorced: Was it the Pursuer-Distancer Marriage? (It’s “the most common type,” Hetherington observes, and “also the most divorce-prone.”) Or was it the Disengaged Marriage? Such marriages, which have a high failure rate, may drift along for years before finally ending, “with a whimper rather than a bang.” I suppose the description of the Operatic Marriage comes closest, given a certain volatility of temperament that my ex-husband and I shared, but, unlike Hetherington’s sample couple, we never smashed shiny new kitchen cabinets with a hammer, screaming, “I’ll show you ugly!” and then went on to have explosive sex. (“For Operatics, quarreling often is a trigger for sex. Indeed, passionate lovemaking follows furious fighting … routinely.”) I glimpse ingredients of my marriage everywhere, not excluding a dash of the Cohesive/Individuated Marriage (the cultural ideal for baby boomers, combining “gender equity” and old-fashioned intimacy) and two level teaspoons of the Traditional Marriage (breadwinner man and homemaker woman—which turns out, disconcertingly, to be the stablest arrangement of them all).

  Even worse, I seem unable to locate myself on the continuum of “postdivorce adaptive styles.” Once again, there are a number of floor models to choose from. I study Hetherington’s six categories closely, hoping to place somewhere not too inglorious between the “divorce winners” (also referred to as “successful changers”) and the abject losers. Front and center are the Enhancers; members of this group, mostly women, actually thrive after their marriages collapse, taking on a previously unsuspected aura of authority and competence—“a quiet gravitas.” Then, there are the Good Enoughs, who are the most typical among the divorced; though “less resilient” than Enhancers, they stumble along as well as they can. Two other categories—the Seekers and the Libertines—are, as you might guess, predominantly male. Seekers are made uneasy by the single life; without a wife to “supply validation,” they exhibit sexual problems and signs of depression. (Hetherington intrepidly tails her subjects right up to the bedroom keyhole, noting that, “after divorce, a number of men in the group became vulnerable to erectile dysfunction for the first time.”) Seekers nudge everyone they know to fix them up and tend to remarry relatively quickly. Libertines, on the other hand, act like college kids on spring break, turning to drink, drugs, and casual sex to allay their self-doubts, but within a year most of them, too, have begun to look for long-term relationships.

  The remaining two styles—the Competent Loner and the Defeated—sound equally dispiriting, but Hetherington insists that the Competent Loner represents a “divorce winner” every bit as much as the Enhancer. Members of this group are generally not interested in remarrying; they have their jobs, friends, and hobbies to keep them warm. (I envision such people as having the admirable but slightly irritating resourcefulness that goes along with compulsively organized CD collections.) Although these self-sufficient folk make up only 10 percent of the study’s sample population, their influence should not be underestimated; Hetherington points out that they may be “a harbinger of things to come,” given the divorce rate, the general delay in marriage, and the steep rise in cohabitation (a living arrangement that portends badly for an enduring marriage).

  Finally
, down where no light shines, live the mole people known as the Defeated. This designation might seem self-evident, but Hetherington is determined to provide the grim details, perhaps by way of a cautionary example. She describes the history of a “mild-mannered” college professor named Walter who left his wife to marry a scheming and seductive babysitter and was, in turn, dumped for a SoHo artist: “Alone, he became deeply depressed, ignored his appearance, was unprepared for classes, saw less and less of his children, and spent most of his free time staring at the television set, smoking dope, or drinking.” And there he stayed: “At the twenty-year follow-up, Walter was still single, still depressed, and still Defeated.”

  I’m no Walter, but clearly my postdivorce adaptive style leaves a lot to be desired. I am, if truth be told, looking for a narrative to call my own, something to help me explain why I am lingering on the stage set of life after the curtain has come down and the other players have married or died. Marriage and death have always been the two paradigmatic endings in Western culture, which raises the question of how to make sense of the havoc represented by divorce, as either an end or a beginning. Perhaps divorce is a way of living two lives for the price of one. Surely this is what the social historian Lawrence Stone had in mind when he noted that the remarriage rate in the seventeenth century was similar to that of today, with divorce replacing death as its precondition: “Indeed, it looks very much as if modern divorce is little more than a functional substitute for death. The decline of the adult mortality rate after the late eighteenth century, by prolonging the expected duration of marriage to unprecedented lengths, eventually forced Western society to adopt the institutional escape-hatch of divorce.”