So many new choices and possibilities for young women since the 1970s, and so much ink and angst spent dissecting it all. What almost never occurs to anyone, perhaps because we dread aging so tend see the aged as a different, lesser species, is to ask women who've lived through it how it all turned out. Think "motherhood" and what comes to mind? Chubby babies and Christmas card family photos? Pumping breast milk at the office and arranging play dates? Doing piles of mud stained laundry and bringing crock pots of food to the team awards night? Endless variations but they usually involve the busy years of young family life. Years single women the same age may be lonely, collecting different experiences. But what happens next is important too. Do those children and husbands stick around and maintain meaningful connections throughout a woman's whole life? Or is she temporary support, a waystation for others' experiences and dreams? Which came first, women's liberation as a woman's choice or a modern individualism that permitted men to replace old wives with new, children to move far away and visit infrequently if at all and relegate the unsightly elderly to nursing homes? Among my women peers, now in their 50s and up, there's not much difference in daily life between those who had children and those who didn't. (This is less true of working class friends and colleagues who tend to be more involved with grandchildren and extended family, not always under the best circumstances but with what seems like more mutual loyalty.) There's a dramatic rise in family estrangement, so painful for mothers especially. At some level, girls and women know their whole lives that we will likely become our mothers. What does that role represents to us? Someone who is revered or at least appreciated and cared for or someone who is a burden and annoyance to be avoided? That view of elder motherhood should and does, if only subliminally, help inform our choices.
As a woman who came of age in the 1970's, married at 25, had children and now grandchildren, my perspective is a bit different.
My children led me to many friendships and experiences I would not have otherwise had. My mother once told me she did more after the age of 40 than she did during her first 40 years and much of that was due to us, her children.
My husband and I worked hard to create strong bonds with our children and extended family while still giving our children freedom (the whole "roots and wings" trope). We are now blessed with adult children who want to visit and who want their children to know their grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and the rest of our large extended family.
With respect, many women are insecure, atomized, and unfulfilled not because they forewent young marriage, but because basically everyone not-affluent is feeling those things. Most of the structures of social life in the anglosphere are aimed at separating people: eliminating public spaces, eliminating safe and comfortable shared living spaces, eliminating opportunities and resources for spending casual time, eliminating the natural world, commoditizing and siloing hobbies, pathologizing non-productive behavior, and on and on. Marriage and nuclear family aren’t the ultimate source of security and social connection, they’re an inadequate consolation in an atomized dystopia. And they are only still encouraged because they satisfy the productivist necessity for reproduction of labor. (Wrote on this here: https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2023/08/seinfeld-and-friends-reflected-the-atomized-u-s-of-the-90s-and-today) Marriage and nuclear family are not fringe pursuits; a considerable majority of people end up in these structures because in a lot of places that's all that's left to achieve a feeling of social connection and security. People pining for meaning, safety, and security and thinking that it belongs only in the utopia of nuclear family because their parents and grandparents were married and also generally secure, are committing a false cause fallacy. They were secure because they grew up in the biggest middle-class expansion in history, which gave them time and financial security, and which is now in probably permanent retreat. Universal marriage won’t solve that, ask any historical peasant.
I fully agree! Community and connection is not only attainable through a nuclear family. It is funny how many people seem to “feel” the same problem (some variant of lack of meaning) but some revert to “we need to go back to nuclear families - that will solve all” while others pivot to more experiences, but somehow the real elephant in the room is not properly addressed.
“The reproduction of labour” is a very sad and myopic way to regard child rearing and having a family. Capitalism did not invent sex and reproduction. If you want to regard children as “units of labour” that’s your prerogative, but I don’t see why you’d choose to onboard this dehumanizing language and concept of parenthood into your own mind and vocabulary.
Because he’s a Marxist who therefore has to see normative human relations as a hellscape of exploitation from which only the inevitable long-prophesied revolution of the proletariat (which never actually happens) can save us through the overthrow of capitalism, which will magically fix all the problems that bedevil us.
So long as one avoids wealthy and corrupt places (think New York city or California), one can avoid the worst of it. I believe whole heartedly in economic growth, but with women entering the workforce there had to be a massive downward pressure on wages. That is what happens when one increases the supply of labor. Add to that the largest period of immigration in US history, and the labor market looks exactly like one would expect.
It is unfortunate that cities like New York have been so corrupted that they are run for sleazy real estate barons like Trump, with the elderly foot soldiers paid-off in rent-stabilized housing. I lived in Manhattan for a time, and it was vulgar to see how many wealthy colleagues lived in rent-stabilized apartments while poor Dominicans at my church packed extended families into tiny apartments in Washington Heights. But that is what their voters want.
I would strongly disagree with your remark about "commoditizing and siloing hobbies." I think this is a real golden age of hobbies. As a child in the 1980's most people got into hobbies from their parents or grandparents, but now so much is open to everyone. I have watched old engineers show immigrant children how to boot up and program Arduino controllers, personally helped immigrant children build computers, install games, and of course i buy every child a copy of StarCraft 2, the greatest game in human history. The only hobbies that are really in decline are hunting and fishing, which is a real shame. The demonization of guns is so ridiculous. It is the same warped thinking that gave us the Drug War.
Overall, we do have some nasty, elitest places along the coasts that really need to be broken open, zoning laws re-written and culture opened up to normal people again, but in the rest of the US, there is a lot of progress. I am horrified that my city Chicago will end up like NYC, with working people forced out for trendy rich kids, but hopefully good will triumph over evil. So far evil is winning (the city even rolled back 1950's zoning laws, so apartment buildings are torn down and replaced with houses like a suburb!), but we are not giving up the way New Yorkers and San Franciscans did.
If you do not like what you see in your community, go and fight it. Bring young people into your hobbies. You would be shocked at how much time retirees will spend with marginalized children getting them into hobbies, and even buying their materials. Furthermore, the natural world is coming back in all kinds of ways. Wolves, bears and mountain lions are returning to their natural habitats. polluted regions have come back far faster than expected. Chicago's rivers are shockingly clean. Rural areas are probably more wild than they have been in centuries. We need more hunters and fisherman to report on bad actors (they are often the ones reporting those who dump), but the upside of industrial agriculture is more wild lands.
If you feel like you are living in an "atomized dystopia," you are hanging with the wrong kind of people. I felt that way when I lived in New York, but it is thankfully gone now. Spend time with your extended family, and if they are far away, make new friends and get active at a religious institution. I am guessing that you have some hostility towards the traditional ones, so go to a Buddhist or Hindu Temple. Learn Pali or Sanskrit or Gujarati. I married into Buddhism, and my local Wat is full of great people. I visit Hindu temples as well and Indian-Americans are wonderful people. They do great BBQ's, but be careful about cricket games. They are WAY too serious about that stuff. But in general, there are so many awesome people all over the place who have great stories and make for great friends. I think you will be surprised welcoming they are. I know that I was, and it rekindled my patriotism. The Boomers definitely were the greediest generation, but the next generation looks good, and they will fix the mess the boomers created. I have tutored and big-brothered quite a few young people, and man the current crop of immigrant children is intelligent and well behaved. They will do better than any who came before. We are in good hands. We just need to wait for the Boomers to die out so we can fix their mess. They cling to power and life because they know that they are all coming back as cockroaches.
I’m wondering how you feel about all the anti-wildlife activism in the middle states like Montana and Idaho that are so anti-wolf to the point of animal torture? Seems that ranchers are getting massive handouts from the govt not only in terms of access to public lands that their cattle destroy but also recently to huge payouts for “wolf damages” to their animals (most of which kills were never found so gee… one wonders who actually killed them since the payouts were over $300,000 in Colorado). I agree there’s a lot of great change happening and also agree with the corruption on the coasts but boy do I see corruption out here in the midwest too.
Thanks for this essay, successful because the thoughtfulness and nuance of the writing inspires a consideration of our own twenties.
My wife and I married in 1985 when we were 23 after meeting a year earlier. So we never had the experience of being single in our twenties. But neither of us ever had the sense of doors being shut.
It's been a grand adventure for the past forty years. Of course we've had our share of "life," in the form of issues and heartache and fights. And with three children, like all parents except liars, we've made our share of mistakes, some funny and some not.
I'm as excited about our life together now as I was forty years ago. I don't know if that makes us an exception or not.
I like this comment. I am tremendously happily married partly because experiences together > experiences alone. There are things one isn't free to do after making commitments to others, it's true. But there are things one is only free to do after making commitments to others. Emotional and spiritual intimacy within a long and stable marriage presents an entire galaxy to explore. Parenthood with your dearest friend, and the only other truly invested party, at your side is a lifetime adventure. Art, friends, travel, music, careers, philanthropy, literature, hobbies: all of these things are better when I have him to experience them with me or at least to be my discussion partner. And this is just coming from the selfish "I belong to myself and I like my life better this way than that" perspective; a whole other frame being the idea that I also belong to God, to the people who came before me and to those who will come after and those who are around me, and prioritizing marriage and family is better for all of those entities. Marriage and family has been a playground and not a prison for me. Others' mileage does vary.
I think that using single=experience/marriage=stability as two poles for how to choose life is somewhat arbitrary. Stability, in many ways, underwrites the success of both modes of living. Being single with stability often means that moving to New York or backpacking around Europe becomes an Epcot adventure as long as there is a safety net to fall back on. If someone has landed a tony, artistic job, I’m guessing that this person has a safety net (upper middle class or wealthy parents.)
By the same token, getting married without any kind of safety net, for whatever combination of motives (love, survival, escape), can leave both members of the relationship shoulder deep in “experience”. The experience of struggling to find a place to live, pay rent, eviction if you can’t pay rent, trying to build stability when it isn’t given is, in most senses, more of an “experience” than say, going to Paris.
Yes, exactly! I bristled at the positioning of “struggle” and “challenge” in contradistinction to being married young. I got married at 18, and was not religious, pregnant, or military. I was a feminist and an atheist and my parents were devastated. Life was very challenging and full of struggle! We were broke and washed our clothes in the bathtub when we didn’t have laundry money. I had a job that was physically and emotionally exhausting, involving matters of life and death, and I was passionate about it. My husband had a mental breakdown and couldn’t work for a long while. My life was much more of a formative crucible than the lives of my friends who would complain to me about their biology test or the weed man trying to give them shitty weed or spring break airfare being expensive. I never once wished I wasn’t loved and didn’t love my husband. I don’t wish I’d had a bunch of bad sex with men who neither respected nor cared about me (we’ve really valorized that as “formative.” What is being formed, a bad relationship with sex?). Life was hard, but I was glad we had each other. We had a lot of fun together. The marriage eventually ended amicably, and I’ve since remarried. People who know my personal biography often ask me if I regret getting married so young and I don’t at all. It was valuable in and of itself, and it’s also easier in my opinion to have a successful relationship when you’re not trying to find space to fit another whole human being into your very calcified life and personality. My first marriage lasted nine years, not a lifetime, but I do think my youth allowed me to grow around my husband like a tree grows around a structure, and even though the structure was removed, there remains that space that love and consequence made and it’s easier for someone else to step inside it.
That’s interesting that you say that. My wife and I married at 22. Both sets of our parents were lower middle class. I guess you’d call them poor in 2025. Not college educated and not much money to carry children past high school. Our similar experience allowed us to build a life around each other. The “tree growing around a structure” metaphor is a perfect way to describe this. I feel like people who have later life family support don’t understand this experience. It really is in many ways a survival strategy, which isn’t entirely an unhealthy way to build a marriage. It teaches you compromise, respecting another person’s boundaries, and a basic understanding that nobody is perfect. I’m glad you were able to separate amicably. Being married early can often force you to mature faster than those around you.
Agree! I’ve always wanted stable love, married twice, now 52 with two abusive marriages behind me and three grown or near-grown sons. I still crave a wing to be under … even though I’m tons stronger than most men I know. “Choosing” may not mean what you think it means, because you never know what you choose. I do know a loyal, stable, exclusive, sacred-bond-based relationship was/is my right path, even if we humans are so rarely up to the challenge.
As someone who chose art and independence over marriage and family, and who feels, at 39, incredibly fulfilled by that choice, I refuse to cede happiness to those who married young. And as someone who has been on the receiving end of much resentment from married mothers at work and in my social circle (jealous I could go back to school in my 30s, or travel, or simply seem fulfilled) I think this essay, while elegantly written, presents a false binary. Experience comes in many forms, as does happiness, and if we’re lucky, we get to work at them all our lives.
Yeah, we get one life and our experiences are our experiences. Growing up I observed so much negativity toward single woman by married woman! They were so "jealous" of their free time. I thought these single women had great lives! They always seemed to cultivate creative hobbies out of work or even find jobs that nurtured their creativity!
Happy to hear your story! I do appreciate being single a lot.
Beautiful essay. Something that occurred to me as I was reading is how we make life needlessly complicated by asserting these strict binaries. What if Simon and Eileen just kept dating? What if they had nurtured a real, stable relationship, and then married when the time was right for them? It's easy to romanticize young marriage, but the stats are what they are. Folks who get married in their early twenties are at a significantly higher risk of divorce. Anyone who has come out on the other side and reached their late twenties and beyond knows why: the things we worry about, the anxieties and immaturities we possess, not to mention the financial instability, make for a powder keg. Something levels out as we get older. We realize that the silly things we used to worry about don't matter. Call me a romantic, but you can still have enriching, exciting experiences with a loving partner by your side. It doesn't have to be "either/or."
I had financial stability and it still did not work out. I suspect a larger part might be differences in maturity, but I could be wrong. Most of the financial insecurity comes from non-wealthy people trying to live in wealthy places like NYC or California.
Thank you for this article. It's put into words very accurately the "idolatry of experience" that I've gradually become aware of since my college years. It's very comforting to me that people are starting to independently wake up to this reality.
If I may make some observations from the Catholic tradition of Christianity, much of which is shared by other Christians...
St. Thomas Aquinas, drawing on Aristotle, made "happiness" (ευδαιμονία) the centerpiece of his moral theology. This tradition of thought believes that the human person - and all lifeforms, in their own way - desires the Good by nature. To desire is to desire the Good: you literally cannot desire anything else. Happiness is the fulfillment of this desire. The question then becomes whether and how far this desire can be fulfilled.
Keeping on the worldly level, Aristotle basically saw this fulfillment of desire as the attainment of wisdom: to grasp truth about reality, including oneself. Because this wisdom is what enables living the good life. Happiness comes ultimately from living a good life. Further, with other Greek philosophers, the task of philosophy was to be able to die well, and to die well was to be wise and good by the end of your life. Not successful, not well known, not powerful, not wealthy, and not "experienced."
Now, a generous reading of the cult of experience is that, actually, people are trying to gain experience for the sake of what Aristotle and other Greeks believed was the point of life. However, the operative concept of experience lacks a workable concept of the Good. Without this, experiences cannot really be evaluated as beneficial or not, so there's no directionality (τέλος) that can put bounds on what people are pursuing. With the proper directionality, even bad experiences can be seen into growing in wisdom.
So what's it all for? If that question can't be sufficiently answered, we have a recipe for despair.
Now Aquinas, as a Christian, found Aristotle's framework pretty helpful, because he could say the Good = God. And Aristotle would agree with this, even though his concept of God would be very different. If the Good = God, then in some mysterious way, what everything and everyone is pursuing is in fact God. And not just that, but the happiness that is a sharing in God's own life because of a certain proportion of goodness.
This doesn't mean that there are not many legitimate happinesses, even very fulfilling ones, along the way, but fundamental to the gospel of Christ is that you are simply never going to find true happiness this side of the veil: you were made for more. And in fact, the pursuit of happiness separated from the ultimate happiness we were made for in God will actually lead to undermining our own good: to be satisfied with a lesser good is to thwart attainment of the Good. Hence, Jesus: "Seek first the kingdom of God, and all else will be granted to you." There is an ordering of pursuit that makes life worthwhile.
So, that's how I read all of this. If anyone else finds this helpful, great. 🙏
i think marilynne robinson once said something like, “Might we not all have been kinder and saner if we had said that discontent is our natural condition…”
Well written but one point….there seems to be an implication that the women in question in this article would marry someone rich if they married earlier. Hot doctor wasn’t a doctor at that age. And the same shitty job that Elaine had would still be the same or a similar shitty job married with kids.
Marrying early wont allow escaping 21st century economics
As someone who got into my current relationship 23 years ago at age 17, I find the contrast this author is drawing between "comfortable" and "experienced" close to totally incomprehensible. It's an experience -- rife with conflict, passion, pain, connection, and misunderstanding -- to grow up with your partner. And, although it does close off the path to having tons of sex with strangers if you're monogamous like me, all the other stuff people associate with youth (drugs, clubbing, travel, intense friendships, career flailing, artistic missteps, much-needed therapy) certainly took up 90-95% of my time and emotional energy regardless. I think what this author wants to describe is closer to "staying in your hometown, following a super familiar and traditional script, and lacking individualistic ambitions" than "marriage" -- because there's nothing inherent to marriage/commitment that either restricts or protects a person in the way she describes.
Spot on. It's up to you, not others and not the outside environment.
I didn't get married till 45 and I'd stack my "experiences" in prior years up against anybody. But 26 years of marriage and 3 kids has given me experiences and meaning in life that makes the first 45 pale in comparison.
Nobody gets it all- it's a uniquely American conceit to think we can. Whole industries and thought leaders are in the business of selling that conceit and the pursuit of it is twisting people up in knots.
Beautiful essay. I admired the writing and how it engaged the topic while still doing justice to the novel. What I found really interesting is how it questions the liberal worldview while still using a somewhat classically liberal framework–the idea that everything is a choice, i.e. “I chose experience, but I could’ve chosen marriage and family. Did I choose wrong?” Never in my life did I think “having experiences” mattered and yet I was also very poor and lonely in my 20’s despite being quite religious at the time. Not seeing all of life as a choice, I usually blamed God or late capitalism. I would have to examine my life quite carefully to separate out the choices from the circumstances, and I would probably be wrong anyway. I’m reminded of a Dear Sugar column from many years ago about the “Ghost Ship”--the ship represents the lives we didn’t lead, “the ghost ship that didn’t carry us.” She also frames it as a choice, but acknowledges we’ll never know if that life would’ve been better, only that it was “important and beautiful and not ours.” I think if traditional views have anything going for them, it’s not to get some “better” life–although that could happen–but to have the inner resources to accept whatever does happen.
I married at 22 under the guise of a christian worldview. It did not last. Neither did the next one. I've had my times of independence and my times of seeking love. It's an impossible question looking back because from the seat of 49 an affectionate wing would have done me a world of good and goddess do I desire it... but here's the rub: I could not withstand such a relationship because it ran counter to the beliefs encoded in me through a desperately traumatic childhood. I share this because I don't think we have the choice we think we do. I loved love but could not love. And I can only say that 26 years later.
How many partnerships begun young are this "affectionate wing"? I don't know. Probably both more and less than we think depending on our perspective. Relationships require parallel growth or they become stifling and that is a tall order in this society for a woman who wants to retain the experience of freedom. There are many layers of gender relating to unpack here as well as questions of what it means to grow, how we do this, etc. Most of this so unique to each person and relationship so as to be difficult to generalize.
I was wondering about the binary between experiences OR a young relationship. This suggests either that experience is limited to casual sex or that being in a relationship restricts a broader sense of experience: travelling the world, meeting interesting people, or going skydiving on a Sunday. Is either of these really the truest representation ?
There’s lots more to the world than random sex; there’s more to sex than random sex: deep, connected, loving vulnerability.
One can travel the world with their partner, having a warm tent to return to and discuss the new perspectives gained. Perhaps having children limits these options somewhat, but it replaces one set of experience with the adventure of parenthood.
I say this to propose a happier middle-ground: one might have their proverbial wedding cake and also spend a life-time eating cake. Perhaps I’m missing something about your definition of experience, but why not experience things under the affectionate wing of another ? The wing itself *is* an enriching experience.
I have to say, I agree with this take. I know I am late here but I was just directed to this essay from a TikTok comment.
I’m interested in the discussion because I got married at 23, 20 years ago (after 5 years of dating, yes we were lucky enough to meet at a young age). In that time, we both obtained graduated degrees, worked at various jobs, settled down in one town, bought and fixed up an old house, had 3 kids (the oldest is now 16), made friends and community, adopted a reactive rescue dog, traveled a bunch with our kids (yes we were lucky to have the money to do this), had many adventures on said travels. We’ve suffered loss and heartache. We’ve made mistakes, which we’ve tried to learn from as anyone does. We’ll be married 20 years in May and are still very happy together. None of this counts as “experience” because we were partnered at the time? This is news to me. I thought it was just life! Lol.
Would I do anything differently if I could? No! I actually feel pretty lucky to be able to say that honestly. I love my life, I love my husband, and I love our kids. I have the life I always wanted.
⭐️ Great essay. I would have chosen the affectionate wing. I’m 30, traditional, Christian, and single because still no one has done the Christian thing. I am devastated because I never chose experience. All I ever wanted was the affectionate wing. And while I am highly educated (masters degree) and have studied abroad and lived in many American cities as well, I don’t think the independence was or is worth it at all. Maybe if I ever do find an affectionate wing, I’ll look back and think I grew in ways others didn’t through this time. I never had those empty, hedonistic experiences described so well in this essay that are both exhilarating and worthless. I have always had something higher to live for—God. And I think in the end, my faith will have served me well. Certainly, if I never get married, a part of me thinks I’ll be perversely grateful that I didn’t have all of the affairs because my married friends who DID have them say now that married sex is so much better than unmarried sex and that the men they gave themselves to before did not deserve them at all. I never want the feeling of wanting to take myself back because I’ve experienced that with a friend before and it’s a horrible feeling. All the same—vacillating between numbness and intense pain because of an absence of nearly all experience (both wholesome and hedonistic) is excruciating and I would not recommend it. I certainly hope someone does the Christian thing for me…sooner rather than later.
My husband and I grew up in a conservative religion and married at 23/25, and immediately had two children. We started a business together, moved abroad, scrimped and worried about money, and had loads of adventures, toddlers in tow. When the kids were seven and ten, we settled in Amsterdam, bought a little flat, and spent a decade trying to get more financially stable.
Somehow we’re now in our forties, and have been married over two decades. We’re getting ready to be empty-nesters in the next few years, and planning to move to Italy, just the two of us. Looking back on our whole adult lives together gives us so much delight. We’ve had our ups and downs, left our childhood religion, tried an open marriage, worried a lot about our kids. But we’ve had so many adventures together, and looking forward to another several decades together (we hope!).
I think we’re just really lucky, but early marriage and experience went hand in hand for us.
Sarah, thanks for your input. I was hoping to read someone who came from a similar dynamic (married young, long time in conservative religion, three kids, left that behind, and even had a period we were open, too).
Also in our forties and married over two decades, I feel almost guilty that I had both the stability and the experience... and we didn't fall apart. It's rare.
Maybe it's because the self-assured partners we have or the risks to that stability that made us stronger and refined us.
This is a very interesting and thoughtful essay, although I think one views the question differently depending on whether one feels like an object or subject of one’s early adulthood. I think many women who marry later do so not because they “chose experience,” but rather because they struggled to find a partner. If you perceive your long single years as a choice, they feel differently than if you wished to marry early but couldn’t find a partner, or your husband died or left you, if no one “did the Christian thing.”
I generally do not think regret of this sort is useful; for most of the women you seem to have in mind, to wish to have married early would be to wish to be a different person entirely. You can’t sail the river of might have been: you cannot know what life you would have had if you’d made different choices. But you can know the life you would not have had, and it’s the one you have now. I will never wish my first marriage had survived, even though I would have been spared immense hurt, because if I were still married to my first husband, I would never have even met the man to whom I am married now. I would not have my children. I would never have seen so much of the world; my best friend would not be my best friend; I would never have had my beloved first dog, who died four months ago. I would not be myself, and I will never wish to be someone who I am not.
So many new choices and possibilities for young women since the 1970s, and so much ink and angst spent dissecting it all. What almost never occurs to anyone, perhaps because we dread aging so tend see the aged as a different, lesser species, is to ask women who've lived through it how it all turned out. Think "motherhood" and what comes to mind? Chubby babies and Christmas card family photos? Pumping breast milk at the office and arranging play dates? Doing piles of mud stained laundry and bringing crock pots of food to the team awards night? Endless variations but they usually involve the busy years of young family life. Years single women the same age may be lonely, collecting different experiences. But what happens next is important too. Do those children and husbands stick around and maintain meaningful connections throughout a woman's whole life? Or is she temporary support, a waystation for others' experiences and dreams? Which came first, women's liberation as a woman's choice or a modern individualism that permitted men to replace old wives with new, children to move far away and visit infrequently if at all and relegate the unsightly elderly to nursing homes? Among my women peers, now in their 50s and up, there's not much difference in daily life between those who had children and those who didn't. (This is less true of working class friends and colleagues who tend to be more involved with grandchildren and extended family, not always under the best circumstances but with what seems like more mutual loyalty.) There's a dramatic rise in family estrangement, so painful for mothers especially. At some level, girls and women know their whole lives that we will likely become our mothers. What does that role represents to us? Someone who is revered or at least appreciated and cared for or someone who is a burden and annoyance to be avoided? That view of elder motherhood should and does, if only subliminally, help inform our choices.
As a woman who came of age in the 1970's, married at 25, had children and now grandchildren, my perspective is a bit different.
My children led me to many friendships and experiences I would not have otherwise had. My mother once told me she did more after the age of 40 than she did during her first 40 years and much of that was due to us, her children.
My husband and I worked hard to create strong bonds with our children and extended family while still giving our children freedom (the whole "roots and wings" trope). We are now blessed with adult children who want to visit and who want their children to know their grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and the rest of our large extended family.
This article scared me. This comment calmed me.
Really insightful comment
This
With respect, many women are insecure, atomized, and unfulfilled not because they forewent young marriage, but because basically everyone not-affluent is feeling those things. Most of the structures of social life in the anglosphere are aimed at separating people: eliminating public spaces, eliminating safe and comfortable shared living spaces, eliminating opportunities and resources for spending casual time, eliminating the natural world, commoditizing and siloing hobbies, pathologizing non-productive behavior, and on and on. Marriage and nuclear family aren’t the ultimate source of security and social connection, they’re an inadequate consolation in an atomized dystopia. And they are only still encouraged because they satisfy the productivist necessity for reproduction of labor. (Wrote on this here: https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2023/08/seinfeld-and-friends-reflected-the-atomized-u-s-of-the-90s-and-today) Marriage and nuclear family are not fringe pursuits; a considerable majority of people end up in these structures because in a lot of places that's all that's left to achieve a feeling of social connection and security. People pining for meaning, safety, and security and thinking that it belongs only in the utopia of nuclear family because their parents and grandparents were married and also generally secure, are committing a false cause fallacy. They were secure because they grew up in the biggest middle-class expansion in history, which gave them time and financial security, and which is now in probably permanent retreat. Universal marriage won’t solve that, ask any historical peasant.
I fully agree! Community and connection is not only attainable through a nuclear family. It is funny how many people seem to “feel” the same problem (some variant of lack of meaning) but some revert to “we need to go back to nuclear families - that will solve all” while others pivot to more experiences, but somehow the real elephant in the room is not properly addressed.
“The reproduction of labour” is a very sad and myopic way to regard child rearing and having a family. Capitalism did not invent sex and reproduction. If you want to regard children as “units of labour” that’s your prerogative, but I don’t see why you’d choose to onboard this dehumanizing language and concept of parenthood into your own mind and vocabulary.
Because he’s a Marxist who therefore has to see normative human relations as a hellscape of exploitation from which only the inevitable long-prophesied revolution of the proletariat (which never actually happens) can save us through the overthrow of capitalism, which will magically fix all the problems that bedevil us.
So long as one avoids wealthy and corrupt places (think New York city or California), one can avoid the worst of it. I believe whole heartedly in economic growth, but with women entering the workforce there had to be a massive downward pressure on wages. That is what happens when one increases the supply of labor. Add to that the largest period of immigration in US history, and the labor market looks exactly like one would expect.
It is unfortunate that cities like New York have been so corrupted that they are run for sleazy real estate barons like Trump, with the elderly foot soldiers paid-off in rent-stabilized housing. I lived in Manhattan for a time, and it was vulgar to see how many wealthy colleagues lived in rent-stabilized apartments while poor Dominicans at my church packed extended families into tiny apartments in Washington Heights. But that is what their voters want.
I would strongly disagree with your remark about "commoditizing and siloing hobbies." I think this is a real golden age of hobbies. As a child in the 1980's most people got into hobbies from their parents or grandparents, but now so much is open to everyone. I have watched old engineers show immigrant children how to boot up and program Arduino controllers, personally helped immigrant children build computers, install games, and of course i buy every child a copy of StarCraft 2, the greatest game in human history. The only hobbies that are really in decline are hunting and fishing, which is a real shame. The demonization of guns is so ridiculous. It is the same warped thinking that gave us the Drug War.
Overall, we do have some nasty, elitest places along the coasts that really need to be broken open, zoning laws re-written and culture opened up to normal people again, but in the rest of the US, there is a lot of progress. I am horrified that my city Chicago will end up like NYC, with working people forced out for trendy rich kids, but hopefully good will triumph over evil. So far evil is winning (the city even rolled back 1950's zoning laws, so apartment buildings are torn down and replaced with houses like a suburb!), but we are not giving up the way New Yorkers and San Franciscans did.
If you do not like what you see in your community, go and fight it. Bring young people into your hobbies. You would be shocked at how much time retirees will spend with marginalized children getting them into hobbies, and even buying their materials. Furthermore, the natural world is coming back in all kinds of ways. Wolves, bears and mountain lions are returning to their natural habitats. polluted regions have come back far faster than expected. Chicago's rivers are shockingly clean. Rural areas are probably more wild than they have been in centuries. We need more hunters and fisherman to report on bad actors (they are often the ones reporting those who dump), but the upside of industrial agriculture is more wild lands.
If you feel like you are living in an "atomized dystopia," you are hanging with the wrong kind of people. I felt that way when I lived in New York, but it is thankfully gone now. Spend time with your extended family, and if they are far away, make new friends and get active at a religious institution. I am guessing that you have some hostility towards the traditional ones, so go to a Buddhist or Hindu Temple. Learn Pali or Sanskrit or Gujarati. I married into Buddhism, and my local Wat is full of great people. I visit Hindu temples as well and Indian-Americans are wonderful people. They do great BBQ's, but be careful about cricket games. They are WAY too serious about that stuff. But in general, there are so many awesome people all over the place who have great stories and make for great friends. I think you will be surprised welcoming they are. I know that I was, and it rekindled my patriotism. The Boomers definitely were the greediest generation, but the next generation looks good, and they will fix the mess the boomers created. I have tutored and big-brothered quite a few young people, and man the current crop of immigrant children is intelligent and well behaved. They will do better than any who came before. We are in good hands. We just need to wait for the Boomers to die out so we can fix their mess. They cling to power and life because they know that they are all coming back as cockroaches.
I’m wondering how you feel about all the anti-wildlife activism in the middle states like Montana and Idaho that are so anti-wolf to the point of animal torture? Seems that ranchers are getting massive handouts from the govt not only in terms of access to public lands that their cattle destroy but also recently to huge payouts for “wolf damages” to their animals (most of which kills were never found so gee… one wonders who actually killed them since the payouts were over $300,000 in Colorado). I agree there’s a lot of great change happening and also agree with the corruption on the coasts but boy do I see corruption out here in the midwest too.
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Thanks for this essay, successful because the thoughtfulness and nuance of the writing inspires a consideration of our own twenties.
My wife and I married in 1985 when we were 23 after meeting a year earlier. So we never had the experience of being single in our twenties. But neither of us ever had the sense of doors being shut.
It's been a grand adventure for the past forty years. Of course we've had our share of "life," in the form of issues and heartache and fights. And with three children, like all parents except liars, we've made our share of mistakes, some funny and some not.
I'm as excited about our life together now as I was forty years ago. I don't know if that makes us an exception or not.
I like this comment. I am tremendously happily married partly because experiences together > experiences alone. There are things one isn't free to do after making commitments to others, it's true. But there are things one is only free to do after making commitments to others. Emotional and spiritual intimacy within a long and stable marriage presents an entire galaxy to explore. Parenthood with your dearest friend, and the only other truly invested party, at your side is a lifetime adventure. Art, friends, travel, music, careers, philanthropy, literature, hobbies: all of these things are better when I have him to experience them with me or at least to be my discussion partner. And this is just coming from the selfish "I belong to myself and I like my life better this way than that" perspective; a whole other frame being the idea that I also belong to God, to the people who came before me and to those who will come after and those who are around me, and prioritizing marriage and family is better for all of those entities. Marriage and family has been a playground and not a prison for me. Others' mileage does vary.
Expressed beautifully and resonates strongly with my own experience.
Here as well. The valuable connections come from family. Not from friends or pets, though those sorts of things are important to flesh out a life.
I think that using single=experience/marriage=stability as two poles for how to choose life is somewhat arbitrary. Stability, in many ways, underwrites the success of both modes of living. Being single with stability often means that moving to New York or backpacking around Europe becomes an Epcot adventure as long as there is a safety net to fall back on. If someone has landed a tony, artistic job, I’m guessing that this person has a safety net (upper middle class or wealthy parents.)
By the same token, getting married without any kind of safety net, for whatever combination of motives (love, survival, escape), can leave both members of the relationship shoulder deep in “experience”. The experience of struggling to find a place to live, pay rent, eviction if you can’t pay rent, trying to build stability when it isn’t given is, in most senses, more of an “experience” than say, going to Paris.
Yes, exactly! I bristled at the positioning of “struggle” and “challenge” in contradistinction to being married young. I got married at 18, and was not religious, pregnant, or military. I was a feminist and an atheist and my parents were devastated. Life was very challenging and full of struggle! We were broke and washed our clothes in the bathtub when we didn’t have laundry money. I had a job that was physically and emotionally exhausting, involving matters of life and death, and I was passionate about it. My husband had a mental breakdown and couldn’t work for a long while. My life was much more of a formative crucible than the lives of my friends who would complain to me about their biology test or the weed man trying to give them shitty weed or spring break airfare being expensive. I never once wished I wasn’t loved and didn’t love my husband. I don’t wish I’d had a bunch of bad sex with men who neither respected nor cared about me (we’ve really valorized that as “formative.” What is being formed, a bad relationship with sex?). Life was hard, but I was glad we had each other. We had a lot of fun together. The marriage eventually ended amicably, and I’ve since remarried. People who know my personal biography often ask me if I regret getting married so young and I don’t at all. It was valuable in and of itself, and it’s also easier in my opinion to have a successful relationship when you’re not trying to find space to fit another whole human being into your very calcified life and personality. My first marriage lasted nine years, not a lifetime, but I do think my youth allowed me to grow around my husband like a tree grows around a structure, and even though the structure was removed, there remains that space that love and consequence made and it’s easier for someone else to step inside it.
That’s interesting that you say that. My wife and I married at 22. Both sets of our parents were lower middle class. I guess you’d call them poor in 2025. Not college educated and not much money to carry children past high school. Our similar experience allowed us to build a life around each other. The “tree growing around a structure” metaphor is a perfect way to describe this. I feel like people who have later life family support don’t understand this experience. It really is in many ways a survival strategy, which isn’t entirely an unhealthy way to build a marriage. It teaches you compromise, respecting another person’s boundaries, and a basic understanding that nobody is perfect. I’m glad you were able to separate amicably. Being married early can often force you to mature faster than those around you.
Agree! I’ve always wanted stable love, married twice, now 52 with two abusive marriages behind me and three grown or near-grown sons. I still crave a wing to be under … even though I’m tons stronger than most men I know. “Choosing” may not mean what you think it means, because you never know what you choose. I do know a loyal, stable, exclusive, sacred-bond-based relationship was/is my right path, even if we humans are so rarely up to the challenge.
As someone who chose art and independence over marriage and family, and who feels, at 39, incredibly fulfilled by that choice, I refuse to cede happiness to those who married young. And as someone who has been on the receiving end of much resentment from married mothers at work and in my social circle (jealous I could go back to school in my 30s, or travel, or simply seem fulfilled) I think this essay, while elegantly written, presents a false binary. Experience comes in many forms, as does happiness, and if we’re lucky, we get to work at them all our lives.
Yeah, we get one life and our experiences are our experiences. Growing up I observed so much negativity toward single woman by married woman! They were so "jealous" of their free time. I thought these single women had great lives! They always seemed to cultivate creative hobbies out of work or even find jobs that nurtured their creativity!
Happy to hear your story! I do appreciate being single a lot.
Beautiful essay. Something that occurred to me as I was reading is how we make life needlessly complicated by asserting these strict binaries. What if Simon and Eileen just kept dating? What if they had nurtured a real, stable relationship, and then married when the time was right for them? It's easy to romanticize young marriage, but the stats are what they are. Folks who get married in their early twenties are at a significantly higher risk of divorce. Anyone who has come out on the other side and reached their late twenties and beyond knows why: the things we worry about, the anxieties and immaturities we possess, not to mention the financial instability, make for a powder keg. Something levels out as we get older. We realize that the silly things we used to worry about don't matter. Call me a romantic, but you can still have enriching, exciting experiences with a loving partner by your side. It doesn't have to be "either/or."
I had financial stability and it still did not work out. I suspect a larger part might be differences in maturity, but I could be wrong. Most of the financial insecurity comes from non-wealthy people trying to live in wealthy places like NYC or California.
Thank you for this article. It's put into words very accurately the "idolatry of experience" that I've gradually become aware of since my college years. It's very comforting to me that people are starting to independently wake up to this reality.
If I may make some observations from the Catholic tradition of Christianity, much of which is shared by other Christians...
St. Thomas Aquinas, drawing on Aristotle, made "happiness" (ευδαιμονία) the centerpiece of his moral theology. This tradition of thought believes that the human person - and all lifeforms, in their own way - desires the Good by nature. To desire is to desire the Good: you literally cannot desire anything else. Happiness is the fulfillment of this desire. The question then becomes whether and how far this desire can be fulfilled.
Keeping on the worldly level, Aristotle basically saw this fulfillment of desire as the attainment of wisdom: to grasp truth about reality, including oneself. Because this wisdom is what enables living the good life. Happiness comes ultimately from living a good life. Further, with other Greek philosophers, the task of philosophy was to be able to die well, and to die well was to be wise and good by the end of your life. Not successful, not well known, not powerful, not wealthy, and not "experienced."
Now, a generous reading of the cult of experience is that, actually, people are trying to gain experience for the sake of what Aristotle and other Greeks believed was the point of life. However, the operative concept of experience lacks a workable concept of the Good. Without this, experiences cannot really be evaluated as beneficial or not, so there's no directionality (τέλος) that can put bounds on what people are pursuing. With the proper directionality, even bad experiences can be seen into growing in wisdom.
So what's it all for? If that question can't be sufficiently answered, we have a recipe for despair.
Now Aquinas, as a Christian, found Aristotle's framework pretty helpful, because he could say the Good = God. And Aristotle would agree with this, even though his concept of God would be very different. If the Good = God, then in some mysterious way, what everything and everyone is pursuing is in fact God. And not just that, but the happiness that is a sharing in God's own life because of a certain proportion of goodness.
This doesn't mean that there are not many legitimate happinesses, even very fulfilling ones, along the way, but fundamental to the gospel of Christ is that you are simply never going to find true happiness this side of the veil: you were made for more. And in fact, the pursuit of happiness separated from the ultimate happiness we were made for in God will actually lead to undermining our own good: to be satisfied with a lesser good is to thwart attainment of the Good. Hence, Jesus: "Seek first the kingdom of God, and all else will be granted to you." There is an ordering of pursuit that makes life worthwhile.
So, that's how I read all of this. If anyone else finds this helpful, great. 🙏
i think marilynne robinson once said something like, “Might we not all have been kinder and saner if we had said that discontent is our natural condition…”
Well written but one point….there seems to be an implication that the women in question in this article would marry someone rich if they married earlier. Hot doctor wasn’t a doctor at that age. And the same shitty job that Elaine had would still be the same or a similar shitty job married with kids.
Marrying early wont allow escaping 21st century economics
As someone who got into my current relationship 23 years ago at age 17, I find the contrast this author is drawing between "comfortable" and "experienced" close to totally incomprehensible. It's an experience -- rife with conflict, passion, pain, connection, and misunderstanding -- to grow up with your partner. And, although it does close off the path to having tons of sex with strangers if you're monogamous like me, all the other stuff people associate with youth (drugs, clubbing, travel, intense friendships, career flailing, artistic missteps, much-needed therapy) certainly took up 90-95% of my time and emotional energy regardless. I think what this author wants to describe is closer to "staying in your hometown, following a super familiar and traditional script, and lacking individualistic ambitions" than "marriage" -- because there's nothing inherent to marriage/commitment that either restricts or protects a person in the way she describes.
Omg I so wholeheartedly agree with you. Read my comment below.
Spot on. It's up to you, not others and not the outside environment.
I didn't get married till 45 and I'd stack my "experiences" in prior years up against anybody. But 26 years of marriage and 3 kids has given me experiences and meaning in life that makes the first 45 pale in comparison.
Nobody gets it all- it's a uniquely American conceit to think we can. Whole industries and thought leaders are in the business of selling that conceit and the pursuit of it is twisting people up in knots.
Beautiful essay. I admired the writing and how it engaged the topic while still doing justice to the novel. What I found really interesting is how it questions the liberal worldview while still using a somewhat classically liberal framework–the idea that everything is a choice, i.e. “I chose experience, but I could’ve chosen marriage and family. Did I choose wrong?” Never in my life did I think “having experiences” mattered and yet I was also very poor and lonely in my 20’s despite being quite religious at the time. Not seeing all of life as a choice, I usually blamed God or late capitalism. I would have to examine my life quite carefully to separate out the choices from the circumstances, and I would probably be wrong anyway. I’m reminded of a Dear Sugar column from many years ago about the “Ghost Ship”--the ship represents the lives we didn’t lead, “the ghost ship that didn’t carry us.” She also frames it as a choice, but acknowledges we’ll never know if that life would’ve been better, only that it was “important and beautiful and not ours.” I think if traditional views have anything going for them, it’s not to get some “better” life–although that could happen–but to have the inner resources to accept whatever does happen.
You expressed a lot of what I was feeling too.
This is an exquisite essay. Thank you.
I married at 22 under the guise of a christian worldview. It did not last. Neither did the next one. I've had my times of independence and my times of seeking love. It's an impossible question looking back because from the seat of 49 an affectionate wing would have done me a world of good and goddess do I desire it... but here's the rub: I could not withstand such a relationship because it ran counter to the beliefs encoded in me through a desperately traumatic childhood. I share this because I don't think we have the choice we think we do. I loved love but could not love. And I can only say that 26 years later.
How many partnerships begun young are this "affectionate wing"? I don't know. Probably both more and less than we think depending on our perspective. Relationships require parallel growth or they become stifling and that is a tall order in this society for a woman who wants to retain the experience of freedom. There are many layers of gender relating to unpack here as well as questions of what it means to grow, how we do this, etc. Most of this so unique to each person and relationship so as to be difficult to generalize.
Thank you, I enjoyed reading this.
I was wondering about the binary between experiences OR a young relationship. This suggests either that experience is limited to casual sex or that being in a relationship restricts a broader sense of experience: travelling the world, meeting interesting people, or going skydiving on a Sunday. Is either of these really the truest representation ?
There’s lots more to the world than random sex; there’s more to sex than random sex: deep, connected, loving vulnerability.
One can travel the world with their partner, having a warm tent to return to and discuss the new perspectives gained. Perhaps having children limits these options somewhat, but it replaces one set of experience with the adventure of parenthood.
I say this to propose a happier middle-ground: one might have their proverbial wedding cake and also spend a life-time eating cake. Perhaps I’m missing something about your definition of experience, but why not experience things under the affectionate wing of another ? The wing itself *is* an enriching experience.
I have to say, I agree with this take. I know I am late here but I was just directed to this essay from a TikTok comment.
I’m interested in the discussion because I got married at 23, 20 years ago (after 5 years of dating, yes we were lucky enough to meet at a young age). In that time, we both obtained graduated degrees, worked at various jobs, settled down in one town, bought and fixed up an old house, had 3 kids (the oldest is now 16), made friends and community, adopted a reactive rescue dog, traveled a bunch with our kids (yes we were lucky to have the money to do this), had many adventures on said travels. We’ve suffered loss and heartache. We’ve made mistakes, which we’ve tried to learn from as anyone does. We’ll be married 20 years in May and are still very happy together. None of this counts as “experience” because we were partnered at the time? This is news to me. I thought it was just life! Lol.
Would I do anything differently if I could? No! I actually feel pretty lucky to be able to say that honestly. I love my life, I love my husband, and I love our kids. I have the life I always wanted.
⭐️ Great essay. I would have chosen the affectionate wing. I’m 30, traditional, Christian, and single because still no one has done the Christian thing. I am devastated because I never chose experience. All I ever wanted was the affectionate wing. And while I am highly educated (masters degree) and have studied abroad and lived in many American cities as well, I don’t think the independence was or is worth it at all. Maybe if I ever do find an affectionate wing, I’ll look back and think I grew in ways others didn’t through this time. I never had those empty, hedonistic experiences described so well in this essay that are both exhilarating and worthless. I have always had something higher to live for—God. And I think in the end, my faith will have served me well. Certainly, if I never get married, a part of me thinks I’ll be perversely grateful that I didn’t have all of the affairs because my married friends who DID have them say now that married sex is so much better than unmarried sex and that the men they gave themselves to before did not deserve them at all. I never want the feeling of wanting to take myself back because I’ve experienced that with a friend before and it’s a horrible feeling. All the same—vacillating between numbness and intense pain because of an absence of nearly all experience (both wholesome and hedonistic) is excruciating and I would not recommend it. I certainly hope someone does the Christian thing for me…sooner rather than later.
Yes. I relate to this so much.
My husband and I grew up in a conservative religion and married at 23/25, and immediately had two children. We started a business together, moved abroad, scrimped and worried about money, and had loads of adventures, toddlers in tow. When the kids were seven and ten, we settled in Amsterdam, bought a little flat, and spent a decade trying to get more financially stable.
Somehow we’re now in our forties, and have been married over two decades. We’re getting ready to be empty-nesters in the next few years, and planning to move to Italy, just the two of us. Looking back on our whole adult lives together gives us so much delight. We’ve had our ups and downs, left our childhood religion, tried an open marriage, worried a lot about our kids. But we’ve had so many adventures together, and looking forward to another several decades together (we hope!).
I think we’re just really lucky, but early marriage and experience went hand in hand for us.
Sarah, thanks for your input. I was hoping to read someone who came from a similar dynamic (married young, long time in conservative religion, three kids, left that behind, and even had a period we were open, too).
Also in our forties and married over two decades, I feel almost guilty that I had both the stability and the experience... and we didn't fall apart. It's rare.
Maybe it's because the self-assured partners we have or the risks to that stability that made us stronger and refined us.
This is a very interesting and thoughtful essay, although I think one views the question differently depending on whether one feels like an object or subject of one’s early adulthood. I think many women who marry later do so not because they “chose experience,” but rather because they struggled to find a partner. If you perceive your long single years as a choice, they feel differently than if you wished to marry early but couldn’t find a partner, or your husband died or left you, if no one “did the Christian thing.”
I generally do not think regret of this sort is useful; for most of the women you seem to have in mind, to wish to have married early would be to wish to be a different person entirely. You can’t sail the river of might have been: you cannot know what life you would have had if you’d made different choices. But you can know the life you would not have had, and it’s the one you have now. I will never wish my first marriage had survived, even though I would have been spared immense hurt, because if I were still married to my first husband, I would never have even met the man to whom I am married now. I would not have my children. I would never have seen so much of the world; my best friend would not be my best friend; I would never have had my beloved first dog, who died four months ago. I would not be myself, and I will never wish to be someone who I am not.