Relax men: She's not the marriage monster Newsweek warned you about
SAN FRANCISCO — When I read a few weeks ago that Newsweek is retracting its 1986 article that claimed a 40-year-old single woman is more likely to be killed by a terrorist than to marry, I thought, well, try telling that to men.
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 SAN FRANCISCO — When I read a few weeks ago that Newsweek is retracting its 1986 article that claimed a 40-year-old single woman is more likely to be killed by a terrorist than to marry, I thought, well, try telling that to men. Newsweek now says that a single woman at 40 has an almost even chance of getting married. Presumably, women are relieved. Too bad the picture of the crazed, hormonal, out-of-time woman is seared into the brains of American men. The 1986 story invented a new kind of woman: a woman of a certain age whose biological clock has begun ticking ominously, leading her on a search for any gainfully employed man to tie down with ball and chain. Understandably, men fled in fear. If, at 29, I’m at all cynical about becoming married by 40, it is because I have spent too much time trying to explain to men that I am not the nightmare image of woman created by Newsweek’s faulty statistic. My own view of marriage is marred by my grandma’s so-far unsuccessful attempts at teaching me how to keep a man. When I learned how to cook at 13, she told me that I was almost ready to get married. When I started college, she told me to be demure and flirt with boys. When I started working and still had no marriage prospects, she panicked. Maybe I should date younger men, she advised; after all, the number of single men in my age group is surely dwindling. The more she tried, the more I rebelled. I didn’t need marriage to make me happy, I’d tell her again and again. Imagine my surprise when, four years ago, the man I was dating broke up with me, saying that he felt too pressured because I was “on the marriage track.” A year later, another man told me roughly the same thing. How had this happened? Somewhere between Venus and Mars, the message had gotten crossed. When I’d say, “I’d like to be married some day,” these men heard, “I want you to propose to me tomorrow.” When I’d say, “I’d like to have children in the future,” they heard, “If I don’t have babies now it will be too late.” Even scarier to these men was when some of my friends began to marry or have children. I remember how quickly one boyfriend, a usually calm and steady engineer, fled the room when he saw me looking online for a bridal gown for a college classmate. When I cooed about my co-worker’s newborn baby boy, another boyfriend, a guy in his 30s who meditated every day, mumbled something about “not ready” and quickly changed the subject. In reality, it is far more important to me to find the right person than to marry and have children with the wrong one. But to these men that explanation seemed always to get drowned out by their deafening fear of what they thought was my “ticking marriage bomb.” What I struggled to explain to these men was that, when I was looking at bridal gowns for a friend, I wasn’t secretly hoping that they would marry me in one of those dresses. And when I was cooing over my friend’s baby, I wasn’t trying to tell them how much I wanted to have children. What I was not-so-secretly hoping was that one day I would find the right person for me. The old Newsweek statistic might have scared some women, but it terrified many more men, who now find any mention of marriage, children or a future together threatening. It now seems almost impossible to tell men that I am really just looking for the same things they are. I am just trying to answer the questions we have all been asking ourselves all our lives: Will someone love me? Will I be alone? My grandmother still calls me and asks me if I am any closer to getting married. But I’ve stopped telling her that I didn’t need marriage to make me happy. Even if Newsweek didn’t retract its awful statistic, I would have still hoped to find love. Besides, she was right on that advice about dating younger men: I’m now dating a writer who is four years younger and doesn’t run away when I coo over a baby. He knows that I’m actually too nervous to hold the baby because I’m terrified it might cry. And he knows that when I say “aaaaw” to that adorable fat baby, it’s because I think it’s cute. Period.
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