Singleness and Selfhood

I'm usually an avid NPR listener, but lately I've found myself having to shut the radio off in annoyance.  Today was one of those days.  Tom Ashbrook on WBUR was interviewing Rebecca Traister, author of a new book entitled, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation.  Now, to be perfectly fair I didn't listen to the whole interview (because I turned it off), and I haven't read the book, so I don't know all of what Ms. Traister had to say.  However, I did read her NPR interview with Terry Gross.  And so I feel a bit more comfortable commenting on what I briefly heard on the radio this morning.

Tom Ashbrook raised the question that the choice to delay marriage is seen by some as a choice to prolong adolescence.  I wish there were a transcript of Mr. Ashbrook's interview, but Ms. Traister responded by saying, essentially, that she disagrees: delaying marriage means that you have to take on more responsibilities (like, for instance, learning how to do handy-man type jobs, managing one's budget all on one's own, etc.), and that means you're more "independent" and therefore more of an adult.  As she said in her interview with Ms. Gross:

. . . what happens is that men and women wind up living more independently in the world for more years, and both of them wind up accruing skills, both professional and domestic, so that by the time - if you're talking about hetero couples - by the time men and women are meeting and partnering and marrying, it's much more likely that the woman knows how to use a drill and do the laundry and the man she may be meeting and partnering with also knows how to do his laundry and feed himself and use a drill. . .

To me equating "adulthood" with a woman's ability to use a drill and a man's ability to cook is a rather doubtful proposition.  But all right, yes, I understand that she was making a broader point about independence and also about the ability for people to enter into marriages with a more balanced sense of how to share domestic labor.  And I do agree that we have done an awful job at teaching our adolescents these basic skills, meaning that they have to learn how to do them as adults.

But acquiring a certain skill set or even being "independent" is not what makes you an adult.  The reason marriage is (or was) seen as a marker of adulthood is because it is (or was) the most important commitment beyond one's self that a person could make.  It binds you to another for the rest of your life.  It is this sense of commitment that makes one an adult - this ability to make an existential choice to devote your life to someone (or Someone) bigger than yourself - that is the marker of adulthood.

Then Mr. Ashbrook raised the question of "selfishness," to which Ms Traister replied to the effect that we, as a society, have a hard time seeing women as people who have "selves" that need to come "first."  This is where I turned off the radio.  All right, yes, patriarchy and misogyny have stripped women of their sense of selfhood - I understand that, I really do, and it upsets me too.  But the idea that we can even have a "self" independent of commitment to others strikes me as fundamentally flawed.  We don't lose our sense of selfhood when we commit ourselves to another person in marriage - we find ourselves.

That's not to say that we have to get married in order to have full selfhood.  The Catholic Church, with its communities of celibate men and women, has certainly never taught this.  Even for non-religious, the Church has affirmed the single life as a vocation.  But regardless of our marital status, we do have to have a certain level of selflessness, and an ability to commit fully and entirely to another person (or Person), in order to discover who we really are - not what we can do or accomplish, but who we really are, our virtues, our vices, our deepest hopes and fears, the source of our hope and our faith.  We must die to self to find one's self.

We are defined by who we love, and making a commitment like marriage ought to be an affirming statement of such a definitive love.  Unfortunately in our society it often isn't.  So perhaps it's a good sign that some are rejecting a flawed institution.  Certainly the increasing numbers of people opting out of marriage should make those of us who are its proponents rethink how this institution is lived and experienced.  But I wouldn't want to throw out the baby with the bathwater.  Marriage, at its best, isn't about nice feelings and finding someone who "complements your lifestyle" (or, as Ms. Traister puts it, who will "improve on the life" that you are building).  It's about growing in virtue, growing as a human being, learning how to love and give yourself to another.  And that's what's missing in the discussion.