What If We Never Get Married?

I'm just asking.

Welcome To Cheaper Than Therapy, a newsletter by Shani Silver.

Thinking of the time I went to the Roman Forum and no one else was there. Even in one of the world’s most over-visited attractions, I was alone.

You get to breathe. You get to release your grip on the promise of someday, the pursuit of a person, and the unspeakable fear of never getting married. Maybe it’s not even about getting married, maybe it’s just the idea of love. The desire for love is extremely hard to let go of because in terms of human need it’s not that far off from food and water. If we’re not careful, single women will cling to the desire for romantic love so tightly and so blindly that we’ll refuse to see the present moment as anything worth our time. It’s the constant looking ahead to the “real” part of our lives, the partnered part, that creates a self-abandonment and willful ignorance of the pleasure of being alive right now.

I know it’s terrifying to think about, but you can do it. My worry is that if you don’t, if a generation of single women never stops to entertain the possibility that what they’re counting on for their future isn’t certain, we’ll spend our lives running from a monster under our beds who isn’t a monster at all. The gut reaction to questions like this, and work like mine, is rejection. Nobody wants to hear from a woman who’s validating singlehood, they just want to hear instructions on where the fuck to find their husband, because they’ve spent a decade looking for him and all they’ve found is digital dating abuse. Giving my work a chance seems tantamount to giving up on love, because we’ve only ever known the life of a woman to exist in two states: Single or partnered. I like to think I offer us a lot more, but I understand how these ideas can be perceived as hot lava. When you’re ready to stop ignoring what’s already happening to you, when you’re ready to stop being embarrassed by your own life, I’ll be here. I won’t be gentle, but I’ll be here.