So Happy Together

Have you ever watched those late-night dating shows, with the sleazy host who dances and leers at all these dancing women and urges you to call this number to meet them? The girls take turns preening in front of the camera and saying stuff like, "Hi, I’m Carmen, and I like hang-gliding and scuba, and I’m looking for a guy who can be sensitive but also has a great sense of humor." And makes a lot of money.

Crass and demeaning, and depressing, isn’t it? They say that 17% of all newly weds had sex on their first date. Well, here they all are, the 17%, giggling and wiggling and flexing their abs, just begging you to call. They want to meet people. They want to have fun. They are all employed.

I don’t mean to be sarcastic with that last remark. These women hold jobs. Good jobs. They get paid well. They can afford nice clothes and makeup. They work hard all day, and they want to party all night. One day, they probably want to settle down and have 1.2 children. They want that child to grow up quickly, with privilege and ambition, so they can get right back to hang-gliding. As soon as the baby can walk, their mothers are back on the run, taking part-time work, exercising, taking classes. Before you know it, the child’s in day-care and mom is back on the daily commute, along with dad. Whoever gets home first makes dinner.

Presuming it works out…. if the guy they’re doing this with turns out to be annoying or stupid or unfaithful, they won’t hesitate to divorce him.

How far we are from "fair and tender maidens", a mournful, nostalgic song if I ever heard one. Fair and tender: pretty and sensitive. The tragic tone of this song could only be due to the fact that the rejected girl’s entire life was doomed because of the infidelity of her boyfriend. He’s off courting another—she gets to grow old in dire poverty, or move to London and become a prostitute. He doesn’t care if it’s her or some other girl: they’re all alike to him. He doesn’t need her. He go join the army, get a new job, or run off and fend for himself.

Update that song to the 1940’s and you get the girl who gets pregnant out of wedlock. Update it to the 1950’s and you get the devoted secretary who finally realizes that her boss is never going to leave his wife. But update it to the 1960’s or 70’s and the song no longer makes sense. Though it will be a long time before she can make as much money as he does, she can move around, find a job, enroll in a different university, whatever. She won’t be pregnant because, maybe, she was smart enough to get on the pill before she started having sex with him. Maybe she’s experimented a little, with drugs, or alternative lifestyles.

And the 1990’s? Girrrrls. Tattoos. Attitude. Self-defense training. Articles in Harper’s called "Who Needs Men?".

Some people find it tempting to think that those "fair and tender maidens" had it a lot better than our "girrrls". In our own nostalgic fantasies, she did get married, and her husband provided for her and never strayed, and they grew old and happy together and went to church twice every Sunday and never questioned authority because God appointed governments and magistrates to restrain the evil-doers.

On the other hand, it’s hard to overlook the fact that the population of London in the late 19^th century consisted largely of prostitutes—women who, for various reasons, didn’t fit into our nostalgic fantasy, and had to go fend for themselves, and because they were denied access to any meaningful employment, fell into the only vocation left available to them. And as for all those "faithful" husbands and fathers… there has to be a big population of customers to sustain that many prostitutes.

Some progressive social thinkers nowadays question whether men even have a role in our society anymore. Women don’t really need them. They can go to university, get jobs, buy homes and cars, and raise children by themselves. They can decide not to have children at all. In Japan and Europe this process is already accelerating with bewildering speed—more than 50% of adults live alone in some communities. In Iceland, 65% of all children are born out of wedlock. In Japan, more and more women are refusing to marry. Many industrialized western nations have a negative birth rate.

If these thinkers are right, and the social and economic forces in our culture are driving men and women into greater and greater independence, it seems likely that more and more people are going to be spending more and more time alone in the future. I think of that guy in "2001: A Space Odyssey", living in some weird all-white apartment, eating his breakfast, watching the time warp, growing old, and dying, and being reborn as a cosmic fetus. You should see it if you get a chance. It may well be our destiny.

Copyright © 1999 Bill Van Dyk  All rights reserved.