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A Place to Lay My Heart

Jill

I often read Modern Love for laffs because it is often ridiculous and self-indulgent and overly-dramatic — in a great, great way — but this week’s version, by Elisabeth Eaves, is most genuinely good one I’ve read in a while (and “good” as in “actually good,” not as in “makes me snicker and that is good”). Also maybe I have the wander-bug and the relationship-phobia and so I can relate to it more than a little.

50 thoughts on A Place to Lay My Heart

  1. Hmmm. . . glad to know I’m not the only one who occasionally finds it a ridiculous column (though, perhaps because I tend toward the sentimental, I would say I only regard every other column that way.) There was one in 2010 about a woman trying to get her comatose father’s pacemaker removed, which was . . . sobering, and thought-provoking.

    This particular article makes me nauseated, primarily with envy. . . not good envy. Envy, maybe, of having the opportunities to so thoroughly explore oneself. I guess being (somewhat) irrevocably rooted can look attractive if you are naturally gifted as a wanderer (and by that I mean, gifted in the finding/receiving of resources to do your wandering, which not everyone is), but when being rooted in a place not of your own choice looks like the only option, it is. . . less appealing.

  2. I really could not relate to the author’s problems and experiences. It’s great that in the end (I really wondered when the author would get around to making her point, and not telling us how ridiculously well-traveled she is) she and her jet-set-match were able to find love and become “settled”. I found this piece to be definitely self-indulgent, and the author… well, let’s just say this reminded me: “Oh, right…that’s why I ignore Modern Love”. I guess I could just do a dramatic interpretation of this article, for the “laffs”, of course. I doubt many would find the author’s story to be particularly relatable .

  3. Ugh, really Jill? The whole thing is a self-indulgent travelog cum relationship confessional. Oh noes! I liked being paid to explore the world but at the same time it was really, really hard because relationships!

    Believe it or not, most of us would kill to be in the position of deciding whether to pursue our travel writing career or settle down to the possibility a fulfilling relationship in a big city. We just don’t have that choice. That’s not to begrudge anyone who gets that opportunity as such, just that I wish they could spend the next six months in a service job in the middle of nowhere so they could be reminded how lucky they are, and how crass it is to write a self-pitying column on their own lives.

  6. I think there are more universal undercurrents in this article (below perhaps what may be self-indulgent) — those of wanting to find and choose a place of your own, of being afraid that the choices you make now will close off your future choices forever, that you’ll get so far in and never be able to get back out to the place you dreamed of.

    I don’t think it’s particularly unjust to the original article to speak to the inherent bittersweetness of the fact that the opportunities (in this case, ability to travel around the world) one person no longer wants can’t just be passed along to those who desperately still do. I’m standing at a different (earlier) stage in my life than the author, and right now it’s almost painful to conceive of someone who has had so many chances to travel that they are unsure of wanting to do more of it, but I can relate to the sense of wanting to have a place of my own.

  7. Didn’t take long for someone to call out whiny rich people for being whiny rich people?

    Yes. That. Exactly. This is a story about whiny rich people. Not a story about a *woman* (you know, a person who also has value) trying to sort out her life and her priorities in a kyriarchial world that tells her both BABIES! MARRIAGE! before you’re thirty or you’ll die alone.

    Nope, because other people also have problems – bigger problems, this woman can’t speak about her experiences.

  9. I don’t care how many haters there are, I loved this piece. And I can also relate. I hardly read Modern Love because it’s exhausting to be dragged into someone else’s drawn out and oftentimes painful saga weekly, but I’m glad I read this. I love this line: “It was as if my horizon had narrowed to a tunnel and then suddenly expanded, giving me back the whole world.” Whether you are single, coupled, a sister-wife, what have you, THIS is the most important thing for women especially to know. That there’s a possibility of changing your horizon, however you want it, and you are in charge of that. I feel like people get tied down in shitty relationships too often in part because this gets forgotten.

  10. Yes. That. Exactly. This is a story about whiny rich people. Not a story about a *woman* (you know, a person who also has value) trying to sort out her life and her priorities in a kyriarchial world that tells her both BABIES! MARRIAGE! before you’re thirty or you’ll die alone.

    Nope, because other people also have problems – bigger problems, this woman can’t speak about her experiences.

    No one said that. You are just projecting. Are we not allowed to complain about wealth privilege now? It is a story about kyriarchy. Its still loaded with wealth privilege. As Holly said, was listing all the cool places she went really a necessary facet of the story? She could have gotten to the point without several paragraphs about how many opportunities she had that other people didn’t.

  11. I’m projecting?

    You decide that whatever she has to say is not valuable because you perceive her to have a vector of privilege and I’m projecting?

    Either you’re clueless or you’re trying to drown out a woman’s voice about her experiences with misogyny by talking about class privilege. Guessing by your misuse of the concept of projecting, I’d guess you’re the former.

  13. Yes. That. Exactly. This is a story about whiny rich people. Not a story about a *woman* (you know, a person who also has value) trying to sort out her life and her priorities in a kyriarchial world that tells her both BABIES! MARRIAGE! before you’re thirty or you’ll die alone.

    Nope, because other people also have problems – bigger problems, this woman can’t speak about her experiences.

    I was going to write this, but Kristen J said it better.

  14. It is a story about kyriarchy. Its still loaded with wealth privilege.

    You know what, it is! And you know what else? My personal stories are loaded with white privilege and class privilege too. Because I have white and class privilege! I’m going to hazard a guess (and I apologize if I’m wrong), that you are male-identified, and that your stories are loaded with male privilege! Maybe your stories are also loaded with straight privilege or cis privilege. (I don’t know for sure of course because I don’t know you, but I’m saying it’s possible – it’s certainly incredibly unlikely that you are the least privileged person in existence.) Because kyriarchy – we’re all in it.

    And, yeah, sometimes that means that our stories can be inappropriate. Like if this had been a piece about how hard it was to be wealthy and how much easier and nicer it would be not to be wealthy (which would be BS), rather than a story about love and relationships which also happened to a person who is relatively wealthy and thus cannot tell an honest story about herself if she’s pretending that she doesn’t have that privilege. Could her life be harder? Sure! Doesn’t seem like she’s claiming otherwise. Or that Jill is.

    Since when was “complete lack of privilege” a prerequisite from telling a personal story?

    And there’s nothing wrong with not finding the story particularly moving or personally resonant or enjoyable. I didn’t! I was kind of bored with it – it’s not my lifestyle and it’s not a problem I’m particularly facing right now. But it’s absurd to turn around and excoriate it on so flimsy a principle as, “What’s she got to complain about? She is clearly privileged on a particular dimension! That invalidates her life experiences entirely.” I mean, why don’t we all just sit here very quietly then? What is the complaint, really? That because she has travelled extensively, then it is inappropriate for her to have struggled with her identity and her relationships? How the hell do those two things go together? How does one cancel out the other? Or is it that Jill is being chastised for daring to put up a post that somehow doesn’t meet the Ever-Lovin’ Feminist Standards of Ideological Purity again?

    (I should be clear, in case anyone wonders, I think HollyER’s reaction makes sense – it’s not a relatable story for everyone, me included, and although I think “self-indulgent” is kind of the point for a personal story like this, that style lacks universal appeal as well. It’s Matt and Stubborn Kind of Fellow’s attacks on the author as whiny and ungrateful that get my hackles raised.)

  15. As Holly said, was listing all the cool places she went really a necessary facet of the story? She could have gotten to the point without several paragraphs about how many opportunities she had that other people didn’t.

    Also, for fuck’s sake – it’s a piece in a newspaper. You better fucking BELIEVE that they want their writers to include details like that, because they are trying to appeal to a particular demographic of readers whom they believe will find that entertaining and interesting and not insulting. Also, if the story is too short to seem like a complete narrative, then what’s the fucking point? Not to mention that it looks like she’s a TRAVEL WRITER. The expectation would be that TRAVEL would be discussed as a rather salient point in the whole thing. So why the fuck does any of that make the columnist, who has a vested interest in, you know, doing her job well enough to keep it and even advance, whiny and self-indulgent?

  16. By the way, Matt, how is it you’re so sure this woman was rich in the first place? Do you really think that travel writers are paid a lot of money, apart from having their expenses paid? Are you so sure that when she traveled on her own she was a “jet-setter”? Have you never heard of young people traveling around the world on a shoestring? Backpacking in Kathmandu, and so on? It seems to me you’re making a lot of assumptions, based on not much.

    I could make some assumptions about you, but instead I’ll ask: just what does a person’s annual income have to be before she’s disqualified from writing about any problems in her life? A dollar more than yours?

  17. It’s odd. . .I didn’t really find the piece to be whiny, at all. If anything, she sounded grateful and pretty pleased with her life. She didn’t act like her life was perfect, of course (and whose is?). But if she had acted like her life was perfect, that would have sounded arrogant and also rendered the whole narrative meaningless (there needed to be a problem for there to be suspense and then resolution of the problem).

    In any event, I did kinda like the story. I can’t relate much to her specific circumstances (I’m a good deal younger; the only country besides the US that I’ve been to is Canada). But I did relate quite a bit to the deeper themes. I’m often torn between wanting to pursue stability and adventure. Part of me really wants a solid long-term relationship, a career, a sense of community. Another part of me wants to sleep with lots of people, work various jobs, try new things, move from city to city. And I don’t really know how to reconcile these two tendencies.

  18. I can’t relate to it nearly as much now that I’m totally broke and living in Moscow with husband and bebe (not that I could relate much before, hah), but,

    Since when was “complete lack of privilege” a prerequisite from telling a personal story?

    THIS.

    Reminds me, incidentally, that there’s a good publication at Duke that looks at stories of sexual assault on campus. I guess it’s not worth reading, though, because, you know, it’s set on a campus like Duke’s.

  19. I find it telling that two men–you know, people who benefit from male supremacy–are up in arms about how we shouldn’t bother reading or taking seriously a woman who has privilege (granted, travel writing appears to be her job, but whatever, SHE’S A JET SETTER).

    I expect you both to put your money where your mouths are and maybe shut the fuck up the next time you’d like to opine on this blog, then. I mean, you are men, and you do benefit from male supremacy. Since you’re using the privilege someone has as a marker of credibility.

  20. Either you’re clueless or you’re trying to drown out a woman’s voice about her experiences with misogyny by talking about class privilege.

    Kristen, consider the source. He’s quite good at pointing out the privilege women and feminists have, has had no problem trashing feminists, yet rarely if ever acknowledges his OWN privilege. Ironic that he expects us to dismiss a woman who’s travelled because (according to him) she’s a jet setter, but he posts with perfect confidence that he’s got all sorts of credibility. Male privilege. You don’t see it when you have it.

  22. I did not see anyone tearing down the author of the piece for being a woman. I read the article twice, and wondered what the article had to do with feminism. I shared the article with my husband (believe me, I am keenly aware of my privileges, and how if I were to go on and on about my certain facets of my life (i.e., things I never had to work for, yet I am grateful for)), and he too had difficulty with finding the author’s point. My husband and I are both extremely comfortable in our feminist views, and found the author to be obnoxious. I grew up surrounded by incredible privilege, and I have to say that anyone (when I was reading and rereading this piece last night, it actually reminded me of both men and women I know, went to college with, grew up with)(travel writer or not) who spoke of their adventures in this manner, would typically garner a case of the eye rolls and tune-outs. There is so much more I could say but, I’m going to have to let people get defensive, fight it out, and more, as my social worker/clinician duties await me. Yes, I am running late. Yes, I’d like to have more time to edit this, and wish I had typed this with my glasses on.

  23. Since when was “complete lack of privilege” a prerequisite from telling a personal story?

    Yeah, exactly. And I think the author did unpack a lot of where she was coming from, looking at what had motivated her to take the choices she did – I guess maybe she could have done a little more, if she even decided that was what she wanted to focus on in her piece, you know? Yeah, potential wealth privilege is a little evident, but I honestly don’t feel that it harmed the writing.

    I think what does make the story difficult to relate to was its brevity. I would have liked to see a more substantial scene featuring Joe from before she decided to move to New York, maybe? Because when he turned up again at the end, I was struggling to remember who this schmuck was or just why she *had* to be with him. To be honest, I still don’t understand quite what she sees in him, because he’s not developed well enough beyond the archetype of the traveller.

    I enjoyed reading it (thanks for sharing, Jill!) but I’d have liked to see more. That’s probably the editor’s fault, re length, I should say.

  24. Kristen, she didn’t express any of her reservations in terms of baybees. She was talking about her desire to balance homesteading with an international career, and the difficulty of finding a partner when you can’t commit to a country; her spouse lived with the same dilemma. (And her first fiance was the stationary half of the engagement.) I and all my female and male friends are bumping into the same problem: life is buying in. Most people don’t manage to meet partners with the same level of mobility and wanderlust; at some point, they have to stop moving or ask their partner to move with them. Or they don’t partner. This lady won the solution lottery: she doesn’t have to make any difficult choices.

    I don’t see why she shouldn’t feel free to write travel columns, and I agree that travel writers cannot be too privileged to publish by virtue of being travel writers.

    But I also agree with the people who thought that this column was another lightweight Modern Love entry. It’s pretty much Eat, Pray, Love with less yoga pants.

    Also:

    By the way, Matt, how is it you’re so sure this woman was rich in the first place? Do you really think that travel writers are paid a lot of money, apart from having their expenses paid? Are you so sure that when she traveled on her own she was a “jet-setter”? Have you never heard of young people traveling around the world on a shoestring? Backpacking in Kathmandu, and so on? It seems to me you’re making a lot of assumptions, based on not much.

    Yes, young people who have enough money or financial support to get to Kathmandu. This cliche exists for a reason. There are ways to travel economically, but they require financial outlay and free time. Those are luxuries. Backpacking is never cheap. Neither are internships, travel writing gigs, and other abroad jobs that pay virtually nothing. International travel is a class marker, and as far out of reach for a lot people as the jet set, having the ability to get off the continent is being “rich.” It’s fair to say that her essay expresses a huge amount of class privilege.

    I am happy for this woman, and more than a little jealous, but these are happy problems to have, and the New York Times is annoying.

  25. @piny,

    I don’t know. To me it felt as if the first engagement and breaking it off was definitely about Adult Woman pressure (i.e., marriage & babies). And the angst over whether she can ever find a partner, given who she is and what she wants, is the same. YMMV and what not, but I definitely see kyriarchal norms in how stiffled and afraid she was.

  26. Thank you Piny, for expressing expressing my viewpoints that I was failing at expressing (in particular, you voiced these observations in a far more diplomatic manner than I did). Yes. The clinician that never gets a lunch just rebelled on her phone.

  27. I don’t know. To me it felt as if the first engagement and breaking it off was definitely about Adult Woman pressure (i.e., marriage & babies). And the angst over whether she can ever find a partner, given who she is and what she wants, is the same. YMMV and what not, but I definitely see kyriarchal norms in how stiffled and afraid she was.

    It’s important to acknowledge that women face pressure around creating families, but her anxiety wasn’t about ending up alone so much as being alone. She said it herself: the itinerant lifestyle was really starting to wear on her. It doesn’t sound like she got engaged because of Adult Woman pressure, although she may have failed to account for her own wanderlust due to Adult Woman pressure. But, really, who knows–she doesn’t mention her other almost marriage except as a leash. She also doesn’t mention kids at all, which is interesting.

    Her dilemma struck me as very masculine from a traditional point of view–the vision of adult life that requires a stable household and the conflicting adult drive to strike out into the world alone. That first fiance was in many ways standing in for the wife.

    But this isn’t a kyriarchal fear. It’s a real problem. Men and women who travel for a living–people in the military, other government employees, business people, journalists, NGO workers–all have to make sacrifices for their careers. It narrows your life in some very humanly difficult ways–even something like owning a piece of furniture becomes impossible. Some of those sacrifices are romantic: when you have a smaller circle of friends and a shortened timeline, it’s difficult to build relationships.

  28. I liked it. I liked that she struggled and made the choice for herself that she wanted more stability without apparently considering the family issue–she had “settled down” before she met him and it seems that choosing the relationship with her does not mean that he has to give up his life. So often it’s framed that all our choices are at least somewhat negative. I think I agree with Piny that it seems like she didn’t have to make a difficult choice, but some of that is how she chose to think about it. We can never get everything we want–how are we going to deal with it? She’s privileged, sure, but there are a lot of privileged people who are whiny and negative even as they’re stepping on others, and it’s not clear she’s like that, though it’s not clear that she’s thinking about her privilege a lot either. Individual privileged people could give up all their money and it wouldn’t help many other people unless our systems change.

    I also agree with Piny that the Times is annoying, though, in its tendency to have nuanced stories about the lives of the privileged while relegating everyone else to dry statistics or one-dimensional poverty porn. A recent vomit-inducing and unintentionally ironic blog post from “I’m a new reporter who violated a woman’s rights to report a story ostensibly about women’s rights”: http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/10/in-one-girls-story-a-test-of-womens-rights-in-afghanistan/

  29. But this isn’t a kyriarchal fear. It’s a real problem. Men and women who travel for a living–people in the military, other government employees, business people, journalists, NGO workers–all have to make sacrifices for their careers. It narrows your life in some very humanly difficult ways–even something like owning a piece of furniture becomes impossible. Some of those sacrifices are romantic: when you have a smaller circle of friends and a shortened timeline, it’s difficult to build relationships.

  30. Well, it’s a bit of a marriage ex machina, although I congratulate her on her luck. But what if she’d ended up with a guy whose career stuck him in a backwater in Laos for months at a time, or a guy who was terrified of air travel? Or a guy who just hated to leave his home city, ever? What if her own travel was less voluntary, less open-ended?

    Oh, that poor young woman. And that horrible reporter. Why was it necessary to force her way into the hospital room?

  31. But this isn’t a kyriarchal fear. It’s a real problem. Men and women who travel for a living–people in the military, other government employees, business people, journalists, NGO workers–all have to make sacrifices for their careers. It narrows your life in some very humanly difficult ways–even something like owning a piece of furniture becomes impossible. Some of those sacrifices are romantic: when you have a smaller circle of friends and a shortened timeline, it’s difficult to build relationships.

    Yeah, I know…but you seem to be suggesting that there aren’t gendered consequences to these decisions? As you say she has a traditionally “masculine” desire and having that desire as a woman constrains you in a way it doesn’t when you’re a dude. I’ve got lots of friends male and female in approximately the same boat and the pressure on the women in that circumstance seems immeasurably higher.

  32. Okay, so more on the masculine thing…I think that it would be more like Adult Woman pressure if she had felt pressure to build these things for other people, specifically for a spouse. Adult Male pressure is more self-absorbed; I think women have felt obligated to give up fun travel-type stuff in order to have babies and be supportive wives. Her arc reads more like a traditional male coming of age, and would map well onto a road movie. (Or a backpacking movie.) Which is interesting to me.

  33. Yeah, I know…but you seem to be suggesting that there aren’t gendered consequences to these decisions? As you say she has a traditionally “masculine” desire and having that desire as a woman constrains you in a way it doesn’t when you’re a dude. I’ve got lots of friends male and female in approximately the same boat and the pressure on the women in that circumstance seems immeasurably higher.

    I think that social pressure can certainly be higher, but I don’t think that the consequences of either part of the dilemma are necessarily gendered.

    Men have more social support for travel (and other selfish desires), and they may be more equipped to depend on wives, but they are still forced to either stay or go. Even if you’re allowed to leave your family for long periods of time, you still have to leave them. That doesn’t change, and that was the problem she was describing. Not, how do I get support for my itinerant lifestyle, but how do I balance travel with stability? She didn’t really want to live out of a suitcase, or travel alone. A man could have written an identical column–in fact, a man did write a very similar one several months ago.

    She also didn’t talk about the potentially gendered aspects of itinerant careers–like putting off kids until you’re middle-aged, or having to care for small children, or having less leeway due to less professional advancement. So, really, I don’t think this was about her wanting to travel as a woman in a world that pressures women to settle down. I think it was more about her wanting to have it both ways: mobile roots. And luckily, she has managed it.

  35. Envy, maybe, of having the opportunities to so thoroughly explore oneself. I guess being (somewhat) irrevocably rooted can look attractive if you are naturally gifted as a wanderer (and by that I mean, gifted in the finding/receiving of resources to do your wandering, which not everyone is), but when being rooted in a place not of your own choice looks like the only option, it is. . . less appealing.

    Yeah, that’s kind of where I sit on this article as well. Good for her for feeling good about her decision to settle down, but – and call it sour grapes if you will – some of us never get to make that decision.

  36. @piny,

    I think we may reading the article differently since I clearly see her engaging the misogynistic dynamic, i.e., earnest inquiries about the weddings, unhappy years of domesticity, etc. Not to mention that writing this story while female is contextually about misogyny since as you say her preferences are “masculine.”. I don’t think a story must explicitly say SEXISM to be telling a story about women’s experiences navigating a sexist culture.

  37. I didn’t say that her preferences are masculine. I said that her dilemma was masculine. That is, she has human desires that she describes and negotiates in very traditionally masculine ways. She isn’t really talking about being a wife vs. a travelling woman. She’s talking about being a partnered vs. mobile person. She could be talking about the conflict between being a husband and a travelling man; the essay would scarcely change.

    And she actually did want years of domesticity. And years of married life. She just wanted years of peregrination as well. And she wasn’t sure how to satisfy both desires. If there is a shading of misogyny in the story, it’s her assumption that she would naturally stop wanting to travel when she got married. It’s not in the conflicting desire for marriage and travel, or in the belief that you may have to give up wandering to enjoy married life.

    And I don’t think this story was solely or, as written, primarily about sexism. I think it was much more explicitly about gender-neutral aspects of maturity, and about having to make difficult choices. And, given that she had the freedom to make a very advantageous set of choices, I think it was very much about class privilege.

  38. Ugh, I read that book — I found it self-indulgent, and her wanton cruelty to everyone around her in favor of her own narcissism was more than slightly gross. The best part of the book were the occasionally single lines that rang pithily true.

  39. She just wanted years of peregrination as well.

    Which is not something women are allowed to want or to have. Instead they’re supposed to want marriage and babies before thirty or otherwise prepare to die alone.

    She was able to navigate that and be successful and happy, despite the kyriarchy telling her that she couldn’t. Which is a story about sexism.

  40. Which is not something women are allowed to want or to have. Instead they’re supposed to want marriage and babies before thirty or otherwise prepare to die alone.

    She was able to navigate that and be successful and happy, despite the kyriarchy telling her that she couldn’t. Which is a story about sexism.

    Again, never at any point in this column does she mention babies at all.

    This is why I say it’s not a story about sexism in the sense you mean: she phrases all of this in terms of two conflicting desires. Two conflicting desires that belong to her, and have more or less from the beginning. She does not phrase any of this in terms of obligation. It isn’t that she feels pressured to have babies or become some man’s loving and supportive wife or buy potholders and learn to cook. It’s that she is lonely, but also bored.

    “I get lonely, but I get bored,” is a very traditionally male way of phrasing the conflict between the desire for a stable relationship and the desire for freedom and spontaneity. It isn’t that women under patriarchy don’t have fraught desires. It’s that for them, marriage is not about a self-interested desire for companionship. It’s about the duty of offering companionship: the wife, the mother. That’s not what she describes here. It’s not an obligation for her. It’s something she wants.

    Her arc is a traditionally male one: “Gee, I guess I’ll have to accept a little bit of boredom if I want to stop being lonely.” It’s the man coming home after sewing his wild oats to take up a more settled life. Traditionally speaking, guys are also pressured to stay put and build families. Guys are also told that they can’t have both. And a male travel writer could have written this column about meeting Joanna, a spunky dark-eyed travel blogger on assignment to find the best chiles en nogada in Puebla. “I found someone who wants exactly what I want. I guess I don’t have to be bored after all. I win!”

  41. Traditionally speaking, guys are also pressured to stay put and build families. Guys are also told that they can’t have both.

    This is likely wherre our disagreement lies, since in my experience this is not even remotely true. Men are told to wait, they can always do it later, no reason to settle down, go sow some wild oats, etc etc…

  42. This is likely wherre our disagreement lies, since in my experience this is not even remotely true. Men are told to wait, they can always do it later, no reason to settle down, go sow some wild oats, etc etc…

    I think women and men receive similiar pressure to “get serious” and settle down in one place as they get older–except with women it’s usually framed as settling down for the sake of having a good family, for men it’s usually framed as settling down for the sake of having a good career. Generally I think the pressure on the women is heavier and more coercive, though.

  43. Traditionally speaking, guys are also pressured to stay put and build families. Guys are also told that they can’t have both.

    Traditionally speaking, women are the ones told to wait for the guy while he goes out (as in Coelho’s The Alchemist, for example, as well as pretty much every other fairytale/adventure story in the history of Western literature) and achieves his dreams. I realize that’s “just” literature, but it has a pretty profound influence on how these arguments are framed in the real world.

  44. Piny, I think perhaps you may be discounting the fact that even if you leave aside babies and the biological clock, etc., the internal and external pressures on women to settle down and enter into a stable relationship are always greater than they are on men of the same age. Men always have time; they’re viewed (at least by some, often including themselves) as never too old to find someone. Not so for women, at least for straight women interested in men under the age of 75. Again, even putting babies entirely aside.

  45. Piny, I think perhaps you may be discounting the fact that even if you leave aside babies and the biological clock, etc., the internal and external pressures on women to settle down and enter into a stable relationship are always greater than they are on men of the same age. Men always have time; they’re viewed (at least by some, often including themselves) as never too old to find someone. Not so for women, at least for straight women interested in men under the age of 75. Again, even putting babies entirely aside.

    I don’t completely agree with this. I think that men face significant, albeit unequal, pressure to stop screwing around and settle down into adult life. Backpacking around Kathmandu until you’re fifty is not viewed as a responsible or normal choice for men, either. It’s just that marriage, for men, offers more freedom. Men can get married and then travel. Women who do that are bad wives and mothers.

    But I also don’t agree with what you’re reading into my comments. This is what I said:

    It’s important to acknowledge that women face pressure around creating families, but her anxiety wasn’t about ending up alone so much as being alone.

    I didn’t discount external pressure around wife and motherhood.

    I argued with the idea that she was writing primarily about “kyriarchal pressure” to settle down, rather than about a rational sense of loneliness. I think it’s fairly sexist to insist that she was mostly processing external pressure to get a husband and kids, rather than listening to her own conflicting desires regarding romantic connection and career fulfillment. She is actually living this life of hers, and reacting to its realities.

    When I say her understanding of her position seems traditionally masculine–me vs. me–I’m not insulting her or discounting her experience with sexism. I’m pointing to the fact that she also wanted companionship and that she also wanted it right away. She didn’t want to wait until she was 75. She didn’t want to place one desire ahead of the other. And thanks to an incredibly lucky circumstance, she didn’t have to.

    I was also arguing with commenter insistence that her class privilege was not very much on display in her description of her position.

  46. I was also arguing with commenter insistence that her class privilege was not very much on display in her description of her position.

    No, commenter insistence that her obvious class privilege doesn’t mean she should just as a general matter STFU. That women with class privilege don’t have something valuable to say about their own experiences in a misogynistic world.

  47. Well, actually, DonnaL argued that it was unfair to consider her wealthy just because she got to travel all over the world. That is a denial of class privilege. The ability to travel, period, makes you rich compared to most people in this woman’s country.

    And to be honest, I also reacted to the story with, Oh, diddums. That’s not because she doesn’t have valuable things to say. It’s because it’s annoying when someone bitches about how her unbelievably awesome job makes it kind of hard to find love. She is talking about a real problem, but she is doing it in an annoying, self-indulgent way. In an annoying, self-indulgent regular installment in an annoying, self-indulgent newspaper.

    I think it’s a valid reaction for other women to have. This story isn’t something that they would necessarily read with unalloyed congratulation. And that also needs to recognized, not dismissed as “STFU.” Given that this woman isn’t being silenced, and given that the narrative of her class is widely recognized (Eat, Pray, Love) I think it’s an overreaction.

  48. I guess I saw this differently. She had already made her decision to settle in NY when she met her new man. The angst she expressed was because he was still living her old life, and in some sense she didn’t want to be the equivalent of the guy who tried to hold her back (fiance #1). She also could have gone back on her decision and started to travel again (the path once taken, given up, but still available). Instead, she kept to her plan, made it easy for him to remain a nomad, while still offering her life up as a valid choice to him, and remaining open to their relationship (rather than being jealous or whiny). In the end, he was the one who made the same choice she had made earlier. She kept the courage of her convictions, and he came around of his own volition. Good outcome all around! I liked this one more than most, but there are very few Modern Loves that lose me after the first graphs.

  49. Well, actually, DonnaL argued that it was unfair to consider her wealthy just because she got to travel all over the world. That is a denial of class privilege. The ability to travel, period, makes you rich compared to most people in this woman’s country.

    I’m not denying class privilege. Nor am I denying that the woman who wrote that article has class privilege compared to people who have significantly fewer resources and opportunities than she does. But you (and Matt) seem to be using a meaning for the words “rich” and “wealthy” that go well beyond their commonly understood meanings. Your meaning seems to encompass not only people who are actually “wealthy,” but also anyone who travels, no matter how cheaply, no matter how unstable their employment is, and no matter how little money they make. In other words, a lot of people who fall in the area between rich and poor . If you’re saying that no such area exists, and are defining “wealthy” to mean “everyone who isn’t poor,” or “everyone who has class privilege compared to another group of people,” then I have to disagree with you. I’m sure there are many people in whatever country you live in compared to whom you could be described as rich, but does that mean it would be fair to call you “wealthy” and dismiss the value of your thoughts simply because of that fact? Because, after all, that was the entire point of Matt’s having immediately labeled this woman as “rich” and therefore “whiny” — to deny that her problems have value or importance.

  50. Wow, I got a little misty. (not sarcasm)

    I found this line moving: “I had created a life that afforded me the illusion of endless choice.”

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