Hope for Women's Peace with Current Singleness

When I was eighteen, I thought maybe I'd be better off as a perpetual Single. It makes me sad, now, to read about my worries about dating and boys when I was eighteen. I was eighteen. A very young eighteen.

A big problem in my life was the pressure to be popular and "successful" with boys. My mother very much wanted me to be popular and successful with boys. It's a theme running through my teenage diaries. I don't think my mother quite understood how different the 1980s were from the 1960s. She went as some boy's date to the prom when she was 14, so she thought dating from the age of 14 perfectly fine, reasonable and even desirable. She once told me, in perfect innocence, that she had learned something interesting from everyone she ever dated, by which she meant things like motorcycle maintenance.

Well, I definitely wanted to go out with boys like that. My mother seemed to have been so popular with boys, I wondered what was wrong with me. And I definitely thought having a boyfriend would be a solution to something--e.g. feeling so unpopular with boys. N.B. For someone who went to an all-girls' school, I definitely worked hard at meeting boys. 

In hindsight, I realize that the boys my mother went out with in the 1960s were really just a kind of good friend, not the kind of pre-fiancé 1980s girls had. And this may be why, when at eighteen I was trying to negotiate how to discourage a 27 year old pizza chef from phoning me, my parents were not much of a help. What was also not a help was that he was an Italian Canadian, and my parents were not Italian Canadians, and my father would rather have cut himself shaving than told a young-ish man over the phone to stop calling his 18 year old daughter, who simply was not ready for a romantic relationship with an adult, which is what my Italian Canadian friends' fathers would have done, in a heartbeat.

While reading my diary (and when I was 18), I felt really terrible for the poor 27 year old of whom I was, on one level, so frightened. He was probably a really nice guy. Only this morning do I realize what a terrible situation that was for an eighteen year old girl to be in. It's not like my parents ever gave me the slightest indication what they really wanted me to do was give up on university and marry out of high school. Other than, of course, my mother's and grandmother's questions as to whether I had met any nice boys lately.* 

"I'm too picky," wrote a teenage girl to me the other day.

Teenage girls still write to me, what with the book and all. 

"Good," I wrote. "Be picky. You're still a teenager. You could marry a millionaire."

"I'm never getting married," wrote the teenage girl. 

"Yes, you are," I wrote back. "According to statistics, you are most probably getting married. Only according to the averages, you are not getting married until... Let me see."

I looked up the statistics on  Age for First Marriages on Wikipedia. Like my mum, this girl's mother had married really young. There have been times in history, sometimes depending largely on the place or the community, when women married really young. But the when and where of this girl was not one of them.

Women in UK 28.5 years old

Women in Canada  29.1 years old

Women in USA : 27 years old

Women in Australia: 27.7 years old

Women in Ireland: THIRTY-TWO years old (Yes, dear old Catholic Ireland. THIRTY-TWO.)

Women in Poland: 25.6  years old.

The men are always older.  

I wonder if Wikipedia has a chart for Age for First Shacking Up. It has one for Who has Lost Virginity by Age 15, which is both sad and funny, for in more "trad" countries (most notably Israel), there is this HUGE gap between  boys and girls whereas in places like Canada, they are 50:50 in their sin, and in the UK, there are more non-virgin girls than boys. (HOLY CRAP. Almost 40% of the English 15 year old girls had had sex, whereas fewer than 10% of Polish 15 year old girls had.)

Oh dear. I am supposed to writing about hope, not sending myself into a head-slamming-into-desk depression.  Here is my hope:

My hope is that young women everywhere shelve the whole question of sex and romance until they are in their mid-twenties and just concentrate on making friends--female friends, male friends--and excelling in their studies or trades. The early 1960s have been over in Canada for a very long time, and they ended in Poland after 2000. Early marriage is now RARE.

I also hope parents raised in more family and marriage oriented times understand that, with some exceptions, like romantic Young Fogeys who love watching films from the 1940s, the modern young man thinks romance and dating = sex, not pleasant path to marriage in his twenties. This is not just the jerks. Depending on the country, and most definitely in the UK, this is almost all of them, including a lot of Catholics. 

And it would astonish the boys to know this is wrong, terrible, exploitative, when according to the standards taught to them by their own parents, schools, media, government, sometimes even priests, they are perfectly nice guys who want nothing more than to get pleasure, give pleasure in return, and have a loving relationship suited to their age, with proper and loving precautions, etc., etc. 

The solution is neither trying to isolate children from the rest of all society or shaming girls into marrying young to the first young man who looks game for it. The solution is to promote and support girls in developing mature, chaste, mutually respectful and affectionate friendships with both sexes, without pressuring them to have "love lives", while assuring them they they probably will get married one day. Almost everybody does.  The important thing is for a woman to marry the right guy-- and to be the right girl--the first time around when she is still young enough to have children.

*To be fair, teenage girl culture itself seemed to revolve around Being Found Attractive By Boys. And yet there was another constant theme, which was If You Get Pregnant, Your Life Will Be Over.