When to marry? A feminist squares off with her daughter
At 23, she’s all for marriage, to Mom’s dismay. When the dust settles, they’re both surprised A text that fittingly began “Plot twist!” announced the latest chapter in Mary Barber’s relationships.
Mary turns to face me in the front hall, curls piled on her head like a dark cloud about to let go. I’ve just fed her a veganish dinner, and I could tell between mouthfuls of kale soup that she was working up to something.
“Mom, I should tell you before I leave.” Mary is recently launched, setting up house in a microscopically small, stiflingly hot bachelor apartment in an east-end mid-rise. “I’ve decided to get married.”
“Oh? I thought you broke up with Frank,” I say, lightly.
“Carl. His name is Carl, Mom. It’s not that hard to remember.”
Actually, it is. Irritatingly, he has two first names instead of a last name and a first name. Let’s call him Carl Frank. And he is hapless, to boot. An easy boy for a mother to forget.
“Not to Carl, Mom. To someone new, someone I haven’t met yet.”
Mary is a tender 23. Marriage, specifically hers, is one of our go-to arguments and up until now our positions have been as predictable as a middle-aged woman at a bar ordering a glass of chardonnay.
Mary, swooning since she was 3 years old over child brides from Snow White to Belle, is for getting hitched right out of the gate.
She stubbornly sees marriage as songfilled days filled with butterflies and rosy-cheeked teapots. I have long seen early marriage as an outdated and anti-feminist idea doomed to fail in an intersectional world of churning choice, a locomotive of pain headed straight for her. Given how often marriages don’t work out, including my own, more sensibly timed marriage at 28. And given my daughter’s emotional proclivities.
Even as a tiny girl, things had a way of breaking when Mary was in the room. But the real danger wasn’t to a smashed glass of milk (her father kept a tally: 37) or a Noguchi lamp, but to Mary’s tender heart. Its perimeter was simply too big for her to defend. Everything affected her. She coped, partly, by demanding happy endings to her storybooks and movies. Once, years earlier, I propped Mary and her older brother in front of The Incredible Journey, the 1963 Disney original, in which a cool cat and two stalwart dogs get dropped by their owner at a pal’s while he goes on vacation, and the pets put their furry heads together and decide to paw it 250 miles home, they miss him that much. OK, as I write this I see the sad underbelly of the story, but I wanted a break, and a drink. Mary found me outside behind the blooming forsythia, her tears sparkling in the sunshine. “It’s sad, Mummy!” she wailed. “But it has a happy ending,” I said to her pint-sized back as she stomped into the house, knocking over the planter of pansies as she went.
The older Mary got, the harder her heartbreak was to fix. She was 18 when her first boyfriend broke up with her. Mary cried for three days. Not teenaged tears, but big, wrenching sobs. On the third day I gave her a Gravol and took her to see Gravity. The movie was set in outer space, what could go wrong? She sat quietly as a so-sad Sandra Bullock reveals her daughter is dead, an untethered George Clooney drifts to certain death, and Bullock subsequently runs out of fuel and oxygen, attempts suicide and catches fire. The credits came up and Mary let loose, her tears spurting sideways. “Mom, seriously?” “But Sandra Bullock lives!” In the five years since that day, Mary has become brilliantly independent, finishing school, landing a great job, and breaking a couple of hearts of her own. She’s developed a wry understanding of the noncommittal modern male — “You don’t say ‘we’re dating’ to a boy, even if you’ve gone out eight times,’ Mary explains with an eye roll. “If you do, he’ll say, ‘We date. There is no ‘ing’ ” — but none of this has made me any less protective of her heart. If anything, I’m more cautious for her than ever. When she mentioned marrying young, I cited its perils, with studies to back me up.
I have an inordinate love of a study, especially where my children’s development is concerned. Meta-analysis, randomized, cross-sectional and the unbeatable longitudinal: I cited them to their rapt baby faces, I cited them to their pained adolescent faces. One of my more recent favourites was by a Catholic priest named Charles Murray. Father Murray said there were two kinds of marriage: the high-risk startup, when you wed in your unformed early 20s, and everything about you and your future is precarious; and the corporate merger, the type of marriage you see on the Wedding pages of the Sunday New York Times of well-educated couples, mostly in their 30s and firmly on their way to success.
Mary knows my long-time preference for the more reliable merger and so now, in the front hall, announcing her marriage plan — admittedly conceptual, rather than specific — she squares her shoulders for disagreement. But not this time. Because what Mary doesn’t know is that lately I have been changing my mind. Lately I have come to believe that Mary may have been right all along and that marrying young might just be the golden pass to happiness.
“Married,” I say, slouching against the doorframe with a serene smile. “Interesting.” “What? No ‘studies say?’ ” “Ixnay. No studies say.” My heart began to change a couple of years ago, when I saw a retrospective of the paintings of Alex Colville mounted at our National Gallery in Ottawa. My mother had died a month earlier. A friend who knew how big the death of a parent can be, even when they live to be 91, as my mother had, said, “Start at the end and work back. You’ll understand when you see it.”
I walked briskly to the final room of the show, trying not to be distracted by walls of astonishing paintings, and found myself in front of a late portrait of Colville and his most intimate and enduring subject, Rhoda, his wife of 70 years. I stood there for a long time. The painting seemed to reveal something important, something I had somehow missed, about my own parents’ 72-year marriage. In the next room, one of Colville’s daughters described on video how her aged parents sat side by side in their easy chairs. “I love you,” Alex would say to Rhoda. “It’s the one big fact of my life.” He died in the summer of 2013, six months after Rhoda.
My parents also had paired easy chairs, from which my dad would tell my mom how much he loved her, often and with feeling. After the Colville show I asked him: “Dad, why did you love Mom so much?’ ” He looked at me as if I had missed the plotline of an action adventure movie. “She is the most important thing in my life. She was the making of me.” Six months later, he followed her out.
Both couples were under 23 when they married, younger than Mary is now. Both wives were initially dubious. “I wasn’t terribly impressed when I met him,” Rhoda said in the video at the exhibit. My mother was similarly underwhelmed, and so I’d long assumed she said “yes” at 21 because there was no other choice: dependence on a man was a given in the wartime ’40s. I’d spent most of my life pitying her hopedashed young womanhood: railroaded, pre-feminism, into a role of conventional servitude.
But that’s not how these women saw it. Far from deriding their determined suitors, they admired their sound judgment in choosing them. Each of the young women bought into the bargain that her husband’s best self would be realized through her, and that that would in turn redound on her. It was an act of faith few of my own friends made: it implied too much dependence.
I decided to call the longest-married person I know. Marsha has been my friend since she goaded me into mocking God in the schoolyard of St. Joseph Primary School. Lightning did not strike me dead, giving Marsha her own godlike status for me from then on. She married, to my dismay, when she was 21. They just celebrated their 40th wedding anniversary and odds are good they’ll hit 70 years together. Today, far from disapproving, I admire her great success at love.
“John was just so certain. At each of our daughters’ weddings, he made the same speech. ‘I married the best woman in the world.’ ” Marsha did not seem to dispute this.
My father made a nearly identical toast at my own wedding in 1983, but his kind of marriage sounded corny to us, even on our wedding day. Undying devotion was out of fashion. My husband and I had love, but we also had doubts — healthy, fully aired doubts — about the whole idea of marriage. It seemed the wiser approach, and we made a good go of it: we lasted 25 years. But as I walked through the Colville show, watching how Alex never stopped painting Rhoda as that central fact of his life, I thought, what if my husband had been that certain of me? And what if I had seen it as my due? I don’t believe in regret. But I wanted at least to understand these early matches, for my daughter.
A few days after our front-hall talk, I told Mary over a late-spring lunch that I had a study to share after all.
“I knew it!” she said with a gloating grin. “Well, it’s more my own study.” In the marriages I looked at, I began, the early leap wasn’t the risky part, as I had once thought, it was the golden pass: by starting out young together, they each became someone they never would have been were it not for the other. When they said they would be nothing without the other, they meant it literally. And they never doubted it, even 70 years later. The very stuff of a happy marriage, in other words, the kind you’d expect to find if you checked in on a pair of Jane Austen newlyweds, 50 years on.
I was enjoying the sound of my theory. Mary looked satisfyingly grave. “Remember,” I said, “he must be sure of you, and never doubt that you deserve it.” I sounded like a member of an Anita Bryant cult — it’s alarming how conservative advice to one’s children can sound — but for Mary it also felt true.
A few weeks later, my new iPhone pinged prettily next to me in bed. It was a text from Mary. Four texts, to be precise. She sends them one sentence at a time.
“Plot twist!” it said. “I’m working things out with Carl. Not jumping back in.” Pause, ping. “Cautiously optimistic.”
That woke me up. Good God, Carl Frank. He was unformed, half-baked at best. A beret-wearing barista/photographer living in a basement rental. The only thing he had to recommend him was his inexhaustible devotion to Mary.
I began to ping back. “No need to rush,” I typed. I spent the next two hours plotting how to drive a wedge between Mary and Carl. At 4 a.m., I decided to look at his photos on Instagram. Nicely framed. One astonishing shot of Mary that seemed lit from within like a Caravaggio portrait.
Colville wrote in the last years of his life, “I think of things as beginning rather than ending.”
I can’t guarantee Mary a happy ending now, if I ever could. But maybe I — I mean, Mary — could make something of Carl, for a happy beginning. That’s a good start.
Postscript: After this piece was written, Mary decided Carl wasn’t the one. There’s someone new. Hope springs.
is the editor-in-chief of Star Metro National. She is based in Toronto. I’d spent most of my life pitying my mother’s hope-dashed young womanhood: railroaded, pre-feminism, into a role of conventional servitude