Miss Pickies, Waity Katies

There are two competing and seemingly contradictory explanations for the contemporary spinster. ("Spinster" because those discussing the unmarried woman of a certain age tend not to portray this situation in a positive light, to put it mildly, even when they themselves are part of the demographic.) In one - call it the Lori Gottlieb model - the spinster is single because she turned down the men she might have married when she was younger, and the options have dwindled since. Had she just given boyfriends 1-10 a chance, she wouldn't be all sad and lonesome when #11 never materializes. In the other - the Emily Yoffe or Dear Prudence one - the spinster gave the boyfriend a chance, all right, but too much of a chance, eschewing opportunities to date other men in favor of a commitment that is not in fact marriage.

In other words, Yoffe's spinster should have been dating around, while Gottieb's wasted the best years of her life doing just that. Yet somehow, the two theoretical spinsters end up in the same place. What gives?

One would expect these two outlooks to be consistent. They at least come from the same general view of male-female relations, namely that women need more from men than vice versa. Both Gottlieb and Yoffe argue that women should care less about how interested they are in the men they're with, and more about whether these men will marry them. Both are asking that women, while still young enough to "get" men they're attracted to (disclaimer, yes, I'm aware that women of all ages have options, although not so much so that options don't dwindle... except in Paris, where a woman of 80 can, I suppose, get catcalls and have torrid affairs and shop at the market at 11 on a weekday morning and... I digress), should forget about attraction and put social convention - or, as Gottlieb or Yoffe would put it, what will make them happy when they're 40 - first. Kind of depressing, when you consider that as it stands, it's not socially acceptable for women to pursue men, or to pick among their options on the basis of physical attraction.

My immediate thought was that this is a window-of-opportunity issue - they're just addressing different age groups. Young women are running after Jordan Catalano when they should be settling for Brian Krakow. Window-of-opportunity women, however, obviously failed to settle for their Brians, and are now cohabiting with Jordans, who, though pretty, don't offer much else.

Or maybe it's not an age thing, but that the boyfriends Yoffe's women (sorry, can't keep typing "spinster") move in with are not the same boyfriends as Gottlieb's rejected. Yoffe's live-in boyfriends are cads, bad boys, which is why they won't commit, while Gottlieb's paunchy accountants made it only a few dates until Miss Picky decided she could do better, choosing life on the edge as the girlfriend of some guy Hugh Grant would play in the movie over a sure thing as Mrs. Paunchy Accountant.

This I find not so plausible. In Prudie's scenario, where the woman finds that the long-term boyfriend she thought was a Brian 2.0 learns that he is in fact a Jordan, I (to borrow a phrase that seems apt) can't help but wonder: how did Angela come to live with Jordan to begin with? Or on real-life terms, who are these boyfriends, and what fabulous, Berlusconiesque alternatives do we - or they - assume they have to the conventional, of-their-social-milieu woman they've been voluntarily, monogamously, cohabiting with? (Prudie, to be clear, is not making a socially-conservative argument about how libertinism regarding premarital relations and birth control has worked for the educated classes but failed the lower-middle, but is in fact addressing "strong, independent, successful, accomplished women who are desperately waiting for their boyfriends to pop the question.") The great big battle-of-the-sexes difference between what he wants and what she wants is at most that he'd only worry about this at 30, once everyone else was marrying, while she's getting antsy at 29, largely because people have been asking her since she had her second date with the guy if they've set a date. The man - or woman, for that matter - who's "not that into" a partner will neither marry nor pseudo-marry that person.

And, in the milieu Prudie's ostensibly addressing, in my at-least-milieu-specific-but-I-will-admit-completely-anecdotal evidence, marriages are virtually always preceded by pre-engagement cohabitation, and these "indefinite" cohabitations virtually always culminate in marriage, even if on an individual level, the man-must-propose rule keeps some women wondering for approximately five minutes, during which time they, I suppose, pen letters to Dear Prudence. I mean, I'm sure there are some 35-year-old women whose same-age boyfriends of a decade imagine that Jessica Alba awaits and throw away an otherwise perfect relationship, but this is hardly the epidemic Prudie suggests. As always with advice columns, only the people with problems are writing in, and one suspects the problems that fit a notion the columnist is already fixated on stand a better chance of getting picked.

With the just-settle/Gottlieb argument, meanwhile, I'm always suspicious of whether 'he was too nice' was really the reason dude never got a second chance. Might it be that single women who think along these lines are doing a bit of revisionist history of their romantic experiences? That what's remembered years after the fact as 'nice' was that he seemed too interested in having a girlfriend or wife in general, as opposed to in you, the particular woman he was on a date with? That he seemed not merely paunchy and accountant-ish enough to make you confident in his continued devotion, but rather a possessive boyfriend-turned-stalker in the making, and you rightfully stepped back? (Brian always kind of had that quality - or consider the Jason Segel character on "Undeclared" - but it's a quality that's indescribably worse when not sanitized for a teen drama, even an "edgy" one.)

To wrap this up in some fashion... if in this day and age, there's no particular singles crisis for well-educated women, the idea that structural forces are keeping women who wish to be married from getting to that point becomes untenable.