Posted on my Roadmap is my one-sentence mission: “I will be a contented and healthy man who, upon his 70th birthday, can look himself in the mirror free of the sting of regret.” Easier written than done, perhaps, but thinking about the question 32 years early opens the door for opportunities to avoid incurring regret in the first place.
I’m sometimes asked whether I get depressed about not having married and “settled down” with a brood of crumb-crunchers and a little suburban house with a white picket fence and a used minivan and a slightly dopey golden retriever. Usually well-intentioned, the question nevertheless is curious, insofar as it rests on two rickety assumptions: First, that marriage and family are normative, from which deviation signifies loss or defect; and second, that I am ignorant of what I’m missing so therefore I should pine for it.
As to the first assumption, I can only say that I’ve seen many people marry and remain happy together for a very long time. I’ve also seen friends younger than I who have already divorced. I am aware, through my own family’s experience, of what divorce does to family dynamics. A few years ago, when I more actively searched for a partner, I was dismayed to discover just how many women in the 25-to-35 age cohort are either single or divorced … but with at least one small child. Marriage isn’t the institution it used to be, and most families I know have so absorbed the individualist Gestalt that “family” is perhaps more meaningful as a tribal affiliation than as blood-kin identification.
I am not unaware of the benefits of marriage and child-rearing. Should the right situation arise, I’d get married. But I’m not drawn to the institution and I don’t feel incomplete because I live in an apartment with no one except my feline overlords. I’ve seen too many elderly people in the hospital who bet on a spouse and children or grandchildren to look after them in their dotage — and then see those bets fail. No one is guaranteed a loving family surrounding you on your deathbed when you’re in your late 90s. People die; they grow apart, they feud, they have different priorities. When I did pastoral care rounds in the hospital, years ago, it wasn’t all that rare for the older patients to want me to stick around. To talk. Sure, they had families — but, you know, they were busy. Seems odd to structure a life, beginning in your 20s, on the gamble of what you’ll need or want in your twilight years. Yet that’s the message, fundamentally, of family: They’re the ones who will take care of you when you’re back in diapers. Good luck with that.
Life is a series of trade-offs. There’s no such thing as a perfect existence — just a never-ending churn of decisions balanced against each individual person’s proprietary blend of needs and wants. With marriage and kids, you get better income stability, regular affection, family bonding, life milestones. Without marriage and kids, though, I retain the freedom to make major life choices without getting them approved by someone else — I can come and go as I wish, buy or save as I wish, avoid having to live with the inevitable compromises that come with marriage, and if I needed to take care of my mom when she gets old, I’m not subject to the whim of a spouse who may resist or resent it. And certainly not least, if I were to retire to a sailboat and see parts of the world, no one will try to stop me.
The other argument for marriage and family follows from a basic human need for companionship. To which, all I can say is that I do not want for friends. I have a long-term stable core, a middle-ring network that comes and goes, and a large flock of friendly acquaintances. I occasionally have weeks where I think to myself: Self, you need to start declining some social invitations so you can get some work done. So I’m not exactly a lonely recluse.
The second assumption — that I should pine or grieve for what I lack — flows from the first. When you accept the normativity of marriage and procreation, then not having it becomes an emotional struggle, a challenge of self-worth, a grave problem requiring resolution. I think there’s a fairly strong Christian Reformed, West-Michigan-culture thing at play, there, too: If you’re not married by a certain age, then there’s something wrong with you. I know quite a few people who unduly stress out over their lack of a spouse. Anyone who’s spoken to the aspiring MRS candidates at Cornerstone University or Kuyper College or even Calvin College knows the fairytale: You wait for your prince or princess then live happily upper-middle-class forever and ever, amen. Lots of those women end up, several years after their graduation and their weddings, with OKCupid profiles that feature them with their infants. I know; I’ve dated some of them. That toxic culture has wreaked incalculable chaos on the lives of the young and the innocent thanks to the tyranny of impossible expectations.
But I digress.
My biggest frustration with friends who do lust after marriage is that the longer they search in vain, the more out-of-whack their thinking becomes. It’s as if there’s some magical ratchet in their heads that, as the months and years slip away, creates ever-more-unreasonable demands for what they expect in a mate — until they come to obsess after an idealized spouse who could not possibly exist in the real world. In a sense, that ratchet is a defense mechanism, with a twofold task of protecting them having to engage in serious self-examination while precluding relationships that might be “good enough” but are nevertheless avoided because they won’t be perfect. The fairytale always trumps, but the drama never ends.
As for me, I guess I have nothing to pine over because there’s not much related to interpersonal intimacy that I haven’t experienced. I’ve loved people. I’ve woken up smiling with someone else’s head beside mine on the pillow. I’ve known the thrill of a first date, the pain of a break-up, the emptiness of a drunken bar hookup and the joy of bonding with someone over drinks. My closest friends have been with me for going on two decades. If I ever woke up at 2 a.m. with a crisis, I can think of at least five numbers to call off the top of my head where the person on the other end of the line wouldn’t hesitate to leap to my assistance.
I am content. So, having weighed the merits and elected my current path, all I can say is — I think I’ve avoided incurring a regret that would otherwise haunt me in late 2046.