I’m a few days back from watching “Gone Girl” — the film adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s caustic, thrilling best-selling book — and feel pretty relieved that I was born without the marriage chromosome. You know the one: the festering tick that strikes midnight in your 20s and is suddenly hungry for lace and toaster ovens. A lot of people really love being married, sure. But I know I never will. And I wish that were OK with everyone else.
You could blame it on my upbringing, as people often do. A lack of exposure to “healthy marriages” (an oxymoron, if you ask me). Not just divorce, but something worse: marriages stuck together on the thinnest of fibers, built on fear of abandonment or helplessness. Marriages forged for convenience and upheld for image instead of heart.
I’ve watched marriages belittle women who would otherwise prevail. I’ve watched the power plays between spouses, and the men always win. I read between the lines better than anyone knows. Unhappiness is best perceived by the unhappy, and I can be — at my worst — a most miserable blue. There are joyous things about binding love. A sense of accomplishment, completion; knowing that your bloodline will live on when you procreate, knowing that you’ll spend your dying days with someone at your side.
But me? I find it nauseating. I hate thinking the best of me exists in the approval of another person. I hate thinking I’m one half of a whole. I hate the idea of partnership, of only sleeping with one person for the rest of my life, of family holidays and calendars and babies that never shut up. I hate ceremonies and poems and unity candles. And I look awful in white.
But what I hate more than anything is that I and others are considered sick women for feeling this way. The first thing I’m asked by friends and relatives after a long time away? “Are you dating anyone?” Never questions about what I’m writing or the places I’ve seen or the great meals I’ve had or the new friends I’ve made — not at first, anyway. Just the age-old “Are you ever going to find a man?” and the great, ticking clock in the corner.
Nobody likes being pitied. But if you pity me for being single, then I pity you because you’re not.
Something like “Gone Girl” speaks to girls like me, because it’s an example of exactly what we fear: that marriage will turn us into unwilling participants in a series of escalating mind games. I personally love the wife character Amy because she’s a villainous, overworked projection of what I know I’d be in a marriage: a boiling pot without a lid.
I like myself best when I’m alone. I like doing things on my own agenda. I like watching the things I want to watch without some nagging voice telling me to switch the channel. I like being a mystery to everyone but myself. And I don’t think that makes me selfish. I don’t think that makes any woman who feels this way selfish, much as society (and our mothers) would like us to believe. In a way, it’s almost selfless. I’m sparing someone the misery of being my husband. And I’m sparing myself the metaphorical bloodshed.
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“You’ll change your mind when you find the right person,” they say. And maybe I will. But maybe I won’t. I just wish I could explain that to a roomful of people without sympathetic looks and whispers.
To quote the book version of “Gone Girl”: “Friends see most of each other’s flaws. Spouses see every last awful bit.” I want my awful bits to myself, thanks.
Lindsey Romain is a RedEye special contributor. She may not like weddings, but she’ll come to yours for the booze and hot dads.
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