|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
Set Me Free: Marriage as Liberation
| Article
# : |
18952 |
|
|
Section : |
LIFE
|
| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1991 |
4,148 Words |
| Author
: |
Diane Medved
Diane Medved is a psychologist in private practice in Santa
Monica, California. She is the author of three books,
including The Case against Divorce. |
Darlene Stanford waited a long time for the right guy to come along. But here she was, at thirty-six, her gown's ten-foot white train pausing behind her with each two steps as she strode down the garden aisle. Her groom Michael Kelley, thirty-eight beamed as he reached out for her hand. For both of them, this movement replaced years of frustration and anxiety with the excitement of shared dreams.
Stanford always knew she wanted a husband and children. But as the years passed without finding that perfect match, she dedicated herself with out remorse to her career. Raised with the post 1960's ideals of independence and self-fulfillment, she pursued a teaching credential and then, while working full time, followed it up with a master's degree and her doctoral coursework. Meanwhile, she fell in love, was ultimately rejected, and then invested another four years in a second dead-end relationship. Finally, she gave up.
But on a plane returning from a professional conference she met Michael, also never married and within six weeks they were engaged.
Now, three years and two babies later, Stanford raves about the domestic life. She's taken the last two years off to care for her infants and has no regrets about putting her career on hold: "I'm finally free at last," she grins. "Marriage and family have brought me what I never could achieve in my career--the option to have it all. Before, I never had a choice--I had to work to support myself, and I had to make work my consuming passion." A forelock of gray dips towards her sparking brown eyes. "Only now do I know that before having kids, I could never fully understand the meaning of either consuming or passion."
Stanford speaks for a growing number of achieving women who are confessing that life as a single person even with a stellar career--is not what it's cracked up to be. Their experiences are surprising even to themselves, coming of age at a time when a common feminist theme was the bondage of marriage. As these largely baby boom women now mature to middle age--with their biological clocks sounding their final alarms--they are increasingly beginning to reassess and even reverse their views on marriage. No longer do they denigrate marriage as inherently oppressive; to the contrary, they now herald matrimony as the key to their greatest liberation.
Two developments have convinced thousands of Darlene Stanfords and their mates that, given the range of possibilities for living out one's
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
