ManhattanWedlock: Never-Married Women, Toxic Bachelors
Lunch the other day. Vicious gossip with a man I’d just met. We were
Discussing mutual friends, a couple. He knew the husband, I knew the wife.
I’d never met the husband, and I hadn’t seen the wife in years (except to run into her occasionally on the street), but as usual, I knew eveiything about the situation.
“It’s going to end badly,” I said. “He was naive. A country mouse. He
Came in from Boston and he didn’t know anything about her and she jumped at the opportunity. She’d already gone through so many guys in New York and she had a reputation. No guy in New York would have married her.”
I attacked my fried chicken, warming up to the subject. “Women in New
York know. They know when they have to get married, and that’s when they do it. Maybe they’ve slept with too many guys, or they know nothing’s ever going to really happen with their career, or maybe they really do want kids.
Until then, they put it off for as long as they can. Then they have that
Moment, and if they don’t take it. . . .” I shrugged. “That’s it. Chances are, they’ll never get married.”
The other guy at the table, a corporate, doting-dad type who lives in
Westchester, was looking at us in horror. “But what about love?” he asked.
I looked at him pityingly. “I don’t think so.”
When it comes to finding a marriage partner, New York has its own
Particularly cruel mating rituals, as complicated and sophisticated as those in an Edith Wharton novel. Everyone knows the rules – but no one wants to talk about them. The result is that New York has bred a particular type of single woman – smart, attractive, successful, and. . . never married. She is in her late thirties or early forties, and, if empirical knowledge
is good for anything, she probably never will get married.
This is not about statistics. Or exceptions. We all know about the
Successful playwright who married the beautiful fashion designer a couple of years older than he is. But when you’re beautiful and successful and rich and “know everyone,” the normal rules don’t apply.
What if, on the other hand, you’re forty and pretty and you’re a television
Producer or have your own PR company, but you still live in a studio and sleep on a foldout couch – the nineties equivalent of Mary Tyler Moore?
Except, unlike Mary Tyler Moore, you’ve actually gone to bed with all those guys instead of demurely kicking them out at 12:02 A. M.? What happens to those women?
There are thousands, maybe tens of thousands of women like this in the city. We all know lots of them, and we all agree they’re great. They travel, they pay taxes, they’ll spend four hundred dollars on a pair of Manolo Blahnik strappy sandals.
“There is nothing wrong with these women,” said Jerry, thirty-nine, a
Corporate lawyer who happened to marry one of these smart women, three years older than he is. “They’re not crazy or neurotic. They’re not Fatal Attraction.” Jerry paused. “Why do I know so many great women who aren’t married, and no great guys? Let’s face it, the unmarried guys in New York suck.”
THE M & MS
“Here’s the deal,” Jerry said. “There’s a window of opportunity for women to get married in New York. Somewhere between the ages of twenty-six and thirty-five. Or maybe thirty-six.” We agreed that if a woman’s been married once, she can always get married again; there’s something about knowing how to close the deal.
“But all of a sudden, when women get to be thirty-seven or thirty-eight,
There’s all this. . . stuff,” he said. “Baggage. They’ve been around too long.
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