Why 25 Year-Old Men Won’t Marry You; or the Invention of Jaywalking

The history of jaywalking is almost entirely forgotten today. A hundred years ago there was no such thing as commuting. Cities were shared spaces and their roads were civic blood vessels through which individuals could pick up the benefits of all the other bodies floating in the bloodstream, Main street was shared by pedestrians, horse carriage, and the new-fangled machine-driven carriages. But they were social spaces, places where people mingled, read public postings, caught up on gossip, haggled over the price of wheat, and where kids played.

It was just this social clutter that stood in the way of making automobiles a mass market good. So the auto industry lobbied to create a federal law to ban the presence of pedestrians on roads. Roads would be for the high-speed travel over moderate distances. Since there had previously been no social hierarchy over who had rights to use roads a new vocabulary had to be introduced to make illicit a heretofore-normal behavior. Thus the slur for a silly, uneducated country person was taken to goad the city pedestrian from thinking she had a right to walk on ground that would subsequently be reserved for cars. It’s a soft social rule, one that has been entirely ignored in New York, but that won’t help you talk your way out of a $200 ticket in Los Angeles or Cleavland.

There has long been confusion between marriage and romantic relationships—the two may in fact be existential opposites. But we’ve agreed to accept the logic that marriage is to love what streets are to cars, a hierarchal right of way necessary for the progress of a modern society. Before we’re old enough to know any one  person to think about marrying, we’re encouraged to fantasize about the institution. Girls bear the weight of this stereotyped future-casting, but young boys are no less prone to imagining themselves grown forward into the broad shoulders of a black tux with a group of tearful admirers seated at their back.

Women have had to put up with the ugliest offshoots from this social straightjacket, expected to be demure virgins without lust beyond the family. But men too have had to heave the dumb weight of their own fantasies, accepting the role of moneymaker, master planner, and chief handyman. The Wall Street Journal recently published Kay Hymowitz’s essay “Where Have the Good Men Gone?”, a complaint against the increasing number of 20-somethings willing to indulge their own life interests instead of reaffirming the time-honored tradition of partnering for life. A man interested in staying out til 4AM on a Tuesday night drinking cheap beer, arguing cultural inanities, and then retreating to a studio apartment for an hour of sex with a friend of a friend is a bad man. A man who finds value in these kinds of pleasures is selfish, fearful to take up the yoke of social responsibility by making babies with Ms. Good-Enough.

For centuries women have labored under the putrid good/bad schism by having to choose either spinsterdom or wedded bliss by age 25, under constant fear that any advance sexual curiosity might accelerate one directly to spinsterdom (after a few years of possessed sluttery). Men get off easier in having their value measured by the ability to keep a job and commit to a relationship. Since men are prone to seeding the sheets in their unconscious moments it’s an undeserved mercy that’s spared them from facing the same slut standards as women.

Getting married at an early age is difficult irrespective of sex. According to website DivorceRate.com, people who wait to marry in their 30’s are two or three times less likely to divorce than those who marry in their 20’s. The national divorce rate in America more than doubled between 1960 and 1990, and now it’s given that one out of every two marriage’s will end in divorce.

Even if, as Hymowitz imagines, the worst social reaction to these kinds of statistics is to rear a generation of young people who prefer working retail, trying to start bands, drinking too much, and having sex with dozens of partners, I don’t see the downside. The philandering isn’t noble, but at least it’s honest. Moreover, it’s relatable. Part of what makes it easy to think of men who do this as bad is the idea that they’re actually getting away with it, that there should be some negative consequence coming their way.

Hymowitz’s piece comes after Robin Marantz Henig’s long story on the post-adolescence many people experience in their 20’s—men and women alike. Henig’s looming question was whether or not there was some serious opportunity cost in this newfound meandering. In trying to formulate this question, “good” and “bad” recur in both Henig and Hymowitz, the root descriptor for how to parse the effects of one’s choices in life. “Does that mean it’s a good thing to let 20-somethings meander—or even encourage them to meander—before they settle down?” she asks without offering an answer.

The idea of Western romantic marriage hangs over this uncertainty about good and bad. Before it was a romantic ideal, marriage was a legal obligation to make a man’s family liable for his children. The emergence of Judaism a thousand years after Hamurabi gives a slightly more romantic air to the legal injunctions of who owes what, and who loses which body part for taking a second lover.

By the 20^th Century most all of the punitive fangs had been removed from marriage. It had been Corinthiann-ized and Beatles-ized, but this defanging unhinged many of its greatest ontological arguments in the process. Marriage requires a life commitment, but love is ephemeral. Even in the best of circumstances it wanes, and leaves you in a strange, comfortable, and mildly disgusting place of over-intimacy. So then the life-affirming eros that usurps the libido in younger years has to be remade as a more realistic, entrenched affirmation that love will be maintained, even when it is naturally dwindling.

Romantic love leads people away again and again, married or not. We still don’t have a reliable set of infidelity statistics but the best guesses is that close to a majority of people who are in longterm relationships eventually have some kind of sexual contact with someone else. Tim Krieder quoted a married friend in his defense of staying single into his forties, “It’s not as if being married means you’re any less alone.”

I still want to get married. The need is much deeper and more acute than when I was younger. I was desperately sick last weekend, delirious with a fever and barely able to stand. I wanted someone’s hand to hold. Someone to read the heat of my skin through the palm of her hand and know that whatever was happening in my body would abate. Things were not going to get as bad as it was easy to imagine them getting (brain tumor, Lyme disease, rabies, the Plague). Likewise there are few feelings more hollow than ending a long day of work in the same place you started and realizing there’s no other body in that space who cares about anything you did. Even as a cynical hedging against these metaphysical anxieties, I have faith in marriage.

Yet there have only been three women in my life I seriously would have married. None of them wanted me. They were all good women, and they each continued to have wonderful and interesting experiences they couldn’t have had with me post facto, at the cost of the experiences they would have had with me. It’s scary to accept the possibility of living alone, but the truth is that no one lives alone. We all live together, we just sometimes agree to place arbitrary limitations on freedom of movement. Which keeps everyone on the sidewalk wondering why they’re not in a car, and everyone in a car wondering how they wound up in a big metal machine going 45 miles per hour with a bustling sidewalk of unprotected people a few perilous feet away. And when a person gets in the way of a machine, the machine always has the right of way. Even someone who was just playing in traffic.

*Images via permanently scatterbrained and Shawn Allen

**Street Rivals: Jaywalking and the Invention of the Motor Age Street

Where Have the Good Men Gone? (Wall Street Journal)

What Is It About 20-Somethings? (New York Times Magazine)

US Divorce Rates 1950-2001

DivorceRate.com Statistics on Divorce by Age

The Referendum by Tim Kreider (New York Times’ The Opinionator)