Here’s an article about the terrible loneliness of single, childless women in middle age:
Gen X women are the loneliest generation of adults right now because they’re the first group who were promised friendship would be enough
I’m glad the article exists but the framing is strange. The passive voice is doing a lot of work in the title. “They were promised”, by whom? Who does this kind of promising? Who takes such promises seriously?
An adult person is fully responsible for their life strategy. If you make a decision to stay single, you own the decision. The article is right in that a single, childless life is different at its core from the life of a married parent. And it’s not about people remembering your appointments or having names to put on the emergency contact form. Here’s how the article puts it, and it’s completely mistaken:
What partnership gives is something different: the person who knows how Monday went because they were in the next room for it, who asks about the appointment without being reminded there was one, who witnesses the ordinary days and not just the significant ones.
Seeing things this way is a tragic, tragic mistake, and I don’t use this word lightly. You can’t treat people like objects, like consumer goods that are supposed to give, give, give. It’s not about what people can give you. It’s about what you can give them. As a wife, a husband, a parent, or an unmarried friend, the whole point is the enjoyment of giving. If you made a decision to organize your life outside of the regular arrangement of marriage and parenthood, it is your task to conceptualize your own life.
The article never abandons its stance of pouty, aggrieved passivity. Here’s another example:
What they’re starting to let themselves want isn’t complicated or dramatic. It’s mostly the ordinary things a primary relationship provides quietly—someone to come home to, someone who asks, someone who is just there for the ordinary version of them and not only the version that shows up when there’s something to get through. They were told they didn’t need those things, that wanting them was something they’d outgrown or never needed in the first place.
Again, here’s the idea that “a primary relationship”, which is a clunky way of saying “marriage”, is supposed to “provide.” Again, there’s the passivity of “they were told” by some unnamed forces that, seemingly, control these supposedly independent women to an extraordinary degree.
A small child is a raging maw of need. There is never enough love, attention, and care that you can give them. There is always room for more. You fill your child with love like a seemingly bottomless vessel. It is only gradually that a child accumulates enough of this fuel to start to learn to enjoy giving. An adult who sees their role primarily as somebody who needs to be given instead of somebody who gives will not be happy whether they are married or single. Because such person is not really an adult.
Female liberation somehow turned into being liberated from adulthood. I observe this in fiction, and we can clearly see it in this article. Friendships are the most important thing in life to a child between toddlerhood and adulthood. What the article describes are extremely infantile women. Singlehood is not the cause. It’s an effect. Mind you, I’m not saying this about all single people. I am speaking specifically about the type of women described in this article.
The article discusses an existing phenomenon. It fails, however, because the author is incapable of locating the real reason for what she describes.
Clarissa's Blog 
https://x.com/i/status/2053560589327180255
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My experience bears this out. Students are sceptical while oldsters enact great enthusiasm.
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It’s also older people who think AI “art” looks good (proud to say this does not include my own parents)
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I begin to think it’s a measure of cognitive capacity. Right up there with how well you remember names, how often you get lost in your town, keeping track of what day it is, and what you did this morning… soon enough it’ll be added to the dementia scoresheet.
ethyl
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LOL ;-D
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“The article discusses an existing phenomenon. It fails, however, because the author is incapable of locating the real reason for what she describes.”
Hmmm, there is the unfortunate female trait of employing euphemism to mask reality, particularly when other females created the situation. No doubt this once helped to maintain in-group solidarity, useful behavior aiding mothers and children in past harsh times, but it does allow miscreants to continue, rather than correct, behavior(s).
Each wave of feminism from the 1848 Declaration of Sentiments onward has become increasingly irrational and more spiteful, always demanding additional preferential treatment, more unearned positions. Some Silent/Boomer mothers even advised their daughters to waste their fertile youth on college and careers, to “experience” the world before marriage, and that no-fault will quickly remedy any unhappy marital situation.
Well, apparently “the chickens have come home to roost” for some of Gen X, and likely for more in Millennials and possibly Gen Z. Some of the latter generations secured wide open DEI rather than the somewhat disguised AA — so subsequently more will likely be unable to secure a husband with equal or superior wealth/status. Oops, clearly some people stepped on her…..
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// It is only gradually that a child accumulates enough of this fuel to start to learn to enjoy giving.
At which age is it supposed to happen?
I am not sure I agree 100% with your main point since giving is supposed to go both ways for a marriage to be worth preserving. Wanting somebody to be there for you is natural for both genders.
After becoming a single mother, I got additional appreciation for what a good husband is supposed to be for, as the second full-time parent and also as financial support. I do not see women who expect that as infantile.
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What if the husband gets sick? Unemployed? Disabled?
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// What if the husband gets sick? Unemployed? Disabled?
It can happen to anyone, but few people enter marriage with somebody who is perpetually unemployable and gravely disabled. True for both genders, again.
But you haven’t answered the question re child development. 🙂
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Any marriage will encounter illness, financial problems, fertility issues, difficult pregnancies, colicky babies, complicated relatives, grief, pain and upheaval. The idea that it’s all about coming home and he asks you about your day is a projection of a relationship between Mommy and a very young child who comes home from school. I started thinking about it, and I can’t remember my husband ever asking me how my day went. Usually, I have to chase him, pin him down, and inflict the story on him. 🤣🤣🤣
As for children, the toughest age for me was between 2 and 5. They sleep a lot less but can’t reliably entertain themselves. And they need a lot of repetitive playing. I would play the same game with Klara 50 times a day. And then the next day. And the next. They need it because they learn something crucial from the repetition. The same song, the same story. You are ready to climb the walls from the repetitiveness.
By age 6, they start reading and playing by themselves more. By 9 it’s sheer paradise because you can finally have conversations that are interesting to you. They start volunteering to help around the house in a way that’s actually helpful and not in a way that requires you to clean for 2 hours after their help. 🤣🤣
I highly recommend telling her a lot of stories through the 2-5 year old time period. They get used to perceiving the world through narrative. They start creating their own stories. This segues into listening to Audiobooks, then to reading and writing their own books.
There is no hack for the 2-5 era. But it’s so much easier after that, I promise.
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Of course, there must be love and mental closeness imo in a happy marriage, so “what a good husband is supposed to be for” was not the best wording. Not only for that, but for that too.
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