A young, married diarist wrote an interesting entry the other day. In it, she admits that she is occasionally curious about the color of the grass on the single side of the fence. She's not the first married person to be afflicted with that same curiosity. In fact, I think the majority of them experience that curiosity. I've met and debated the issue with quite a few married people. For what it's worth, here is my two-cent opinion about the grass on this, the single side of the fence. Are you ready?
It stinks. It's miserable. It's a lot of show and no substance -- and sometimes there's not even any "show" (the young diarist described grass on the single side perfectly as astroturf).
Single life is lonely. [I would type that sentence in size billion typeface, if I could, but then you'd be scrolling to China to reach the rest of this story.]
Really, really lonely.
Really.
You could have fifty friends with whom you get together at least once or twice a month to visit and have parties (that was the case with me until I moved recently), but, since most of those friends are married, the visits frequently tend merely to accentuate your loneliness in the end. All societies are centered on the institution of marriage. The longer some people remain unmarried, the lower their self-esteem goes. It cannot be helped. You eventually begin to imagine that people (even other single people) are looking at you as if there is something wrong with you, because you cannot find someone to marry. In order to avoid their seemingly judgmental gaze, you start to avoid them, thus increasing your sense of loneliness even further.
[For the record, I'm not some homely misfit who never stood a chance with people in general, or women in particular. I have been (was?) quite the opposite for most of my adult life.]
Some of you may be convinced that you would never suffer from loneliness if you were single. While it may be true that some college-age singles (or those a year or three beyond college) are generally not lonely, it becomes more and more unavoidable as you get older. Why? Because it takes more than just you to tango.
It goes something like this:
As a single person, you might as well accept the fact that your friends, one by one, are going to get married as the years pass (usually within only two or three years of one another). As married people, they will give you fewer and fewer opportunities to get together with them. Their spouses and children will come first (as it should be), and TV (also known as mindless relaxation after an exhausting day of work and family) will come second. Once or twice a month, their consciences may get the better of them, and they will invite you to their houses for supper or drinks. However, sixty percent of their activities during your visit will be devoted to domestic issues (arguments, crying children, meal preparation, phone calls, etc.). You will soon feel as if you are really nothing more than a court-appointed charity case who is being given a free meal and a cursory visit in order to ease your friends' guilty consciences.
I can hear some of you now, saying that this won't happen to you. You'll just be sure to meet new, single friends. That sounds good in theory; but it is difficult in practice. You will soon realize that most adults your age, even the billions of adults that you don't know, are either blissfully engaged or stoically married. And, worst of all -- EASILY THE VERY WORST OF ALL -- when you reach the age of 30 (at nearly the speed of light when viewed in hindsight), the "younger" crowd, the crowd you most closely identify with, the crowd that proudly called you one of their own just a few years earlier, will look at you as if you are out of your mind for even thinking of trying to associate with them. Since you don't feel 30 (every single 30-year-old feels as if he or she is still 21), this unfair banishment will hurt like hell. You will eventually find yourself sitting on a barstool in your favorite young-adult bar, visiting with the extremely busy 22-year-old bartender (who is only humoring you because he or she is paid to do that). Soon you won't have the heart to return to that scene anymore, unless you are a glutton for punishment, or are considering the benefits of becoming a lonely old alcoholic (I am neither a glutton for punishment, nor a lonely old alcoholic, although I sometimes weigh the pros and cons of becoming the latter).
A few of you may be lucky enough to meet another single adult (someone just like yourself) with whom you can kill time (for time killing is what it really boils down to); however, single adults are extremely rare. Don't hold your breath while waiting to run into such a person. Also, don't think that they are magically going to make your single life worth living just because they are single too. You'll just end up being unhappy together.
You could continue to date single adults your own age; however, they are even more rare than single friends (this odd fact seems to be an unusual variation of Murphy's Law). On those few occasions that you are lucky enough to date someone, you may wake up one day to the realization that you are "recklessly" tap dancing on that slippery slope that leads to the vertical precipice overhanging marriage, which would defeat the purpose of living that single life that you are admiring from afar. Wouldn't it? :-)
Finally, there is a fourth choice: You could hang out with people who are still single because they are the most pitifully hopeless social misfits on earth. They are more common in our society than "normal" single people. And don't be too sure that you are skillful enough to avoid them. They don't always look like pitifully hopeless social misfits at first. Many of them put on a good show just long enough for you to show a passing interest in them. Once you've done that, you're trapped -- unless you heartlessly tell them to leave you alone (which I cannot do; so, therefore, I have finally decided to live the life of a virtual recluse).
As you may have concluded by now, everyone basically has two choices in life, both of which lose a lot of their luster with time: remaining single or getting married. Based on my years of observations of married couples, as well as on my personal experience with single life, I believe that married life is the vastly preferable choice, even with its large list of drawbacks.
Before concluding this commentary, I must make one clarification: Remaining single, even with all of its drawbacks, is vastly preferable to one particular type of marriage. That type is the one in which someone gets married just for the sake of being married. I would rather live a terribly lonely single life than one in which I "just settled" for the next available woman (I trust that it is unnecessary to explain why this is so). Since graduating from high school (and college, too, for that matter), I have had more opportunities to "just settle" than I care to remember (and a few opportunities in which I would have been ecstatic to be with certain women, but I was too stupefyingly chicken to approach them). I was always too kind hearted to hurt a woman's feelings by breaking up with her (if the attraction wasn't mutual), so I very foolishly passed up on a lot of dating opportunities. I was always worried that I would remain too kind hearted to one of these women all the way up to the point where the preacher says, "And you may now kiss the bride."
