Unhooked Generation | by Jillian Straus

INTRODUCTION UNHOOKED GENERATION

First comes love,
then comes marriage,
then comes the baby in the baby carriage.
—children’s rhyme

It was half past eight on Friday night in New York City. Here I was, on yet another first date with an “interesting” thirtysomething accountant named Jeremy. He had a square jaw and a mane of black hair. We were sitting in a candlelit restaurant in Tribeca packed with hipsters, drinking a bottle of white wine and talking politely about our jobs. I was thinking to myself, tiredly, could this be the man I spend the rest of my life with? But even though the conversation was engaging and clever, I found I could not help checking my watch. I knew already that chances were it was just another evening, in what felt by then like a lifetime of first dates. It had been three years since my last relationship. I wondered how many more dates I had to go on before I found “the one.”

My thirty-four-year-old friend Drew, a newspaper reporter in Chicago and a serial monogamist, has a string of failed relationships behind him. Blessed with a striking visage and charm, Drew has no trouble finding dates. He dated Audrey, a petite blonde, for two years before she moved in with him. Prior to Audrey, it had been Suzanne for two years, and before her it had been Terry, on and off for four years. Women fall hard for Drew, and in turn he falls in love easily; but ultimately his relationships break up because--even though he says he desperately loves each of these women at the time he is with her--he can”t get to the next level with any of them.

My friend Michelle, twenty-eight, an Atlanta elementary school teacher with offbeat good looks, is afraid to give love another chance after having been dumped countless times. She often calls me crying, asking: “What is wrong with me? Or is something wrong with the guys I am choosing?” When her friends meet somebody new, she waits for the axe to drop on them, too. This once easy-going woman has become quite cynical.

Ian, thirty-one, a Los Angeles lawyer, is also having trouble in his romantic life. He was engaged at twenty-five, but his fiancée called off the wedding. She said she wasn”t sure she wanted to get married; her parents had had a “bad marriage” that had made her too suspicious of marriage in general to take the ultimate step. It took Ian six years to get serious with someone again. About a year into his new relationship, he and his girlfriend Clara discussed living together and getting engaged. But when they started to look at apartments, things became tense between them; Clara had gotten a new job and was becoming more independent in the relationship, and Ian was anxious. With every fight, he questioned whether the relationship was right. Before a lease was signed, the two had broken up. Clara says now, “It just wasn‚t perfect enough for him.”

By the time I myself had turned thirty, I was realizing that I had spent hours on the phone with both my male and female friends all over the country discussing their relationship troubles. The conversations with men were anguished, and the conversations with women were tearful. These people have full lives--busy jobs, close friends, and passionate interests. Yet I couldn”t help noticing that the topic of our failing relationships dominated almost every conversation. Though they lived in different parts of the country, came from different kinds of families, and worked in different professions, so many of my friends were echoing the same sentiment: they were frustrated, confused, and even depressed about their romantic lives. Some had turned to their parents for guidance. But the older generation, no matter how sympathetic, didn”t seem to truly understand our plight or to have advice that was really applicable to us. It was as if the two generations were speaking a different language.

These conversations made me wonder what was going on with my peers. I started to ask myself: Do we just talk more about our unhappiness with relationships than other generations tended to do? Or could it be that our generation is indeed having a particularly difficult time in the search for love and commitment?

When I began to ask that question out loud, my life changed completely. Men and women both would practically pin me to a wall to talk to me about this issue: they spoke of lonely years between serial relationships, painful breakups, and bad dates.

At the time, I didn”t have any of the answers they so clearly craved. I didn”t have a clue about how to find love and commitment myself, despite the fact that my own parents had seemed happily married for forty-two years. But I began to understand that something unusual was going on with us; this issue seemed to resonate so widely and deeply. What was happening? How hard could it be, after all, to court and pair up? Generations had done it since time immemorial. Were we immature, or just unlucky? Misguided, or just appropriately picky? Were there pressures on us, perhaps, that were a greater hindrance than the pressures that had borne down on other generations before us?

I decided I would have to try to find out, if I could, what was going on with our generation--and whether there were any answers out there for us when it came to our search for love. This book explores why so many of us face a rocky, detained, or pit-fallen road to long-term commitment. Why is the search for love so difficult for us, and what can we do about it?

First I will take you through my own story as a typical thirtysomething single, urban professional. Then I will examine the cultural factors uniquely affecting this generation, what I call “The Seven Evil Influences,” that undermine our relationships every day. Through the stories of single men and women I will explore how these influences make us look at potential partners, how they confuse the dance by which we court each other, change how we perceive commitment, and pose real obstacles on the path to romantic fulfillment. Throughout this book you will see particular terms highlighted, many of these terms Gen-Xers will recognize and laugh at, other terms I have coined to give a name to modern dating approaches and scripts that are also unique to this generation. (See the dictionary at the end of the book for a complete list of terms.) Finally, I will take you through the stories I discovered of actual, real-life, happy couples. I will tease out the lessons they learned and show you how we can all, ideally, share in the joy of these insights about long-term love.

To get a fuller picture of our dilemma, I decided to interview one hundred single people living in various cities throughout the United States. I focused on Generation X--the first generation after the baby boom--because no other generation has faced the same set of choices and concerns. Some generations are defined by war or depression; absent these events, generational identities are arbitrarily defined. I decided to look at men and women between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-nine because it is the cohort that at its oldest was born just after the boomer era, and at its youngest is now old enough to date seriously.

This book is not a broad sociological study. I did not seek to pin down a breadth of data, but rather to identify a generational atmosphere and attitude. I started asking questions of my own network, which is mostly composed of people who are younger, urban, and educated. Word spread; networks alerted other networks; responses started to pour in--and I made a concerted effort to widen my reach. I decided to interview people in six cities in different geographic regions of the country: San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Minneapolis, Dallas, and New York. I put the word out in these cities through Internet postings, ads in local newspapers, Web sites such as Craigslist (which connects people in urban areas to jobs, apartments, and dates). The queries I sent out varied but essentially asked for respondents who were looking for a partner. I also randomly scouted men and women in places in which single people congregate. I interviewed one hundred singles, ranging from middle to upper middle class, most of whom had some college education or had completed their BAs. About one quarter had some graduate education. Thirty percent were people of color. Why did I focus on these younger, mostly urban, educated singles? Because these were the people who had the same questions I did.

The identities of everyone in this book have been disguised. I have changed names and altered personal features and locations to gain the most candid accounts possible. However, the experiences and the words that appear in the pages that follow are rendered just as these men and women spoke them.

Throughout this book, I examine the issue of commitment between men and women of this generation. For some Gen-Xers, commitment is defined by marriage; for others, it is defined in other ways. I decided to limit my subjects to heterosexuals, because the emotions and current politics surrounding gay courtship and gay marriage deserve to be the subject of another book.

In every city to which I traveled, singles abounded. I encountered scores of singles in bars in New York, packs of singles at street fairs in Chicago, throngs of singles at crawfish boils in Dallas. The singles I met in all of these cities all over the country seemed to have much in common with one another: similar interests, values, and educational levels. Over and over again, single people in each of these cities told me it was hard to meet other singles because of where they lived. In other words, I saw crowds of people all looking for someone special--all unable to find what they were looking for, and all convinced the problem was where they lived. It was clear to me that geography was not the problem, however--the problem had something to do with the seeker”s approach.

My subjects each gave me over two hours, some in the middle of their workday, to tell their stories. They were all hoping for some magical answer to the question of why they haven”t been able to find love or, having found it, what the key is to making it last. Many told me they hadn”t shared any of these intimate details about their love and sex lives with anyone: not lovers, therapists, or best friends. I listened to men and women who had never been married, people who had been divorced, and those who were in less than fully committed relationships. Though the individuals varied, many common themes emerged. They all seemed to share an attitude. This attitude makes them part of what I call the “Unhooked Generation.”

Some articulated their longings for a relationship in a way that struck a powerful chord with me. Laura, a thirty-four-year-old physical therapist in Minneapolis, with freckles and a raspy voice, expressed herself with poignancy as we sat in a run-down pancake house in downtown Minneapolis. “For three years,” she told me, “I woke up miserable every day [because] I didn”t have someone in my life. It wasn”t societal pressure, it wasn”t my family, it wasn”t my biological clock. I just wanted someone. It was a constant source of sadness, every single day.”

I heard many variations on this theme from my interviews with one hundred singles. Although most rarely stated feelings of emptiness this directly, I saw the pain in their faces, heard it in their voices, and sensed it in their body language. My stereotypical assumptions about commitment as it relates to gender began to fade. Men and women expressed similar longings. Some of the people I spoke to had been struggling in bad relationships for years. Others dove deep into a commitment until they found a flaw and then moved on to the next partner. Still others had a series of superficial short-term unions--all in a failed quest for that ultimate bond. It became clear that my generation craved connection and longed for intimacy--just like every generation that has walked the earth--but many of us didn”t know the path to get there. We wanted to share our family frustrations, career dilemmas, dreams, and fears. Yet hundreds of thousands of intelligent, successful, emotionally stable, attractive twenty- and thirtysomething men and women remained single despite their longing.

Numbers bear out our frustrations: According to the Census Bureau, one third of men and nearly one quarter of women between the ages of thirty and thirty-four have never been married, nearly four times the rates in 1970.

Part of the reason for the growing single population is the high rate at which men and women are delaying marriage. According to the Census Bureau, the average age of first marriage for women is now twenty-five, and for men twenty-seven. This is the first time in U.S. history both sexes are choosing to marry so late. In other words, our generation is living a historic extreme of having multiple committed partners prior to marriage--and therefore we are experiencing historic levels of heartache and disappointment. It is not that we don”t marry; eventually, most of us will. But many who do get there do so with a lot of angst--which leads to self-doubt, as well as skepticism about the lasting bonds of commitment. From broken engagements to multiple breakups and angry ultimatums, making a lifetime commitment for this generation has become a new kind of challenge. The common denominator in your story and mine is not that we are individually incapable of relationships, or that our partners are. The problem is much deeper.

This book does not mean to idealize any other era. There are many benefits of being a member of this generation but, as with most treasures, each has a downside. Other generations have documented their particular struggles with relationships and marital life--from the suppressed housewife and distant husband of the ”50s to the broken homes of the ”70s. There is nothing new about the struggle for intimacy and commitment. But the old struggle has a particularly new guise.

On my journey of listening, I realized that everything I learned in the culture about how to find and sustain a relationship was wrong. In fact, I discovered that the people who seemed to have the secret were doing the very thing my peers and I had been advised to overlook or scorn. I will take you through the voices of these people who are looking for love in ways we will all recognize but are counterproductive. You will see the obstacles, pitfalls, and challenges that threaten people our age in their search for love. But remember, at the end of this journey there is hope. I will also introduce you to people who have found lasting love by using an approach that is the opposite of what we are taught to believe. My hope is that my experience and this book will help you learn faster than I did. Don”t lose heart--it”s only by looking at these obstacles that we can see differently.

Let”s start with my own story. In the comfortable, leafy suburb of Los Angeles where I grew up in the 1970s, most of the families were intact and most of the homes had three or more bedrooms. My mother and father had, for the most part, a good, solid marriage. My father ran a small business and my mother was a substitute teacher. In spite of being long married, they indeed seemed to have passion in their daily lives: amidst visits to pediatricians, parent-teacher conferences, and busy work schedules, their love affair kept simmering. Every morning when my father left for work, he would bring my mother the newspaper in bed and kiss her good-bye. One morning, I found him watching her sleep; he said to me, “Look how beautiful your mother is” as the sunlight flooded their bedroom.

Their attachment seemed to bloom more openly when my sister and I went away to college. When I returned home over Christmas break as a freshman, my father was away on business. My mother and I were watching our favorite TV show: it was, I am embarrassed now to report, Knots Landing. We were lying on the couch and my mother dozed off, but when she heard the sound of the key turning in the door she suddenly sprang awake. “Dad is home,” she said, with a lilt to her voice. When he walked in, she smiled at him with her chin lowered; her eyes looked up at him like a high-school girl with a crush. Although he had only been away since that morning, they acted as though they”d been separated for a week.

I remember teasing my mother by asking her whom she loved more, my sister and me or my father. Quiet and pensive for a moment, my mother hesitated and then looked up at me and said delicately, “You are my child. I could never love anyone more, but your father is my life.” At the time I was shocked by her response and, as I recall, a little hurt. But her honesty helped me to better understand their union. Their relationship was based on friendship and deep mutual respect--and they shared the feelings of adoration that I could not wait to share with someone of my own.

Love happened for me for the first time in my sophomore year of college. I fell in love with a dark-eyed senior named Alessandro who was half Korean and half Italian. He was the first man to give me the feeling of what lust felt like when it was mixed with love. In his Bob Marley-filled flat, with its dead joints in the ashtray, I would gaze at him while he slept after our lovemaking. We had a typical college romance: studying side by side in the library, attending formals, and going to football games together. We loved to stay up late and discuss politics and philosophy. The mere sight of him across the grassy quad excited me. After a year, I wanted to get more serious--but Alessandro wanted to play poker, hang out with his friends, and find a job. Though we were seriously in love, I never dared to utter the “M” word, for that was not a part of the college vernacular when I was becoming a young adult. And Alessandro himself was a child of divorce; marriage was the last thing on his mind. I found that reality too painful to endure; we broke up in my junior year. Instead of a purely romantic reverie, which in past generations of lust-dazed men and women may well have led to the altar, we went our separate ways. That was my first experience with heartbreak, but certainly not my last.

Aside from the pain, that experience had one more side effect: I started to question whether love could indeed last a lifetime. I heard Alessandro talk about his childhood and his parents” vitriolic divorce and now I had experienced firsthand with Alessandro that love didn”t necessarily mean “happily ever after.”

The fact that someone like me--whose parents were actually well matched--had already absorbed a seed of doubt about lifelong commitment attests to the fact that the marriage ideal was no longer intact as I became an adult. As I mentioned earlier, my generation faces a host of cultural factors that, somewhere along the way, make us look at commitment and marriage in a different way than our parents did. After all, we have more options, more skepticism, and more heartbreak born of experience. For the women of my generation, marriage is no longer the singular feminine goal. And for the guys--well, you can imagine. They don”t have to look at divorce to question marriage and commitment; all they have to do is open the latest issue of Maxim magazine.

So I, from an intact home, went into the world--and into a typical postcollege experience of dating and serial monogamy.

Certain commentators have made the point that an early adult experience of serial monogamy leads to a lot of heartbreak and cynicism, and that it can actually undermine faith in marriage and commitment. One of these is Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, author of Kosher Sex. Rabbi Boteach argues that, by the time you have seriously dated a couple of people, slept with them, and left them or been left by them--that is, before you ever make it to the altar--there is “scar tissue” on your heart. Maggie Gallagher, who wrote The Abolition of Marriage, makes a similar case. These books defy the conventional wisdom of our generation--handed down to us by the boomers--that a series of intimate relationships prior to marriage can strengthen the marital bond, much like training wheels strengthen the skill of bike-riding. The problem is--as I began to feel after listening to my own heart and hearing the feelings of my male and female friends--when you painfully experience your training wheels falling off a couple of times, it is hard to trust your bike.

After graduation, I fell in love twice more, experienced my share of heartbreak, broke a few hearts (in retaliation?), went on dates, and submerged myself, over the course of my twenties, as did many of my peers, in a handful of long-term relationships. They all ended miserably, and they made me question what it was that I was searching for and how I would find it. My peers had their own relationship angst. Even those who were certain they wanted marriage had lost some faith as their own relationships failed.

In spite of intermittent years as part of a couple, for most of my adult life I have been a single woman. I spent my twenties at a high-powered job I had long aspired to: working in television production for The Oprah Winfrey Show. I was passionate about my work; I earned a good salary and got promotions over the years; I lived alone in a nice apartment; I ate out; I shopped; and I traveled when I could. I embraced the sexy identity of the independent single girl--and I wore it with enjoyment and pride.

I had what was in many ways an enviable life--rewarding work, plenty of male and female friends to share free time when I had it, evenings out, movies and dinner. I went on lots of dates, sometimes so many that I felt as though I was on an assembly line, and sometimes so few that I felt like a spinster. Unlike many of my friends, I never hated dating; I enjoyed the unexpected conversations and the mystery of meeting someone new.

But the chaos of my career in television kept me moving so fast that sometimes I didn”t even notice what was missing in my life; often I was so busy with my job that I hardly noticed how lonely I was. But when things calmed down, when the pace slowed, when the noise quieted, something happened: after the production was over, and all the videotape had been edited and the voice mails returned, I felt a silence stir inside me. In these darker moments, I felt that swelling loneliness that I did not have someone with whom I could share a life.

My busy career and active social life entertained me for long periods, but I slowly realized they were not going to fill the void when those empty feelings came up. These were emotions I was actually ashamed of; the girls on Sex and the City would sneer at me if they knew. The feminist in me did not want to let myself fall prey to the specious belief that I couldn”t be happy without a man in my life. But I had to face that fact: The woman in me wanted a man. The need to “connect” intimately with someone was indeed powerful.

This term “connection” is a popular buzz word for my generation. It means a deep emotional intimacy--an intense bond. My single friends and subjects expressed the same longing. It seemed ironic that a generation that was so eager for connection seemed so terribly disconnected.

This exploration for me was a life-changing one. Wisdom indeed came from some unexpected places. I saw myself in so many of my subjects, and realized these themes were indeed universal. I was touched by my subjects, every one of them. As I wrote the pages of this book, I literally heard their voices and they became my guides. I knew from our hours together that something had to change.

Ironically, a few months into my research, I met a wonderful man, whom I started to date. It was time to put theory into practice. At first I resisted this relationship, as I thought it would interfere with my role as a student of single life. But I fell in love as my perspective grew broader. For the first half of the year that I was writing this book, I was a single woman whose romantic life seemed as though it had been stalled for a decade. For the second half, I was a woman becoming more and more deeply involved with a mate. So I write with both the skepticism of an independent woman with a string of failed relationships, and with the optimism of a slowly opening heart. As I went on this journey, I dropped my own self-defeating expectations and began to overcome my own fears of commitment. I want to thank the people who shared their heartbreak and happiness with me because it helped me discover what I was doing wrong. I hope that what I learned from all those who spoke to me about love will help me find my true love this time--just as I hope that the disappointments and fulfillment they shared will help you find yours.