I Don’t — Why I Never Got Married

When I was twenty-five years old, I was explaining to my cousin Wendy, a newlywed, my confusion about several career paths that I wanted to pursue. We were at Thanksgiving dinner and she said in front of my entire family, “Why don’t you just get married and have kids?” She suggested marriage and kids as if this could happen overnight, like ordering a water filter from Amazon. I wasn’t even dating anyone. My cousin’s “solution” insulted me. I knew what she meant was Why don’t you just do what everyone else does and then all your problems will be solved? But I’ve never done what everyone else just does, and I knew that merely being someone’s wife wouldn’t satisfy me. And besides, I didn’t want kids, which made marriage seem even more pointless.

“Any fool can be married,” my Ivy League educated and married friend Jenny, told me a few months later. I always subscribed to the belief that marriage was a ridiculous, archaic trap that most people fell into for a host of wrong reasons, forgetting that it originated as a business contract. It was like a tattoo — exciting at the beginning, but too permanent. My parents divorced when I was twenty-one, which was late considering I grew up in the 80’s, but the threats of it loomed over us for at least ten years prior. Most of my friends’ parents had divorced way before mine, so I kind of came to age with the notion that marriage didn’t work. I…