Features
Staying single
“I used to think that the worst thing in life was to end up all alone. It’s not. The worst in life is ending up with people who make you feel all alone.” Robin Williams.
No wonder this fine young man I know prefers being single while most of his friends are happily, or otherwise, married, and parents. One good pal has gone through a divorce but tried again and seems to be
“It’s better to be unmarried and face the future alone rather than marry someone you cannot put up with”
“But you can carefully chose your future wife.”
“Worse than a lottery! People change.” To me, at least in Sri Lanka, men change much more after marriage.
I started a project to have single women – no longer called spinster with its negative connotations – write their stories and I wanted to publish the collection; the narrators all un-named and un-identifiable too with deliberate changes in bios. Our country is small, everyone almost knows everyone else, and most are gossips too. Insufficient volunteers for my publishing project. So I cast the net wider to make it a book of ‘Women and Love’. Restriction of our economy gone to the depths has stymied me since publishing is low.
I read with interest a NYTimes article sent me by a US based friend. It was written by Frank Bruni who has been on the staff for more than 25 years. He writes and I quote:
“The NYT published a long article defining a new problem: More baby boomers and Gen Xers are living alone than forebears of their age did, and that apparently poses physical, psychological and financial challenges. Born 1964, I’m the fumes of the boom. I live alone. And reading the article, I suddenly felt like some cautionary tale.”
Another article Who cares for ‘kinless’ seniors? Stated that an estimated 6.6 percent Americans aged 55 and older have no living spouse or biological children.
Both articles were important, Brunii noted. “They rightly expressed concern for older Americans who don’t have the resources or the kind of extended family that I do. They’re at risk. We should attend to that.” He surmises the issue by saying that single living persons are an incipient danger and may tax the government. For many others, it’s bliss. “Life that is not shadowed or filtered by the doting, demands and dissatisfaction of another.” He also adds the mitigating fact of rearing a dog or cat.
The local scene
I come to Sri Lanka in my discussion. The Dept of Census and Statistics may have the number of unmarried over a certain age, but far outdated. Difficult to pin point a percentage since what is the age that is going to be taken as cutoff point, so to say. The saddest fact of the matter is that now many young adults and even olders have to remain single due to economic reasons.
However, I know full well this refusal to get married when one is of marriageable age – up to 40 for men, a little less for women – is becoming a problem for mothers, more so of the worrying kind. The emotion is purely altruistic and maternal. “Who will look after my daughter when we are gone?” Worse if she is an only child. Mothers may continue receiving much from bachelor sons, but mothers are worried about them too. However, I know two women who definitely did not want their children marrying. It is inexplicable selfishness since they were well off, independent, and shared not demonstrative love between them and their children. In one case the daughter was married off and no moves made to find wives for sons. One fell in love and had to flee overseas. The other married and the daughter-in-law received nasty indifference and disrespect. The other dame wanted no children married. Son left family to get married, so did one daughter. They were forbidden from coming home even to visit their henpecked father. One girl stayed back and was slave to Mum. Now she is alone in the world. Relatives and friends are not forever giving; unlike a child of one’s own.
Long ago time was when, whether you liked it or not, were ready for marriage or not, you were given to the best proposal which had come via the correct channels; then the ubiquitous magul kapuwa. Sons too were almost forced to marry. Life ran so linear then: birth; education – limited for women; jobs for men, marriage, children, hopefully satisfied old age with grandchildren swarming around. Now we know about LGBTQ+ where + stands for even other than those named. However even a hundred years ago lesbians and more openly homosexuals would have lived. How did they manage married life?. Misery and perhaps suicide for women unless they were changed. Men had the opportunity of being respectably married but slinking off to boy/man friends; demonstrated so well in the film Giraya, in which author Punyakanti Wijenaike has a woman married to a homosexual – excellently portrayed by Peter de Almeida in the film of same name.
Times changed with the turn of the 19th century. Conservative families were as yet treating marriage and parenting as the be-all of life. But higher education was entering and even women were proceeding to university and careers, no less. Their resistance was nurtured. Thus marriage for love and mutual consent were balancing proposed marriages. The latter gave room for either party to refuse the offered partner, more than once or twice. Then parental indulgence waned as specters of spinsters aging before the mother’s third eye, waxed. And so majority men and women embarked on the trodden path, rosy, or stony and miserably muddy.
At present more young ones are avoiding signing on the dotted line but cohabiting. This seems to the trend in countries such as the Netherlands. It was a common practice in rural Sri Lanka where living together was a marriage sans the signatures or thumb impressions in a marriage register. There were half European children too, most disowned by fathers and brought up entirely by often poor village women. A few estate planters, particularly, lent their surname and met all expenses but often brought across the oceans a ‘white’ wife. British Law insisted on marriages being registered.
The world marched to the first quarter of the 21st century with very many inventions around, even in habits and ‘done things’, hence cohabiting. Many women hold well paying professional careers and do not wish to tie themselves to husband, home and children. I have heard a bachelor say : “When milk is cheap why buy a cow?” or some such low explanation of his unwillingness to tie the knot and loose his free goafing. But it is aging and loneliness that looms ahead. That too may be mitigated in the forward rushing planet. After all many marrieds end up alone with all its negatives and fears.
Some older young ones even opt to have children sans wedlock and sans even a man to be named the father. I know an admirable woman who wanted a child to be her own but not a man to be her husband. She adopted the child and proudly was a single mother, fulfilling admirable paternal duties and obligations. She told her daughter she was adopted when she was of understanding age. The girl is well adjusted in life and happy.
I return after a detour to my subject of parental attitude to children regards marriage. The majority even now feel their daughters, more specially, need to be married, but thank goodness no coercion; even appealing has ceased. Children are allowed to choose how they lead their future lives. The maternal fear and visions of harming loneliness in single old age for their babies lingers. However, there are ‘homes’ and hospices mushrooming, even in SL, where geriatry is studied, coped with well, and good care given. Primarily, youth have to be respected: they know what they wish for and want.
Oscar Wilde said: “I think it’s very healthy to spend time alone, You need to know how to be alone and not defined by another person.” Even when old? asks a concerned mother.