But Ms. di Prima is honest about the limitations of the arrangement. She wrote that she avoided the pains of romance, but the man she married is still a domineering, abusive mess, in her recounting. Furthermore, in marriage, she has lost something integral to herself. “One of my most precious and valued possessions was my independence: my struggle for control over my own life,” she wrote, continuing, “I didn’t see that it had no intrinsic value for anyone but myself, that it was a coin that was precious only within the realm, a currency that could not cross borders.”
These words, when I read them, sounded in me like the chime of a tuning fork. I had never before read such a precise description of what marriage asks some people to give up. Those who panic over the rise in the number of single Americans do not see that this statistic includes lives of hard-won independence — lives that still intersect with a community, with a home, with a belief in something wider than oneself. The people clinging to old narratives around singledom and marriage can’t yet see these lives for what they are because, as Ms. di Prima puts it, they are not “an objectively valuable commodity.” Their meaning is “a currency that cannot cross borders.”
Join the conversation as a VIP Member