"In my years of semi-voluntary celibacy, I have several friends who have been in multiple relationships, some of them quite passionate and committed, but with barely a pause in between each one.
The immediate sense of loss after a relationship is painful, but at least there’s a word for it: heartbreak. I have no simple way to describe the slow, dull ache of separation from physical and emotional intimacy after years without it. To roll on the floor drunk-sobbing about being single at this point would be ludicrous. It would also be absurd, and cruel, to say to someone who just broke up with their lover, “I’ve heard all this before, and I’ll hear it again before I get a turn.” But I have wanted, in moments of exasperation or bitterness, to say it.
Love and relationships are also, among other things, a marker of time. “Forever” frequently begins in love, though it is theoretically as tenuous as the single state. Looking ahead, if I really am riding this train to the end of the tracks, I don’t see any of the grand events in my future that help ground and timeline human existence, the events being in love provides. After my best friend got married she told me she cried all the next day, overwhelmed by the outpouring of affection from everyone she knew. She deserves it all, but years later, still single, I’ve realized that there will be no similar ceremonious acknowledgment of my life or my relationships with friends and family. Until I’m dead, I guess, but that won’t be very fun for me. Anchoring my existence without the signposts of commitment, or children, is a lot of work, and sometimes I feel myself giving up on it, drifting off into a grey directionless space in danger of floating completely away.
Weddings and heartbreak are all intense moments in the journey of love, and they both make you feel alive as hell. There is something wildly cathartic about going nuts immediately after love ends, eating tubs of ice cream while watching TV, leaning on your girlfriends for emotional support, kissing the wrong person some drunken night out on the town. Then as time goes on and the kisses end, you’re just someone eating ice cream. It’s not an emotional high or low. It’s your life, and a life that confuses and depresses people. I know when I try to tell a friend that I think I will be alone forever, they are imagining bleakness. They want it to stop. They want to give advice without acknowledging the subtext of offering a solution to my “problem.”
The underlying message in those platitudes is that I need to just keep on wishing and hoping and waiting. Just wait, and wait, because something better than the life you have is guaranteed. Love is guaranteed. But it’s not, is it? Not at all, not even for someone like me, who they maybe think is cool, reasonably attractive, and not obviously insane. I wanted to cry at that dinner table, because keeping up the farce that I’m still waiting means staying still. It means diminishing the life I do lead, which is a good one."
It's obviously not a "good life," as Aimée is miserable. The feminist worldview she still espouses and advocates for is leading her to the grave lonely and childless.
Marriage and children are indeed "anchors" of existence, giving meaning, purpose and focus outside one's own thoughts. She instinctively knows what she's missing, yet cannot find it.
Keep your daughters from the poison of feminism so they don't end up in the same state as Miss Lutkin.
Your progressive worldview will never love and cherish you, no matter how committed you may be to it. It will never hug your leg tightly and say "I love you, mommy." It won't be there to hold your hand in your old age.
The fruits of feminism are loneliness, bitterness and a lasting heartache that Merlot and cats can never fill.
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