The Best Defense
I inadvertently offended a friend’s father the other day. It absolutely wasn’t my intent to do so, and in fact I didn’t even realize I had until my friend mentioned it, but an offhand remark I made about my relationship to the state of matrimony left him deeply offended. While I’m sorry he interpreted my innocent comment to be a denigration of his 30 year marriage, I’m not sorry I made it. To be honest, I’d do the exact same thing again in similar circumstances.
What happened was this: We were having brunch and somehow the conversation turned to the question of why the third finger of the left hand is the wedding ring finger. My friend’s 13 year old daughter, knowing that my lint trap of a brain is chock full of useless knowledge, asked me to clear up the question. My flippant reply, “I don’t know. I try to know as little about marriage as possible,” was apparently seen as an attack on marriage in general, and a devaluing of his in particular.
Let me be clear here that I am not anti-marriage. I have nothing against marriage per se. In fact, I firmly believe that marriage is an institution should be open to anyone who wants to experience it. I just have absolutely no interest in experiencing it myself. And I’m a little sensitive about that.
You see, we may very well be living in the 21st century, and statistics might support the idea that there are a heck of a lot of solo moms out there, but our society is still programmed to assume that all women are either married, or want to be. For example, a moms board I belong to recently added a “Single Moms” section. The first post? A married woman inviting the other married ladies to discuss where they’d met their “dh,” the better to help all us old maids find our own Prince Charmings. Personally, I quite often get called “Mrs.” at parent-teacher conferences, the automatic assumption being that if I have a child, surely I must be married. I’ve endured my share of well meaning friends trying to set me up on blind dates, unwilling to believe that I’m single because I choose to be, not because I can’t find a man. I’ve heard joking comments about finding a rich husband to better support my children and, to be perfectly honest, I wasn’t amused.
It’s not that I don’t respect my friend’s father’s choice to marry; it’s that I often don’t feel like my choice not to marry is given the same due. So, yeah, I guess I can be a bit defensive when it comes to the issue of marriage. And we all know what they say about a good offense, right?