The M-R-S Degree

I’d never been to anything cultural at Harvard before, so when it was Ladies’ Night at the Hasty Pudding and somebody was organizing a group to go, I went. During intermission, I heard the girl in the row behind me talking, loudly, about her impending marriage, “back in Texas in July.”

I wanted to go to the bathroom, but I couldn’t leave my seat because I was listening to her. She was a senior, a year older than me, describing to the girls sitting next to her the details of the day she’d gotten engaged. She and her boyfriend had gone to dinner in a limo. At the restaurant her menu had “Will you marry me?” printed on it, and when she looked up from reading it he was down on one knee while the restaurant staff clapped.

“When are you going to have kids?” one of the girl’s friends asked.

“We’ll start thinking about children when I’m 24 or 25,” she said primly. I felt strange and suddenly had the urge to rummage through my purse for my driver’s license. Not the one that says I’m 22-almost-23, the one I usually pull out at school, but the real one, the one that’s usually hidden in the back of my wallet, the one that reminds me I’m not even 21 yet. While I usually find this fact annoying, tonight I wanted to be reassured by it.

About three days before this incident, my boyfriend of two years and I had broken up, and I’d been experiencing horrifyingly vivid visions of my single future. There I would be, living in one shabby room of an old blind lady’s apartment in Queens. For company, I’d have six cats, which I’d name things like “Mr. Right” and “Main Man.” Upon returning home from work each day, I would make tuna for supper and share it with the cats. After dinner, I’d have a coffee mug of boxed Franzia as a treat and then fall asleep, alone—except for my cats, which would scamper back and forth across my twin cot throughout the lonely night.

I would be an even more depressing version of Miranda, my least favorite “Sex and the City” character.

The average age at which one marries in the United States is 25, which means that girls who get married straight out of college aren’t normal. Nevertheless, I’ve spent more than one night here listening to girls drunkenly weep that they will never get married unless they meet somebody at Harvard now. My parents were married the August after they graduated, when my mother was 21. Granted, that was in 1978, but evidence from more modern sources reinforces the idea that you’d better meet your life partner in college. My best friend from high school got a “promise necklace” from her boyfriend last Christmas. My sorority does a special ritual when girls get engaged. (I’m sure it’s creepy and involves singing.) My Quantitative Reasoning 34 textbook even calls colleges “magnificent local marriage markets.”

Harvard girls have so much going for them that early marriage doesn’t need to be their top priority, but, for some, it is. There’s a facebook.com group called “Future Homemakers of America.” I’ve heard more than one girl “joke” that she came to Harvard “to get her M-R-S degree.” Why? Maybe we’ve watched too many “Sex and the City” episodes and we fear being single at 35—and, by extension, fear being single in our 20s.

Or maybe we don’t want to end up in the position of Rachel Greenwald, author of Find A Husband After 35 Using What I Learned at Harvard Business School. In an Amazon.com customer review of the book, Bruce from Australia writes, “If you want to attract the right guy, read on...Contrary to the PC Brigade’s PR campaign, guys prefer slim, healthy women.” Are these the men from whom 35-plus women have to choose? Maybe we should find husbands now—you know, while we’re thin.

Or maybe, as usual, we’re stressed out because we go to Harvard. If it attracts the best and brightest people in the country, and if you want your husband to be the best and brightest, you’d better meet him here.

But I think the main problem is that uncertainty is scary, and leaving college and going out on your own is scary, too. It would be nice, upon graduation, to have somebody to go with you, find a crappy apartment with you, open a bank account with you, and spend Saturday night in a strange city with you. I might be doing those things on my own, while the girl behind me at the Pudding knew she would, after July, be doing them with somebody else.

She was talking again. “I’m actually not sure why he hasn’t called me yet,” she said in a falsely casual voice.

Nobody’s future is guaranteed. Things happen. People get job offers in other countries, become pregnant accidentally, develop drinking problems, win the lottery, or accidentally poke their own eyes out while they’re waving the (small) diamonds on their engagement rings in their friends’ faces. Upon entering college, I would never have predicted that I’d end up in a two-year relationship at all, never have imagined everything that would happen to my original blocking group, and never have known that one night in the spring of junior year I’d be sitting in the Hasty Pudding watching guys strip. Yet all these things have happened, and none of them is bad.

Uncertainty is scary, yes, but it’s fun, too. I go out at night now not knowing who I’ll meet or what will happen, but I almost always have a good time. I don’t know what I’ll end up doing after college or whom I’ll end up with, but I know that my wretched vision of cats-as-only-friends probably won’t come true, if only because I really don’t like cats.

And I know I won’t have to follow Bruce-from-Australia’s advice: “Guys believe retail therapy is for emotional cripples, especially if you are over 35.” Fuck it, I’m only 20.

Laura H. Owen ’06, an English and American Literature and Language concentrator in Leverett House, recently adopted a guinea pig, which is kind of like a fiancé, only much more adorable.