介绍:
Manhattan Wedlock:
Never-Married Women, Toxic Bachelors
Lunch the other day. Vicious gossip with a man I'd just met. We were
discussing mutual friends, a couple. He knew the husband, I knew the wife.
I'd never met the husband, and I hadn't seen the wife in years (except to run
into her occasionally on the street), but as usual, I knew eveiything about the
situation.
"It's going to end badly," I said. "He was naive. A country mouse. He
came in from Boston and he didn't know anything about her and she jumped
at the opportunity. She'd already gone through so many guys in New York
and she had a reputation. No guy in New York would have married her."
I attacked my fried chicken, warming up to the subject. "Women in New
York know. They know when they have to get married, and that's when they
do it. Maybe they've slept with too many guys, or they know nothing's ever
going to really happen with their career, or maybe they really do want kids.
Until then, they put it off for as long as they can. Then they have that
moment, and if they don't take it. . . ." I shrugged. "That's it. Chances are,
they'll never get married."
The other guy at the table, a corporate, doting-dad type who lives in
Westchester, was looking at us in horror. "But what about love?" he asked.
I looked at him pityingly. "I don't think so."
When it comes to finding a marriage partner, New York has its own
particularly cruel mating rituals, as complicated and sophisticated as those in
an Edith Wharton novel. Everyone knows the rules—but no one wants to
talk about them. The result is that New York has bred a particular type of
single woman—smart, attractive, successful, and . . . never married. She is in
her late thirties or early forties, and, if empirical knowledge is good for
anything, she probably never will get married.
This is not about statistics. Or exceptions. We all know about the
successful playwright who married the beautiful fashion designer a couple of
years older than he is. But when you're beautiful and successful and rich and
"know everyone," the normal rules don't apply.
What if, on the other hand, you're forty and pretty and you're a television
producer or have your own PR company, but you still live in a studio and
sleep on a foldout couch— the nineties equivalent of Mary Tyler Moore?
Except, unlike Mary Tyler Moore, you've actually gone to bed with all those
guys instead of demurely kicking them out at 12:02 A.M.? What happens to
those women?
There are thousands, maybe tens of thousands of women like this in the
city. We all know lots of them, and we all agree they're great. They travel, they
pay taxes, they'll spend four hundred dollars on a pair of Manolo Blahnik
strappy sandals.
"There is nothing wrong with these women," said Jerry, thirty-nine, a
corporate lawyer who happened to marry one of these smart women, three
years older than he is. "They're not crazy or neurotic. They're not Fatal
Attraction." Jerry paused. "Why do I know so many great women who aren't
married, and no great guys? Let's face it, the unmarried guys in New York
suck."
THE M&MS
"Here's the deal," Jerry said. "There's a window of opportunity for women to
get married in New York. Somewhere between the ages of twenty-six and
thirty-five. Or maybe thirty-six." We agreed that if a woman's been married
once, she can always get married again; there's something about knowing
how to close the deal.
"But all of a sudden, when women get to be thirty-seven or thirty-eight,
there's all this . . . stuff," he said. "Baggage. They've been around too long.
Their history works against them. If I were single and I found out that a
woman had gone out with Mort Zuckerman or 'Marvin' (a publisher)—the
M&Ms—forget it. Who wants to be twentieth on that line? And then if they
pull any of those other stunts, like children out of wedlock or rehab stays—
that's a problem."
Jerry told a story: Last summer, he was at a small dinner in the Hamptons.
The guests were in TV and movies. He and his wife were trying to fix up a
forty-year-old former model with a guy who had just gotten divorced. The
two were talking, and suddenly something came up about Mort Zuckerman,
and then Marvin, and suddenly Jerry and his wife were watching the guy turn
off.
"There's a list of toxic bachelors in New York," said Jerry, "and they're
deadly."
Later in the day, I relay the story to Anna, who's thirty-six, and who has a
habit of disagreeing with everything men say. All guys want to sleep with her,
and she's constantly chewing them out for being shallow. She's dated the
M&Ms and she knows Jerry. When I tell her the story, she screams. "Jerry is
just jealous. He'd like to be like those guys, except he doesn't have the money
or the power to pull it off. Scratch the surface and every guy in New York
wants to be Mort Zuckerman."
George, thirty-seven, an investment banker, is another guy who sees the
toxic bachelors as a problem. "These guys—the plastic surgeon, that Times editor,
the crazy guy who owns those fertility
clinics—they all take out the same pool of women and it never goes
anywhere," he said. "Yeah, if I met a woman who had gone out with all those
guys, I wouldn't like it."
大家还在听
