Kate Bolick on Refusing to Settle (Part Two)

This is the second part of our email interview with writer Kate Bolick, whose excellent “All the Single Ladies” cover story for The Atlantic addresses at the current state of marriage.

EZ: Kate! Your life must be so crazy now. Any particularly crazy stories? Also, the article has been optioned to be a still-nebulous TV series — that’s fantastic. Any idea what it might look like? “Successful unmarried woman is chilling and doing well”?

KB: Ah, finally we speak again — safe on the other side! A month ago I was bracing myself for a mountain of hate mail, and today I am still alive. The amount of attention the article incited has been completely surreal in the aggregate. But case by case there hasn’t been anything too crazy, save for a few truly scary hate letters (i.e. “I am making it my personal mission to destroy you, Kate Bolick”), and a few really, really sweet mash notes. (And now this breaking news of one minute ago! A graduate student just wrote to say that she’s doing a research project on the article, the media response, and the changing discourse around what it means to be married in this country. I cannot wait to read that.) Thanks to my plan to avoid the magazine’s online comments section, overall I’ve just been — shoot me for being the corndog that I am — incredibly gratified to hear from so many strangers who felt the piece resonated, in all sorts of different ways.

I actually have no idea what the TV series will be. But I really like Josh Berman, and I trust that he’ll do something unexpected and interesting.

EZ: Whoa, that hate mail! It’s so cinematic with the “you, Kate Bolick” part. (I once got a hate mail that told me something I wrote sucked, and I responded by thanking her for reading. She wrote back: “You are truly horrible and repulsive, despite your nice manners in responding to my indignant e-mail.” Hah. People are weird! Anyway.)

I don’t mean this to be leading, but if you could go back and tweak anything in the article, would there be something you’d change? That might be a boring question if the answer is no, which it very well might be, so … alternate question:

In your awesome Refinery 29 interview (this is starting to be like holding a mirror up to a mirror! I love it!), you say “Given my temperament, I do believe that I’ll eventually want to be married, but only when I’m ready for it, and with a man who shares my values.” What kind of values do you mean? And if you ever do get married, can you imagine all the very hilarious jokes that’d be told at your wedding in this post-”All the Single Ladies” world??

KB: How about I’ll answer both questions, and you can decide which one to use?

I’d change a few things about the article if I could. I wrote it in a week and a half, after six breakneck weeks of research and reporting and seven separate trips involving airplanes — it was an enormous amount of pressure. And so I had to be fast, and not think all the way through some aspects, and almost arbitrarily give more attention to some ideas than others, and then of course The Atlantic had its own editorial agenda I needed to honor. You know back in Part I of this interview when I say my brother compares my writing the piece to agreeing on a dime to run a marathon? In fact it was more like running a marathon in flip-flops while balancing a tray full of soup dishes in one hand.

To be more specific, if I’d had more time I would have: talked to middle-class single black women rather than just Denean and her friends; incorporated ideas about religion and marriage; worded a few of the “personal” parts a little differently; shown a few more alternative futures and not just the all-female residence; and more gracefully explained what I was trying to get at about marriage and money, so that people couldn’t misinterpret me as saying that I think men aren’t marriageable because they’re broke — in fact I say the opposite, but not well enough.

I have some ambivalence over having opened the article in that rather Victorian fashion about my ex-boyfriend and me. I did it for two reasons: the story seemed very common and therefore emblematic; I wanted to personalize the material in a way that made it accessible to everyone, men and women, of any age, and I thought that would do the trick. I kept it very simple, with none of the messy details, by way of moving along to the larger points, and I asked him to read it before I filed to make sure he was comfortable with what I wrote, and he was. But in the aftermath we’re both feeling a little weird about it, me because so much of the media has fixated on the personal aspect, which seems a little beside the point, and he because having his name out there turns him into a more visible “character” that people are projecting their own stories onto, which is uncomfortable, and which perhaps could have been avoided if I’d just called him “A” or something. The irony is, it’s not actually very personal, in that I don’t confide the gritty details of what happened between us, or even the reality of my romantic life since, aside from those few greatest hits (and misses).

I’ve been struck by the critique some people make that I wasn’t saying anything new. I agree insofar as anyone who’s thought about this stuff knows mounds more than I do and has said it before, and obviously plenty of people live out “alternative” or “non-normative” lifestyles and have been forever. But as the enormous reaction has proven, these ideas hadn’t yet been delivered in quite this way in a mainstream, national publication, and apparently that needed to happen.

What I wouldn’t change is the exploratory approach, and how I’m not telling anyone to do one thing. The larger conversation around men and women and romance tends to get very bifurcated and blame-y — either moralizing or polemic — and I very consciously wanted to strike a very different kind of tone.

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“Values” is a loaded word, isn’t it? I just meant a guy who sees the world similarly to how I do, who prizes things like honesty and communication and absurdity and new experiences.

But here’s the thing: I never once say in the piece that I never want to get married! I’m not against marriage. I’m just against its being our only and highest ideal. Our public rhetoric and internal monologues need to catch up to the on-the-ground fact that more and more of us are getting married later, or are creating “alternative” lifestyles, or are getting married and then getting divorced, and therefore spending a much longer period of time single than ever before. So how do we create a conversation that reflects and speaks to this new world we’re already living in? But, yes, if I do ever get married — well, it will be a very funny wedding. You’re invited!

EZ: Thank you! I would definitely, definitely be there. (And I know what you mean about the “personal” writing part, although I thought you handled it really beautifully, coming across as honest and straightforward but never self-indulgent.)

Another thing that strikes me about the piece is that it makes me do a lot of “Yeah!”s and “YEAH!”s while reading, but ultimately it doesn’t make me do anything any differently, action-wise, if you know what I mean. There’s no, OK, and now I will do THIS and THIS. Because there is no “advice,” really, to be given. Which isn’t a complaint, because advice would probably be inappropriate. But I feel like I want to DO something. Like the mental fist-pumping is somehow not enough. What should people DO in reaction to reading this piece, if anything? Or, are there ways in which you’re leading your life differently after researching and writing this piece?

KB: “Mental fist-pumping” is cracking me up. I was intentionally not prescriptive — I’m just not wired that way, and it didn’t seem appropriate anyhow. But now that you’re asking, I can think of a few things.

Societally speaking, we need to pay more attention to how we’re raising and schooling our boys, because young men really do seem less-equipped for adulthood than young women are.

More specifically, all of us, men and women, need to take a more critical approach to our unquestioned assumptions around romance and marriage, as the ways in which we’re thinking about these things are really outdated; the reality of how life unfolds is much more fluid and surprising than we prepare ourselves for.

I also wonder if there couldn’t be something like “relationship ed” folded into sex ed, by way of better equipping young people to navigate their sexual lives not only practically but also emotionally.

And if someone could take a red pen to all the inane rhetoric that fills the self-help aisles about the ever-elusive but all-fascinating male brain, I’d like that, too — our casual, pop-psych-fueled conversational culture abets a lot of really assy behavior in our menfolk.

Finally — and I can’t believe I’m saying this, but here goes — those looking to find and maintain stable, longterm relationships really do seem to have more luck outside of major metropolitan areas, so if that’s what you’re looking for, date across state lines or change the ZIP code on your online dating profile. How’s that for advice?

EZ: It is great! And “relationship ed” is a brilliant idea.

Kate! Thank you for emailing with me now and earlier, and, more importantly, for writing the piece at all. I’ve thought about it so many times since I first read it, and obviously so many other women and men have, too. In good ways and in difficult ways (as far as what it means/implicates), but always in appreciative ways. Thank you.

And is it okay if I end this by embedding the “Single Ladies” video, even if the song’s message isn’t quite the same?

KB: Yes! This way we can all watch and silently muse over what a disappointment it is that Beyoncé made such a completely excellent song (and dance) ultimately be about “putting a ring on it.”

Previously: Part One.