Read Online The Unspeakable by Meghan Daum - Free Book Online Page B

ruled by them even though I no longer fully believe them, which I guess is to say that even though I can see the folly of imposing them on others, there’s never going to be a day of my life that I don’t breathe them in and out like oxygen itself.
    The basic rundown is this. Thanks to some combination of class, generation, personal baggage, and innate temperament, my parents raised my brother and me to believe that relationships (at least the romantically and/or legally partnered kind) were for the weak. Time-consuming, physically and emotionally risky, and total nonstarters in the way of résumé building or the accumulation of A.P. credits, they were little more than distractions from the Big Life Project that was work. And though “work” tended to be murkily defined in our household (as it happened, there weren’t a whole lot of A.P. credits flying around), it was clear that its opposite—domestic life, family life, the kind of life where adult concerns and interests are perpetually subsumed by a tide of parent-teacher conferences and sticky surfaces and meltdowns in the toy aisle—put a major cramp in any thinking person’s style and should be put off as long as possible if not avoided entirely. That my parents were themselves living such a life—in the suburbs, no less—was a stinging irony I fully absorbed only later.
    Every December, a pile of Christmas cards accumulated in a basket in the dining room. They were from faraway relatives and people my parents had known in previous lives. Many contained portrait-studio family photos or newsletters bragging about various accomplishments and/or lamenting various medical ailments. These missives were read and commented upon in depth by my parents, often with the derisive implication that if winning a Little League trophy was big-enough news to make the annual Christmas letter, this family must not have accomplished a whole lot else. But of all the nonachievements presented, none were subject to more scorn than the news that someone was getting married, especially if that person was in some way deemed too young, too nascent in his or her career, too undeveloped as a person to withstand the identity-erasing effects of formally attaching yourself to another (possibly similarly undeveloped) person.
    â€œJackie Harris is getting married ,” my mother would say. She would say this in the same tone as she might say Jackie Harris got a tattoo . Or Jackie Harris has dropped out of that applied physics Ph.D. program and enrolled in beauty school .
    Translation: Early marriage is for the unambitious. Successful people stay single for a long time and when they’ve achieved everything they possibly can on their own they marry equally if not more successful people. Then their weddings are announced in The New York Times . Translation: If you are not important or successful enough to get your wedding announced in The New York Times you’re not ready to get married.
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    The “Knot Yet” debate was in April. The invitation to participate had come in December. Two weeks before the event, there was still no venue. One week before the event, I was told that it would take place at a Modern Orthodox synagogue in Beverly Hills. Two days before the event, a phone conference was held among the participants, at which time the Marriage Project director asked if it was too late to do any publicity or advertising. The rabbi who led the synagogue was also on the phone and said that he would put a notice on the website and alert the members of the shul’s singles’ group. The Marriage Project director said he anticipated there could be as many as five hundred people in attendance and the rabbi said there was a larger auditorium we could use if the numbers exceeded the capacity of the hall we’d originally planned on.
    When I arrived at the synagogue on the evening of the event, ten minutes before the