The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After (42 page)

Besides keeping her from prematurely belonging to a man who didn’t quite belong to her yet, the rules also helped a woman attract and evaluate potential mates by avoiding
another
major distraction that women today
are plagued by, above and beyond premature attachment. We call it “working on our relationship.” I’m inclined to suspect Jane Austen would have called it “making a good wife.” Which she wouldn’t have thought made a lot of sense ... before you’re a wife at all. Once a woman is “in a relationship”—just as soon as there’s an understanding that we’re together with a guy, whether or not we’re living together, or sleeping together, yet
³⁵
—our attention is bound to switch from 1) evaluating him as a potential mate to 2) doing everything we can to make the relationship work.
³⁶

It has come to seem perfectly normal to us that a couple should be, at one and the same time, “working on their relationship” and also deciding whether that relationship is going to last.
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In fact, we’re so used to a kind of tentative togetherness—where there’s already a commitment, but it’s a temporary or partial one—that we act like the actual decisions about whether to take the relationship to the next level of commitment, and even whether to stay together at all, are decisions we can make jointly with the man, as part of the relationship. But if you think about it rationally, it doesn’t make a lot of sense. The two of you can’t really decide together to what extent and even whether you’re going to be together. In the end, these are decisions each of you has to make for yourself.

A friend of mine (a psychologist in private practice as a therapist, for whatever extra authority that gives his story) was once telling me the story of how he and his wife decided to get married. At the point in their relationship where they were getting really serious, he found himself in the process of a career move—from one academic institution to another—that meant he would also be moving to a different state. He had fallen in love and was thinking he wanted to get married. But the decision was complicated by the move. Telling me the story, he happened to say: “We still had a decision to make. Well, two decisions, actually.” By which he meant that he had to decide whether he wanted to marry her, and then she had her own separate decision to make about whether she wanted to marry him. Something about the way
he said it clarified in my mind the fact that any permanent romantic commitment really requires two individual decisions—a point that we lose sight of with all our talk about “the talk” and “working on our relationship.”

Compared to us, Jane Austen heroines are willing to forego a lot of things to maintain their freedom to choose a man from a position of independence, instead of wheedling and caressing one into choosing them. In the short term they do without sexual pleasure ... and the thrill of that moment with a new guy when you first admit to being interested in each other and cross personal boundaries ... and the togetherness that you can enjoy in a romantic relationship even if it’s tentative or short-lived. They’re incredibly strong women.
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To live like a Jane Austen heroine, do you have to be bravely lonely? No, you don’t.
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But you
do
have to be strong enough to be willing to postpone some very good and desirable things—the relief and exhilaration of letting him into the secret of your feelings, plus pleasure, romance, and comfortable togetherness with a guy—until it’s all justified by a firm commitment on his part. Going for those things prematurely means giving up your freedom to choose a man wisely; it means short-circuiting the delicate kind of courtship in which Jane Austen heroines and their heroes find permanent happiness. That’s the purpose of all those rules in Jane Austen—from the arcane ones about how many dances you could dance with one partner, to the perennial principles about pacing the speed of your attachment. They’re all for preserving a woman’s freedom to choose permanent happiness.
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But this is all sounding awfully hard and a bit depressing. Do the real, original rules for women disappointingly boil down to keeping your legs crossed before marriage? Is our only real choice between being a Marguerite Fields—caught in the attachment gap between men and women—and
being forty-year-old virgins?
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Well, no. The conservative Christian no-sex-before-marriage rule is not the complete recipe for Jane Austen heroine status. How do I know? I’ve lived it.

I grew up an Evangelical Christian in Memphis, Tennessee. I went to an all-girls’ school; boys were alien and fascinating creatures to me. Before I’d ever been asked on a date, I heard from the speakers at “Youth Week” at my church the very precise limits we were supposed to abide by once we got started mingling with the opposite sex. After hyping the titillating “How far can we go?” question all week, the charismatic guest speaker announced the definitive answer on the last night.
A kiss good night.
That was it. If you always stopped right there, you’d save yourself from the ugly fate the speaker had been warning us against all week with his stories—which even to my naïve ears sounded strangely 1950s-vintage—about the kind of girl who ended up going “all the way,” asked the guy afterwards if he still “respected” her, and ended up the brunt of derisive male laughter when her question was the punchline of the story the guy told his street-corner buddies.

So when I did start dating a guy, that’s the standard I tried to live by. But it didn’t really work. It was a failure in two different ways, actually. First of all, “a good night kiss” can mean a lot of different things, some of which tend to have a certain momentum beyond anything that can be covered by that description. But that wasn’t the only deficiency in the admittedly well-meaning advice I was trying to follow. The other problem was that the stop-at-a-good-night-kiss rule didn’t address the main point of the real, original rules that Jane Austen heroines follow. It didn’t do anything to keep me from glomming onto the first guy who took a serious interest in me. I spent two years in a relationship that had almost all the exact problems Jane Austen heroines avoid by following the real, original rules.

It kept other guys from asking me out. It kept me busy “working on our relationship”—a miserable combination of 1) trying to improve my character and curb my expectations to accommodate the guy, and 2) badgering him to change himself to accommodate my expectations—instead of asking myself whether he was really the right guy. It gave me the illusion that the
two of us were in something together, when really we were just trying each other out. And—surprise!—it turned out that the guy I was working so hard to be together with wasn’t as committed to me as I was to him. I spent the whole time feeling way too much like Mrs. Clay, and not nearly enough like Elizabeth Bennet. And high school wasn’t the last time I made that mistake.

Some of the attachment was no doubt from the (oxytocin-inducing) good-night kisses. But it wasn’t just that. Even more important, I think, was the “dangerous particularity”—the reality that I’d already chosen him, the tentative commitment, the fact that we were a couple. The “relationship” itself was the problem.

In college I converted to Catholicism
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and progressively lost touch with the Evangelical Christian world. But eventually I read up on “honorable courtship,” which is a new solution for the problem addressed by the old good-night-kiss rule I picked up as a teenager. Apparently at one Christian college, students aren’t supposed to pay each other any romantic attention before consulting with both their parents and agreeing to undertake a “courtship,” in which their stated goal is to figure out whether they want to get married. But notice, a woman who has entered into an “honorable courtship” is now in a tentative quasi-commitment with a man. It’s not courtship as Jane Austen understood it—where a man has made his interest clear, but the woman hasn’t yet said
yes.

Quasi-commitment even without sex falls afoul of the real, original rules Jane Austen heroines live by. But so does physical intimacy without even quasi-commitment. As I was finishing this chapter, I came across a blog called “Hooking Up Smart,” where Susan Walsh offers women “5 Ways to Get More Control of Your Relationships.” Walsh rejects both
Rules
-style and
He’s Just Not That Into You
-based approaches and argues for self-control. So far, so good.
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A lot of Walsh’s advice matches up with what you can learn from Jane Austen. But Walsh seems to expect that women can do things like “Make sure that your level of interest is no greater than his,” “Think of yourself as ‘single’ because you are,” and “Try not to discuss him constantly with your girlfriends” at the same time that they’re sharing a level of physical intimacy with a guy that’s more Lydia than Elizabeth Bennet. That’s exactly the miserable state of affairs Marguerite Fields describes
in her
New York Times
piece. A woman who tries to follow Walsh’s advice is going to find herself vainly struggling for that “Zenlike form of nonattachment” that seems to come so easily to men, so hard to women.

One more thing about that guy I dated in high school. Notice how I keep calling him “that guy I dated in high school”? Instead of “my high school boyfriend”? That’s because even back then I had a certain reluctance to claim him as my “boyfriend” or admit that I was his “girlfriend.” My hesitation came mainly from a source quite different from my Evangelical church, where pairing up was all the rage in the youth group.
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That reluctance was picked up from my grandmother who, having been raised by
her
grandmother, was a link to much older ideas about relations between the sexes. She called the boys in our lives “beaux,” not “boyfriends,” because a “beau” is any man who’s interested in you—not necessarily one whose attentions
you
have accepted.
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Raising her own children in the 1950s and’ 60s, Grandmother was totally out of touch with the going-steady, pin-ceremony, “be true to your school now Just like you would to your girl or guy”
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romantic ethic of the fifties.
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There’s a story in our family about the engagement party for my aunt. Grandmother had been so insistent that her daughter keep her options open until she was
officially
engaged that Aunt Mary had been dating different guys in Memphis while the man she had decided to marry was in medical school in Baltimore. So when Aunt Mary called a male friend to ask him to the party, he asked whose engagement it was for—assuming she was asking him to be her date. My grandmother brought a kind of faint memory of those real, original rules into the late twentieth century. She gave me at least a whisper of a feel for what it might be like to live in the system that Jane Austen brought to perfection, when women were freer to find their way to love without premature commitments.

But it’s all a long time ago. What if you truly wanted to live like a Jane Austen heroine today? To go beyond learning to be a little wiser about why love, twenty-first-century-style, is making you unhappy? To do more than minimally protect yourself from the hazards that Jane Austen understood better than we do? What if you wanted to get to fall in love the way Elizabeth Bennet does? Is it even still possible? That’s the subject of the next and final chapter.