What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding Read Online Free PDF Page A

love you,” and then been together for several years.
    So I was starting to wonder if I’d just never have crazy single-girl stories. Which felt like I was choosing to skip a vital life experience, like seeing Paris or having a child, the memory of which would comfort and entertain me as I lay in my old-lady bed, knowing that I had
really done it.
    Trevor was handsome and hilarious and weird in a way I loved. But he was also an aspiring comedy writer who, like all aspiring comedy writers, was regularly unemployed. The same month we started dating, I had finally stopped aspiring and started doing, getting my firstwriting job on
That ’70s Show
, and so his unemployment was also accompanied by depression since, every morning, I went off to his dream job. This was a big bummer for both of us. I loved him, and he moved in with me when his lease was up during a period of unemployment, but I didn’t plan on marrying him. I didn’t think being in a relationship with someone I didn’t want to marry was a problem, mostly because, as I’ve said, I had never really wanted to
get
married,
period.
    So why was that? Most everyone says your feelings about marriage come from your parents’ marriage. I don’t know if that’s the whole explanation, but here is my parents’ story, which definitely had at least some influence:
    My parents met when they were young, tan, blond Southern California lifeguards at the same pool in 1967. Picture everyone in
Gidget
, and you get the idea. They got married very fast and very young, at barely twenty and twenty-four, and I grew up experiencing them as very much in love—with me, and with each other. They showered together, they danced in the kitchen, they locked the bedroom door on Saturday mornings.
    But after eighteen years, they had grown dramatically apart. The nineteen-year-old lifeguard whom my father had married had turned into a workaholic international corporate lawyer, whose world was getting bigger with every year. The young, beautiful sailor and naval officer who whisked my mother off as a new bride to live in Newport, Rhode Island, and Naples, Italy, had turned into a juvenile probation officer who worked nine to five (which was considered part-time in our house) and who was a cheerfulhomebody, happiest on the couch with me, my mom, and a box of wine.
    He resented the housekeeper my mother hired so she didn’t have to spend her few free hours cleaning the house. She resented that she was working constantly to bring home a big check that she wanted to use to see the world, and yet he insisted on going to the same condo in Maui year after year, where we would make sandwiches and break into the beachfront pool down the road. She would buy him flying lessons for his birthday, because as a young man he had dreamed of being a pilot, and he would feel criticized for not being enough for her. She wanted him to have a life about more than us, he wanted her to have a life that was more about us.
    It broke.
    Following are the lessons I internalized about marriage as a result of my parents’ marriage:
    1. Getting married young is gambling on a game you don’t know how to play. You don’t know who either of you is going to become. If you get married before you are fully cooked, you have no idea if you are marrying someone who will ultimately be compatible with you.
    2. Marriage is a limiter. It limits your freedom, and it limits your capacity to follow your dreams. If you do make the mistake of growing while married, your marriage will end.
    3. No matter how in love you start out, no matter how much you dance in the kitchen and lock thebedroom door on Saturday mornings, love will die.
    And so when people like Vito and Trevor asked me to marry them, I said no.
    My best friend, Sasha, was mystified about why I would be spending what she called my “high-worth years” with someone I wasn’t going to marry. The world was my oyster,
now
, she would say, but it wouldn’t be that way forever. I