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By Root 1510 0

in 1953. But to intended readers, the totalitarian marital outlook of the fifties—an all-new “togetherness”—had nothing at all to do with their own lives in the 1990s. They were, to quote many TV commercials and newsmagazine segments, free single women devising creative solutions to their lives and problems, primarily to the unsettling state of “singleness” in such an unsettled world. They were not “slaves to societal custom…and not cruel to our friends who are not married yet,” explains Tara, who did not get engaged until twenty-six. “I thought through my options and waited…. No one was pushing me to do it. Well, perhaps a little, because that’s what society expects…. But what I wanted was someone in my life to go out with, permanently, and what is wrong with that? Someone to take with you out into life? Just think about what life is these days. Why wouldn’t you want a partner?…Having your friends goes only so far.”

More than one million young couples between the ages of twenty-two and twenty-five, last year agreed.

“There’s just something so very right about confronting the world and your job and the hostility of everything, knowing that there’s someone who is legally and emotionally attached to you,” says Mrs. Caitlin Cardozo, the only young subject who did not wish to have her name changed. “I’m proud of what I’ve achieved in my personal life,” she says. Although she admits that there is “a tiny bit of a stigma connected to marrying at a young age,” she thinks “the people who object or have a problem with this are people in their thirties who have put a lot of emphasis on career, and now don’t know what to think or do about marriage.” She speculates, “Maybe someone like me is threatening to them. Maybe I make them concerned that their own way of doing things, all that cool late-night-at-the-office life, was not very well thought out.”

This view is most wonderfully captured in a 1997 piece in New York magazine about young wealthy girls racing around to weddings as if it were 1952. The piece begins on Park Avenue and features young college graduates, onetime private-school cliques, in Vera Wang’s and Bergdorf’s, looking impatient with the women crouched on the floor fixing the hems of their gowns. One young woman, twenty-one, explains, and I paraphrase, We’re city-bred girls and we’ve had our share of wild times and drugs and fooling around. Getting married is a way to move beyond that phase in life and not to get stuck, in another one, alone.

And as author Sara Bernard assesses things, “The circle of women who seem to be skipping their Mary Tyler Moore Murphy bed phase…is bigger than just the waspy-preppy circuit.” Many others out there had upsetting personal histories that read like that of Rose quoted above, the “untraditional…range of experiences starting…[with] your parents separating.” Many want to marry early or whenever it’s right and, like Mrs. Caitlin Cardozo, believe that it is only older Others who have problems with this scenario.

But now and then someone acknowledges the unique tensions and ambiguities of younger wifehood, many of these conflicts directly related to youth—to the inescapable feeling that a twenty-one-year-old wife has in some sense skipped out on a vital part of her young life. These tensions seem to simmer and sometimes explode when doing housework. As one twenty-four-year-old puts it, “Others are having TGIF-fucking Friday and I’m having to vacuum—rugs and the floors and tiles—because, look, I’m not fucking mopping, thank you, and his parents are coming over in twenty minutes and we both work.”

Vacuuming. Dishes. Laundry. Many younger married women say it seems to be more difficult to do housework as a married person than as a single. “I’ll be vacuuming or changing the beds or the sheets and I’ll get this creeped-out feeling,” says “Jennifer,” twenty-three. “When I was doing those things for myself, I did them because I wanted to, not because I had to—it felt like part of the fun of living on your own, out of your mother’s house. Now there is a sense of ‘I have to do this,’ like there