A Little Bit Married: Adding No Judgment to the Soup

Have you been thinking about the Zeitgeist lately? Me neither — until I went to a writer’s conference through the Harvard Medical School Department of Continuing Education. Hannah Seligson assured us that we need to have our finger on the Zeitgeist if we want to stay relevant (and incidentally get a book successfully published.) Wanting to stay relevant, I went to my room and Googled “zeitgeist,” just to be sure. Wikipedia told me it is “the spirit of the times.”

Who is Hannah Seligson? You obviously don’t have your finger on the Zeitgeist. I had never heard of her either. A self-described Gen Y-er, born in 1982, she’s only twenty-seven years old and was a featured speaker at the conference.

No, she was not some Harvard brain-child (OK, she did get her B.A. from Brown – way back in 2004). She is a freelance journalist and writer who, with her finger apparently right on the Zeitgeist, has just published her second book, “A Little Bit Married: How to Know When to Walk Down the Aisle or Out the Door.” You can check out her website here.

What does it mean to be “a little bit married?” Well, she informs us that for millions of twenty-somethings there is now a sprawling life stage between puberty, around thirteen, to marriage, often past thirty, in which there is a lot of coupling and uncoupling, but there is often at least one committed long term relationship. “Today,” she says, “the long term relationship is a rite of passage that’s as significant a developmental marker as your first kiss, taking out your first mortgage, or deciding to have kids.”  It feels like being married, but it’s not marriage; it’s more “a little bit married.” It is, apparently, ultimately a temporary state: impermanent, and destined to be followed by actual marriage or breakup.

So, she has me thinking about Zeitgeist. What is the spirit of our times? Why only “a little bit married?” Well, in an article in the Daily Beast (she has me really Zeitgeist connected now!), she says, “The zeitgeist today is expressed in lines like, “I’m in no rush.” Apparently the timeline to adulthood has been loosened; there’s a long period in which young people consider themselves “emerging adults.” People are switching jobs, career paths are uncertain, moves across country and even to other countries are common.

Then there is the fear of divorce, left over from preceding generations with too many ultimately abandoned relationships. This may be contributing to spending many years trying to uncover your perfect “soul mate” before attempting marriage.

So what’s the common theme? It looks to me like impermanence. The emerging social structures reflect a world dominated by constant change. The zeitgeist is change, impermanence. Why be in a rush to get someplace if everything is constantly changing?

So what’s Grandma’s recipe for the Zeitgeist? I think we are still experimenting with the three-root impermanence soup: expect it, accept it and greet it with an attitude of “That’s good.”  I think this week I will try to sprinkle in a little “no judgments” and compassion for the twenty-somethings. They seem to be trying to find a way to fully embrace the present moment in a world of rapid change.

However, I would really love to hear from them. I know many of you know or have kids in this age range. Please send them the link to this blog (copy this – grandmassoup.wordpress.com – and paste it into an email) and let’s get some intergenerational dialogue going.

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