“I grew up thinking I would be Meg, and now I think I might be Jo!”
This was the struggle I overheard from someone who recently saw the 2019 film adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. For those less familiar with the story of 4 sisters, Meg marries her first love and starts a family, while Jo goes off independently rebuffing romantic expectations, choosing adventure and eventually marrying a professor over the expected Laurie.
Greta Gerwig’s latest interpretation (spoiler alert) goes so far as to incorporate L.M.A.’s true and quasi-autobiographic intentions for her heroine: Jo was actually intended to remain single, but the publishers wouldn’t allow for it.
People want a happy ending.
Perhaps you wanted the happy ending too. Maybe, like me, you spent most of your adult life pining for the stuff of period dramas. There is comfort in the familiar stories of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy, Anne Shirley and Gilbert Blythe, and even Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester: Girl and Boy meet, one falls in love with the other, obstacles ensue as the reluctant one comes to realize his/her true feelings, and it all works out in the end.
The duty of 1800s authors was to introduce the concept of marrying for love to a world bound up in obligation. And as I’ve wrestled with my own inner “Jo-ness,” I can’t help but wonder if the task for modern-day story-tellers is to unmask the truth to a world convinced that romantic partnership is the answer, that
you should want more out of life than an ending.
Learning to embrace singleness can be a struggle. It requires sorting through disappointed hopes, grieving unmet expectations, and untangling the fiction from the reality. But I’m guessing the real people of prior centuries would puzzle at our obsession with finding partners. Us “old maids” have opportunities our predecessors didn’t have: Influence, position, status, security, intimacy, connection, and dare I say happiness are no longer tied to coupling the way they have historically been.
Spinsters never had it so good.
So instead of looking at all the Megs in your life who have marriage and children and stories you pine for, perhaps it’s time to start smiling at the Jo in the mirror and living the adventure in front of you.
Take the What Type of Single Are You? Quiz and find out how you can step towards a different kind of happiness.