The article, as one can gather from the title, is about women who marry in their 20's for practice and see nothing wrong with taking a guy out for a test-drive and dumping him off at the curb once the sheen wears off--here are some highlights from the article:
Andi takes a throaty slug of her second raspberry martini, picks at her fish taco, then sits back in her chair. "I think marriage is the new dating and having kids is the new marriage," she proclaims loudly, as yet another woman dining with her partner turns to stare. "It's true. I wouldn't have married him if I didn't think I could get out of it...."
Of course, our generation can afford to chuck the Cinderella story when the glass slipper doesn't fit. While our grandmothers were forced to remain shackled to unhappy unions for monetary reasons, most women today have the financial wherewithal to cry uncle and bolt whenever we get uncomfortable.
For some, a starter husband is like a starter home � a semi-commitment where you're willing to do some of the surface work, like painting the walls, but not the heavy lifting, like gutting the whole foundation; he's just not a long-term investment. Others compare a starter husband to a first job, where you learn some skills and polish your resume before going after the position you really want....
It's easy to write these women off as callous or self-absorbed. And yet on some level, they just might be pioneers [my emphasis]: Why stay put in an empty shell of a marriage � an arrangement on paper only � instead of calling it what it is? "This generation is reinventing marriage," says Paul.
I thought pioneers were supposed to be brave people who ventured out to discover new things and make the world a better place, not cowards who are too afraid to say "no" to a marriage that they don't want just to "have a gorgeous party, and make my parents really, really happy" as one woman put it.
A man is not a car and anyone who compares a human being to an object this way has more issues than I care to discuss in a blog post. I realize these self-centered articles and books such as The Starter Marriage and the Future of Matrimony
are fun to write and really make women feel "empowered" to act in the same manner as the sexist men of yesteryear who spoke of women like chattels. But in reality, women who use men for starter husbands are the opposite of empowered--they are the archetype of the weak female: afraid to say no, afraid of independence and afraid to be unmarried in their 20's. Yeah, the "you go girl" movement has really done a lot for these women--and reinventing marriage in this way is not empowerment of a new sort, it is just a new twist on an old theme, leaving a lover with a broken heart.