The Problems of Choice

"I had just turned 35 when I started thinking about freezing my eggs," writes the author of a controversial Newsweek piece called "Why I Froze My Eggs."

I came across the Newsweek piece while writing an article on egg freezing for an Indian magazine.  Americans might be surprised to realize that in India - a culture known for housewivery and arranged marriage - the population of well-off single women is on the rise.  A colleague recently told me that at one dinner, his wife and her best friend counted and realized that they know 40 unmarried women over the age of 30 in Delhi, and not one unmarried man.  Dinner parties in Delhi seem, sometimes, not all that different from dinner parties in Manhattan.

The women I've interviewed for my article (all of whom have asked to remain anonymous) have an interesting perspective on their situation.  Pretty much every one talks about "not meeting Mr. Right" - it comes up in the Newsweek story, too.  One of my sources objected when I referred to her as a "career girl" - she wrote back "ideally I would have married in my late 20s."

I know that most women are content with their lives, but flipping through my notes I can't but feel a sense of loss.  Which is odd because we've been raised with more choice than any previous generation.

This blog post is about choice, and what it means.  That single word carries so much ideological and personal weight.  Choice means abortions, sex, career, family, everything.  It's a way of life.  It's the right to a way of life. I was raised with the belief that a woman's right to choose her life is sacred, untouchable, and unquestionable.  I still believe that it should be untouchable.  But there are aspects of "choice" - and the universe of possibility that it has come to encompass - that could stand closer scrutiny.

For example, what is the relationship between choice and control?  The egg-freezing narrative highlights a very modern conundrum.  Modern technology has given us more control over our lives than ever before, but very few of the women I talked to wanted to freeze their eggs.  As young girls, they did not grow up dreaming about the day a doctor would one day put them under anesthesia and extract their eggs with a needle.  These women froze their eggs because they had no other choice - they didn't meet Mr. Right in time.  It's true that our mothers' generation didn't have the option of freezing their eggs.  But then, they didn't really need it, did they?  They had husbands.

I don't believe that the feminist movement made mistakes.  Women are better off today than at any point in the historical past - that is absolutely undeniable.  I am not trying to say that we should go back to those days.  For the record.

But are women honest about the "choices" that they make?  My source wrote "ideally I would have married in my late 20s."  She makes it sound like an opportunity lost.  But we are a generation of women who know exactly how to get what we want.  Two years ago I moved to another country and called tens of foreign editors because I wanted to get a job in journalism, doing what I loved.  With relationships, I've been happy to be almost pathologically lazy, letting career dictate my moves and then vaguely hoping that everything else will work out.  I'm two years away from my "late 20s" - the age that my source wanted to get married by.  The fact that I don't feel ready for that kind of commitment bears closer scrutiny.

We talk about about how the modern era has extended the period of adolescence for men, but it's done the same thing for women.  In a recent piece, Myriam Miedzian argues that "friends with benefits" is an arrangement that mainly seems to benefit men. Not really.  Women often instigate and enjoy these set-ups because they don't want the pressure of commitment, either.  We are a more commitment-phobic generation than any previous one, and a lot of that may have to do with the luxury of choice.  Choice is a hard thing to renounce - and marriage is, culturally, defined as much by what you lose (freedom) as what you gain (stability).

Another source mentioned that freezing her eggs helped "take the pressure off" future relationships.  But trying to take "pressure off" future relationships is the sort of thing that makes sense when you haven't spent the past several days injecting yourself with hormones that will stimulate your ovaries.  At that point, it does seem like the pressure is already on.

When you're raised with infinite choices - as our generation has been - it can be hard to make a choice.  Has technology actually given us more choices, or simply more fallback options?