“This was the first time it crossed my mind that a young woman like us — a knowledge worker, a writer, a leftist — might regret her independent youth and wish she had married a loving person at a young age. I’d associated this idea with a type of womanhood we considered totally outside of our zone of interest: anti-intellectualism, a belief in the primacy of motherhood. I was blindsided by the suggestion that we might be better people if we were recused from formative independence and struggle. I looked around at my friends and acquaintances, especially the married ones, and wondered if there was any truth in the idea that the years they spent as poor captains of their own ships, unmoored and often lonely, were in fact not remotely necessary or enlightening.
Why did no one else find this proposition shocking? It was such a clear transgression against the entire prevailing ethos of young womanhood (at least in liberal contexts). Critics were concerned with whether Eileen’s happy ending with Simon constituted a more regressive romantic ending than we’d seen in Rooney’s prior novels, but there was no preoccupation with this regret on Eileen’s part. Is that because one is liable, in extreme love, to suddenly wish all kinds of self-negating and previously inconceivable things? Did we read this and think we knew better: that when Eileen grows accustomed to her marriage, she’ll be glad that she had the chance to grow up among her friends before she and Simon came together? Or maybe this is the essential quality which separates a romance from a novel: in a romance a woman must be rescued from circumstances which are sad, inadequate, grief-filled, wasteful. Perhaps a romance is less powerful if it acknowledges all those other little placeholders and consolation prizes (friends, work, art) which we pretend can make us balanced and happy.”
Robbie Griggs 