The New Shotgun Weddings : It Used to Be: First Comes Love, Then Comes Marriage, Then Comes Junior in the Baby Carriage. Nowadays, Some Couples Are Having Junior First.
IN A NAKED MOMENT of truth, girl talk can slice right to the heart. “I can say it was completely an accident, but that wouldn’t be true because I didn’t put my diaphragm in that night,” my friend--I’ll call her Susan--was saying at lunch the other day. “But I didn’t plan it, either. It’s hard to admit that you’ve been manipulative. But as an intelligent person, you have to admit to a certain amount of manipulation.”
Susan is 35, a publicist, beautiful, smart, a great tennis player, funny--and three months pregnant. Next month, she’s getting married. Her boyfriend, Allen, who is going on 40, says he wants to walk down the aisle to the strains of Junior Walker and the All-Stars’ “Shotgun.”
Six months ago, Susan and Allen moved in together after seeing each other for a year. When she started bringing up the subject of marriage, she says, he “got the heebie-jeebies.” “Listen, all I know is that I’ve wanted to have a kid for so many years. I just feel in every ounce of me that I want to be a mother. I think I’d be totally unfulfilled, totally bummed, if I got to be 45 and didn’t have any kids.”
Susan talked about living in “desperate times,” about reading last year’s depressing Newsweek story, which said that she was more likely to be killed by a terrorist than to get married, about Allen’s inability to make commitments about where to go for dinner, let alone to the Big M.
“So, in fact,” she said, “this is my way of making him do what I want him to do and what I truly believe he wants, too. The bottom line is he’s happy the decision was made for him.”
A few weeks later I asked Allen to meet me for lunch. He didn’t seem so happy. A self-described Peter Pan type who views himself as a musician “with long hair on my heart,” Allen is a documentary film maker. I asked him why he’s getting married. “The mensch factor,” he said, shrugging.
But he’s also deeply resentful: “She got what she wanted,” he said. “I’m being pushed and pulled by a woman who doesn’t necessarily view the world the way I do. She’s a WASP from Philadelphia; I’m a Jewish boy from New Jersey. We were raised differently. She assumes a lot about people.
“Susan is a great woman. She’s going to be a great mother. She loves me and I love her. And it’ll work. It’s just that I feel like I’m being shoved in as the devil-may-care bachelor kind of guy, whose life style I embrace, and coming out the other side as the family man, trying to make a living and wondering how I’m possibly going to support a wife and a child. So there’s a lot of pressure. It’s new terrain, not necessarily voluntary terrain.”
He looked across the restaurant at a newborn infant.
“Look at that baby,” he gushed. “She’s beautiful. Just beautiful.”
SUSAN AND ALLEN are far more honest than most couples I know. She admits to being manipulative; he admits to feeling ambivalent--trapped one minute and elated the next. Neurotic products of the suburbs of the ‘50s, they’ve been wanting to get on with their relationship but haven’t been sure how to take the next step. For them, the next step turned out to be a child.
After speaking with Susan and Allen, I wondered whether their hasty wedding plans were an anomaly. But I quickly discovered that they weren’t the only ones diving into matrimony because of an accidental-on-purpose pregnancy.
Shotgun weddings have become the latest incarnation of yuppie love in Los Angeles. But these days, the bridegroom isn’t so much standing at the altar while staring down the barrel of a father-in-law’s gun as staring down at a positive home pregnancy test. You can quibble about definitions (no one likes to admit that theirs is a forced union), but my interpretation of a shotgun wedding is one in which the bride is pregnant.
Long associated with teen-agers who don’t know better, the new shotgun weddings are now taking hold among baby boomers, who make up the largest segment of the American population. It’s not surprising that many members of a generation intent on prolonging its adolescence have chosen a rebellious way of growing up: Like bad boys and girls, they’re committing the quintessential adolescent act--getting “in trouble.” The ensuing whirlwind of pregnancy, marriage and, perhaps, home ownership is like the ultimate rush, the ultimate high that culminates in the miracle of birth.
There are few good statistical measures of how many women are pregnant and unmarried or pregnant when they get married. But according to several Westside obstetrician-gynecologists whose large practices cater mostly to affluent women in their 30s, one of every five pregnant patients is not married. “Most of them,” says obstetrician Robert Friedland of Hamrell, Lieb, Dubin & Friedland, “are in a relationship and are married by the end of the pregnancy. The baby just speeds things up. But it’s not like the old shotgun marriage of having to get married, because there doesn’t seem to be a stigma anymore.”
Bridal shops confirmed this theory also. Like Susan, more and more women are getting married in drop-waist dresses. Or being fitted for dresses after the amniocentesis. Or looking green at the gills on their wedding day. “It’s incredible, like an epidemic--all these pregnant brides,” says Geri Perlman, who runs the Victorian Garden bridal shop in Studio City. “Even two years ago, getting pregnant didn’t necessarily mean they had to get married right away. But now, all these women in their 30s are reverting back to old-time values. I think it’s a new morality of the ‘80s, or maybe a preview of the ‘90s.”
The trend is not reflected nationwide. Not yet, anyway. According to the most recent U.S. Census Bureau figures--averages for the years 1980-84--less than 4% of women in their 30s who are having babies for the first time are in shotgun marriages. On a national level, the only age group that compares in numbers to the upscale picture in Los Angeles is 18- and 19-year-olds, among whom shotgun babies make up 23.7% of all births. “There is no relationship between what’s happening (in Los Angeles) with the rest of the United States,” says Martin O’Connell, director of the fertility branch of the U.S. Census Bureau.
But the more I looked for shotgun couples, the less I had to. These romances include couples who are living together, like Susan and Allen, and marry sooner than expected; women who, on the second or third date, get pregnant and marry soon thereafter; couples who don’t marry until after the baby is born, sometimes because he or she is still technically married to someone else; women who staunchly refuse to get married until they already are pregnant. Anything goes. Just look at Woody Allen and Mia Farrow. (Allen has said he has no intention of getting married.) Or Steven Spielberg and Amy Irving. (They married after the baby was born.) Or Cybill Shepherd and Bruce Oppenheim. (She was pregnant when they married.)
After spending a month interviewing more than 20 couples--most of them in their 30s and early 40s and many into their second marriages--as well as psychotherapists, obstetricians and pediatricians, what I saw emerging was a clear pattern: Love and marriage in the late ‘80s has less to do with passion than compassion. There is a desperation, a biological imperative for women who have delayed childbearing for careers and now see their options for motherhood closing off. For men, the “settling down” factor has everything to do with timing: There is a profound fear of AIDS while, paradoxically, birth control practices are wildly sloppy. Not to mention a conservative shift in attitudes toward abortion.
The irony is that, just when it seemed that marriage was not necessarily a prerequisite for motherhood, the generation that grew up on sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll is resorting to some peculiarly old-fashioned nesting strategies. Having lived through the self-awareness of the ‘70s and the new technologies of the ‘80s--first we could have sex without procreation; now we can have procreation without sex--we’ve watched the old rules change. But have they really?
This, then, is the new story--which is really a new-old story--of getting back to basics in a culture of instant gratification, of groping for traditional patterns, now blurred beyond distinction and wrapped in different packages. And in an odd sort of way, it is also a hopeful story, because it underscores a basic belief in the value of children.
“I think women in their 30s never before had the guts or society’s tacit permission to be as aggressive in a relationship, to make the decision about marriage and about pregnancy,” explains a 35-year-old prosecutor who says she got pregnant on her third date and was married two months later. “It’s like we’re fast-food people. You want a hamburger? Go to McDonald’s. You want a baby? What are you going to do, get married and wait 10 years? Shotgun weddings are very much a sign of the times. They’re like McDonald Marriages.”
THE INVITATION to Nana Zeligman’s baby shower tells the story: “It’s a baby shower and . . . SURPRISE . . . Nana will be surprised to find out that she’s getting married . . . April 1, 1987 (It’s no joke).”
Unlike most of the women I interviewed, Zeligman, a 35-year-old former sales representative for women’s apparel, was steadfast about not getting married until after her baby was born. For one thing, a couple she knew who had married shotgun-style had a miscarriage and wound up getting divorced. For another thing, she says, “I can hear the whispers in the background as we’re getting married: ‘She’s pregnant and that’s why they’re getting married.’ When I get married, it’s because I want to, not because I need to or have to. I figured if Farrah could do it, so could I.”
As it turned out, her boyfriend, 36-year-old biology teacher Michael Sommers, conspired with her obstetrician-gynecologist to draw a blood test from her so he could secretly secure a marriage license. During the co-ed baby shower at her mother’s home, Sommers took Zeligman upstairs, popped the question and handed her a wedding ring. She said yes, and they glided down the staircase together as a judge and cheering friends and family waited below.
The progression used to be pretty basic: You fall in love, get married and have a baby. And if you’re lucky, you stay married. There was a mutual rhythm to it all, like the old childhood chant: “First comes love, then comes marriage, / Then comes Junior in the baby carriage.”
But now, people are getting it all backwards. First comes the baby--at least in utero--and then comes marriage and, with luck, the love part follows. Carl and Carol (not their real names) met in law school and had gone out on a few dates when she got pregnant. “He said, ‘Do you want to get married?’ ” Carol recalls. “I said, ‘Are you kidding?’ You know, I thought it was a joke. What kind of a jerk asks someone to marry him when I don’t even know him?”
Like any good lawyer, Carol used a reasonable-man standard in making up her mind. “I looked at it rationally,” she says. “Anyone who worked full time and went to law school at night--I know those people. They’re very determined and strong-willed. I was married to someone before who you would think was perfect. And it didn’t work. So, I didn’t love Carl at the time, but I thought I could probably grow to love him. I mean, I never even liked blonds, and he’s really, really blond. But he’s a reasonable person. I figured if he’s not an alcoholic, not a wife-beater, not someone with severe problems, I could handle it. So, that’s how I went into it.
“I realized I was falling in love with my husband,” she adds, “when I was seven months pregnant, which was three months after we got married.”
Sometimes, the marriage part comes last. A 43-year-old interior designer from Marin County, who says she “chose parenting before choosing marriage,” remembers having to wait on the bathroom floor for her 2-year-old daughter to get off the potty before her wedding in a rabbi’s study could begin. “We really do feel we probably would not have gotten together were it not for our daughter,” she says. “The dynamic of both falling in love with this baby and falling in love with the idea of having a baby and having that baby allowed us to spend enough time together that we could fall in love and choose each other.”
For 33-year-old Bob Romney, who owns a computer-graphics company in Irvine, it seemed appropriate to wait until his girlfriend was six months pregnant before asking her to marry him. “She got pregnant the first month we were living together,” he says. “I can remember thinking, ‘On the one hand, we should get to know each other better, and on the other hand, how much choice do we really have?’ There’s also the romantic notion of a love child. It’s a good sign. It shows us nature is smiling on this union.”
If Romney’s statement was a veiled reference to AIDS, other people were less oblique, telling me that it’s no fun being single anymore. If the shotgun groom has a mantra, it is: Enough already. The party’s over.
A 39-year-old attorney, boyish-looking but serious, was dating three other women when he met the woman he would marry. “Our communication was based on whooping it up and having a good time,” he says, explaining that they were seeing each other two or three times a week for four months when she got pregnant.
“I had no intention or desire to get married. If it happened, it happened. But I certainly wasn’t looking for it, nor did I think about it. I was having too good a time. There was no need to rock the boat.”
What changed his modus operandi was his girlfriend’s pregnancy. “It’s like life kicked me in the butt and said: ‘You’d better make a decision and get real. If you don’t, you’re gonna be 50 years old, jumping from woman to woman, and you’ll come out the back door full of adventures and experiences but maybe missing the greatest experience of all.’ When that little blue stick (from a home pregnancy test) is looking you in the eye, you know it’s real. My heart started pounding. I felt a little shy and embarrassed about it. At 39, you don’t expect this to happen.
“The only option I was going to present her with was (that) if she wanted to make it legal and get married, I’d have no problem with that. The other options weren’t even discussed--having an abortion or giving up the baby for adoption.” It was also a matter of timing, he explains. “There’s no way I could have done this younger. I would have bailed out; I was just too selfish.”
So, the baby forces the issue. Though I had always believed that children were the product of a couple’s love for each other, now I’m coming to understand that the other way around is possible, too: More and more, children are bringing people together who otherwise wouldn’t be. We may have ridiculed the hypocrisy of our parents for staying in lousy marriages “for the kids’ sake,” but now there’s a whole generation of kids growing up whose parents basically got married “for the baby.”
“It’s like the child is a way of putting romance in the whole deal,” says Beverly Hills marriage and family counselor John Grenner, who specializes in treating couples. “For a lot of these people, having a baby first is a way of sneaking up on the American dream.”
HOW DID WE GET to this point? Are women growing more manipulative or are men getting wimpier? Who’s forcing whom to the altar? The answers are complex and confusing.
Richard Burkhart, a 42-year-old rock ‘n’ roll manager, decided last summer to break up with his girlfriend while he was away on a business trip. When he returned home, she told him she was pregnant. “I really didn’t want to be forced into a relationship just because a child was there,” he told me. “It wasn’t on my list of things to do that week--to have children.”
After breaking off the relationship but agreeing to help support the baby, he began seeing a therapist and accompanied his former girlfriend to the doctor’s office for prenatal visits. Their baby was born on Valentine’s Day. In June, they married on the beach in Hawaii.
“Looking back on it today,” he says, “the right time would have never come. I probably would have gone until I was 65 years old and not had children and reflected back and regretted it. I felt very guilty when my first wife didn’t have children, like I robbed the best years of her life for that. So, I might not have had children had it been otherwise. This has forced me to do something I think I’d probably have kept putting off. I’m glad I didn’t.”
Wanting to be forced, needing to be pushed--it was like a lament I heard echoing over and over, mostly from the men I interviewed. As one of them told me: “You’ve gotta lead a racehorse to the track.” The women who loved them initiated things by getting pregnant in spite of the protests of being “trapped” and the waves of resentment that might come later. So, it wasn’t women resorting to old female games. And it wasn’t men acting like little boys. It was much more.
What it comes down to is this: In domestic life, women do the real planning and men do the real whining. The symbiosis is inextricable. Shotgun romances are no different, except that for many couples the pregnancy forces what’s been avoided--the plans, the commitments, the future--and pushes the relationship to a point where he (or sometimes she) decides to either get off the fence and make the commitment or end it.
As Susan told me: “It’s Allen’s nature to be a blob about decisions, and it’s my nature to be hyper and demand that he do things. Just the fact that he resists me in taking all these steps along the way is his form of manipulation.”
In other words, a woman’s manipulation is rivaled only by a man’s reluctance to make a commitment. Both are equal forms of control. “If you study these people in a shotgun wedding situation,” says Sherman Oaks psychoanalyst Walter E. Brackelmanns, who specializes in treating couples, “you’ll find they had difficulty in getting married, but unconsciously that’s what they wanted to do. By and large, the pregnancy was in no way a mistake. They need something to help them, and the child becomes the vehicle for which they can get married.”
Brackelmanns continues: “These are people who have difficulty forming a close, intimate relationship--the so-called commitaphobes. She had waited longer than she hoped to have a baby because of her career; he had been married before or very preoccupied with his career or very frightened of getting married. So together, they found this way of getting over that hurdle.”
For most of the people I spoke to, their pregnancies either occurred just before the couple was about to split up or soon after they committed themselves to marriage--flip sides of the same coin. In either case, the pregnancy seemed to be used as a sort of bargaining chip in directing the course of the relationship.
“The issue of commitment,” Brackelmanns adds, “has become such a major issue that what women have done is separate the whole issue of having a child from the relationship so that the two are not necessarily welded together. A woman, then, would consider having a child and not necessarily be married.”
Indeed, that seemed to be a key component in the decision-making process for the women I met. As a 36-year-old film executive told me: “I thought to myself, what’s the worst that can happen? I would have this baby and bring her up myself, which a lot of people do. If it came to that, I could deal with it.”
During my interviews, one theme kept surfacing again and again: commitment to a baby is far less threatening than commitment to marriage. Especially for men. “Marriage isn’t etched in stone,” Allen told me. “But the baby is etched in stone. That is something that nothing can break apart--no matter what.”
Counselor John Grenner believes that the shotgun phenomenon may be one of the first significant consequences of a high divorce rate. “Enough time has passed where so many of us have been touched (by) or lived through divorce that we’ve seen children can be raised by parents living apart and still feel loved,” he says. “The consequence is we have more confidence in our relationships with a child than we might with the institution of marriage. If you have a child, that relationship is permanent.”
BUT THERE WAS also something else swirling around my head that the experts weren’t talking about. Something far more compelling. At the heart of this story is a nasty little secret: People aren’t practicing “safe sex.” In fact, many aren’t practicing birth control at all.
“I remember telling her, ‘This is a dangerous game we’re playing,’ ” said one man, whose girlfriend went off birth-control pills because her skin was getting blotchy. Other men simply shrugged and said: “We were careless,” or “We were irresponsible,” or “We didn’t bother with the condom that night.”
At first, the women I interviewed said that the pregnancy was an accident. But when pressed, they would say things like, “Maybe subconsciously I wanted it,” or “There’s no such thing as an accidental pregnancy, except among teen-agers.”
Of 20 women I spoke with, 19 said their pregnancies were unplanned--even though only one woman was using birth control. They said they either thought they were infertile because they hadn’t used birth control for many years or miscalculated their cycles or assumed it would take longer than it did to get pregnant. “For the most part, women in their 30s don’t get pregnant by mistake anymore,” said Beverly Hills obstetrician-gynecologist Paul Crane. “Usually, what happens is she got sloppy with birth control and thought she couldn’t get pregnant and then did.”
Often, there is a stunning sort of pragmatism in making these life choices. “I don’t think I consciously did it,” one woman told me. “I really didn’t think that was a night I could get pregnant. We went out to dinner. We drank a lot of wine. I had no intention of sleeping with him. It was, ‘Oh, what the hell.’ Plus I needed a ride to the airport. ‘If he sleeps over, how could he not take me to the airport?’ So, I thought, ‘Well, why not?’ ”
And yet, she confided that a month before she had gone to church and prayed: “Please, God, let me get married and have a baby this year.”
The question of whether to have an abortion seemed to be ruled out quickly by most of these couples. For women who see their baby-making years coming to a close, abortion is no longer an acceptable option. For men, too, abortion has become anathema--but for very different reasons.
In fact, I kept hearing a kind of abortion backlash from the men, most of whom had been quite cavalier about abortion in the past. Now they speak of it as though the experience was their own--not their former lovers’. As Allen says, “I’ve already had two abortions and one miscarriage. I couldn’t see negating another life.”
One man, who was raised Catholic, described his ex-girlfriends’ decisions to have abortions as “the most devastating experience of my life.” A rock ‘n’ roll drummer, who bore the responsibility for two abortions, put it this way: “It was real accessible not to have a kid. We all got a distorted look at giving birth. The miracle of it got blanketed. Somebody put the lights out on it with abortion. And like everybody else, I took a very lax attitude.”
And the guilt lingers. In one case, a television writer decided he wasn’t ready for a child. His girlfriend told him to call to make the appointment for an abortion. Confused and conflicted, he ended up talking to the obstetrician-gynecologist, who posed a series of questions: Do you love her? How old are you? Do you want to have children? When? Do you realize if you wait another five years that you’ll be 50 when your child starts school?
Not only did they marry and have the baby, but they expect another child soon. Still, the pain of that time remains palpable. After agreeing to be interviewed, the couple canceled at the last minute. “The thought you might actually have aborted this thing you’re now hopelessly devoted to, it’s just kinda easier to put that behind you and not relive the struggle,” the husband told me on the telephone. “For us, it was real wrenching, a searing time.”
But even more troubling are those stories I kept hearing in which marriage is never really an issue; she wants to have the baby, he doesn’t--and then he leaves.
Jackie Sallow, a 38-year-old professional photographer, decided to have a baby on her own, despite objections from her boyfriend. Recalls Sallow: “One night, the baby was up at least four times. I was at wit’s end. I turned over in bed--to the empty side--and said, ‘Honey, will you go get him this time?’ Then I rolled over and said, ‘Sure, honey. No problem.’ I mean, this is the most intimate thing in your whole life, having a baby--and there’s no one there to share it with. No one to say, ‘You’re doing a good job.’ ”
IF THE BRIDE’S pregnancy during yesteryear’s shotgun wedding was hidden, today’s shotgun secrets are usually out of the closet.
“After 20 years in the rabbinate, I’m seeing much more of this than ever before, but now there’s a decided difference,” says Rabbi Steven Jacobs of the New Reform Congregation in Encino. “The change is that most of these people have been living together and had a commitment to each other. People are not embarrassed. Nothing is done secretly. People at the wedding know she’s pregnant. They seem to be more honest with themselves.”
And yet, no matter how honest the couple, the stigma of illegitimacy remains. Santa Monica pediatrician Jay Gordon says that in the L.A. fast lane, children of unmarried parents may not risk disgrace. “But you move to the heartland and those kids are no less bastards than they were 100 years ago,” he says. “People are realizing now that there may be a significant impact on a child of a non-wedded union, if nothing else for a child’s last name and discovery that his parents were not married when he was born.”
What do you tell your child when the time comes? Carol and Carl say it is the one serious conflict in their marriage. She wants to lie to their daughter about their wedding date, saying it happened a year earlier. But, says Carl, “I want to tell her the truth--that we really had the choice and we decided to have her. Unplanned doesn’t mean unwanted.”
N THE GLOW OFan MTV video--ironically, it was the Georgia Satellites performing “Keep Your Hands to Yourself,” which depicts a down-home shotgun wedding--Shirley Burkhart, a 28-year-old purchasing agent for a manufacturing firm, was nursing her 3-month-old son, Sean. When her boyfriend, Richard, first asked her to marry him, she said no.
“I didn’t want to get married when I was pregnant,” she says, “because I didn’t feel he was marrying me for me. He was marrying me because I was pregnant.”
It is an issue that gnaws away at these relationships and creeps back years later. “I still get real teary and sad just thinking about that time,” says a writer who is married and pregnant with her second child. “It’s real painful stuff, remembering his indecision. I’m in therapy three times a week to deal with all this, and I’m still not ready to put it all together.”
How will these relationships hold up in the long run? And what about the children; how will they fare? There are no answers yet, but there are some interesting clues. A recent study of shotgun weddings by University of Michigan social historian Maris Vinovskis suggests that the majority last longer than five years, and that the children of these marriages do better in school and on intellectual and social development tests at ages 5 and 6 than those whose parents hadn’t married. But the shotgun marriages Vinovskis looked at were of teen-agers, not of well-educated, upper-income adults.
It’s odd, but for all the narcissism and immaturity associated with the new shotgun wedding, there is also a degree of healthiness to it. The primary focus, really, is not on oneself but on what psychologists call generativity, or a sense of obligation to the next generation. Some may act like spoiled children getting there, but at least they’re there.
In the end, though, it may all come down to a question of trust. A baby has a way of making you put up or shut up as partner and parent. Nothing can both challenge and inspire a relationship more than a child. Bringing a new life into the world is a little like letting go of a previous existence--confronting one’s mortality and saying goodby to Never-Never Land. Getting married for the baby’s sake may make us uneasy, but as far as reasons go for getting hitched, it’s not that bad, either.