In an iconic episode of Girls, “One Man’s Trash,” Hannah spontaneously spends a weekend with a hot, respectful doctor in his expensive brownstone. After a couple of sublime days in his house she suffers a moment of shameful envy. “Please don’t tell anyone this,” she says, in tears, “but I want to be happy.”
Doctor: Of course you do. Everyone does.
Hannah: But I didn’t think that I did. I made a promise such a long time ago that I was going to take in experiences, all of them, so that I could tell other people about them and maybe save them, but it gets so tiring, trying to take in all the experiences for everybody, letting anyone say anything to me. Then I came here and I see you. And you’ve got the fruit in the bowl and the fridge with the stuff, the robe, you’re touching me the way that… I realize I’m not different, you know? I want what everyone wants, I want what they all want, I want all the things. I just want to be happy.
What is that thing Hannah calls happiness while she’s ensconced in the doctor’s house? Financial security, romantic stability, the sense of being safe and cared for. Her usual life is full of assholes, sexual misadventures, broke months, and tedious jobs. The weekend ends awkwardly when the hot doctor grows tired of her, but Hannah dries her tears and waltzes off into that continuing mess of her life, changing nothing. He might protest that everyone wants to be happy; for Hannah this wish is a moment of weakness. Her object in life is to take in experiences, and the object of Girls is to delight in the vast breadth of thrilling and harrowing events which can befall a willing girl in her early twenties in New York. Hannah and Jessa both regularly justify their behavior, as well as their unhappiness, with the conviction that they will one day be, as Jessa wonderfully puts it, “fucking fat… because I’ll be full of experiences.”
When I started watching Girls, at eighteen years old, freshly arrived in New York City myself, this was the kind of life I wanted. My friends and I had an ideological devotion to experience and a belief in the nobility of independence. We were entirely convinced by the dichotomy Hannah set up in “One Man’s Trash” — that a girl could either be experienced or happy — and it seemed to be confirmed by our knowledge of feminism and our desire to be modern. To choose experience was to choose to be single when you were young, to be willing to undergo some precarity because you had to look out for yourself, to be curious about the characters you would meet and what effect they’d have on you, and to rely on your friends for solace and support. To choose happiness was to try to make a career, a marriage, and a stable life as efficiently as possible: basically, as I saw it, to spit in the face of the great opportunity that women had finally wrested back from the jaws of history.
This was the fundamental ethos that had long governed the young secular woman in a big liberal city. Before Girls, in Sex and the City, independence and experience were valued, though with a little more reserve, as precursors to a conventional-ish happiness. The women of Sex and the City (excepting Samantha) wanted husbands, but the glamour of their single lives went a long way in making up for the lack. Fifteen years later, Girls was instead the ultimate advertisement for experience as object, rather than as consolation, even as it made the single life look significantly more disturbing than it had looked on Sex and the City. And that depiction of experience as object was electrifying. It seemed to free us from thinking of dates as tests to be passed, or of our lives as escalators we were obligated to ride up. I knew some day most of us would seek more stability, get married, and have kids, but I never doubted that we’d be glad we’d had some dangerous fun when we were younger. That was how one learned to charm, to fall in love, to work, to feed a hangover, to survive a variety of small-time ordeals. That was the crucible of adulthood.
This is why the most shocking piece of writing in recent contemporary fiction is, to my mind, not any of the sexually explicit or morally disturbing stories we have come to expect, but this short passage from Sally Rooney’s third novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You. In an email to her friend Alice, Eileen discusses her childhood neighbor Simon, with whom she has had an on-and-off-again romance since she was a teenager:
You know the first time I went to bed with Simon was almost ten years ago? I sometimes think it would have been a nice life for me if he had done the Christian thing and asked me to marry him then. We could have several children by now and they would probably be sitting on the train with us at this very moment, overhearing their father’s conversation with a bird enthusiast. I just have this sense that if Simon had taken me under his wing earlier in life, I might have turned out a lot better.
Shortly before this, Rooney sums up the years Simon and Eileen have spent apart in this devastating way:
And the years afterwards, with Natalie in Paris, his youth, gone now, never to be had back again. Living with you is like living with depression, Natalie told him. He wanted, he tried to make her happy, and he couldn’t. Alone afterwards, washing his dishes after dinner, the single plate and fork on the draining board. And not even young anymore, not really. For Eileen those years had passed also somehow, sitting on floorboards unboxing flat-pack furniture, bickering, drinking warm white wine from plastic cups. Watching all her friends move away, move on, to New York, to Paris, while she stayed behind, working in the same little office, having the same four arguments over and over again with the same man.
How often do we read such a clear rejection of youthful experience? Eileen and Simon’s independent twenties come down to this, a set of boring, lonely, demeaning trials. There’s an incantation that Simon’s youth is lost to him, that he wasted it by picking the wrong person, then feeling miserable alone. Eileen wishes she had been spared the alienation of her crowded flats, her shitty job, and her other long-term romantic relationship by becoming Simon’s wife. To have been simply loved well from the beginning, rather than having had to make her way on her own — in a sense, to have faced no challenging break in the transition between childhood and adulthood — this would, she thinks, not only have saved her a lot of suffering but made her a better person. Does she mean less jaded? More innocent?
I realize Rooney’s novels are not perfect heirs to Girls and Sex and the City. The lineage is not so simple, the possibilities of the novel decidedly different from those of a TV series — and Rooney’s books have a much clearer allegiance to romance. But, like Girls and Sex and the City, Rooney’s novels were among the few pieces of art about young womanhood that were consumed or at the very least argued over by just about every woman I knew between 2018-2022. The saturation and relevance of Rooney’s novels made it impossible not to look at them and wonder what they signified about our world. And when Beautiful World, Where Are You was released, it seemed to me an observation of a very profound change which went little remarked-upon by the hordes of Rooney-observers.
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.
Of course, Beautiful World, Where Are You is not a simple romance, and Alice and Eileen spend a great deal of time considering marriage itself. A primary concern of the book is that, for the young secular woman, the pillars of faith, marriage, and children have been emptied out. In an email to Eileen, Alice writes that traditional marriage “was obviously not fit for purpose… but at least it was an effort at something, and not just a sad sterile foreclosure on the possibility of life.” In this postfeminist landscape in which the satisfactions of traditional lifestyles have been so reduced, experience counts for little with Alice and Eileen. They’re not having fun. Rooney approaches both marriage and Christianity with a sort of anxious, skeptical desire; Alice and Eileen meander toward the comfort of these institutions, troubled by the scarcity and loneliness of the world which young secular women have inherited by rejecting these compromised offerings, and finally asking themselves whether they should have to endure such scarcity and loneliness just because marriage and religion have noxious histories. This is a deep question, and I was endeared to this novel because of how elegantly Rooney poses it. But how does she answer? When Eileen wonders about Simon to Alice, she says that perhaps he should have “done the Christian thing” by marrying her a decade earlier. Presumably this is a sort of joke at the expense of Simon’s faith; it’s also a way of making a half-joke out of a sincere, alarming thought. What if “they” — the Christians, the anti-intellectuals, the primacy-of-motherhood folks — are right?
In the years since Beautiful World, Where Are You was published, we’ve seen a lot more people publicly wondering if “they” might be right on this front. Not only is the happy-ending romance genre undergoing a renaissance that seems directly aimed at young and queer people, but of course there are the secular-adjacent offshoots of the tradwives, those influencers who are not openly religious but whose lifestyles attest to the satisfactions of early marriage and motherhood. Perhaps this is because the lives of the unmarrieds are coming more and more to resemble Eileen’s pitiable, tragic little office, her warm white wine. I don’t need to describe these familiar material realities in any detail: our heightened isolation in the post-pandemic internet age, our increasingly entrenched social and financial disparities. When Hannah uttered her shameful wish to the hot doctor, Dunham resurrected the desire for a traditional life for half an hour, out of curiosity, just to toss it back into the pit of history. It was just a game; even the hot doctor was in experience-land, separated from his wife and fooling around with a 24-year-old. Now when Eileen confesses her wish to Alice (2021), it still has a subversive, outdated quality, but Rooney works to redeem it: just a few pages later, Eileen is married and pregnant. Are the possibilities of experience so narrowed? Can a girl no longer have a totally worthwhile and edifying amount of fun if she avoids getting married before she’s twenty-five?
In 2016 I read a popular collection of essays by Mark Greif, Against Everything, which included a piece originally published in 2005 titled “The Concept of Experience”:
The new object is called ‘experience,’ in the word’s most modern sense. Experience is directly attainable. It is definite and cumulative, where happiness is ambiguous and pleasure evanescent… Face-to-face with the shortcomings of more respectable goals, we have turned large tracts of our method of life over to experience — unwittingly. Even where life appears to be lived for happiness, it is lived by and through experience. We see our lives as a collection of experiences… You put them on the shelf, and take them down; or lie awake at night, just wondering at them. They come with stories, and you put forward your experiences as rivals to the experiences others can tell. We become lifelong collectors, and count on fixed mementos to provide the substance of whatever other aims we may declare, when asked, are our real goals or reasons to live.
Greif perfectly described the ideology that had governed my whole life and immediately undermined it. The way that Hannah defined her attitude in “One Man’s Trash” seemed in retrospect the consummate expression of Greif’s claim about our concept of experiences as collectible. Though his theory is general, I couldn’t help but feel it spoke especially to the ethos of the young secular woman, down to the invocation of “the shortcomings of more respectable goals.” And this essay made plain why living with this object, experience, was so hauntingly inadequate. Our concept of experience “gives us the feeling we are really living,” Greif wrote, “but makes us unsatisfied with whatever life we obtain.”
It was only when I read this essay that I realized how hauntingly inadequate I did find my own pursuit of experience. For me that path hadn’t been hard-won. The experience-object was the only one my generation of young secular women had. We were the demographic for whom more respectable goals had the most oppressive shortcomings. The opportunity to seek experiences that were previously impossible or destructive was the supreme — and the only — goal my generation inherited as the antidote to all those traditional lifestyles which were not “fit for purpose.” My mother, who came of age in the ‘70s, was an early adopter of the experience-object and it formed the bedrock of my sense of life. No one I knew acknowledged its haunting inadequacy, perhaps because as a feminist victory it remained special and fragile. I didn’t find living through my twenties in the pursuit of experience as grim as Alice does (“a sad sterile foreclosure on the possibilities of life”), but I began to realize it had always had the flavor of a last-ditch attempt, a theory rather than a tradition, an experiment in which we were the guinea pigs. Then again, that was how I was brought up to think life should feel: like something new and untested, with challenges valued more highly than comforts.
What was the goal of experience, aside from some feminist reclamation? It was an attempt to encounter as much of the world as possible, to soak up otherness and change as much as we possibly could; part of the inadequacy of living in this pursuit was the futility of trying to escape ourselves. “We really wish to be multiple,” Greif wrote in 2005. Reading this with a distance of twenty years we wonder whether experience as an object is now being repudiated not only because the available experiences have become less interesting but because the sense of “being multiple” is now accessible via much faster, more visceral routes than, say, going out and meeting people or reading a whole novel or watching a whole film. We can now be way more multiple than that, way more times per day. For what do we need the viscerally mixed blessings of being young and single? The quality and value of experience has degraded, and it no longer seems like such a compelling object. Perhaps it’s already long gone. What object has replaced it?
Experience, we hoped, would broaden us. The new object seems to be the inverse: the contraction and refinement of the self, within and against the overwhelming flood of external information with which we are in constant contact. We might call this new object cohesion, or clarity. And getting married young is exactly that: the cohesion of one’s identities, contraction and refinement, a safehouse from within which to view the external circus without having to risk getting dirty and lonely. I don’t know what it’s like, but from what I can see it isn’t regressive anymore. Perhaps it’s far more fulfilling than the broken pursuit of experience.
I would be remiss if I crudely reduced Beautiful World, Where Are You to suit my argument, so let me do Rooney some justice in the final hour. Earlier in the novel, when things still stand very uncertainly between her and Simon, Eileen describes to Alice a period in her early twenties when she had kept a diary:
Was I really like that once? A person capable of dropping down into the most fleeting of impressions, and dilating them somehow, dwelling inside them, and finding riches and beauty there… I know I was twenty-three, I had just started working at the magazine, you and I were living together in that horrible flat in the Liberties, and Kate was still in Dublin, and Tom, and Aoife. We went out to parties together, we had people over for dinner, we drank too much wine, we got into arguments. Sometimes Simon would call me on the phone from Paris so we could complain to each other about work, and while we were laughing, I would hear Natalie in the background, putting away plates in the kitchen. All my feelings and experiences were in one sense extremely intense, and in another sense completely trivial, because none of my decisions seemed to have any consequences, and nothing about my life — the job, the apartment, the desires, the love affairs — struck me as permanent. I felt that anything was possible, that there were no doors shut behind me, and that out there somewhere, as yet unknown, there were people who would love and admire me and want to make me happy.
Here is that same period which is later described in such degraded terms: Eileen and her warm white wine, Simon with his unhappy girlfriend in Paris. And yet here Eileen describes it in language that exactly endorses the significance of experience, a hopeful rush. It’s precisely that feeling of “no doors [being] shut behind [us]” that we imagined we would forgo by marrying young. Is that feeling good only for its promise that someone out there will love and admire us and want to make us happy? If many doors had already been shut, because she’d become Simon’s wife and the keeper of Simon’s love, would Eileen have been better off? What’s more precious when one is young — that loose sensation of complete possibility, or the soundness of maturing under an affectionate wing?
To my mind, even the serious posing of this question is a marked shift in our ideological culture of the self and of romance. Rooney could easily tell us a reassuring story: that those lonely and complicated years apart were the indispensable training ground in which Eileen became herself and grew confident and mature enough to marry Simon. But she doesn’t. Those years were to some extent a misunderstanding, a lost opportunity. The world is such that we might rather be happy and comfortable than experienced. What would you rather? Presuming no one did the Christian thing, when you were very young, by marrying you: do you crave, in retrospect, the protection of an affectionate wing?
Lillian Fishman’s first novel, Acts of Service, was one of The New Yorker’s best books of 2022. She is a regular contributor to The Point.