When my wife and I told certain friends we were expecting a child, they didn’t get it. I mean, they understood the premise and all, but they didn’t get it. They were polite enough to not question us, but I could sense their desire to: Why are you doing this?
I didn’t have the framework at the time, but in the past year I encountered Tim Kreider’s idea of The Referendum, which captures these friends’ reactions perfectly. As Kreider explains it:
The Referendum is a phenomenon typical of (but not limited to) midlife, whereby people, increasingly aware of the finiteness of their time in the world, the limitations placed on them by their choices so far, and the narrowing options remaining to them, start judging their peers’ differing choices with reactions ranging from envy to contempt. The Referendum can subtly poison formerly close and uncomplicated relationships, creating tensions between the married and the single, the childless and parents, careerists and the stay-at-home. It’s exacerbated by the far greater diversity of options available to us now than a few decades ago, when everyone had to follow the same drill. We’re all anxiously sizing up how everyone else’s decisions have worked out to reassure ourselves that our own are vindicated — that we are, in some sense, winning.
What an insidious question: Are we winning?
And, yet, it’s very difficult not to ask. Kreider points out that while we all followed the “same drill” a generation ago, today, our big decisions are more like choices. My wife and I chose to move to Colorado, away from both of our families. We chose to have a child (or, more accurately, chose to stop foiling biology).
And while I wouldn’t claim that The Referendum has “poisoned” any of our close relationships, it’s easy to sense a new distance between us and some of our friends. As with so many things, I can only hope that shining a light on The Referendum is helpful. Let’s not allow it to be a background process, pulling us, as we grow older and make different choices, away from each other.
These two decisions
Taylor Coe 