While reading Beautiful Little Fools it made me think about a strange statistic I remembered reading a couple of years ago, married women die sooner than unmarried women. I always thought that was so strange, it has been proven that companionship and community cause people to live longer, and it improves quality of life. So why would women who are not married live longer?

It is a counterintutive statistic but one thing it does show is the whole get married and live happily ever after was never really true. As I get older and I read more, learn more, live more I wonder if I would ever want to get married. I grew up thinking marriage was inevitable, all my friends parents had been married, my parents had been married, I did not understand that there was an entire demographic of people out there that had never been married.

I feel like these types of books are important because it brings up new ways of thinking about subjects you already thought you understood, and yet in a book I’ve read three different times over my life I never thought to myself, “no one saw George kill Gatsby.”

Then while reading this book I wondered what Daisy would have to say to 21st century women. Would she advise all of us to never get married? She had to get married to ensure her family was alright in Beautiful Little Fools, however she still did love Tom at first, and then ultimately she decided to leave him in the book. In the last chapter she reminises on her past but when thinking about her future she is trying to find the happiness she used to have back when she was more innocent, and a new single life with her daughter. Daisy does not think about men, romance, or garnering more wealth.

In a world that was not her reality, upon understanding women can have the same jobs as men, would she think marriage was a stupid proposition?

I try to think about how realistically marriage is useful or helps a woman nowadays and besides the religious aspects I can not think of any. It is not like you have to be married to have kids, buy a home, raise of family, or grow old together, and it is not like getting married guarantees you will do all of that.

I genuinely wish I could know what women would say from the suffragate era to women of today, would they encourage marriage as it is easier to get divorced now and take the romanticized outlook on life, or would they say there is no logical reason anymore, what is the point?