I didn't think anything of it when I was 30, and they didn't believe it. They said I was going to beat up at 40, but they were wrong again, and I've never been like this. Then they said I would be scarred by the time I was 50, and this time they were right. - "The Other Woman"
Dink DINK, or Double Income No Kids in English, means that both spouses have income, but no children. Dink was popular in Europe and the United States in the 1960s. Young people at that time emphasized themselves and pursued freedom. Young men and women, after marriage, choose not to have children, so that they have more time and financial resources to realize their self-worth.
What will the life status of Dink women look like after they enter middle age? Will you regret not having children? We can get a glimpse into the 1988 film The Other Woman, released in 1988 and directed by Woody Allen. This film is different from Woody Allen's previous comedic style, it is a "Bergman" style film.
Marion, the heroine of "The Other Woman," is a philosophy professor at a women's university and a writer. At 50 years old, she has a decent job, an excellent husband, a seemingly harmonious family and circle of friends, and she feels that everything is perfect. Recently, however, she suddenly became suspicious of her life. The cause was that in the apartment she was renting to concentrate on writing, she overheard a conversation between a pregnant woman and a psychologist in the next room.
Then what happened in a succession of victories pushed her into the abyss of self-doubt, and she began to be restless, dazed, and even had the idea that it would be better to have a child.
<h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" > material abundance cannot make up for the emptiness of the mind</h1>
Marion's decent job gave her a stable, lucrative income. Her husband, Ken, is a well-known cardiologist, and both belong to a group that doesn't have to worry about material conditions. However, under the seemingly harmonious married life of the two people, what is hidden is the embarrassing situation of being sexless and having nothing to talk about.
They eat with different friends every night, even with those they don't really like. Wedding anniversaries are also being spent with another couple. Marion offered her husband to spend his wedding anniversary alone at the small hotel where he had stayed in love, but was refused because he had already accepted a gift from a friend.
As Marion says, "They're all lonely." Because of loneliness, I am keen to make friends with all people, whether I like it or not. Then spend that time, which has nowhere to spend, deal with these friends, eat with them, and pretend to be excited to chat about topics that you are not interested in.
Every time at the party, a room full of friends is invited, which looks very lively, but there is no friend who can really open their hearts.
Although Marion did not have much money in his youth, he was able to choose his first husband, Sam, his favorite birthday presents, as far as he could bear. When receiving the gift, Sam happily hugged and kissed Marion. At that time, Marion's heart was full, and she could truly feel the love from Sam.
Looking at the marital status between her and her current husband Ken, giving her husband a gift for her wedding anniversary, she chose an afternoon and did not buy it, because she did not know what Ken really liked. Although the two have been attending various parties and activities together, they have not had spiritual communication with each other for a long time.
Material enjoyment is a stimulus that temporarily satisfies a person. But after the stimulation, it will feel lonely and difficult, and want to pursue new stimuli, so the cycle back and forth, and finally only the emptiness of the soul is left.
Marion and her husband Ken are materially rich, but spiritually deprived. When people reach middle age, they already have the achievements they should have in their careers, and their lives begin to become lonely after the lack of goals, and their days are getting more and more difficult.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > self-centered superiority that makes family and friends flee</h1>
Marion has a younger brother. Compared with Marion, the younger brother is a man who has achieved nothing, and the 40s are still pursuing unrealistic writing dreams, the embarrassment of the financial situation forces his relationship with his wife to become bad, and quarrels become commonplace.
Many times, my brother's family had to rely on Marion for help. Marion treats his sister-in-law, who is late for the traffic jam, unceremoniously saying that he has to strictly follow his own schedule to arrange his life, and take a taxi to leave. This sense of self-centered superiority makes her sister-in-law humble and cramped in the face of Marien, and in order to win a little inner balance, she throws out the fact that her brother is hiding from Marion.
This sense of superiority is also reflected in the encounter with Claire, Marion's cherished former friend. Claire's husband is a theater director, and Marion uses his good taste and vast accumulation of knowledge to easily draw the other person's attention to himself.
Claire sees this situation and can't help but say that she and Marion have been estranged from Marion over the years because she has deliberately done it, the reason is that she thinks that Marion stole her once beloved boyfriend, and when she is with Marion, she will feel inferior, think Marion is smart and funny, and she is childish and boring.
Marion was shocked to learn of Claire's thoughts, never realizing that she was such a nasty image in the eyes of what she considered her best friend.
Watching the whole film, you will find that Marion is depressed and excited, and he is alone to find a way to calm his mood, or read a book all night, or walk on the street for hours. She has no close friends to talk about, so much so that she ends up pouring out the bitter water of life for a pregnant woman she doesn't know.
Roland Miller wrote in the book "Intimacy" that another feature that makes intimacy easy to maintain is trust, expecting the other party to treat and respect him. People believe that intimacy doesn't hurt and expect the other person to meet their demands and focus on their own happiness. The loss of this trust often leads to suspicion and suspicion, to the detriment of the openness, honesty and interdependence that characterize intimate relationships.
Marion is a "stubborn and selfish" person whose world has always been self-centered, and when her brother and friends are away from her, she doesn't even realize that the other person is intentional. Her lack of respect and kindness to those around her eventually led to the distancing of her relatives and friends.
<h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" > an overly rational way of doing things that makes people lose their nature</h1>
In her 20s, Marion was pregnant with her ex-husband, Sam. However, because she was worried that after giving birth, her attention would be distracted to the child, and she could not wholeheartedly conduct academic research, and finally without consulting her ex-husband Sam, she went directly to the hospital for abortion. When Sam learned of the situation, he angrily scolded her for being cold-blooded.
Sam was Marion's college mentor, much older than Marion, and according to Marion, Sam "already had good grades in his field" and was just getting started.
In fact, Marion does not hate children, which can be seen in the relationship between her and her husband's daughter Laura. She didn't want that child, not because she didn't love, but because she chose to abandon her emotions and plan her life with rational thinking.
Before Marrying her current husband Ken, Marion meets a man who makes her heartwarming, Larry. Although Larry had a soul resonance with her, she rationally chose to marry Ken because Ken was "excellent and educated" and she couldn't find a reason not to marry Ken. For this sudden suitor, Larry, she rationally chose to resist and swept it out of her life.
When Marion was in the apartment, she heard the pregnant woman in the next room say to the psychiatrist: "Some things in life are not real anymore, full of deception." I didn't know who I was anymore. I looked at my husband lying next to me as if he were a stranger. Her attention was immediately drawn to the fact that the pregnant woman's feelings were so similar to her own. They are all confused about their future.
Marion's rationality is also evident in the film, when her brother shows her the first steps he wrote, and she gives the evaluation that it is "flashy, there is too much emotion in it... No one will be interested in your dreams." Knowing that her brother had been pursuing his dream for several years, she still gave such an objective evaluation. This also made her brother, who had nothing to talk to her when she was a child, also start to stay away from her.
As a professor of philosophy, Marion always uses his own rational thinking to think and solve problems. This has become her principle of handling all kinds of affairs, abandoning emotions and blindly pursuing rationality, Marion has become a working machine, efficient, but unusually cold.
Heine once said that human reason crushes superstition, and human emotions will destroy egoism. It can be seen that in life, people's rationality and sensibility have their own uses, and they should coexist. Blindly pursuing rationality, what will eventually be lost will be human nature.
The film culminates when Marion invites pregnant women to lunch. After drinking half a bottle of red wine, Marion confided in the pregnant woman about her thoughts:
"To be honest with you: I haven't found balance since I was 50. I used to think I had everything, but many opportunities slipped through and you couldn't catch it anymore, and maybe a child would be better off. ”
Marion's tearful eyes showed that this was not a word of comfort for the pregnant woman, but a true thought that she had been hiding deep in her heart and did not want others to see.
It was also during lunch with the pregnant woman that Marion discovered that her husband was cheating. Sensibly, she did not go up to question her husband, but walked away silently, and then walked aimlessly through the street for several hours.
When she returned to her rented apartment, she heard the pregnant woman's last conversation with the psychiatrist:
"I met a very sad woman today. That woman, you'd feel like she had everything, but it wasn't, she had nothing. She scared me that if I couldn't stop myself from being like her, one day I would be like that too. ”
After that day, the pregnant woman ended her psychotherapy, and it was Marion who used her life experience to cure the pregnant woman's prenatal depression.
At the end of the film, Marion divorces her husband Ken, who never quarrels, and after a period of sadness and dazedness, she resumes her new life. And this time, she didn't want to pretend that everything was fine, she wanted to release her emotions. Outside of work, she wants to spend more time with her cherished brother's family.
Will Dink women regret not having children? Marion in the film regrets it. The real-life author, as a mother of two children, never regretted giving birth to them, although they completely disrupted the trajectory of my life, but at the same time added a lot of color to my life, and when I was with them, I felt that my heart was full and full of hope.
Where there is giving, there is gain, and where there is gain, there is loss. After abandoning his children, Marion did achieve good results in his field of work. Although after losing her love and friends, she had anxiety and dazedness, and doubted whether she had chosen the wrong one, she finally found herself and started her new life at the age of 50.
There are many multiple choice questions in life, and whether to have children or not is also one of them. Since you have chosen, don't regret it, stick to your heart, cherish everything you have, in order to better embrace tomorrow.
Author: Cheng Dahua. After the age of 30, I learned that the confusion at the age of 20 was because there were too many choices. Follow me and we get better together.