The Magic Room: A Story About the Love We Wish for Our Daughters by Zaslow Jeffrey

Author:Zaslow, Jeffrey [Zaslow, Jeffrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Itzy, Kickass.to
ISBN: 9781101553633
Amazon: B005ERITA2
Publisher: Gotham Books
Published: 2011-12-17T05:00:00+00:00

During college, Ashley had met a man from France who was two years older and had come to Michigan State for a master’s in marketing. Manu was charming and handsome, with an accent that made him sound like the quintessential romantic Frenchman. Ashley, so often a serious young woman, and not especially sentimental, found herself very drawn to him—or perhaps the idea of him. He was certainly more exotic than any boy or man she’d come across in Laingsburg.

When she graduated from college, the school’s Department of French Classics and Italian awarded Ashley a $4,000 scholarship and told her she could use the money for any pursuit she’d like. She decided to visit France for two months—Manu had already returned there—and so her relationship with him deepened. The next year, 2005, she got that job as an elementary school English teacher in Challans, France, a rural community near Nantes.

In some ways, this was the adventure Ashley had always dreamed about during her childhood in Laingsburg. But it was more difficult than she expected. For one thing, especially given her mother’s health issues, it was hard for her to be away from home.

Manu lived in Paris, four hours away, and she saw him every weekend. She felt very lonely in Challans—the town was isolated, her mother was far away, and she was the only American working at the school—and so her time with Manu felt like a lifeline for her. At least at first.

In his own way, he was supportive and engaging, but Ashley began to notice something. “I realized I was still lonely when I was with him,” she says.

Manu just wasn’t as mature as Ashley, and he was very much a mama’s boy. In European countries, that’s not uncommon. Young people rely on their parents longer, and live at home far longer than Americans do. In Italy, for instance, the percentage of men ages thirty to thirty-four living with their parents now tops 36 percent, up from 14 percent in 1990. (For women in that age group, 18 percent live at home.) High unemployment and rising living costs are a factor. But the declining marriage rate may be the biggest cause. Adult children in Europe don’t usually leave home unless they’re married, and fewer and fewer feel any rush to marry. The number of marriages in Italy has fallen from 500,000 a year in the early 1970s to about 260,000 today. Meanwhile, the average Frenchman today doesn’t marry until age thirty-one, a jump from an average age of twenty-three in 1980.

There’s almost no stigma in Europe for a man living with his mother well into adulthood. In fact, when surveyed, more than half of Europeans approve of the idea. A guy can live with mom and date the field. Many see that as the good life.

By contrast, the percentage of Americans ages thirty to thirty-four living with parents is now 5 percent for women and 9 percent for men. More than their European contemporaries, young adults in the United

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