A Husband Isn’t Lady Gaga’s Answer

The singer wants to be married, but it’s complicated

Lady Gaga has talent, fame, fortune, an Oscar, a new love and a new album. There’s just one thing she doesn’t have — a husband, and she wants one.

When asked what she wants after all that, the singer told InStyle, “Marriage.”

She doesn’t explain why, but is clear that she wants to have children and those sometimes, not always go together.

No one needs to be married or even have a romantic partner nowadays to have children — more women are becoming single mothers by choice, or are co-parenting with someone they are not romantically involve with, or are cohabiting with their romantic partner. No one’s going to fault anyone for wanting to follow the traditional script: meet, date, fall in love, marry, have kids. It’s how it’s been done, for the most part, for a long time.

Still, Lady Gaga’s proclamation of a desire to be a wife to a husband and a mother to his children brings up a few questions — who is marriage material (a complicated issue) and who is parent material, and whether we should require would-be parents to be licensed to be sure they are.

Lady Gaga recently shared the trauma she experienced early in life — being raped at age 19, which led to a “psychotic…