All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation (17 page)

Four years after we first met, the man Sara had been seeing was offered a great job in Boston. They dated long distance for a year. But then they had to make a decision; he was intent on staying in Boston, despite the fact that it was not a city that offered her much professional opportunity.

Watching Sara wrestle with her choices was painful. She was thirty. She loved New York. She had a great, well-paying job. She was crazy about her apartment. She adored her friends. But she also cared for her boyfriend; she wanted to try to make a life with him, to see what happened.

It was the kind of upheaval, smack in the middle of adulthood, which was messy enough to make me consider, back then, the wisdom of early marriage. When we're young, after all, our lives are so much more pliant, can be joined without too much fuss. When we grow on our own, we take on responsibility, report to bosses, become bosses; we get our own bank accounts, acquire our own debts, sign our own leases. The infrastructure of our adulthood takes shape, connects to other lives; it firms up and gets less bendable. The prospect of breaking it all apart and rebuilding it elsewhere becomes a far more daunting project than it might have been had we just married someone at twenty-two, and done all that construction together.

The day Sara moved to Boston, after weeks of packing up and giving away her stuff, a bunch of friends closed up the U-Haul and gave long hugs and shouted our goodbyes as she drove off. When she was gone and I was alone, I cried.

Make no mistake: I believed that Sara should go. I wanted her to be happy and I understood that what we wanted for ourselves and for each other were not only strong friendships and rewarding work and good times, but also warm and functional relationships with romantic and
sexual partners. Both of us were clear on our desires for love, commitment, family. The only way to build all those things, I thought at the time, was to leave independent life behind.

I didn't want to think of our friendship, our multi-textured life together, as some stand-in or placeholder for “realer” relationships with partners, but it was undeniable that part of what we did for each other was about practicing and preserving intimacy in our lives—remembering how to share and bicker and compromise and connect, how to work through jealousy and be bored together—even during years when we did not have traditionally romantic partners with whom to learn these human skills.

What's more, we pushed each other to become hardier versions of ourselves, more able (and, I suspected, more likely) to form healthy, happy alliances with partners. Friendship had helped make Sara's relationship possible; through one particularly self-pitying lens, I saw it as the rocket that propelled a shuttle into orbit . . . and then, inevitably, fell away. I was able to identify with Amina's story about Ann's move a decade later because, for me, Sara's departure was among the hardest losses of my adult life, far more destabilizing than my earlier breakup with a boyfriend.

Long before I ever considered that I'd one day be writing this book, I tried to make sense of my grief by writing a story called “Girlfriends Are the New Husbands.” In it, I argued that while women no longer necessarily matured in the context of marriages, we did not spend our adult years alone, but instead became each other's de facto spouses.

When I sobbed to another, usually Eeyoreish, friend—a mentor about ten years my senior, who had herself been single deep into her thirties—she surprised me by assuring me: “Don't worry, she'll come back.” Oh, I know, I said, she'll be back to visit, but it won't be the same. “No,” my friend said more firmly. “She'll come back. Her life is here.”

I was completely flummoxed by her confidence. Sara wasn't coming back. You don't come back. I knew this from way back, from Laura Ingalls and Anne Shirley and Jo March; I knew it in my bones. We might have postponed fate, but marriage remained women's ultimate destination, the tractor beam that would eventually pull us all in.

Sara and I were, to some degree, over.

The sadness Amina felt when Ann left didn't dissipate quickly. She started going to therapy again, since “the one person I would talk to wasn't there.” Feeling that her social fabric in Washington D.C. had unraveled, Amina began to make plans to leave the city. “Ann was the center,” she said. “And without her, there was not a lot there for me.”

There was little chance that Ann, who had a big job in Los Angeles and was falling in love with her new city, was going to return east. Amina recalled a road trip they took together out west; Ann had gotten California plates and was glowing with affection for her new-found home. Amina remembered telling her, “It's stupid beautiful watching you fall in love with California; it's like watching the Grinch's heart grow.”

When a member of a romantic couple gets a great job in another part of the world, there is usually at least discussion of whether the partner will accompany her or him; when a spouse has a yearning to live north and another spouse south, there is, typically, negotiation about where, or if, they will settle as a unit.

Given the way we're taught adulthood is supposed to unfold, the idea of figuring friends into life's trickiest logistical equations sounds silly. You can't—and aren't supposed to—build your lives around friendships, but rather around families, marriages, jobs,
maybe
aging parents . . .

But for Ann and Amina, the friendship does factor in their ideas about the future. Relocation has been discussed. “I'm getting really tired of this long-distance relationship and soon one of us is going to move for the other person,” said Amina. Ann concurred, but it was hard for Amina to find a job that made the move a realistic option. Amina moved to New York, Ann's least favorite city, in 2013. They tried not to let six weeks go by without seeing each other. In 2014, Amina took a job in northern California.

“She's the person I text all day,” said Ann. “If she didn't hear from me for a day, you could basically assume I was dead.” When Ann spent a year as a boss, she was careful never to talk to her colleagues about her romantic or her sex life, but, she said, “They all knew Amina was my person.”

“It's really important that my coworkers know Ann,” said Amina. “You
have to know the place that Ann occupies because people only talk about their significant others; I don't even think I say she's my best friend because it's so much more than that to me. She is the person I talk about every day. She is my person.”

Though Amina said that there is no connection, this formulation—“She is my person”—echoes language used on the television drama
Grey's Anatomy
. The show's central relationship was the nonsexual but deeply loving friendship between two surgeons, Meredith and Cristina, tough women who argued and competed with each other, shared beds and booze, who disliked hugging and cheap sentiment, and were obsessive about their work and their love lives, and who referred to each other lovingly and possessively as “my person.” It probably matters that
Grey
's was the creation of Shonda Rhimes, prolific writer and director of so many television shows about diverse and complicated women that her entertainment empire is often referred to as if it is some fantasized island of female power: Shondaland. Rhimes is the unmarried mother of three.

Intimacies between women who are each other's “person” have long played a crucial role in society, especially for women who have lived outside of traditionally married family units. The scholar Sharon Farmer has written that medieval Parisian “single women sometimes found practical, economic, and emotional support in their companionships with other unattached women,”
³
and notes that Parisian tax records offer evidence from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries of women living, working, and being assessed together.

The closeness of unmarried women to each other was so recognizable that tight friendship (and often bedfellowship) between maidens was often used as a plot device by Shakespeare, whose heroine, Helena, of
A Midsummer Night's Dream
, describes herself and Hermia, with whom she shares an “ancient love” as being, “Two lovely berries moulded on one stem . . . with two seeming bodies, but one heart.” In nineteenth century America, when westward expansion created a dearth of potential husbands on the East Coast, the social and adult domestic partnerships of women proliferated to the point that they became known colloquially as “Boston marriages.”

As interactions between young women at boarding schools and women's
colleges became more frequent, the tightly cathected relationships they formed as teenagers became so accepted that there was a term for their connection: they were “smashed.” As Betsy Israel writes, “smashed” pairs were thought of by their approving parents as something like “best friends going steady, and, once smashed, they'd learn trust, loyalty, tolerance, patience” from each other. The practicing of these behaviors on each other was all supposed to be in service of their later marital unions, Israel notes, “even if those who wed never felt quite the same about their husbands.”

The scholar Carroll Smith-Rosenberg argues in her 1975 essay, “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations Between Women in 19th Century America,” that the centrality of women's relationships with each other was determined in part by the rigidly patrolled divide between the male and female spheres in earlier centuries, creating what she called the “emotional segregation of men and women.”
⁴

Women often lived together, within multigenerational family housing, or in sex-segregated schools, boarding houses, or in factory dormitories like those in Lowell, Massachusetts. They guided each other through emotional and physical maturation, bonded over their experiences of courtship, marriage, and childbirth and, as Smith-Rosenberg writes, “lived in emotional proximity to one another.” Marriage between these women and men who had been raised separately and educated and trained for public life, meant that “both women and men had to adjust to life with a person who was, in essence, a member of an alien group.”
⁵
As Smith-Rosenberg writes, “While closeness, freedom of emotional expression, and uninhibited physical contact characterized women's relations with one another, the opposite was frequently true of male-female relationships.”

Friendships often provided women with attention, affection, and an outlet for intellectual or political exchange in eras when marriage, still chiefly a fiscal and social necessity, wasn't an institution from which many might reasonably expect to glean sexual or companionate pleasure. Because these relationships played such a different role from marriage in a woman's life, it was quite realistic for commitments between women to persist as central after the marriages of one or both of them. Even the
happiest of married women found something in their associations with other women that they did not have with husbands. As Elizabeth Cady Stanton, devotedly wed and mother of five, once said of her activist partner, Susan B. Anthony, “So closely interwoven have been our lives, our purposes, and experiences that [when] separated, we have a feeling of incompleteness.”

It was not only women who turned often to their own sex for practical and tender fulfillments. In the early male-dominated Southern colonies, some men lived together on tobacco plantations and were referred to as “mates.”
⁶
Abraham Lincoln shared a bed for several years with his friend Joshua Speed, to whom he wrote in 1842, “You know my desire to befriend you is everlasting.”
⁷
And, according to
The Atlantic
, President James Garfield's attachment to his college buddy Harry Rhodes was so deeply felt that he once wrote, “I would that we might lie awake in each other's arms for one long wakeful night.”
⁸

The language of sentiment between same-sex friends—not to mention references to embracing, touching and snuggling in bed—suggests to many modern readers that the women (and men) in question were engaged in what we'd now understand as homosexual relationships. And some surely were. But the concept of homosexuality as a sexual identity really only emerged in the early twentieth century, making it largely impossible to retrospectively evaluate the nature of many close, even physically expressed, same-sex bonds.

Certainly, there were women who were both cognizant and vocal about their fealty to other women, in love and in life partnership. In her 1889 autobiography, reformer Frances Willard, who only had committed emotional and domestic relationships with other women, wrote that “The loves of women for each other grow more numerous each day . . . In these days when any capable and careful woman can honorably earn her own support, there is no village that has not its examples of ‘two heads in counsel,' both of which are feminine.”
⁹

Others tried to clearly distinguish between carnal and romantic impulses. Margaret Fuller, Transcendentalist writer and literary critic, who had a lengthy epistolary friendship with Caroline Sturgis, and who at the end of her life entered a passionate affair with a man she may have
married, wrote, in reference to another intense alliance with a woman, “I loved Anna for a time with as much passion as I was then strong enough to feel . . . This love was a key which unlocked for me many a treasure which I still possess, it was the carbuncle which cast light into many of the darkest caverns of human nature.” But at the same time, Fuller argued that while it is “so true that a woman may be in love with a woman, and a man with a man,” such relations are “purely intellectual and spiritual, unprofaned by any mixture of lower instincts.”
¹⁰

Smith-Rosenberg argues that a contemporary preoccupation with individual psycho-sexual dynamics was, for a long time, part of what obscured a larger social and political context in which to examine women's friendships. While the erotic dimensions of women's relationships to each other may well have mattered to the women themselves, the official distinction between gay or straight seems hardly crucial to those of us examining the place of women as supports in each other's lives.