All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation (19 page)

Elliott Holt is a novelist who lives in Washington, D.C.; she has two sisters, went to an all-girls school, and describes herself as one of those women whose most intimate relationships have been with other women. When she was in her twenties, she recalled to me, she and her friends often saw each other several times a week; they hung out and talked deep into the night. By the time they were in their thirties, some of her closest compatriots had begun to peel off into couples, saving to buy apartments and have children; they stopped going out as much. Now that she's forty, and nearly all of her closest girlfriends have partners and children, she
said, she is lucky to catch up with them every three or four months. “I feel completely out of sync with my peers,” Elliott said, “And I love them so much!”

As the only single woman in her social circle, Elliott said, “I always joke that I feel like a foreign exchange student: I do speak the language: I have nieces; I've been in people's weddings! But I'm kind of shut out.” Her married friends used to invite her to social events but, eventually, she said, the invitations dwindled. She assumes that this is because her friends realized that all they talked about were kids and husbands and houses, and that they didn't want to subject her to it. But what they don't understand, she thinks, “is that I'm trying to figure out where the community is where I
do
belong. It's tricky to confess you're not sure where you fit without sounding like you're whining about not having a partner.”

Elliott recently spoke to an ex-boyfriend who told her that she needed to make friends who were in their twenties or their seventies. And she's tried. On a work visit to New York she met a group of young women who invited her out with them. She had a nice time, until, she recalled, “at eleven-thirty, they said they were going to head somewhere else and I had the sense that the night was just starting, and was going to end at two in the morning.” Elliott felt the decade and a half that separated them keenly. “I was born when Nixon was president,” she said. “And they'd go out and take smoke breaks and I thought, ‘Oh my god, you guys smoke! My friends all quit at twenty-nine!' I had a drink and a half, but I was tired and out of sorts.” Elliott went home.

Six months after she moved to Boston, Sara came back.

She came back for many reasons and after an enormous amount of difficult decision making. She came back because the relationship she'd traveled to Boston for wasn't fulfilling. More importantly, she came back for the very reason my Eeyoreish friend had predicted: that the life she'd left in New York—her work, her city, her friends—
was
fulfilling. She came back for herself.

It was remarkable. I was sad that her relationship hadn't worked out, but happy that she had built a life on her own that was satisfying and welcoming enough to provide her with an appealing alternative to it. And I was thrilled to have her back.

But spaces can creep up between friends just as easily as they do in marriages; gaps yawn open just as they do with lovers. Sara and I were still close; we still talked and drank and watched awards shows and traveled together. But maybe because she was nursing painful wounds as she rebuilt her New York life, and was resistant to simply falling back into her old patterns; maybe because, after the pain of having to say good-bye, I was gun-shy about giving myself over so completely, our friendship was never again
quite
as easy, quite as effortless as it had once been.

Then, a couple of years after her return, it was I who fell in love. It was I who suddenly couldn't go out multiple nights a week with my girlfriends, because I had met a man with whom—for the first time in my life—I wanted to spend my nights.

We have no good blueprint for how to integrate the contemporary intimacies of female friendship and of marriage into one life. In this one small (but not insignificant) way, I think nineteenth-century women lucky, with their largely sucky marriages and segregation into a subjugated and repressed gender caste. They had it easier on this one front: They could maintain an allegiance to their female friends, because there was a much smaller chance that their husband was going to play a competitively absorbing role in their emotional and intellectual lives. (Though, admittedly, as Charlotte Brontë and Nell Nussey demonstrate, even a loveless marriage could put a crimp in communicative freedoms).

When I met Darius and fell in love with him, I was stunned by how much time I wanted to spend with him, and also by the impossibility of living my social life as I had before. I could not drink beer at the end of most workdays with Sara or eat dinner every other night with my friend Geraldine; I could not spend my weekends hashing over everything that had happened that week with my cousin Katie. I couldn't do those things because, if I had, I wouldn't have been spending most of my time with this wonderful guy who, in a remarkable turn of events, I also wanted to have sex with. And once I took out the constancy of communication with
my friends, the dailyness and all-knowingness, the same-boatness, the primacy of our bonds began to dissipate.

The worrywarts of the early twentieth century may have been right about the competitive draw of female friendship, about the possibility it might inhibit or restrain a desire for marriage, especially bad marriages. But the real problem with having friendships that are so fulfilling that you prefer them to subpar sexual affiliations is that when you actually meet someone you like enough to clear the high bar your friendships have set, the chances are good that you're going to
really
like him or her. That's what happened to me.

It's not that I loved my friends any less. They are still my friends; I love them and I miss the everydayness of what we used to have. I feel guilty, but here was the truth, for me: I couldn't maintain the level of immersion in my friendships and immersion in what was to become my marriage, because I had been, in many senses, very happily married to my friends.

There has not yet been any satisfying way to recognize the role that we play for each other, especially now, as so many millions of us stay unmarried for more years. Because whether through our whole lives, or through decades at the beginning of them—and, often, at the end of them, after divorces or deaths—it's our friends who move us into new homes, friends with whom we buy and care for pets, friends with whom we mourn death and experience illness, friends alongside whom some of us may raise children and see them into adulthood. There aren't any ceremonies to make this official. There aren't weddings; there aren't health benefits or domestic partnerships or familial recognition.

And when those friendships change—when one friend moves or marries or dies—there aren't divorce settlements, there aren't specially trained therapists, there isn't alimony; there's not even a section in the greeting-card aisle to help us navigate it.

That's what makes the stories that women tell about their friendships—in letters to each other, in novels, and now on television shows and in movies—so powerful. It's part of what I loved about
Jane Eyre
, in which Jane's friendship with the consumptive and ill-fated Helen Burns saves her from boarding school solitude, about Anne Shirley, who finds her “bosom friend” and “kindred spirit” in schoolmate Diana Barry,
and announces in her youth, “Diana and I are thinking seriously of promising each other that we will never marry but be nice old maids and live together forever.”

Popular culture offers us visions of female friendship, and also, simply, of single women who can keep us company and perform a public, performed version of the thing that flesh-and-blood friends have done: reassure unmarried women that their lives are real and full and worth telling stories about.

In 1962, Helen Gurley Brown, a forty-year-old Arkansas native who had worked her way up as an advertising copywriter and was certainly
not
a member of what would soon become the women's movement, published a blockbuster book. The slightly trashy paperback had none of the heft of
The Feminine Mystique
, which would be published the next year, but it addressed a constituency that Friedan would barely acknowledge. It was called
Sex and the Single Girl
and was a frank guide for unmarried, sexually adventurous women. It presumed that single women were motivated largely by their hunt for husbands, but, Gurley Brown believed, they should be having fun and feeling good about themselves along the way.

“If you can forget the stultifying concept that there are appropriate years for certain endeavors (like getting married) and appropriate days for being gay and merry (like Saturday nights) and use these times without embarrassment or self-pity to do something creative and constructive . . . I believe half your single girl battle is over,” Brown wrote. She called the single years “very precious . . . because that's when you have the time and personal freedom for adventure” and took a rather pragmatic view of marriage, which she called “insurance for the worst years of your life.”

The book caused a stir in the mainstream media. Letty Cottin Pogrebin, who would go on to co-found
Ms. Magazine
with Gloria Steinem, was, in the early sixties, a publishing publicity executive in charge of promoting
Sex and the Single Girl
. She told me of first reading the manuscript and thinking, “This is fantastic; this is my life.”

Other books were beginning to present stories about what twentieth-century female life, unhooked from marriage, might look like. Rona Jaffe's
The Best of Everything
(1958) was a
sturm-und-drang
yarn about unmarried girls in clerical jobs, while Mary McCarthy's
The Group
(1963), was about more privileged young women, also grappling with sex, birth control, lesbianism, rape, work, and friendship. Norman Mailer would diss
The Group
by sneering at its author—in the style of men put out by powerful women of every era, apparently—that she was “a duncey broad . . . in danger of ending up absurd, an old-maid collector of Manx cats.”
¹³
(McCarthy was, in fact, four times married.)

In 1966, a twenty-nine-year-old actress, Marlo Thomas, daughter of Hollywood comedian Danny Thomas, was trying to land a sitcom vehicle. Frustrated by anodyne scripts, Thomas would later recall, she asked a group of executives, “Have you ever thought about doing a show about a young woman who is the
focus
of the story? As opposed to being the daughter of somebody or the wife of somebody or the secretary of somebody? About
her
dreams, about something that
she
wants out of life?”
¹⁴
According to Thomas, the executive responded, “Do you think anybody would be
interested
in a show like that?” Thomas gave him a copy of
The Feminine Mystique
and soon after, ABC green-lighted a half-hour television program (produced by Thomas) about Ann Marie, an unmarried actress with an apartment of her own. Thomas originally wanted to title the series
Miss Independence
, but producers dubbed it
That Girl
.

Thomas, who would become active in the women's movement, was so driven to keep her peppy confection focused on a woman living on her own terms and
not
alongside a husband that, when ABC wanted to renew
That Girl
, Thomas declined. She felt that Ann, whose relationship with boyfriend Donald appeared unconsummated, was no longer a realistic representation of how American women were living. When executives wanted to end the series' five-year run with Ann and Donald's wedding, Thomas again balked: She did not want to send a message that women's stories always lead to marriage. Instead,
That Girl
's 1971 finale was about the couple getting trapped in an elevator on the way to a women's liberation meeting.

The year before
That Girl
went off the air, its brawnier successor had kicked off.
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
, which would run from 1970 to
1977, was about a television journalist who breaks up at thirty with a boyfriend whom she put through medical school. Mary Richards moves to Minneapolis, finds work at a local station, and befriends her neighbor, Rhoda Morgenstern, to whom she opines in an early episode, “If there's one thing that's worse than being single, it's sitting around
talking
about being single.”

Nancy Giles, a fifty-two-year-old unmarried comedian, actress, and television commentator told me that she loved
Mary Tyler Moore
because Mary “didn't end up married, and she was in the newsroom; she was a working person with bills and rent.” More than that, her narrative let millions of women know that new opportunities for hat-tossing self-sufficiency were not only possible, but might be desirable. Television news anchor Katie Couric, for years television's highest paid journalist, told me in 2009 that Mary was one of her role models. “I know it sounds crazy,” she said, “but I saw this woman out on her own, making a life for herself, and I always thought: I want into that.”

Of course, popular culture has also been the most visible and widely absorbed vehicle for backlash—of both the gentle and punishing sort—
against
independent women. As women's liberation slid into Reagan-era, socially conservative, decline, movies reflected increasing anxiety about the growing population of unmarried women by again reflecting them as solitary, sad, and occasionally monstrous.

In 1988's
Crossing Delancey,
Izzy Grossman, a single bookstore employee whose old-world
bubbe
hires a professional
yenta
to set her up with a pickle salesman, is warned that “No matter how much money you got, if you're alone, you're sick!” (Izzy ends up with the pickle guy). At around the same time, Glenn Close warned ominously that she was “not going to be ignored,” as the murderously single, lonely Alex in
Fatal Attraction
, who, after a one-night stand with a married man, covets his nuclear family so intensely that she—the unstable element of unmoored femininity—sets out to destroy it. When Alex meets her final judgment, it's the traditional wife who metes it out: shooting her until she bleeds out
and
drowns in a bathtub, in one of the most gruesome punishments of nonconforming femininity ever committed to celluloid. “The best single woman is a dead one,” wrote feminist critic Susan Faludi of the movie.