All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation (20 page)

Probably the most progressive film portrayal of a libidinously liberated
single woman in the 1980s came from director Spike Lee, and his 1986 film,
She's Gotta Have It
. Lee's heroine, Nola Darling, a sex-loving woman whose reluctance to commit to one man leads her to take three lovers, embodies a bracingly nonjudgmental portrayal of female desire. But, as the critic bell hooks points out,
She's Gotta Have It
includes a scene in which Nola is raped by a man who repeatedly asks “Whose pussy is this?” until she answers “Yours,” conceding ownership of the very sexuality that is her path to autonomy.

Recalling the bleakness of popular depictions of singlehood just a few decades ago makes it all the more extraordinary that today we are so surrounded by single women on television. It's this transition for which we have
Sex and the City
to thank, no matter our hesitations about it. Its focus not simply on single female life, but on relationships among single females, was revelatory.

Writer, director, and actress Lena Dunham has called female friendship “the true romance” of her show,
Girls
. And, indeed, the opening scene of its premiere episode showed Dunham's heroine, Hannah Horvath, waking up in bed, spooning her best friend, Marnie, who has taken refuge with Hannah both in an effort to escape being touched by her boyfriend, and because the two women wanted to stay up late watching
Mary Tyler Moore
reruns.

Dunham has spoken publicly about the struggles to not lose herself in her real-world friendship with political adviser Audrey Gelman. “What I want from my life and what you want from your life are very close but not identical,” Dunham told Gelman in a 2012 joint interview, “and the job is to support your vision, not my vision of your vision. . . . Loving without judgment or fear of abandonment is. . . . the toughest activity known to mankind and I think with best friend that can be even more pronounced because you aren't my mom, we don't have kids together—but we do have matching tattoos.” In the same interview, Gelman said that she couldn't imagine them ever parting ways, because “I think our souls are too commingled to ever split.”

The 2011 comedy
Bridesmaids
was a box-office hit that made news ostensibly because it proved that women would pay to see other women star in a raunchy feature; it was also remarkable in that the central
tension of the story was not between a heterosexual couple, but between best friends, struggling to survive the drift when one of them gets married and meets new people while the other flounders professionally.

The fury around that drift—the anger that is evidence of how badly a best friend can break your heart, especially when moved aside in favor of a more traditional
romantic partnership—was also central to one of
Sex and the City
's most memorable scenes, after Carrie Bradshaw quits her job in order to move to Paris with a man. When her best friend, the partnered mother and lawyer Miranda, questions Carrie's choice to abandon home and career for a relationship, Carrie yells back, “I cannot stay in New York and be single for
you
!” By the time
Sex and the City
's television and cinematic run ended, three of its four protagonists were married. Tellingly, in order to sustain the project's narrative, which had always been driven by the friendships and not the love affairs of the women on the show, in the second feature film, writers sent all four characters to another country, Abu Dhabi. This geographic departure allowed them to behave as if they did not have husbands to crowd their lives, and thus continue to function as each other's primary relationships.

A decade after
Sex and the City
's end, television has
Broad City
, which is even less apologetic about its vision of female friendship eclipsing hetero partnership. Television critic Rachel Syme has argued that it is “a love story . . . about two hapless, pot-smoking, sexually experimental, striving, swearing, struggling, inseparable young gal pals.”
¹⁵
The two lead characters, Abbi and Ilana, Syme writes, “are intoxicated by . . . each other's presence, full partners in crime and life” who “live separately but share nearly everything: drugs, stomach issues, sexual fantasies . . .” Syme cites a scene that is the perfect distillation of the intimacy of their dynamic: one in which they cuddle under a blanket, discussing their fear of one day pooping during childbirth. “If it happens to me, you have my permission not to look,” Ilana comforts. “I'm going to see you give birth, then?” Abbi asks. “Bitch, duh,” is the reply. “Who else would be my focal point?”

This stuff, even the silliest of it, is important. It provides a proper acknowledgment of and an unembarrassed vocabulary about the role women play in each other's lives. In 2013, the website Buzzfeed ran a list called “22 Ways Your Best Friend is Actually Your Significant Other” (it
included signs like cooking together and talking about growing old together, and ended with “. . . you don't mind people thinking you're a couple, because platonic or not, this is the best relationship you've ever been in.)” The same year, women's magazine
Marie Claire
published a story about women in their twenties, thirties, and forties who are each other's medical contact person, who get mortgages together, who help each other get pregnant. The story's author cited comedian Amy Poehler's joke, that on meeting her friend Tina Fey, she thought, “I finally found the woman I want to marry.”

In 2013, science writer Natalie Angier gave the centrality of female friendship a zoological boost, pointing out that, “In animals as diverse as African elephants and barnyard mice, blue monkeys of Kenya and feral horses of New Zealand, affiliative, long-lasting and mutually beneficial relationships between females turn out to be the basic unit of social life.”

Some West African chimpanzees, Angier reported, form female bonds that are “resilient, lasting until one member of the bonded pair dies,” while female baboons form friendships as a way to combat the stresses—male aggression, bossiness, and infanticide—of baboon life. It all sounds pretty familiar, actually.

“You have to have somebody to hang onto,” a researcher explained to Angier.

Single. It's a word that's woven throughout cultural monuments to unmarried life, from
Sex and the Single Girl
to
Living Single
to the 1996 Cameron Crowe film
Singles
to Beyoncé Knowles's 2008 song “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It),” from which this volume derives its title. It's the word that social psychologist Bella DePaulo relied on in her book,
Singled Out,
as the base of her phrase “singlism,” which she uses to describe the “stereotyping, stigmatizing, and discrimination against people who are single.”

It's also a word that plenty of single women loathe.

Rebecca Wiegand Coale explained that one of her New Year's resolutions when she was unattached was to stop using the word
single
to describe herself or any other woman. Rebecca, twenty-nine, saw her circumstances as an unpartnered woman as the opposite of single. When she'd been in a relationship, she explained, she'd felt dependent on one person for emotional support and companionship. She and her ex “did basically everything together, from laundry to going out,” she recalled. The relationship, she said, was a good one. “But it was kind of lonely, because it was just the two of us.”

When it ended, she said, she began to make friends through soccer and bowling leagues. She made progress in her work life, and went on a networking kick to meet new colleagues. In fact, Rebecca and her business partner and friend, Jessica Massa, coined the term “The Gaggle,”
on which they based a website and book, to describe the collection of romantic prospects in their life. “Suddenly,” said Rebecca, “my life was so much richer and so much more
full
of people to depend on and relate to and connect with. I never felt more fundamentally lonely . . . than when I was in a relationship. And I've never felt more supported and connected and fully appreciated than when I was ‘single!' ” Rebecca has, in the years since she weighed in on the word “single,” married a man with whom, she said in 2014, “I don't have to sacrifice the full, rich life I built” when unmarried. And she maintains that it was unmarried life, as opposed to her eventual marriage, that put the loneliness of her earlier relationship in perspective.

I thought of Rebecca's pushback to the idea of being “single” when I read a 2013
New York
magazine profile of Fleetwood Mac singer Stevie Nicks. Questioned about her life as a woman who has never permanently settled with a romantic partner, Nicks replied, “I don't feel alone. I feel very un-alone. I feel very sparkly and excited about everything. I know women who are going, like, ‘I don't want to grow old alone.' And I'm like, ‘See, that doesn't scare me. . . . ' I'll always be surrounded by people. I'm like the crystal ball and these are all the rings of Saturn around me.”

While the interplanetary part probably doesn't resonate for those of us who are not witchy rock icons, the part about not feeling solitary as an unmarried woman certainly does apply to many, including Rebecca and including me.

I saw more people every day when I was single than I do as a married person. I went out more, I talked on the phone with more people, knew more about other people's lives. I attended more baseball games and concerts; I spent more time at work, and certainly engaged more with colleagues and peers. When I met my husband, we turned in toward each other and our worlds got smaller.

But, while unpartnered life does not necessarily cut people off from the larger world, it is true that when women are not committed to a significant other, when they do not regularly begin and end their days with a romantic partner, they often wind up logging many hours by themselves, in their own homes, in their own heads. And, for many of them, that's just fine.

There is an assumption, put forth by everyone from greeting card companies to Bruce Springsteen, that nobody likes to be alone, least of all women. But many women, long valued in context of their relations to other people, find solitude—both the act of being alone and the attitude of being independent—a surprisingly sweet relief.

“I really value my time alone,” said Kitty Curtis, a twenty-six-year old hair stylist from New Jersey. When she exited her last relationship, she first felt scared and was eager to find a new boyfriend immediately, but the feeling passed. “I started to value not having to worry about another adult agenda of any sort, not having to worry about anyone else,” Kitty said, “and I got comfy and cozy in my new life. It's just a really easy life, being alone.”

Kitty always wanted to travel, but in her two long-term relationships, she said, “I felt like I was constantly having to pull somebody along into a dream.” Her vision of what she wanted “had to be compromised with whatever kind of vision they wanted . . . I was so, so smothered.” By the time she ended her most recent relationship, she said, she felt unencumbered. “Now, I feel like there's so much to see in the world, so many more things to do. It's so much more exciting than the idea of combining my dreams with anybody else's.”

For some, a desire to be left to their own designs remains a steady drumbeat throughout their lives. For others, the solitary impulse strikes at discrete periods, switching on and off with a yearning to cuddle up or hunker down with other human beings. But, in all cases, women's yearning for liberty can be just as keen as the pull toward companionship that has been much more widely advertised.

In her satirical Internet series about women in Western Art for The Toast, writer Mallory Ortberg included an entry entitled “What The Happiest Woman in the World Looks Like:” a painting of a woman sitting alone. “Do you know how rare finding a moment's peace has been for women throughout human history?” Ortberg wrote. “If you spent the rest of your days alone in a cottage on a solitary Alp, it would not
begin
to make up for the years your foremothers spent having to listen to men as a profession . . . A woman alone is a beautiful thing.”
¹

Frances Kissling, a reproductive rights advocate who was, for a long time, in charge of Catholics for a Free Choice, was born in Queens, the oldest of four in a working-class family. After briefly joining a convent after high school and deciding that she didn't like it, Frances began her adult life as a sexually exuberant single woman. She has never married and never wanted to. “I'm going to be seventy next year and there is a thing about me, not about circumstances,” Frances told me in 2013. “I am very suited to being alone. I
like
being alone. I
need
to be alone.”

Frances lived with a couple of men and had one live-in relationship that bridged ten years of her twenties and early thirties. It was a good relationship by many measures, she said, until, “Ultimately, we just bored each other to tears.” But, she continued, that relationship is evidence that she
can
be partnered: “It's not like I always wanted to be hermetic. But I'm quite a private person and most of the time I have more fun with myself than with other people.” For years, Frances said, she couldn't fathom the appeal of marriage. As her married friends have aged, she conceded, she has watched some couples grow in complementary ways and has decided that a few “have something now that I find attractive. I'm not looking for it, but I definitely see the benefits for people who are healthy and can build a long-term meaningful connection with each other.”

But, she added, the things those long-married friends have now derive from the very feature that she finds most repellent about marriage: the quotidian mechanics of cooperation with another human. “I cannot embrace the mundane things in life,” Frances said. “When I was in relationships, the interruption of my very important thinking was intolerable. The occasional intrusion of worrying or caring or considering the
other person
in moments of spontaneity: suddenly you're with people and you decide you want to go out to dinner and you have to call this
other person
and tell them you're going to dinner, not because you need permission but because it's the right thing to do.”