All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation (22 page)

In 1979, the
Christian Science Monitor
reported on single women
buying stereos, art, cookie jars, and furniture for themselves, since “single women deserve nice things too” and “who wants to sit on orange crates until you've got a wedding ring on your hand?
⁹
” It required some defensive effort to adjust to this new normal; the
Monitor
explained that if this new generation of unwed consumers was “a bit more self-indulgent than their mothers and grandmothers, it's because they've decided they're ‘worth it.' ”

But, as with many public estimations of female self-worth, a little goes a long way. In 1987, the
New York Times
, which thirteen years earlier had declared the news that single women were “self-assured, confident, secure,”
¹⁰
had changed its tune. “There is a single woman in New York, bright and accomplished,” began a macabre mid-eighties story in the newspaper, “who dreads nightfall, when darkness hugs the city and lights go on in warm kitchens.”
¹¹
(Apparently, all that furniture the
Christian Science Monitor
had reported that single women were buying for themselves had not included lamps.)

Single women, the
Times
reported, while appearing to live lives full of “hard work and good friends, of stimulating days that end with cultural events, gymnasium workouts or Chinese and a soak in the tub” in fact “complain bitterly about their love lives and their marriage prospects” and are dogged by “nagging dissatisfaction.” Strangely, many of the women interviewed did not seem that bitter or dissatisfied; one thirty-nine-year-old executive averred that she'd grown “increasingly satisfied with her single life.” The
Times
reporter made reference, in a penultimate paragraph, to “several studies” showing that “single women are happier than their married sisters,” but confidently noted that that research “flies in the face” of the opinion of one hairdresser who claimed that her single clients are very distracted by looking for a man.

Yes, many women who had pursued careers and not families experienced loneliness. But the question of whether that loneliness would be ameliorated by marriage—
any
marriage—was one that didn't get attention, even when another executive explained to the paper that some choices about remaining unmarried were made expressly to escape the unhappiness of an earlier generation of
married
women: “When you think of your mother as helpless, unable to choose her own life, you become determined never to be vulnerable.”

The message to women, especially high-achieving women, was that their singleness was their fault: They'd opted for the gymnasiums and Chinese food, and thereby sacrificed the warm, well-lit kitchens. The underlying implication was that women's responsibility for their marriage-free fates lay in living lives that were
too
good,
too
full, and
too
powerful.

When people call single women selfish for the act of tending to themselves, it's important to remember that the very acknowledgment that women
have
selves that exist independently of others, and especially independent of husbands and children, is revolutionary. A true age of female selfishness, in which women recognized and prioritized their own drives to the same degree to which they have always been trained to tend to the needs of all others, might, in fact, be an enlightened corrective to centuries of self-sacrifice.

Amina Sow agrees. The advice she gives everyone is “Always choose yourself first. Women are very socialized to choose other people. If you put yourself first, it's this incredible path you can forge for yourself.” Amina too understood how she sounded as the words were coming out of her mouth. “If you choose yourself people will say you're selfish,” she said. “But
no
. You have agency. You have dreams. It takes a lot to qualify a man as selfish.”

Single women have never enjoyed a particularly glossy reputation. One Reformation-era proverb, which would be cited in different forms by John Donne and William Shakespeare, proclaimed that women who died unmarried were doomed to “lead apes in hell.”

Despite the fact that living uncoupled for large portions or all of life has become the new normal, that fewer Americans are marrying and that those who are are doing so at later ages; despite the fact that people who live alone make up almost 30 percent of the population (more than nuclear families
¹²
), stigmas about single people, and especially women, as aberrant, weird, stunted, and perhaps especially as immature, persist.

In 2012, writer Deborah Schoeneman published an essay, “Woman-Child,” about what she perceived as the indulgence of single women in
childish extravagances, such as sparkly nail polish. Meanwhile, the conservative columnist Kevin Williamson laid into the HBO show
Girls
, for which Schoeneman herself had written
:
“[Lena Dunham] might have gone one better and called it
Thumbsuckers
,” Williamson wrote, continuing that “The more appropriate title
Diapers
would terrify her demographic.”
¹³
In not having and taking care of babies, Williamson felt, the unmarried female characters of
Girls
were themselves the babies.

In more serious quarters, single young adult life is often called “extended adolescence” or “adultescence;” unattached twentysomethings are sometimes referred to as “kidults.” Psychologist Jeffrey Arnett has suggested that we use the term “emerging adulthood,” acknowledging a new life stage, akin to the formal recognition of “childhood,” “adolescence” itself, and “middle age”: semi-defined periods within the human lifespan that have become recognized, often in response to adjustments in technology, medicine, industrialization, and civil rights. Images of “adultescence” are often summed up with a vision of grown but underemployed children sleeping on their parents' couches. Journalist Judith Shulevitz has asserted that “the twenties have turned into a lull in the life cycle,” casting single life as a pause in adulthood.

While it makes sense to consider a period of grown-but-unmarried life as a new phase, the way it is cast as an inherently
im
mature stage isn't quite right. After all, unmarried life is not a practice round or a staging ground or a suspension of real life. There is nothing automatically adolescent about moving through the world largely on one's own—working, earning, spending, loving, screwing up, and having sex outside traditional marriage.

Yes, in a bad economy, grown children live with their parents. However, that's not a new familial configuration; historically and across classes, adult children have very often lived with their parents. We just didn't consider them quite so adolescent when they were married and had children dwelling with them in the multigenerational unit.

There is also a rather rich history of traditionally married adults behaving in childish ways: expecting to remain the center of attention and have their needs met by partners who feed them, entertain them, and do their laundry. Yet there has been little equivalent agonizing over the scourge of infantile husbands throughout history.

In many ways, the emotional and economic self-sufficiency of unmarried life is more demanding than the state we have long acknowledged as (married) maturity. Being on one's own means shouldering one's own burdens in a way that being coupled rarely demands. It means doing
everything
—making decisions, taking responsibility, paying bills, cleaning the refrigerator—without the benefits of formal partnership. But we've still got a lot of hardwired assumptions that the successful female life is measured not in professional achievements or friendships or even satisfying sexual relationships, but by whether you're legally coupled.

In turn, those assumptions are often undergirded by an unconscious conviction that, if a woman is
not
wed, it's not because she's made a set of active choices, but rather that she has not been selected—chosen, desired, valued enough. I remember keenly the day, in the midst of my bad first breakup, that an older male friend, trying to comfort me, explained why he'd decided to propose to his wife: because, “you don't let merchandise like that sit on the shelf.” I let the implications of his remark wash over me as I sat glumly on my shelf, unpurchased and unloved.

“Among my very liberal, educated milieu,” said Elliott, the forty-year-old novelist in Washington, “There is a sense of: ‘What happened? How are you still on the shelf? You must be a defective product because nobody bought you.” This is the message she absorbs every time a friend tries to be encouraging by telling her, “I would think everyone would be after you!”

Despite the fact that they are one of the largest growing demographic in the nation, women who remain single later than many of their peers often feel isolated, not simply in literal ways, but as if their experiences are unique.

While I was writing this book, I had dinner with a friend of my father-in-law, an unmarried academic in her fifties, living in a Midwestern community where the vast majority of her peers were married. While I held forth on the huge numbers of women now living outside marriage, she looked at me witheringly. This big, bustling world of single women that I (a traditionally married woman, no less) was describing did not match her experience of feeling socially excluded, aberrant, solitary—like the only single woman in a world of wives.

Nancy Giles, a fifty-two-year-old television commentator who lives in New Jersey, says that, even if she knows rationally that the world is now full of unmarried women, she still experiences an unconscious sensation that “single women's experiences have been cut off from each other and put on islands where each of us feels like we're freaks.” Giles believes that feelings of freakishness stem from male confusion about women who, by choice or by happenstance, live life unattached. She remembered the perplexity she inspired in a former radio co-host, a white male comedian, who, she said, didn't know what to make of her. “He couldn't put me in a box,” she said. “I wasn't a
Roseanne
-type housewife; I wasn't a woman he could tease for always dating the wrong men; I wasn't seeing anyone at the time; I wasn't gay. He would have denied that my being black made a difference. But he couldn't figure out how to deal with me, because I was just this kind of happy person. Why wasn't I having dating problems or being upset? Why wasn't I a man-hater? There was just this big giant question mark over his head.”

In a 2011 study, researchers at the University of Missouri explored the pressures faced by middle-class, never-married women. They found that these women experienced a heightened sense of deviant visibility within their families and communities (especially at events like weddings, even more especially during bouquet tosses) and that, conversely, they were made to feel
in
visible and inconsequential in social environments in which the default expectation is that all adult women are wives and/or mothers. The study was headlined, “I'm a Loser, I'm Not Married, Let's All Just Look at Me.”
¹⁴

There remains an anxiety that a lack of marital affiliation might somehow be tied to a lack of
existence
, especially for women who have for so long been valued and lauded for their connections to others. It's in the line from
When Harry Met Sally
, in which Harry tells Sally that what she's in for, as a young woman headed to New York, is the risk of dying “one of those New York deaths where nobody notices for two weeks until the smell drifts out into the hallway.” It's a funny line, but also a chilling one, especially for those of us who have feared, on occasion, that a lack of traditional ties leaves us unmoored, not just from nuclear family structures, but from the world.

Loneliness is not directly tied to whether you're partnered. Journalist Judith Shulevitz has pointed to recent studies showing that chronic loneliness is a medical condition that takes place on a biological, cellular level, that at least part of the propensity for the condition is hereditable and that part of the rest of it has to do with conditions we face as newborns and children, long before anyone is being encouraged or discouraged from pairing off with another individual. Contemporary psychologists, Shulevitz reports, “insist that loneliness must be seen as an interior, subjective experience, not an external, objective condition.” Loneliness, in short, writes Shulevitz, “is the want of intimacy.” And a want of intimacy is not necessarily abated through marriage.

More than one in three adults over the age of forty-five report being lonely; not all these adults are single. And, as anyone who's ever been in a bad romantic or sexual relationship knows, intimacy doesn't just show up and make itself at home when you have sex with someone, nor does it necessarily creep in slowly over years; often, in fact, intimacy between romantic partners can fade over time. And there may not be any loneliness as profound as the one you feel when you are lying next to a person to whom you are supposedly tied tighter than anyone else and feeling nothing but unknown, unseen, bereft of connection.

While reading Meghan O'Rourke's memoir of losing her mother to cancer, I was struck by the way the grief seemed more intense to her because, in part, she felt it hers to bear alone. O'Rourke, who writes about the disintegration of her marriage during her mother's illness, memorably recalls an instance in the hospital in which she sees another young woman about her age, obviously in pain, and feels a particular kinship with her, until she sees the woman again, accompanied by a husband and children, and immediately retracts the tentacles of shared experience. “Your grief is not like mine,” she decides.