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For most of my adult life, I have been, in the words of Beyoncé, a single lady. I met my current partner in 2021. My previous relationship ended in 2009. For the intervening 12 years, I was single.
I loved those years. I devoted a lot of time to building my career as a communications specialist for international NGOs: working internationally, immersing myself in local communities, and seizing every opportunity that came my way. Outside of work, I traveled widely and prioritized my own development. I practiced yoga and learned to cook. I wrote a novel. I bought and made a home. I found and lost friendships. So much of life exists outside of romantic relationships, and I immersed myself in this realm. I embraced solitude, relying on myself for sustenance and happiness. It was an enormous gift to intentionally build a happy, fulfilling life, just for me. And I’m not the only one to think this way. The number of single people in the U.S. has increased significantly in recent decades: In 2004, 33 percent of people aged 18-34 were unpartnered. By 2018, that number had risen to 51%.
During my single years, I had one friend who would always ask if I was dating anyone. No matter what else was happening in my life, my relationship status was the only thing that mattered to her. The rest of my life was only window dressing around that central, critical question: had I been chosen by another person? I tried to be generous with her. I knew she came from a generation of women defined entirely by their relationship status. If I’m honest with myself, her questioning only bothered me because it struck a nerve.
There were times when I longed for a partner. I knew it was better to be alone than in a bad relationship, but I still craved some kind of romantic connection. I dated: immersing myself in dating apps, swiping and liking, and going on first dates, before scampering back to my solitude. Sometimes my dates liked me and wanted more. Sometimes I liked them and wanted more. But those desires rarely overlapped. In 12 years, I had only a few flings, all of which were more trouble than they were worth. I was sometimes lonely, though less than people assumed. I missed having a steady person by my side, someone to drive me home from the hospital after a medical procedure or collect medication from the pharmacy when I was sick. But I certainly didn’t feel lonely on weekend nights, curled up with a novel and a bubbling lasagna.
Interestingly, I struggled to surface articles about heterosexual men choosing to remain single. There are plenty of alarmist pieces about how dating opportunities for heterosexual men are diminishing as relationship standards rise, but few include the voices of men who’ve found value in remaining single.
But despite rising numbers of single people, the cultural expectation that we will fall in love and get married remains strong. For some, it’s only when we’re happily partnered that our lives are considered complete. Being single is usually positioned as something to overcome, not something to celebrate. Someone like me—who remained single for more than a decade in a world devised for couples—is a puzzle to be solved, not a reality to be accepted.
What follows is a collection of articles offering different perspectives on single life. I hope they will challenge your perceptions of what a single life can look like and push you to make space for the richness that exists independent of romantic partnership.
On Spinsters (Briallen Hopper, Los Angeles Review of Books, July 2015)
I first considered my singlehood as an identity while reading Kate Bolick’s book Spinster, which grew from this 2011 article in The Atlantic. I enjoyed the book, but it was Hopper’s blistering review that really resonated with me. Hopper doesn’t criticize the book, as much as she imagines what could have existed in its place. Bolick’s book features five white female writers living in the American Northeast. The review challenges this framing and imagines the diverse group of radical women who built lives full of “friendship, faith, family, community, political purposefulness, significant caregiving responsibilities, dazzling professional success, and, occasionally or eventually, real romance.” This review adds queerness and radicalism to a book I loved, while expanding our understanding of what a satisfying life can look like outside of the same old heteronormative, patriarchal pattern.
Spinsterhood, for Bolick, is not simply being an unmarried woman. Nor is it cat-collecting, celibacy, or the social indignity of life as a human Old Maid card. Instead it is something luxurious, coveted, and glamorous, associated with long days of reading, plenty of room to sprawl in bed, ecstatic self-communion, and, as befits the former executive editor of the decorating magazine Domino, a well-appointed apartment of one’s own.
Single Women are the Most Potent Political Force in America (Rebecca Traister, The Cut, February 2016)
This 2016 piece is especially interesting to read alongside Traister’s more recent essay on the resurgence of a societal push toward marriage.
This adaptation from All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation by Rebecca Traister reads like a dispatch from a very different era. Traister argues that “wherever you find increasing numbers of single women in history, you find change.”
I also loved another piece from The Cut—Anna Holmes’ thoughtful take on her decision to stay single. “For a certain type of creative, highly sensitive soul,” she writes, “singledom was a feature, not a bug.”
Building from her own experience as a longtime single woman, Traister writes about how a cultural reassessment of female life could spark a significant political shift. I enjoyed how Traister takes what is ostensibly a cultural issue and traces its influence on our collective political priorities, pointing to how issues like pay equity and caregiving are rooted in the changing role of women in society.
Today’s women are, for the most part, not abstaining from or delaying marriage to prove a point about equality. They are doing it because they have internalized assumptions that just a half-century ago would have seemed radical: that it’s okay for them not to be married; that they are whole people able to live full professional, economic, social, sexual, and parental lives on their own if they don’t happen to meet a person to whom they want to legally bind themselves. The most radical of feminist ideas—the disestablishment of marriage — has been so widely embraced as to have become habit, drained of its political intent but ever-more potent insofar as it has refashioned the course of average female life.
On Being Queer and Happily Single—Except When I’m Not (Brandon Taylor, Them, December 2017)
This heart-wrenching essay about being single in a world that expects us to want romantic partnerships was published on Them, one of my favorite sites for queer news. With beauty and simplicity, Brandon Taylor writes about his history of childhood sexual abuse and how it impacted his life. Like Taylor, I experienced sexual trauma during childhood and found snippets of my own experience between his sentences. Taylor writes movingly about how sexual attention makes him squirm, and how he craves the intimacy of close friendship rather than romantic connection. Ultimately, he strives to make peace with himself knowing that, at least for the moment, singlehood is the best fit for him. I related to it deeply.
Perhaps that’s the source of my uneasiness. That every time a person interacts with my body, I’ve got to live with the record of it; that suddenly I have another voice to contend with as I try to make peace with myself. It’s another thing I have to move aside or reconcile as I move slowly, so slowly, with the speed of geology, toward a deeper accordance with myself and what I want or don’t want.
St. Teresa and the Single Ladies (Jessa Crispin, The New York Times, January 2016)
I didn’t expect to relate to a 15th-century Catholic nun, but I was very happy to be proved wrong. Jessa Crispin travels to Ávila, Spain, where the locals are celebrating a philosopher who pioneered women’s independence more than 500 years ago. In the Catholicism of my youth, a woman’s only role was to birth and raise more Catholics. But St. Teresa chose another path, joining the church because it was the only way for a woman to be a philosopher and an author. In doing so, she became an unlikely role model for women choosing to create a life alone. This piece also highlights how unmarried women are often the most socially and politically engaged members of society, which reflects my own experience volunteering during my single years. Without a romantic partnership, I had more energy to devote to my community. For a season, I spent my Friday nights volunteering at a children’s hospital—more meaningful than a night of socializing.
Teresa did not want to be reduced to merely a body, bred and sacrificed for the sake of her husband and children. If she had to choose between being a body and a brain, she would choose to be a brain. So she entered the church — the only way a woman could become a philosopher.
The New Science of Single People (Jesse Singal, New York Magazine, August 2016)
DePaulo has published several books on singlehood and has also given a popular TEDx talk on the topic.
We’ve all heard the studies: married people are, on the whole, happier and less lonely than their single counterparts. But when social scientist and long-term single person Bella DePaulo decided to examine the research, she uncovered serious methodological flaws in how these studies were conducted. This piece examines the research that currently exists on single people and highlights how further studies could benefit society as a whole. Single people have a lot to teach us about the pleasures of solitude, the importance of building a life based on your own values, and why we shouldn’t prioritize one central romantic relationship to the exclusion of everything else.
Ever since social science has been interested in the concept of marriage, it has endorsed the idea that everyone’s goal and likely trajectory is to get married at some point. “The idea has been that everybody wants to get married, and eventually everybody will, so why bother studying single people?” she said. Single people are either people who have failed to get married, in other words, or married-people-in-waiting. They’re not worth studying as a category unto themselves.
The Escalating Costs of Being Single in America (Anne Helen Petersen, Vox, December 2021)
Throughout most of my single years, I was fortunate to be able to live alone. I couldn’t always afford it, but would sacrifice other luxuries to ensure my own space. One of the biggest challenges to remaining single in a world structured for two is the financial strain it can cause. In this thoughtful and deeply researched piece, Anne Helen Petersen dives into the ways our society is organized to support the needs of partnered people. The tax code, social security benefits, pensions, health insurance, IRAs, and countless other aspects of our societal infrastructure are set up to support married family units—and disadvantage those who choose to stay single. This particularly impacts women, who can expect to live longer than men, but earn less over their lifetimes. Women of color, especially Black women, are particularly penalized. It’s a sobering article about the need for policy—as well as cultural—change when it comes to the rights of single people.
American society is structurally antagonistic toward single and solo-living people. Some of this isn’t deliberate, as households cost a baseline amount of money to maintain, and that amount is lessened when the burden is shared by more than one person. There are other forms of antagonism, too, deeply embedded in the infrastructure of everyday life.
Clare Egan is a queer freelance writer based in Dublin. She writes a regular newsletter about life after trauma and is working on her first book.
Editor: Carolyn Wells
Copyeditor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands, Krista Stevens
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