Why I'm Still Single and (Sort of) Okay With It
Corbis
Being single isn’t a disease. But if you’re an unpartnered woman in her late 30s or (gasp!) beyond, it can sometimes be tough to remember that. Sure, it’s more common these days to stumble across fellow single ladies on your subway car, in your art class, or at your best friend’s baby shower. But marriage is still – still! – widely idealized as the universal straight-American-female End Goal, and it’s shoved down our throats by everyone from first cousins twice removed to hysterical supermarket tabloids.
In her new book, Spinster, Kate Bolick plumbs the depths of her own (white, straight, upper-class) experience to help dissect the taboo of 30s-and-up singledom. In the book – a half-personal, half-polemic expansion of a popular Atlantic article from 2011, – the author attempts to deconstruct the idea of marriage as a one-size-fits-all inevitability, arguing that it’s an institution that’s grown unnecessary – and uninteresting – for many women. Including herself: Bolick has long been “meh” about matrimony. Though she’s a serial monogamist who craves intimacy, she writes of feeling claustrophobic in most long relationships.
While researching other famous spinster sorts, Bolick comes to realize that being solitary can be something to celebrate, not shun. The book is frustratingly narrow in the scope of women it focuses on; Bolick doesn’t bother addressing gay marriage, and notes that “the political, social, and economic forces that shape the African American single experience is an entire book unto itself.” But she believes, as do I, that women should unblinkingly follow whatever desires move them in the direction of the life they want. Bolick ends up in another LTR by book’s end, and is clearly still sorting out what the life she wants will ultimately look like for her.
I can relate to that. Like Bolick, I’ve spent the bulk of my thirties alone. In fact, now 38, I’ve been single, for all intents and purposes, for 10 years. Sure, I’ve dated – have I ever – and I’ve experienced a panoply of short-term things. I’ve had my heart splintered many times; I’ve shattered a few in return. But I haven’t had a legitimate long-term relationship since my last one ended at 28. I haven’t said “I love you” to anyone other than my closest friends or family, and I haven’t felt that warm, nervous buzz of looking into a man’s eyes as he says it to me for the first time.
When we hear about women like me, it’s usually framed in one of two ways. Either we’re desperately spinning our wheels, date after date, night after night, on a sad little hunt for a husband to make everything OK; or we’re loudly, proudly “single by choice”: stubbornly rebuffing all our dwindling dude options because we’re 1. overly independent; 2; overly picky; 3. overly obsessed with our careers. Concocting two reductive “reasons” for female solitude and setting it up an either/or thing – with both sides steeped in sexist mythology – isn’t fair, and it isn’t honest. For many women like me, our “explanation” for long-term singledom falls into greyer zone.
I’m not single because I have some soul-deep yearning for solitude, or because I start feeling itchy in relationships, like Bolick. Though I never fantasized about a wedding, a picket fence, or a nuclear family – even as a kid – I’d love to be in a happy, stable partnership, preferably one that lasts a while. I’d love to find a best friend I happen to enjoy sleeping next to; not because I need a man to fix my frayed feminine edges (ew), but because, cliche as it sounds, I’d like an accomplice to share my life with.
It needs to be the right someone, though – and that’s the best “reason” I can give for why I’ve been on my own for the past 10 years. Since then, my longest relationship, of 6-ish months, was with “Jack” (not his real name), a sex addict I knew I should’ve run from the moment I met him. I didn’t, because I’d just moved 3,000 miles across the country, to a city where I knew all of two people. Jack was smart, interesting, and well-connected, and I was craving companionship. I wanted to give things a little time, to wait and see if he’d reform, to see if my feelings might blossom. They didn’t. And when I caught him trying to set up a tryst with a cross-dressing male prostitute on Craigslist, I barely cared. I was never invested, I was just … lonely.
Loneliness is the bitterest rival of peaceful long-term singlehood. During other forlorn periods in my late 20s and early 30s, I briefly attempted to “make things work” with men like Jack; ones I knew, at gut-level, I should’ve left alone. Like Dan, the adorable dim bulb from Seattle who insisted he needed to get into Manhattan for class on September 11, 2001 (um, subways aren’t running, dude). Or Andy, the passive-aggressive aspiring guitarist who told me I was the most beautiful girl in the world, but who I could barely stomach peck-kissing. Or Chip, the painfully clingy recent divorcee who began texting me incessantly the minute our first date ended, and didn’t stop until we parted ways three months later.
None of those men were bad people, but they were bad for me. They reminded me it’s profoundly more uncomfortable to be with the wrong person than to be alone, and they only reinforced my aversion to settling, which is why, well, I haven’t settled.
But I haven’t chosen this lifestyle as some Sweeping Feminist Pronouncement, either. I’ve never been sure whether I wanted kids, but now that my time for a biological child is dwindling, I feel a twinge of fear about Missing My Window. What if I look back and regret all this romantic reticence? Should I just suck it up and pick someone already? Um, no. Love isn’t Netflix – it can’t be fulfilled on demand. (And I have a little more time on the kid front, I think/hope.)
So for now I’ll keep my eyes open while I keep on being a party of one. Not because I don’t want love, but because I only want it if it’s right, and because this is how my cards have fallen. I’ve dated, I’ve done my own thing, I’ve grown discouraged, I’ve grown hopeful again, I’ve stepped back and focused on my friendships. Being on my own is just my reality right now. One I’m sometimes OK with, and sometimes not.
Related:
Oscar de la Renta’s Peter Copping On His First Bridal Collection & The Importance of Bustiers
