Why We Can't Sleep

by Ada Calhoun

  I saw my friend Nikita again not long ago. She seemed more relaxed. When I asked about her marriage, she told me things were better. A few months after her husband first broached the open-marriage question, she was no longer nursing their baby and felt as though she could at least have the conversation without getting mad. But by that point, her husband was no longer interested in the idea. “‘So, you just worked through it?’ she asked him. ‘Meanwhile, you put me through months of processing and now you’ve decided, “Oh, maybe I don’t really care anymore.” It was just a phase?’”

  That was the gist. Recalling this conversation to me, she sighed.

  That decision about her marriage had been made, and some others, too. The older kids were in better schools; the youngest would be starting preschool before too long. Renovations on their new home were almost finished. Renting out the New York place brought in enough money that she didn’t have to work. Still, she wants to do more with her life. She’s just not sure what that is.

  “My entire life, whenever I’ve made big changes it’s been because of a moment of clarity: Aha! This is what I’m supposed to do!” she said. “I think whatever’s supposed to come next will reveal itself. I hope it will.”

  7

  Single, Childless

  “God isn’t going to tell you a partner and baby are never going to show up.”

  “I thought I’d be married and have kids by now,” said my friend Sarah Hepola, the author of Blackout, as we ate breakfast together at a diner in Dallas.

  Sarah and I worked together in our twenties at the Austin Chronicle.¹ We went to see a lot of bands play, drank as if drinking was our job, and saw each other living not exactly our best lives. But we had fun. One time, inspired by the roller-skating cult-movie-musical Xanadu, we went skating and considered ourselves prodigies even though we fell down a thousand times.

  She told me, “I see my [married] friends around me and they’re struggling, but I can’t help thinking that I would prefer their struggles to my struggles. They say, ‘I just want to go out and have sex with some random guy,’ and I think, ‘Why? I want to go home and watch a movie with my husband. I want kids to wake me up at four a.m.’”

  What she’s describing sounds like the makings of the perfect Gen X movie: a Freaky Friday remake in which a married woman with children swaps lives with a single woman who has a hot dating life and a cool job.

  “Because there is this increasing number of women living alone,” says Sarah, “I think there is a push to tell narratives that are about their triumph. But I don’t feel triumphant. Nor do I want to be some sort of reactionary, cautionary tale. That is not the truth of it either.”

  For a long time, her desire for children was abstract: “The decision about whether or not to have a baby has been kind of vague, free-floating.” Then, at forty: “My desire to have a baby blossomed really powerfully. At forty-one, I started dating this guy in another state. There were a lot of red flags along the way that this was not going to be the relationship that I wanted it to be, but I ignored them. I needed to make it work because I felt like this was my last chance. By the time that relationship ended, I was forty-two. Then earlier this year, I was diagnosed with fibroids and I’m looking at a possible hysterectomy.” She hasn’t given up on finding a partner with whom she might adopt children, though she’s haunted by the question: Where is he?

  One therapist I met gave me an especially poignant term for the feeling Sarah describes: “ambiguous loss.”

  “When you think about women in their forties,” says Kelly Maxwell Haer, executive director of the Boone Center for the Family at Pepperdine University in California, “it’s a very rare person who pictured herself single. The ambiguous loss of singleness is the type where the desired partner is psychologically present in a person’s mind but physically absent.”

  Generation X women are told incessantly that they should do—or should have done—things differently in order to get what they want. Still, however many times you make a vision board or try to magic a partner or a baby or money or success into your life, sometimes it doesn’t happen. And that’s not necessarily because you didn’t try hard enough.

  So how do you know if there’s still hope?

  “Ambiguous losses are a particular type of loss that is hard to define and lacks closure,” says Dr. Haer. “The ambiguous loss of singleness is particularly challenging to navigate. The person could be found in five minutes. Or never. You’re not going to get an email from God that says you’re never going to have a partner. That hope lingers on, and it’s hard to live in hope that is not met. It’s not like the closure of death, where you know this person has died, and it’s over, and you can go through grief and move on. Humans don’t do uncertainty well.”

  In 1950, about 22 percent of American adults were single. That number has more than doubled, marking one of the most significant changes to American demographics in the past century. In 2016, 59.8 million households in the United States were maintained by single people—47.6 percent.² Close to 40 percent of babies are now born to unmarried women.³

  Gallup reported that, as of 2013, 16 percent of Gen Xers had never married. That’s compared with 10 percent of Boomers and just 4 percent of our grandparents’ generation.⁴ Headline after headline on the order of RECORD SHARE OF AMERICANS HAVE NEVER MARRIED proclaims the rise of the singles.⁵ This trend appears to be continuing with Millennials.⁶

  Even those members of Generation X who do marry tend to delay it. Thanks to us, the age at which Americans marry is at a new high. The median age of first marriage, which hovered between twenty and twenty-two for women and between twenty-two and twenty-six for men from 1890 to 1980, has risen to almost twenty-eight for women in 2018, and nearly thirty for men.⁷

  We’ve also seen what the National Marriage Project calls the great crossover: since 1989, the median age of a first-time mother has been earlier than that of first marriage. That has been true for decades among the poorest women in America, but there has been a “rapid and recent” trend in that direction for middle-class women with a high school diploma or some college.⁸

  There’s a lot of good news here.⁹

  College-educated women who wait until thirty or later to marry have higher incomes.¹⁰ Delays in marrying have been credited with bringing down the divorce rate.¹¹ Thanks to the decrease in the stigma around singleness, women are better able to chart their own course. Women are no longer dependent on men the way they were in prior generations. Until the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974, it could be difficult for a woman even to get a credit card in her own name. Today, single women are far more likely than single men to buy their own homes.¹²

  Sociologist Eric Klinenberg, author of Going Solo, has said that the rise of single people in America has played a role in revitalizing cities, in part because they tend to go out and socialize more than married people do. He also sees another benefit: “In a moment like this,” Klinenberg told Smithsonian magazine, “living alone is one way to get a kind of restorative solitude, a solitude that can be productive, because your home can be an oasis from the constant chatter and overwhelming stimulation of the digital urban existence.”¹³

  The downside: middle-aged women may feel ready to marry only to discover there is no one available whom they want to marry.

  “I teach aerobics, right?” a DC friend said the other day. “And I have to load the car myself. Every week. I just have to put every piece of equipment and my boom box and all of it in the car. And all I can think is: Am I going to have to do this myself forever? Will I never have a man to help me?”

  She’s had a lot of trouble finding him. She goes to church and wants a man who does, too. She’s well educated and ambitious, so she wants someone accomplished. She also wants someone roughly her age, and capable of fixing things around the house. She has now met, she thinks, every single heterosexual professional man in the Washington, DC, area who goes to church and owns a tool kit. She feels her options are f
ar more limited than people who aren’t in her shoes could imagine.

  There is data to back up my friend’s dismay. According to research cited in journalist Jon Birger’s book Date-onomics, there is a nationwide “man deficit,” at least among the college educated.¹⁴ In New York City, where I live, there are 400,000 more women than men.¹⁵ One Pew study showed that most women consider it very important for a man they might date to be employed, but for every one hundred unmarried women there are only sixty-five employed unmarried men—a dire ratio that shrinks to forty-seven when only divorced, separated, and widowed men are counted.¹⁶

  This is bad news for Generation X women, a relatively well-educated group.¹⁷ An awful lot of men who say they want an intellectual equal in reality tend to shy away from women who are better educated than they are or make more money than they do. In one study published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, men were more likely to express romantic interest in a woman they had not met if she outperformed them in a test than if she did worse than they did. But in face-to-face interactions, the men were more likely to be romantically interested in the woman if she did worse on the test than if she outperformed them.¹⁸

  Meanwhile, my aerobics-instructor friend hears all the time that she might have better luck with less boxes for the man to check. To her, this sounds like being told to settle. Single women in their forties keep getting advised to do that. Women’s magazines and smug married friends accuse them of being too picky or too independent or too something. They’re told they must not have looked hard enough.

  Dating in middle age can wear down even the hardiest souls.

  Romantic comedies and fairy tales have filled us with unrealistic fantasies, while Tinder has convinced us that if we keep looking long enough, we will find the one soul mate out there for us. It’s a perfect storm of disappointment and frustration and transactional encounters.

  “Online dating technology inflames everyone’s knee-jerk judgment and pickiness,” said one friend. “Swipe left on the guy with the big head, swipe left on the guy without a job—and who knows if you might have liked that guy in real life?”

  Life is much more complicated at this age than it is in our twenties. One single friend of mine felt vulnerable following the death of her mother but was cheered up by a series of fun dates. Only, after hanging out with the guy a few times, she learned that he wasn’t exactly divorced from his children’s mother—or even separated from her.

  Another friend in her midforties said she’s not going online in the wake of her recent breakup: “I’d rather look through midcentury modern end tables on Etsy than scroll through men.”

  Still, the pressure to date more or date better can be intense. One divorced mother of two told me that she hasn’t dated since her divorce a few years ago and doesn’t particularly want to. But now that she’s getting older, women in her family have begun to fret over her singleness. “My mother and her generation used to say, ‘A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle,’ but now, suddenly, they’re Mrs. Bennet from Pride and Prejudice: ‘Ooh! He’d be a good catch!’”

  Susan Patton, nicknamed “Princeton Mom,” wrote a book in 2014 called Marry Smart, encouraging women to snap up a man in college lest they turn into overeducated spinsters. “Another Valentine’s Day. Another night spent ordering in sushi for one and mooning over ‘Downton Abbey’ reruns,” she wrote in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece.¹⁹ “Smarten up, ladies.”

  But what if you’ve read the advice books and done your best and in middle age you’re still alone? On the TV show UnREAL, the bachelorette character Serena says all her friends are married, and she adds, “The weird thing is I did everything right. I did everything just like them. My friends say that I’m just too picky. That no guy is good enough. But the truth is, nobody picks me.”²⁰

  Since the oldest Gen Xers entered their fertile years, there has been a rush to convince women that their chances to marry or have children are falling every second of every day, like a rock thrown off a cliff after college graduation. In June 1986, Newsweek declared via a cover story that middle-aged women were destined for spinsterhood by their having delayed marriage. A forty-year-old, white, college-educated woman, the story said, was more likely to be killed by a terrorist than to get married. Never mind that the article was based on a modest 1985 demographic study called “Marriage Patterns in the United States”²¹ that made no mention of terrorist attacks. According to the abstract, one conclusion was simply: “Education is the most important correlate of decisions about the timing of first marriage.” Stop the presses.

  In 2002, the incendiary book Creating a Life by economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett asserted that 40 percent of women making $50,000 or more a year were childless at age forty-five and that fertility dropped after age twenty-seven.²² Magazines fanned the flames with cover stories like “Baby Panic,” which read: “These days, the independence that seemed so fabulous—at least to those of us who tend to use that word a lot—doesn’t anymore.”²³

  Offering a catharsis was Tina Fey on Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update: “Sylvia’s right. I definitely should have had a baby when I was twenty-seven, living in Chicago over a biker bar, pulling down a cool twelve grand a year.”²⁴ Fey provided a counterexample, too: she gave birth to her two daughters at the ages of thirty-five and forty-one.

  In 2014, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists issued a statement that women’s ability to have babies decreased gradually beginning around age thirty-two and then more quickly after age thirty-seven.²⁵ Newsweek recanted the “terrorist” article twenty years after publishing it. Still, bogus statistics continue to haunt the culture, striking fear into the hearts of women who want children but haven’t had them yet.²⁶

  Many Gen X women make a conscious decision not to marry or not to move in with a partner—or not to be parents. They are able to go where they want when they want, to work as much as they want, to cultivate friendships, to give back to the community, to make their own life without interference from or obligation to anyone else. Members of the Childfree by Choice movement state a strong case for living life without kids and for offering support to those who make that choice.

  One single friend of mine is a foreign correspondent. She has lived all over the world, including in Lebanon and Tunisia. When I see her every couple of years or so, she looks even more stylish as she sips wine and flips her long hair and tells me about her “lovers” and how she can see the Mediterranean Sea from her office. She’s never wanted a permanent partner or a child. She is delighted with her life, a walking advertisement for singledom.

  Another woman I know married young and then divorced at the age of thirty. At thirty-five, she was still single. She decided that pursuing more than one goal at a time wasn’t going to work for her, and so she threw herself into her career full tilt: “And that’s essentially what I’ve been doing the past six years. I went to grad school. I got a master’s in public administration. And I actively never wanted my job to be my whole life, but I’m super happy with where I am professionally now.”

  Briallen Hopper writes in the funny essay “How to Be Single”²⁷ about how you should defend your singledom, even if that means filling your home with newspapers and feral racoons. (“Do not rule this out just because it’s a cliché. It works.”) Then, if you still find yourself being courted by someone, she says you should: “Send them a Havisham GIF, either Helena Bonham Carter from Mike Newell’s 2012 version of Great Expectations or Gillian Anderson from the 2011 BBC version or Martita Hunt from the 1946 David Lean version. (Anne Bancroft from the 1998 version is too hot.) If your date tries to keep bantering or flirting, just keep sending Havishams until they stop.”

  Single women may still be marginalized or stigmatized even—some say especially—when they are happy about being single. In her book Singled Out, social psychologist Bella DePaulo calls this “the singles treatment”: “No matter how fabulously happy and successful yo
u may be,” she writes,²⁸ “you can still get the singles treatment. In fact, some people who dole out the treatment sometimes seem especially miffed by singles who are not whining about their singlehood or pining for coupledom.”

  In the 1959 Doris Day–Rock Hudson movie Pillow Talk, Thelma Ritter’s oft-drunk character, Alma, approvingly quotes Rock Hudson’s character, saying, “If there’s anything worse than a woman living alone, it’s a woman sayin’ she likes it.”

  That seems to have been gospel for 1959. But many happily single women hear it even now. In a 2018 New York Times op-ed called “I’m in My 40s, Child-Free and Happy. Why Won’t Anyone Believe Me?”²⁹ writer Glynnis MacNicol told the story of meeting an older man she admired at a dinner party. He told her she had a terrible life and had his leftover steak wrapped up for her to take home.

  This “I’m happy/No, you’re not” nonconversation isn’t only patronizing. It sets women who are delighted to be alone against women who are unhappy being alone. Many women in America today are like my international vixen friend—cheerful possessors of prime real estate, embodiments of sexual freedom and independent glamour.

  “My father’s mother raised two kids by herself during World War II after her husband died,” said a fortysomething woman who gets paid to eat at exciting restaurants all over the world. “For heaven’s sake, I have it so easy. I’m living in a nice house, in a nice neighborhood. I have friends, family. I have nothing to complain about.” She said she contemplated single motherhood when Angelina Jolie was on all the tabloid covers. She has six. I could have one! she thought back then. “But if I’d had a kid then, I couldn’t do any of the things I do now.”

  And yet, one single woman told me that she’s starting to realize that for decades to come, she might well be buying her own orange juice when she has the flu. She knows she could get a friend to do her a favor or pay someone to do it, but said that feels depressing.