Knowing how to enjoy going solo outside the home is just as important as living well inside of it. Yet young adults who live alone often struggle to take pleasure in certain mundane, everyday activities—going to a restaurant, bar, concert, or movie, for example—because they grew up believing that these are things one shouldn’t do alone. For many, traveling alone is particularly daunting. Single women are often warned about the dangers of going on the road without a companion. Even travel writing that encourages women to do so can easily convey the opposite message. The article “A Woman Traveling Alone? The World Can Be Your Oyster, Too,” which appeared in the Boston Globe in 2009, notes that traveling alone can be quite a social experience. Yet it also warns, “Safety is the top concern for female travelers,” and quotes the author of a book for female travelers who says, “The moment we step out of the door, we are aware of the footsteps behind us.” The article’s advice: “Consider taking a women’s self-defense course . . . [and] learn how to decrease your chances of being a victim.”20 This is sage, no doubt, but not exactly emboldening.
Ella, who lived abroad as a student and now travels regularly for work, has turned herself into an intrepid traveler. She takes adventurous treks and ambitious group tours to remote countries as well as silent, weeklong yoga retreats outside the city, because her apartment does not offer a sufficient escape from the stress of urban life. Like most singles, Ella perceives that the travel industry is designed for couples. Hotel rooms and car rentals, for instance, typically cost the same for one person as for two, and advertising usually targets couples and families.
In recent years, however, she has noticed that the market is beginning to accommodate the emerging demands of independent tourists. According to the Travel Industry Association, singles and solo dwellers account for 27 percent of the domestic tourism market, and about 10 percent of leisure travelers go alone. Recently a number of hotels, spas, and cruise lines have taken notice. In February 2010, for instance, Norwegian Cruise Line announced that it would install 128 studios for solo travelers on its Caribbean tours. These guests would pay the same per-person rate as members of couples, a major change from standard industry practice, which demands that single travelers pay for two.21
Yet travel, no matter how welcoming the accommodations, is ultimately just a temporary escape from the challenge of crafting a meaningful life alone. And as veteran adventure seekers like Ella acknowledge, if you’re not thoughtful about how you do it, the search for the new can get old. “I’ve heard so many people say that they love living alone because it allows them to travel whenever and wherever they want,” the journalist Ethan Watters told me. “But traveling turns out to be a false god. It can’t answer your deepest questions, or deliver you much more than an extended break.” Eventually all solo tourists learn that home is their final destination, and that’s where they have to make their lives work.
DISCRIMINATION—FROM EMPLOYERS, real estate agents, and housing associations—makes arranging one’s everyday life more complicated, and the people we interviewed report that learning to fight it is essential for living alone. For instance, singles report that their supervisors and colleagues respect the personal time of employees with spouses and children, but not theirs. “In my office, I’m the only one living alone,” Ella explains. They all work long hours. But when there’s something urgent, something that might take a while to complete, Ella often gets the call because everyone knows she has no companion or children whose needs demand attention and may get in the way. This is a common complaint. Molly, the Web designer, says that in her office “single people are expected to work more, harder. If you have this claim of a child at home, it’s understood that you’re going to leave earlier than other people, it’s understood that of course you can’t work on the weekend.”
Sherri Langburt, an entrepreneur in her late thirties, started a Web site that offers products, advice, and community building for singles and singletons after experiencing discrimination firsthand. She’s thin and fashionable, with a heart-shaped face, long brown hair, and an edgy, slightly nervous disposition. She’s concerned about the ways in which unspoken prejudices shape people’s personal and professional experiences, and when I first meet her she complains that differential treatment in the workplace runs deeper than most people think: “When I worked in corporate America, I was in a situation where everyone in my office got pregnant around the same time. So I’m coming in at eight and they’re coming in at ten thirty, and then they’re going to doctors’ appointments at two. And I get it, but there’s no balance. I mean, they’re leaving at five once they have the kids, because they need to get home. That’s fine, but then I’m sitting there working until seven. There was just a very big difference in the workloads.” What really irked her, however, was the time she was denied a bonus that her married colleagues in an underperforming division received. When she complained, her boss, who was friendly but always treated her as if she were “some kind of party girl,” told her that the managers believed that, as a single woman who dressed well and appeared to have an active social life, she was doing fine as is. “People make assumptions. He said, ‘You wear all these clothes, and you’re always out, and we figured you don’t need it.’” Sherri left the job soon after to start SingleEdition.com, and one of the Web site’s most popular features is a forum in which participants discuss how to handle discrimination in the workplace.
Another popular feature is a forum for singles to discuss discrimination in the real estate market. This is a particular problem in cities with a lot of cooperative apartments, because in these buildings prospective buyers have to be approved by private boards whose members may not believe that those living a “singles lifestyle” make appropriate neighbors. Sherri experienced this personally when she moved to New York City and started working with a real estate agent. She found several co-op apartments appealing, yet the agent steered her away from them: “‘You’re a woman, you’re single, and you’re Canadian,’” he told her. “‘No board is ever going to approve you.’ He kept saying that. But I had this great job. I had money in the bank. And this guy was, like, no.” Exasperated, Sherri decided to switch brokers. “Everyone was sending me names for the best broker in the city, and they would all just say the same thing: ‘You clearly have the financial backing and the secure job. But you’re single, you’re a woman, and you’re from Canada. Three strikes. You’re going to get rejected.’ It kept happening over and over. It was ridiculous! I was thirty-two years old and I’d call my friends crying.” Eventually Sherri stopped trying, and didn’t start again until she got married. “With my husband,” she says, “it was easy-peasy.”
Those who do not need approval from co-op boards have an easier time finding a home. In fact, the spike in housing purchases by singles is one of the most remarkable changes related to the fast rise of living alone. This was also inspired by an important legal reform. The Equal Credit Opportunity Act, which Congress passed in 1975, prohibited lenders from rejecting applicants on the basis of sex or marital status and from asking women what kind of birth control they used or whether they planned to have children. Singles, particularly women, were suddenly able to enter the housing market. According to the National Association of Realtors, in 1981 single women represented 10 percent of all U.S. home buyers; at the time this practice was so novel that the New York Times reported, “Invariably, when single women talk about having purchased a home, the sentiment expressed is: ‘I never would have considered this ten years ago.’”22 By 2009, single men and women accounted for 10 and 21 percent of all home buyers, respectively, and together they represented nearly one-third of the market. Single men and women also made up 12 and 24 percent of first-time home buyers, respectively, or more than one-third of the market. In the 1950s, real estate agents would have been surprised to see a single female client in their office; now it’s surprising if they don’t. “I’ve been in realty for about fifteen years now and the trend has increased th
roughout the years,” the president of the Chicago Association of Realtors told a local newspaper. “It’s not a trend, it’s a norm.”23
The increase in home buying by single women under age forty-five is especially striking. From an economic perspective, the cause of the change looks obvious. Today more women have received advanced education and established themselves in successful careers than ever before. In 1970, for instance, 36 percent of all college graduates were women, compared to 54 percent today. Women’s income still lags behind men’s, and there’s not yet equal pay for equal work, but the pay gap is narrowing. In the 1970s, the median income of full-time female workers was about 52 percent of what full-time male workers earned. By 2007, it was up to 71 percent. Single women have made even greater gains, particularly compared to single men. According to the Pew Research Center, “Among U.S.-born unmarried adults ages thirty to forty-four at every level of education, women’s median household incomes rose more than men’s from 1970 to 2007,” and “Unmarried women in 2007 had higher household incomes than their 1970 counterparts at each level of education.”24
Single women’s relative economic success is only part of the reason that they have become the fastest-growing participants in the housing market. After all, on average single men continue to earn more than single women, yet they are much less likely to purchase places of their own. My interviews suggest that the spike in women’s home buying is due not only to their economic success, but also to dramatic changes in the social psychology of living alone. Whereas not long ago most women viewed getting married as the key moment in the transition to adulthood, today there are other ways to make the change. Men who live alone in their thirties and forties show little interest in committing to a home or a neighborhood, and they rarely feel the need to settle down. But for a growing number of single women in early adulthood, buying a home has become a powerful way to pivot from one life stage into another. It’s a signal, to themselves and to those who know them, that they are ready to invest in themselves.
Kimberly lives in New York City and works in the film industry; her shoulder-length brown hair frames a pale complexion and a sweet but somewhat sinister smile that conveys her confident and mischievous side. She’s enjoyed great success in a competitive field, but she admits that she experienced an emotional crash when she found herself alone in her early thirties. It took several years to address the pain related to her own unmet expectations. “I was sad and depressed and lonely,” she recounts. “It wasn’t really where I wanted to be.” But work kept her busy, and that helped her avoid despair. “I could ignore it during the week because I had somewhere to be all day and into the night, but those weekends got hard. Like, you know, you wake up on a Sunday and you just have nothing. You plan nothing and you’re on your own.” Kimberly used television to distract herself from nagging questions about why she didn’t have a partner or a tighter friendship network, only to find that it left her feeling empty. “I used to watch a lot of TV, but that was a real fast way to get depressed and lonely.”25 Although she realized that she needed to get off her couch and out into the world, she had trouble getting motivated. She would wait for the phone or doorbell to ring, but they didn’t. “It took me a long time to figure out that it wasn’t gonna happen the way it happened in college. People didn’t just drop by, and it was just harder to make friends. Everybody’s busy and nobody really has any time. And I was scared, scared to put myself out there. For three years I would call my brother every weekend [to complain]. I’d have nothing to do.”
When Kimberly reached her mid-thirties, something snapped. “I got sick of being lonely,” she says. “It took a long time, but something happened and I grew up and transformed.” Kimberly insists that the decisive moment came when she opted to move out of her apartment and buy a place of her own. It was a stretch, financially and psychologically, but it was important, because it signaled that she was no longer waiting for a man to help her jump into a new life stage. She was doing it independently, on her own terms. “I hadn’t settled down with anyone. I hadn’t fallen in love. And I had to stop and take a look at that. I never thought I’d buy an apartment alone. I sort of resisted it the whole way through. I didn’t want to hang curtains by myself. I’d always thought I would do it with a partner and a lover, and so that was hard.”
Immediately, the change felt good. So good, in fact, that Kimberly kept changing things. She decided to remake her body, got a personal trainer, began biking on weekends with a group, and lost thirty pounds. She renovated her apartment, opening up space so that she could throw dinner parties. She reached out to people, inviting friends out, putting herself on the line. Her big breakthrough was placing a profile on an online dating site, something she’d been “terrified” to do before. She worried someone she knew would recognize her and that they would confirm her fear “that I was a loser because I wasn’t already in love.” That fear diminished as Kimberly settled into her new life. “I got more confident in who I was, so I was less afraid to talk to people, less afraid to make friends, and less afraid to go out and be adventurous.”
She was dating, but she stopped going out on second and third dates with men who didn’t really interest her, because she no longer felt as insecure and she didn’t need everyone to like her. She cut back on her TV viewing and kept herself from falling into a vicious cycle of depression, social withdrawal, and loneliness. She quit her job and started freelancing, which she’d wanted to do for years. Then Kimberly made an even bolder move. She reached out to Single Mothers by Choice, an organization that supports women who want to become parents but refuse to settle for an unsatisfying partner, and began to consider having a child on her own.26 Like so many single women in their late thirties, Kimberly couldn’t avoid hearing the “booming alarm bells” on her biological clock, and she decided to confront the issue head-on. As Kimberly saw it, she had become so strong and self-sufficient while living alone that she could now handle the responsibility of caring for another. To be sure, it wouldn’t be the kind of domestic partner she had imagined when she turned thirty, and she was hardly certain that she would go through with the process, since having a child would make finding a man even more difficult. But Kimberly no longer felt sorry for herself. “I’m lucky,” she says. “I have some money and I have family support. I think I’m gonna figure it out.”
PEOPLE WHO LIVE ALONE are well aware that, however enriching it may be, becoming a single parent is also the most challenging way to get domestic companionship. There is another, more popular alternative for people who want to live alone but also need someone to care for or something to help stave off loneliness: getting a pet.
Animal companions are a common feature of Western cultures. “In 2004,” writes the historian Katherine Grier, “more than 60 percent of American households contained pet animals; 36 percent included children.” An essay in a public health journal reports that U.S. pet ownership rates “are typical of developed countries around the world . . . Examples of dog, cat, and/or bird ownership in European households include Belgium (71 percent), France (63 percent), Netherlands (60 percent), Britain (55 percent), Italy (61 percent) . . . and for all seventeen European countries surveyed (52 percent).”27
There is a long-standing myth that people who live alone are more likely than others to own pets because they use them as substitutes for human relationships, but the evidence doesn’t support this. Pets, as dog owners know, often serve to promote interpersonal interaction rather than to prevent it. Moreover, people who live alone are far less likely to own a dog or a cat than people who live in couples or in multiperson families. In 2006, for instance, roughly one out of five solo dwellers had a dog and one out of four had a cat, while for families of four about one in two had dogs and more than one in three had cats.28
The number of solo dwellers with pets is not insignificant, however, and in our interviews those who lived with a dog or a cat left little doubt about how much they value their rela
tionships with animals. One woman we spoke to, for instance, wondered whether having a pet meant that she shouldn’t count as living alone. Another said that owning a dog has been transformative, but mostly because taking care of it has made her leave the house and engage with other people more often. She takes her dog on errands, ties him up on a long leash when she’s hanging out in her front yard, even brings him to the neighborhood bar. “I’m chatting with more people on a daily basis now,” she reports. “I was more holed up before. The dog really did open up my world.”29
Angelina, who’s in her late twenties and works at a labor union, spent years living with allergic roommates. Getting a cat, she says, “was, like, one of the reasons I decided to live alone. I got her right away. My relationship with the cat is pretty huge. She greets me when I come home and she keeps me company all the time.” Angelina likes the fact that caring for her cat is not especially demanding. “It’s hard to clip her claws alone, and it’s really hard to get her in and out of her carrier,” she explains, but otherwise it’s easy. She can leave the cat alone with a big bowl of food and water if she goes away for a few days. She can shut her out of her room if she brings someone home. “Having a one-bedroom apartment has made it perfect, though. She has her own room to play at night.”
There’s a price to pay for maintaining this arrangement with a pet, however. As Donna Haraway, social critic and author of The Companion Species Manifesto, acknowledges, “The relationship is not especially nice; it is full of waste, cruelty, indifference, ignorance, and loss, as well as of joy, invention, labor, intelligence, and play.”30 Then there’s the financial toll. Renting the big apartment that makes cat ownership so pleasant has drained Angelina’s pocketbook. “If I had gotten a studio, I would have thought twice about having a cat, because I like the idea that I can shut her out if I need to,” she explains. “But I’m paying $1,100 a month for this one-bedroom, about 45 percent of my take-home pay. Then there’s gas and electric and now phone and Internet—all things I would have divided by three if I had roommates. So my finances have spun out of control.” Ultimately, the big apartment proved unsustainable, as did the lifestyle Angelina had built around it. She decided to leave her job, enroll in graduate school, and move to a cheaper city. That the cat would accompany her was never in doubt.
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