Going Solo

by Eric Klinenberg

  For women, the sexual benefits of living with a partner are even greater. Consider how those who have remarried or moved in with a lover answered the AARP survey about their sexual activity during the previous six months: 88 percent said that they had kissed and 54 percent said that they had intercourse once a week or more. Compare these figures to the responses from divorced women who had remained single: 18 percent said they had kissed and 9 percent said that they had intercourse once a week or more during the previous six months. Their responses to the celibacy question were similarly disparate: 17 percent of remarried women and 77 percent of unmarried divorced women said that they had not had sexual intercourse, while 42 percent of remarried women and 81 percent of unmarried divorced women said that they had not had oral sex, either. But they self-report the same frequency of masturbation: Whether coupled up or single, 7 percent of divorced women over forty do it once a week or more.

  Admittedly, the AARP survey does not tell us everything we might want to know about the sex lives of middle-age divorcees. For instance, many of the divorced women we interviewed insisted that they weren’t suffering from their sexual inactivity, because their libidinal energy had diminished as they got older and adjusted to being on their own. “I don’t want to be going around in a perpetual state of disappointment and heartbreak,” says Sandy, a fifty-seven-year-old in the San Francisco Bay Area, when asked about having a sexual partner. “It’s not in my life, it’s not happening for me. And I suppose if I really wanted that I could go out and get it, but I don’t want it just to have it. I don’t feel the necessity of having it.”6 Moreover, the AARP study measures the quantity of sex, not the quality, and some would surely prefer to have less sex with more partners than more sex with the same partner. Overall, however, the sexual benefits of getting remarried appear just as significant as the economic ones. But if the historical trends in remarriage tell us anything, it’s that a growing number of divorced and separated people believe that living with another partner also carries substantial costs—great enough to make going solo a more attractive option.

  THERE’S NO DOUBT that many of these singles are still looking for a spouse or domestic partner, and many single women complain that good candidates—namely, men who are looking to pair off with a woman in their age range rather than one much younger—are hard to find. There’s more to the story than this, however. In the AARP survey, 43 percent of women and 33 percent of men who divorced between the ages of forty and sixty-nine said that they are now “against marriage” and unwilling (in the abstract, at least) to do it again. Their own negative experiences are one key source of this skepticism, but so are the experiences of others. Between 1950 and 1989 the rate of second marriages that resulted in divorce nearly doubled, a trend that means even those who believe in the institution’s virtues have a hard time believing that they can learn from their own mistakes.7

  Kaela, the forty-one-year-old who lives in Berkeley, is petite and professional, dressed in a sleeveless green shirt and a long patterned skirt that fits with the local style. Although she is open when discussing intimate details of her personal life, Kaela keeps her face turned to the street until the end of our interview, when she gets comfortable enough to show her expressive amber eyes. In her view, the best thing about living alone is “knowing that I don’t have to consider anyone else. I can indulge my weird little habits”—from eating the same thing for four days in a row to watching cheesy TV shows and waking up to read in the middle of the night—“and do what I want to do.” The other thing she loves about living alone is that she’s no longer frustrated by a man who has selectively deskilled himself out of cooking and cleaning and uses this as an excuse to dump domestic work on her. “A lot of men have this fake helplessness when it comes to household stuff,” Kaela explains. “My partner and I just had different standards, so we’d have the kinds of disagreements that many, many couples have.”

  Charlotte, who at fifty-two carries her big-boned body with grace and confidence, is an office manager in Manhattan. She married young and had two children before divorcing four years later, and in her view the kids are the only good things that resulted from the relationship. She raised them as a single mother and has been living alone since the youngest one moved out a dozen years ago. Initially, it was difficult: “I had a little bit of the empty-nest syndrome going on. It was extremely lonely. And it was scary. I mean scary—like the killer is under the bed or in the closet downstairs.” But within a few years she had overcome these fears. Charlotte moved into a smaller home that suited her downsized domestic responsibilities and turned it into an oasis from the city and her office, where she spends most days dealing with other people’s needs. “I paint, I write, I read. When I feel like being bothered with somebody, I am.”

  Charlotte has learned to love her domestic autonomy. “When you live alone, there’s no compromising,” she explains. “I do everything I feel like doing, when I feel like doing it. And it is totally self-indulgent. It’s just all about you.” It’s not that she’s a narcissist or an introvert. But after a bad marriage and two decades as a single mother, Charlotte feels entitled to put her own needs and desires before those of others. “I don’t think I want to tend to a living thing ever again,” she says. When her children left home, Charlotte plunged herself into the local art scene, and she spends many evenings and weekends going to galleries or painting in a shared studio. Yet she keeps her contacts at a distance. While Charlotte once enjoyed entertaining, these days she rarely invites anyone into her home. “I can’t manage to have any fun at the party,” she admits. “It’s a lot of work. And I always ask myself, like an hour before people come, ‘Why are you doing this? Why?’ I spend the whole evening being their slave. It costs me an arm and a leg, and now my house is all messed up, and people want to know when I’m gonna invite them back!”

  Charlotte still enjoys companionship. She’s close to her family members, and occasionally she dates. The most intense relationship she had after her divorce was about twenty years ago. She wound up living with a man, but she calls the experience “awful” and “disastrous”—so bad that it “put the nail in the coffin” and led her to shut out suitors for years. As she approached fifty, however, some of Charlotte’s relatives worried that she would never find a partner. “My mother was warning me, ‘You need to get out,’” Charlotte recalls. “People start to tell you things like ‘You’re gonna grow old alone’ and ‘You better lock down something now while you can.’” Charlotte took their concerns to heart. She feared that she’d become reclusive. She wondered what would happen to her if she lost her job or got a serious illness. She questioned whether her self-indulgence had gone too far.

  One of her cousins always tried to set her up on blind dates, and although Charlotte was usually skeptical, recently she agreed to give it a try. It worked. “I like him,” she confesses, as if she’s still surprised. “I mean, I don’t like everything about him . . .” Charlotte is cautious about the new relationship, but not too cautious. At the time of her first interview, she was spending two nights a week with her boyfriend and things were heating up fast. Recently, he even brought up the possibility of marriage.

  Charlotte is struggling to make a decision. She enjoys her uncompromising lifestyle, the freedom to do what she pleases whatever the hour. But she’s “afraid of being alone down the road,” as she puts it, and she worries about the frightening prospect of aging alone if she doesn’t move in with someone soon. Her daughter, she says, “is worried that I’m going to be old, broke, possibly sick, and maybe unhappy that I’ve made this choice. Every now and then I get afraid that she’s right.” Charlotte’s predicament is stressful, and she complains about the dearth of wisdom to help guide her decision. She’s aware of all the pundits and professors who espouse the value of marriage, and although she hasn’t read the studies personally, she knows about the social science literature that claims married people have more economic security and even longer
lives. But like many veteran single women, especially those who have been through a divorce, Charlotte doubts that a husband would protect her from the ravages of aging or dying alone. She knows that the odds suggest she will outlive a male partner, and if they are right then getting married would eventually place her in the stressful and unhealthy position of becoming a dying man’s primary caregiver—not exactly a responsibility she wants.8 During the interview, she shifts back and forth on her options, landing on a note of puzzlement: “I don’t know what I’m gonna do.”

  CHARLOTTE’S CONCERNS about marriage are not unusual among divorced women in her situation. After all, the AARP study reports that usually “women do the walking,” and in many cases it’s because they believe they’ll be better off going solo and establishing their own identity than living with a man who might crowd them out. The survey also shows that middle-age divorcees are more afraid of failing in another marriage than of not finding someone else. Most of the divorced women we interviewed reported that they were open to moving in with another man someday, but only under the best of circumstances. Some insisted that he would have to be self-sufficient, so that they wouldn’t have to do all the domestic work. Others said he would have to respect their hard-won autonomy and understand that they already had lives of their own. “You become a lot pickier when you’re older,” explains Madeline, the sixty-one-year-old San Franciscan. “You’re just not willing to live with a whole lot of stuff you lived with when you were younger and you’ve got that primal urge to mate. You sort of self-select.”

  There is a cost to this pickiness. Madeline, who’s slim and dressed stylishly in black from head to toe, acknowledges, “I’m not having any sex.” But she insists that “at my age it ceases to nag at you.” In fact, her experience going solo has changed the way she sees her generation: “I always thought that the reason women were alone when they were older was that they were simply rejected. I don’t think that anymore. I think they just say, ‘I’ve been there, done that,’ and unless you’re really something special, you’re fine as a friend.”

  FRIENDS PLAY A SPECIAL ROLE in the lives of women who move into a place of their own after divorce or separation, and the sheer number of people who live alone in contemporary cities means that finding other people who can bond over this shared situation is easier than ever. Although divorcees often fear the specter of social isolation, the General Social Survey (GSS), which is the largest study of American social behavior, shows that single women above age thirty-five (divorced as well as never married) are more likely than their married contemporaries to do the following activities: see or visit a best friend at least weekly, have a “non-visit” contact (such as a call or an e-mail exchange) with a best friend at least weekly, spend a social evening with neighbors, regularly participate in informal group activities, and be a member of a secular social group.9 In my interviews, divorced women often said that their friends aren’t just companions, but also “chosen family,” their most reliable sources of social and emotional support.

  Fifty years ago, single women who lived alone stood out in their families and communities. They were odd and unusual, and this made them objects of pity if not scorn. Today, however, the population of middle-age adult women who live alone and are likely to stay that way for years or longer is so large that we take it for granted. Helen, for instance, says that when she first lived alone she felt lucky to be in Greenwich Village, which was full of women in her position. Over the past forty years she has watched this scene make its way into the cultural mainstream, and now she believes that “living alone is easier than ever because there are more people to keep you company.” It’s not hard to find them. On the Internet, people who live alone—including a surprising number of middle-age divorcees—use social networking sites to find new friends, romantic partners, and groups of people who share their interests. Contemporary cities are full of singletons who are remaking their own societies, creating environments in which, as Helen puts it, “you don’t have to feel marginalized, or even alone.”

  Feeling lonely is another issue. For no matter how much time divorced and separated women spend with friends and neighbors, they find it hard to escape at least an occasional pang of loneliness, and in some cases the pain lasts longer. Compared to women who live with a romantic partner, women over thirty-five who live alone are twice as likely to report feeling lonely four times a week or more and about half more likely to report feeling lonely at least once a week.10 (But keep in mind that this does not mean living alone causes loneliness. It’s possible, for example, that people who feel lonely more often wind up living alone because they have trouble sustaining intimate relationships of all kinds.) “Many people—and I’m one of them—absolutely live with loneliness all the time,” Helen says. “It’s like an illness. Ten thousand mornings I wake up and just go through the day, and the aloneness is like a cubic force in me in a way. It’s dark.” Helen has developed techniques for taming these feelings. She spent decades in therapy, and she has trained herself to think and write about her feelings rather than running from them in the predictable ways—whether sleeping around, drinking, or filling time with TV. It’s a luxury to spend so much time on herself, she acknowledges. But to Helen it seems necessary, because the challenge of making herself feel right is so great.

  In Helen’s view, for most of us loneliness is inevitable. It’s part of the human condition, and she rejects the belief that living alone is its source. Like many divorced women we interviewed, Helen copes with her own feelings of social failure, in part, by dismissing the notion that another marriage or romantic relationship would alleviate them. “People are in this incredible panic to avoid being alone in the room with themselves,” she explains, but their desperation can lead to disaster, because “there’s nothing more lonely than being with the wrong person.” Madeline has a theory about why so many divorced people feel this way: “When a relationship doesn’t go well, it’s a very lonely situation. You can’t go to the person that you’re with for help with this problem because, in your eyes, they are the problem. So you become a little island all to yourself within that relationship, and it’s very lonely.”

  The divorced women we interviewed don’t deny that, viewed historically, the institution of marriage has helped to nurture children, create communities, and establish powerful social bonds. But they often insist that these common goods generally came at women’s expense, and that at this point in their lives they need not worry about them. Moreover, they refuse to romanticize marriage or “the good old days” when couples stayed together no matter how much they suffered and women were locked out of jobs that would allow them to make it on their own. It’s one thing to debate the issue sociologically. At a personal level, the real question is: When does life feel better? Living alone is hardly painless, but for many who have endured a failed marriage, it hurts less.

  WOMEN WHO LIVE ALONE are not the only ones who suffer from loneliness after divorce or separation. In fact, women’s tendency to make and sustain social connections makes them less vulnerable to isolation than men. According to the General Social Survey findings, men above age thirty-five who live alone (both divorced and never married) are more likely than men who live with a romantic partner to see or visit a best friend at least weekly, spend a social evening with neighbors or friends, and belong to a social group. But the only one of these activities they do as much as women who live alone is socialize with friends—in every other area single women are more socially engaged. Men who live alone also have relatively high rates of loneliness. (As with women, this loneliness might be the cause rather than the consequence of living alone.) They are twice as likely as men who live with a partner to self-report feeling lonely at least one day a week and about three times more likely to feel lonely four or more days a week.11

  Yet they are rarely miserable. Lou, a fifty-seven-year-old attorney and part-time musician who lives in a small, ground-level apartment in West Berkeley, has had his
own place since his second marriage collapsed fifteen years ago and he relishes the autonomy it affords him. “When you’re married, you don’t have your freedom,” he explains. “You have to think about everybody else and not just yourself. Now I can sit here and watch TV all day long and nobody’s going to say ‘boo’ to me. I can practice my trumpet whenever I want. I have my own space and I feel comfortable in it. Everything about it is how I want it to be.” Between work and his jazz gigs, Lou keeps himself busy, and he enjoys having downtime in peace. “There’s enough in my life that it doesn’t bother me to be alone and not going to parties every week. It used to be that I didn’t ever want to go out by myself. But now I’ll go to movies on my own, go to a Chinese restaurant. I don’t have to make plans or think about it. I just go.”

  Occasionally, however, this freedom can be oppressive. “I feel lonely sometimes,” Lou confesses, but whereas many divorced women his age devote themselves to planning lunches and nights out with friends or coworkers, Lou has adopted a more passive approach. “I don’t spend a lot of time trying to fill up my social calendar. I just take it as it comes.” Recently, he’s begun to worry that this lifestyle isn’t good for him. He has filled his days and nights with work, music, commuting, and television, and the absence of more intimate human companionship—sex, but also simple, everyday contact and the rhythms of being in a shared space—is haunting him. “Maybe it’s just my doing,” he says, “but the fact that I have been alone for so long is probably the biggest failure in my life.” Like many men in his generation, Lou believes that he lacks the social skills that he sees in women. He struggles to sustain his relationships with friends and family, and has even more trouble meeting new people or finding dates. When he gets down or lonely, he spends even more time on work and music. “I don’t dwell on it,” Lou explains. “That’s just the way it is.”