Going Solo

by Eric Klinenberg

  The article hit a nerve. The Utne Reader requested permission to reprint it, and Cagen says she got “thousands of letters, e-mails, mix tapes, with the chorus ‘Thank God, I thought I was the only one on the planet who felt this way.’” She started a Web site, Quirkyalone.net, which includes her own writing, media coverage of the movement, and a number of “Quirkyforums,” including discussion threads on friendship, politics, sex, and work. By 2003, Cagen had secured a book contract to write a full-fledged manifesto, and she decided to turn February 14 into a counterholiday, International Quirkyalone Day. Cagen organized events in San Francisco, New York, Providence, and Glasgow that year, and by 2010 the growing ranks of Quirkyalones had planned holiday celebrations in forty cities on four continents. By the end of that year, more than 6,700 people had registered to post items on Quirkyalone forums, and tens of thousands more had visited the Web site. Calls for local events issued from Indianapolis, Istanbul, and Iceland, as well as all the big cities where singletons come together to be alone.

  Cagen is now something of a hero for the growing ranks of singletons who are learning to feel secure with their status, and she is often their public face. She appears frequently on popular national television and radio programs to explain that going solo is a viable, legitimate, and not necessarily lonely way to dwell in a city—a point that is surprisingly controversial given how many people are already living alone. And she seems to be everywhere on February 14, because the media never tires of contrasting the Quirkyalones with couples who are paying dearly for roses and prix fixe meals at romantic restaurants. (The singles don’t suffer from the comparison, since they usually celebrate their counterholiday in crowded dance clubs where everyone appears to be having fun.) But recently Cagen has been feeling increasingly uncomfortable with her role in the movement, and her responsibilities to those who see her as a symbol of independent womanhood have become burdensome, even oppressive. I have met with her a few times over the years to discuss her evolving relationship to the Quirkyalone concept and to the community she helped bring into existence, and in every conversation she has dwelled on the fact that her very public liberation has been personally restricting.

  Cagen has sustained her passion for promoting the status of singletons, though she sometimes finds it repetitive because, as she puts it, “organizing Quirkyalone Day has become a bit like throwing the same wedding every year.” She has grown tired of living alone, and as she approaches her late thirties she finds herself longing for a long-term romantic partner. A husband, even. “I’ve always been open to the possibility of finding the right guy and getting married,” she tells me as we share lunch in San Francisco’s Mission District. “And Quirkyalone was never about being alone—it was about being connected, to yourself and to other people too. Now I’m ready for a different experience. I’ve lived alone for a long time, and at this point in my life I’d grow a lot more if I were partnered. To be honest, I worry that if I keep on making this the center of my life I’m going to wind up being single forever.”

  Her experience helps illuminate a fundamental feature of the singleton society, one that poses problems for those who try to improve the status and well-being of those who live alone: Few people who live alone are inclined to define themselves that way, let alone to organize political campaigns that enlist those who share their fate. Many, including Cagen, of all people, are willing to push back against the cultural pressure to marry and advocate for those who prefer to go solo, but also see living alone as a temporary, if perhaps recurrent, stage in the cycle of life. Others expect to be on their own much longer but simply do not identify as singletons because other categories—man or woman, black or white, rich or poor, young or old, gay or straight—frame their self-perceptions.

  In the abstract, at least, there is no reason that domestic status should figure into someone’s identity. In practice, however, people who live alone have discovered that others—from friends and family to the growing number of businesses that are beginning to create special products to suit their needs and interests—do define them that way. Many believe that they are treated unfairly in their personal and public lives, and a growing number have decided that they’d be better off coming together as a group. Some, like the Quirkyalones, seek acceptance, legitimacy, and community, but others want more: Better access to health care, housing, and social security. More fairness in the tax code. Less workplace discrimination. Greater representation in politics. A stronger public voice. These things don’t come easily for any group of people, and particularly not for one that’s as heterogeneous as singles (who, after all, include people from eighteen to one hundred, some of whom live alone and some of whom do not). It’s not yet clear whether it’s possible to form a collective identity based on being a singleton, or to inspire a movement for social change with the slogan “Solo dwellers of the world, unite!” But there’s no shortage of entrepreneurial singletons who see themselves as a vanguard and are committed to trying.

  KIM CALVERT IS AN UNLIKELY ACTIVIST, or at least that’s my first impression when she and her chatty white cockatoo, Mimi, greet me in her elegant Santa Monica home. Mimi is not her only daytime companion. A few months before my visit, Kim had converted several rooms near the entryway into office space for the small staff she’d recruited to launch Singular Communications, which published Singular magazine until 2009 and now produces the Web site and social networking service SingularCity.com, targeting affluent Angelenos who live alone. A journalist and dot-com veteran in her late forties, Kim counts herself among the ranks of people who live alone but are resolutely opposed to identifying themselves as single. “It’s a word that just has horrible associations for me,” she says as we sit in her verdant courtyard garden. “It makes me think of desperate, unhappy people who can’t get a date, and that’s never been who I am.”1

  I hardly need convincing. Calvert is a New Yorker’s vision of Los Angeles beauty, with long blond hair, a well-toned body, perfect skin, and warm brown eyes. She’s dressed fashionably but casually, in jeans, a tie-dyed long-sleeve shirt, a silver necklace, and large brown sunglasses flipped to the top of her head. Her demeanor is professional and serious, but the venture we are there to discuss was inspired by profoundly personal experiences, and her tone lifts noticeably as she explains it. Calvert belongs to a women’s group designed for professionals who want help living up to their aspirations. Soon after joining, she noticed that they were spending a lot of their time together discussing relationships, or their lack thereof. “There are about fifteen of us,” she explains, “but only three are married. And the rest of us would always use some of our speaking time to justify to everyone what we were doing to find a husband. At some point I was listening to a friend who was clearly happy without being married, and I started to ask, ‘What are we doing? Why can’t we just accept that this is who we are and get on with our lives?’”

  Marriage hadn’t done much for Calvert, anyway. She had given it a try fifteen years earlier, despite the fact that she had never pictured herself settling down, and it was an unmitigated disaster. “I’m a free spirit,” Calvert tells me. “And when I got married, I suddenly felt like I had to report where I was going, who I was with, what time I was going to be home. It was like being a child again. I’d known this man for years and always loved talking with him. Suddenly, I wanted to push him out of my life.”

  Calvert believes that there are millions of men and women who are better off going solo, and her Singular enterprise, which she cofounded with the wealthy sixty-five-year-old divorcé and entrepreneur David Wright, could help some of those who live alone appreciate what they already have. “There is a mission to this,” she explains. “We want to liberate single people from the bondage of old ideas that are blocking their ability to have a great life today. And that means fighting against the huge industry out there that makes money by making single people feel bad about who they are. Think about those TV shows that do makeovers so people can
finally be desirable, finally get married, finally be happy. They program us to think that it’s awful to be single and tell us that we need to be fixed. We have to overcome that.”

  At Singular Communications, the first step involved redefining the experience. “Singular,” Calvert says, connotes someone special and distinctive, so on each cover the words “SEXY SAVVY SINGLE” ran above the magazine’s name. Then she targeted an audience: people more or less like her. In an editor’s letter for the premiere issue, Calvert wrote, “I like being single. I like my life. I have great friends, I’m active, involved in my community and have the career of my dreams. I love my alone time—to read, write, meditate and be me without compromise. I don’t need another half to be whole. I am complete. And yes, I love men, I love romance, I love intimacy—but it’s so much better now that I’ve banished the marriage agenda . . . So if you can identify with me, if you’re comfortable being single, if you enjoy an active, social lifestyle . . . Singular magazine is for you.”

  Actually, getting a copy of Singular involved more than identifying with Calvert’s message. The thick, glossy magazine was mailed only to affluent single Los Angeles residents, and was designed for high-end tastes. There were full-page ads from Jaguar, Beverly Hills Porsche, Residences at the Ritz, Bang & Olufsen, Greystone charter jets, and Fiji water. Cover stories profiled glamorous unmarried celebrities such as Leonardo DiCaprio and Serena Williams. Contributors named their favorite self-indulgences in their bios, with responses including massage (one man says he prefers Hawaiian massages with two therapists at once), good red wine, chocolate, and new gadgets from Apple. There were pages of product reviews and endorsements, for everything from personal concierge service to health clubs and new dental technologies. But most of the content was decidedly singular: an article criticizing singles for “sit[ting] back passively” in public affairs rather than organizing as a political bloc; a column on the “Myth of the Perfect Catch,” which warns readers about falling in love with their fantasy of who a person is rather than with the real human being; and a story about a psychologist who witnesses so much dishonesty and infidelity in her patients’ relationships that she grows skeptical of marriage.

  As for SingularCity.com, it includes original content (such as a feature on “The Rules for Staying Single”) and a forum where members can meet. Calvert describes it as “an online city with citizen members, a place where you can start old-fashioned relationships in a high-tech environment, which is important in a city that can feel as alienating as LA.” SingularCity also sponsors regular get-togethers, from movies to happy hours to more formal parties. While Calvert insists that these are completely different from ordinary singles events “where people who can’t get a date go in hope of finding the person they’ll marry,” she concedes that “people are probably trying to hook up there, just like everywhere else.” Her agenda, after all, is to connect people and help them feel comfortable no matter how they choose to live. “We’re not opposed to marriage,” she tells me. “But people need to realize that singles are the new majority, and our job is helping to establish their voice.”

  A FEW MONTHS AFTER I record these words in Santa Monica, I hear them repeated, almost verbatim, in a one-room office on a busy commercial street in Brooklyn, from a woman who couldn’t possibly look or sound any less like Kim Calvert. Nicky Grist, who until mid-2011 was the executive director of the Alternatives to Marriage Project, or AtMP, has a cool, analytic intelligence, as well as degrees from Yale and Princeton and twenty years of work experience with community organizations and government agencies. She’s a light-skinned African American Jew in her early forties, and when we meet the first time she’s wearing a stylish blue suit, striped purple socks, and closely cropped black hair with a few specks of gray. Her voice is soft and a bit squeaky, but it gains depth and volume when she speaks out about a charged political subject. This happens often during our interview, because we’re discussing the topic that has consumed her for five years now: the fair and equal treatment of the nearly 100 million unmarried adult Americans, nearly a third of whom live alone.

  Grist says she discovered AtMP in 2005 the way most people do: searching the Internet to learn the costs and benefits of marriage. It was not an academic investigation. Grist’s domestic partner, a New York City fire lieutenant, had proposed to her, partly because getting access to his health insurance would allow her to quit her job and look for something better. Yet Grist had always been opposed to marriage, on the grounds that it was discriminatory against gays and, historically at least, a bad deal for women. “I had billions of reasons for being skeptical about marriage,” she tells me. “One of them being that my parents’ marriage would have been illegal in sixteen states when they did it, because she was white and Jewish and he was a Caribbean black. But this time there was a good reason to consider it. I needed a way out [of my job].” She started googling the topic, and within a few minutes she found that the AtMP Web site had answers for nearly all of her questions. “I also thought, ‘Wow! This is an incredible organization.’ It was the only place out there helping single people figure out the consequences of being unmarried. It’s not just access to health insurance. There are workplace discrimination issues, housing discrimination issues, estate planning issues, political issues, tax issues. And they had it all laid out for you. It was great.”

  As she scanned through the Web site, Grist noticed that the Alternatives to Marriage Project was looking for an executive director, and suddenly she started thinking that she might have found yet another excuse to leave her job. Even though the organization was based in Albany, where a young unmarried couple had founded it in 1998, Grist decided to apply anyway. They liked her so much they not only hired her, but also let her move the headquarters to Brooklyn. “I took a 50 percent pay cut,” Grist says. “And I went from a good-sized organization to one with an annual budget of about $35,000 per year. But it’s worth it because it’s such a luxury to work for an organization where none of my values are being compromised.” Advocating for alternatives to marriage may sound like a radical occupation, but Grist insists that it’s utterly mainstream. “Most Americans aren’t married, and most households do not contain a married couple. If you look at it that way, we’re promoting the interests of the majority. And it’s not like we’re making outrageous demands. All we want is a society that recognizes how many of us are living outside of this institution, and has laws that support us.”

  The Alternatives to Marriage Project works on behalf of unmarried people in all kinds of situations, including gay and straight domestic partnerships and families led by single parents. These constituents usually have a story about why they’ve opted out of marriage or been denied the option, and they see themselves as part of a group with common interests. People who live alone aren’t like that. One reason, Grist explains, is that a lot of them are looking for a partner and can’t identify with those who are not. “There are really two potential groups: those who are happy or at least accepting of singlehood, and those who are just saving up for their weddings. The first group, which we call the ‘solo singles’ or ‘unmarried unpartnereds,’ cares about marital status discrimination and gets involved in what we do. The second group—much of it anyway—doesn’t have a problem with that discrimination. They just want to hop over to the other side of the marital divide so it’ll all be fine.” This poses serious problems for AtMP’s political work. “It’s hard to organize any group,” Grist says, “and it’s especially hard when they don’t have a shared identity or interests.” In the aggregate, people who live alone endure many of the same problems and penalties. But since they rarely form an aggregate, it’s unclear how any organization can help to improve their fate.

  Consider one potential bloc of singletons whose status has garnered attention in policy circles during the 2000s: the African American middle class. According to research led by University of Maryland sociologist Kris Marsh, African Americans who have never marrie
d and live alone are the fastest-growing segment of the black middle-class population, and women are especially likely to be part of this group. African Americans who live alone, Marsh argues, are “not just a phenomenon of early adulthood,” but are instead “on a trajectory to becoming the most prominent household within the black middle class if not the entire black community.”2

  What’s driving this increase? Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson argues that two major social changes—the dramatic disappearance of industrial jobs once occupied by African American men, and the subsequent mass incarceration of men from these same communities—has generated a rising class of “unmarriageable males” and thereby reduced the intraracial marriage market. But this is not the entire story. For decades, marriages between black men and white women have been more common than marriages between white men and black women, and in the 2000s they were more than twice as common. This is one reason why, as Yale sociologists Natalie Nitsche and Hannah Brückner report, “black women are twice as likely as white women to never have married by age forty-five and twice as likely to be divorced, widowed, or separated.” Another is the expanding gap in education. Today black women are far more likely than black men to obtain a college or graduate school degree, and they’re also more likely to discover that the price of their success is that it’s harder to find a spouse.3

  Faced with such bleak options, the emerging generation of African American professionals increasingly shuns marriage as a means of securing middle-class status and, as Marsh argues, “stabilizes its position by not marrying and continuing to live alone.”4 But gaining stability in one dimension of their lives can bring suffering in another. In her study “The Sexless Lives of College-Educated Black Women: When Education Means No Man, Marriage, or Baby,” Yale sociologist Averil Clarke claims that conventional measures of inequality fail to register the personal costs of educational attainment and economic achievement among black professionals. The stigma of being single and childless can be especially severe for black women, she shows, because of the expectations of their families and communities. But so is the stigma of being a single mother, which means unmarried black professionals lose, whatever they do.