All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

by Traister, Rebecca

  Of course, the endless appeal of a city life has drawbacks, as Alison observed, noting that as much as she loves living independently in New York, there’s an insatiability that she finds discomfiting. “Everyone always feels that they can do better appearance-wise, or find someone who makes more money or is more intellectually stimulating. There’s always going to be someone or something who’s more enticing, more interesting.”

  The madding crowds of people and of possible diversions can be overwhelming. From many urban interviewees, I heard repeated complaints of how hard it is to meet appealing mates, especially (for hetero women) as historic migration patterns hold and many cities remain home to more women than men.

  Typically, single men outnumber single women where they always have: in many Western cities that once drew homesteaders and are now home to the tech industry. Eastern cities, including Boston and Atlanta, still have bigger populations of women. There are around 150,000 more single women living in New York City than there are single men,14 while the dearth of women in Alaska has long been so pronounced that Oprah Winfrey did a handful of shows about Alaskan bachelors throughout the 1990s.

  For those heterosexual women who hope to find partners, these numbers are often cited as the grim dead end of youthful urban jollity. As a twenty-two-year-old in my first steady job out of college, a divorced colleague in her forties regularly made me swear, as we chain-smoked in our office and gossiped about men, that if I hadn’t married by the time I was twenty-eight, I would decamp for less urban climes. “You don’t want to be one of those women,” she’d say darkly. “The ones who stay after it stops being fun.”

  Ten years later, into my thirties and still having fun, I had dinner with a friend who’d lived in New York, but dispatched for New Orleans in her mid-thirties, where she’d promptly fallen in love. “As soon as you cross to the other side of the Hudson,” she’d told me, “you’ll meet a man.” More recently, while chatting with a group of women about the difficulty, especially for successful black women, of meeting a man in New York, MSNBC host and political scientist Melissa Harris-Perry cracked: “Just go stand in a mall in North Carolina.” Worried that that her remark had sounded glib, Harris-Perry later elaborated: “When I say if you stand in a mall you can get a husband, I’m not saying it’s a good husband or one you’d want to marry.” She added, even more seriously, that what she meant to convey was her sense that, “in my experience, marriage is an expectation and a desire of young adulthood for both men and women in the South. Men are actually wanting and expecting to marry and seeing marriage as a sign of full achieved adult manhood.”

  Precisely. And if the reluctance of most women to go stand in the mall but, instead, to tough it out (or live it up) in largely single cities tells us one thing, it’s perhaps that these women are not really living their lives to find husbands who make such firm connections between marriage and adulthood.

  Journalist Jen Doll wrote in The Village Voice, in a very fine piece about the varied pleasures of being single in New York City: “That, to a large extent, is why we live here. It’s not because we wanted to settle down with the patient and reliable plod-along schmo, and have babies and live in a three-bedroom house with a two-car garage where we peaceably grill in the summer and make casseroles in winter until we die. It’s not because we wanted our lives charted out before we lived them.”

  Doll’s view was one that the journalist Juliet Wilbor Tompkins had scoffed off a century before, in an essay called, “Why Women Don’t Marry,” in which she wrote of young single women: “They are very happy. . . . with their battle cry of freedom! To their ignorance, life offers an enchanting array of possibilities. They see ahead of them a dozen paths and have but contemptuous pity for the woman of the past who knew but one dull highway.”

  Whether Tompkins was correct about the contemptuous pity, what’s true today, especially in light of more contemporary possibilities, is that that one dull highway is simply not for everyone. To that end, cities permit a degree of self-selection; they siphon from the nonurban dating pool many of those who might rather be working or playing or sleeping with someone else. Perhaps the distractible and sexually voracious actually shouldn’t be committing to the people they’d rather be doing something else than committing to, and cities offer a place for them to live and thrive.

  When we cast, as we so often do, the choice not to permanently partner as a failure or as a tragedy, we assume partnership as a norm to which everyone should or must aspire. But cities allow those who might have made restless, dissatisfied, always hungry-for-something-else mates who caused their partners unhappiness to exit the marriage highway, veering instead onto paths that take them to places that they’d rather be.

  It’s not such a bad thing to always have something to do, someone to meet, work to complete, trains to catch, beers to drink, marathons to run, classes to attend. By the time some women find someone to whom they’d like to commit and who’d like to commit to them, perhaps it’s not such a bad thing that they will have, if they were lucky, soaked in their cities and been wrung dry by them, that those who marry later, after a life lived single, may experience it as the relief of slipping between cool sheets after having been out all night. These same women might have greeted entry into the same institution, had they been pressured to enter it earlier, with the indignation of a child being made to go to bed early as the party raged on downstairs.

  And, if marriage never happens, or before it happens, what’s also true is that some women simply want to stay and keep playing. As Doll wrote, “We don’t know what we want. And so we want a little bit of everything, over and over again.” In Doll’s formulation, “our status as single, independent, financially solvent New York women. . . . has us sitting on a mountain of unprecedented options. Options: Those are exciting. So we want all the options, bigger and better and faster and shinier, or taller or sexier or stronger or smarter, and yet somehow also different and completely our own. We want the tippy-top of what we can get—Why shouldn’t we?”

  Infrastructure and Community

  Letisha Marrero’s parents had grown up in New York City. They were Puerto Ricans who were determined to give their children an American identity; they moved their family to a California suburb. Letisha came back to New York as soon as she could, working her way up at celebrity magazines, buying herself an apartment on the city’s Upper West Side, dating but never finding anyone to whom she connected. When she was thirty-five, she became pregnant with a man she was about to break up with and decided to have the baby on her own.

  Suddenly, the city to which she had been so driven became inhospitable. Seeking financial security, she sold her small Manhattan apartment, using the money to pay cheaper rent in a gentrifying neighborhood in Brooklyn. However, when she had her daughter, with no partner and a job that didn’t allow her the flexibility she needed to raise her child, she found herself pushed into increasingly underdeveloped areas, trying to find the combination of community she loved and the safety she sought as a single mother. “I didn’t want to be a pioneer,” said Letisha. “Gunshots did not have any appeal to me whatsoever. I decided we had to get out somehow.”

  When Letisha was laid off from a job in 2009, she realized that she had to move. She and her daughter Lola went to Virginia, closer to family and to Lola’s father. Some of the relief she’s felt since leaving the city, she said, has felt like “leaving an abusive relationship. It’s like ‘Oh! Not everything has to be a struggle! I don’t have to lug my groceries up five flights of stairs!’ ” Getting her daughter into good New York City schools, and into the gifted programs in the public system was, she said, “a fight every single term. I didn’t have the money and wouldn’t want to pay $25,000 for my kid to go to elementary school, and here I don’t have to fight to get her a good education.” She and Lola live in an apartment complex in Virginia, and Letisha now finds herself considering the appeals of yards and grills that prompted her parents to put down suburban roots.

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bsp; Letisha also misses New York, and what it offered her as a single mother, even at the same time that it made it impossible for her to stay. “In New York, everybody on the corner knew who I was,” she said. “Oh, that’s the brown woman with the baby and the dog.” This sense of community was comforting, and felt safe, even in the neighborhoods that she understood to be unsafe. One of her apartments, Letisha recalled, was “right next to a shady bodega,” but she said, “Never once did I feel unsafe in there.” She said she was never harassed on the street, often felt like the shop owners who sat outside on sidewalks served as an informal neighborhood watch, and felt comfortable enough with her neighbors, in each of her New York apartments, that she could ask for help getting groceries and a stroller up the stairs. She sometimes even left Lola in a store with neighbors while she ran across the street to pick up her laundry. “The attitude was: She’s one of us and we take care of our own,” she said. “I never felt like I was going to be in any danger. But you can’t control the shootings, and I wouldn’t go to block parties.”

  In her Virginia apartment complex, Letisha said, none of her neighbors acknowledge each other.

  For single women, with or without children, cities offer domestic infrastructure. The city itself becomes a kind of partner, providing for single women the kind of services that women have, for generations, provided men. Male participation in the public sphere has long been enabled by wives who cooked, mended, did laundry and housekeeping. When men were single (and when they weren’t) another low-paid female population worked as their maids, laundresses, seamstresses, secretaries, and prostitutes.

  Until recently, there was not a reverse set of services available to most single women. For the well-off, at least, cities go some way toward rectifying that, starting perhaps with providing residents with smaller living spaces that require less cleaning and maintenance. In a city, you are more likely to have a super to perform maintenance and, if you are affluent, a doorman to collect packages, groceries, and greet your guests. There are shops and carts on every corner devoted to preparing morning coffee and hot breakfasts for people on the way to work. It’s in cities that there is a stereotype about high-flying young women who use ovens to store sweaters: a testament both to the lack of closet space and the fact that reasonably priced take-out food of nearly every ethnicity is available around the clock; in cities, the work of food preparation that for generations fell to women becomes remarkably more negotiable. There are laundromats and tailors. There are neighbors to help with childcare; roommates with whom to split rents and electric bills. All these things make city living a partial answer to a question sociologist Arlie Hochschild has posed: “The homemaker of the 1950s is no longer at home, and so we must ask, ‘Who is going to do her work?’ ”15

  And that’s to say nothing of the other structural components of a metropolis: the walkable access to multiple entertainments, to bars and clubs and movie theaters and gyms and basketball courts and parks. There is the public transport, the trains and subways and buses and trolleys that can get you to jobs and friends and family cheaply and (usually) swiftly.16

  Even for those who can’t easily avail themselves of the higher-end urban perks, the dense population allows for things like the “neighborhood watch” aspect that Letisha discussed: the streets lined with nosy neighbors, residents sitting on sidewalks in lawn chairs, paying attention to everyone who passes. In apartment complexes where residents know each other, there can be more off-the-cuff childcare options, more people from whom to borrow a cup of sugar.

  The big populations of urban centers still create more jobs: often, yes, grossly underpaid jobs delivering take-out and washing gym towels for the more affluent, but still, more jobs than are available in rural communities, from which you might have to drive miles to get to the nearest mall or amusement park or hospital that might employ you.

  In fact, one worry goes, cities might promote more prolonged independence by providing the kinds of amenities and support that one might otherwise require a mate to enjoy.

  Speaking about her perceptions of different regional marriage patterns, Melissa Harris-Perry described to me how the girlfriends with whom she’d attended college in the south had mostly married early, while those she met later while working at Princeton remained single. It left her with the impression that “high-achieving black women marry in their twenties in the South” but far later in the North. Wondering why this was the case, Harris-Perry recalled a friend whom she described as “a classic fifty-year-old New York bachelor,” who had once explained his persistent singlehood by noting “that on any day he could have his laundry done, he could get food in the middle of the night if he was hungry, he could go out and sit in the park, or he could go to a show; the proximity of all the services, arts, and cultural events, plus a wide variety of people to be dating made marriage not particularly interesting.”

  The notion that women too might get from urban homes what, in another era, they got—or what men got—from marriage is a radical, progressive revision of what marriage means. Cities allow us to extract some of the transactional services that were assumed to be an integral, gendered aspect of traditional marriage and enjoy them as actual transactional service, for which we pay. This dynamic also permits women to function in the world in a way that was once impossible, with the city serving as spouse, and, sometimes, true love.

  Dodai Stewart grew up in New York. Her father, a doctor who was twenty years older than her mother, died when Dodai was a teenager, and her mother has never remarried. Dodai has been in and out of several relationships with men she had every intention of marrying, but, for a variety of reasons, it’s never come to pass. Just after she turned forty, Dodai told me, “My long-term relationship is with New York. Definitely. I write about the city. I photograph the city. The city is Girlhattan.”

  Dodai remembered one of her exes, a San Franciscan who told her that he couldn’t wait to get married and have a lawn. Dodai never wanted a lawn. He didn’t know what the old punk nightclub CBGB was; he couldn’t manage to distinguish, either culturally or geographically, between uptown and downtown. Dodai couldn’t take it. “When you don’t understand my city,” she said, “you don’t understand me.” She chose New York over the man. She feels strongly that the city is a more rewarding mate. “The city talks to you all the time,” she said. “It leaves you messages. You walk by graffiti, and everything changes suddenly because you read something that speaks to you. New York is a character in my life.”

  The fact that Dodai was raised in New York, by a mother who has lived independently here for more than twenty years, may make it easier for her family to understand her independent path. For those urban dwellers raised in earlier-marrying regions and amongst earlier-marrying friends, the dynamics can be trickier.

  Urban Myths

  Nisha, from suburban Napierville, Illinois, described to me the disjuncture she feels between her life in her hometown and her life in Washington, D.C., as a twenty-four-year-old who works in social media and is in a relationship but remains unmarried. She’s begun to note that some of her friends and high-school classmates are marrying, but her social circles in Washington and New York, where she also works, remain single. In the city, she said, her friends “are focusing on our careers and enjoying city life, but some of my friends from home are wondering when their boyfriends might propose.”

  Everyone she knows in D.C., Nisha told me, has both a day job and side projects and social calendars so packed that it’s difficult for her to imagine meeting any old-fashioned marital milestones. She thinks that, in five years, her perspective will be different. “There is that invisible line of thirty,” she said. “When women get close to thirty is when people start to wonder about you.” Her parents, immigrants from India, have said to her that they hope she doesn’t wait that long. But, she added, they also understand that in a new economy, it’s “not smart for a woman to be financially dependent on a man.”

  Of course there are millions of single
women who never leave, or indeed who move in a reverse migratory pattern, from cities to suburban and rural areas. And, while the age of marriage is rising everywhere, in the places where people tend to marry earlier, the stigma of remaining unmarried can be strong.

  Kristina is a thirty-five-year-old archaeological lawyer who lives in Bismarck, North Dakota. She was born and raised in Philadelphia, and because of the ever-changing, regional nature of her work and studies, has lived as an adult in Massachusetts; Dallas, Texas; Carlsbad, New Mexico; Reno, Nevada; Rhode Island; Fairfield, Connecticut; Farmington, New Mexico; and Missoula, Montana.

  With her vast geographical range, Kristina could say with confidence that, “being single is a handicap in the more rural places.” When she told friends that she was moving from Missoula to Bismarck, many expressed concern that she’d be moving to a more urban area without a husband for protection. She told me that her response was often, “I moved from Connecticut to New Mexico by myself, and you’re worried about the high crime rate in Bismarck?”

  As Kristina began to make friends in North Dakota, she said, some people expressed shock that she wasn’t married and had never been married. She also reported that, on several occasions, after being asked if she were hitched and replying no, people would respond by saying “Oh, I’m so sorry.” But as an inhabitant of a place where early marriage is the norm, even she has internalized some of the prejudice and alarm about people she meets who remain unmarried. If she meets a man her age who has never wed, she said, “My red flags are all over the place. ‘What’s wrong with you? I know I’m single, but I’m feisty from the East Coast. Now you explain yourself to me.’ ” She thinks that if she lived in a city, she’d be more comfortable dating single men, because the swifter normalization of single adult life in cities makes the men who are single seem more . . . normal.