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

by Traister, Rebecca

  The year before That Girl went off the air, its brawnier successor had kicked off. The Mary Tyler Moore Show, which would run from 1970 to 1977, was about a television journalist who breaks up at thirty with a boyfriend whom she put through medical school. Mary Richards moves to Minneapolis, finds work at a local station, and befriends her neighbor, Rhoda Morgenstern, to whom she opines in an early episode, “If there’s one thing that’s worse than being single, it’s sitting around talking about being single.”

  Nancy Giles, a fifty-two-year-old unmarried comedian, actress, and television commentator told me that she loved Mary Tyler Moore because Mary “didn’t end up married, and she was in the newsroom; she was a working person with bills and rent.” More than that, her narrative let millions of women know that new opportunities for hat-tossing self-sufficiency were not only possible, but might be desirable. Television news anchor Katie Couric, for years television’s highest paid journalist, told me in 2009 that Mary was one of her role models. “I know it sounds crazy,” she said, “but I saw this woman out on her own, making a life for herself, and I always thought: I want into that.”

  Of course, popular culture has also been the most visible and widely absorbed vehicle for backlash—of both the gentle and punishing sort—against independent women. As women’s liberation slid into Reagan-era, socially conservative, decline, movies reflected increasing anxiety about the growing population of unmarried women by again reflecting them as solitary, sad, and occasionally monstrous.

  In 1988’s Crossing Delancey, Izzy Grossman, a single bookstore employee whose old-world bubbe hires a professional yenta to set her up with a pickle salesman, is warned that “No matter how much money you got, if you’re alone, you’re sick!” (Izzy ends up with the pickle guy). At around the same time, Glenn Close warned ominously that she was “not going to be ignored,” as the murderously single, lonely Alex in Fatal Attraction, who, after a one-night stand with a married man, covets his nuclear family so intensely that she—the unstable element of unmoored femininity—sets out to destroy it. When Alex meets her final judgment, it’s the traditional wife who metes it out: shooting her until she bleeds out and drowns in a bathtub, in one of the most gruesome punishments of nonconforming femininity ever committed to celluloid. “The best single woman is a dead one,” wrote feminist critic Susan Faludi of the movie.

  Probably the most progressive film portrayal of a libidinously liberated single woman in the 1980s came from director Spike Lee, and his 1986 film, She’s Gotta Have It. Lee’s heroine, Nola Darling, a sex-loving woman whose reluctance to commit to one man leads her to take three lovers, embodies a bracingly nonjudgmental portrayal of female desire. But, as the critic bell hooks points out, She’s Gotta Have It includes a scene in which Nola is raped by a man who repeatedly asks “Whose pussy is this?” until she answers “Yours,” conceding ownership of the very sexuality that is her path to autonomy.

  Recalling the bleakness of popular depictions of singlehood just a few decades ago makes it all the more extraordinary that today we are so surrounded by single women on television. It’s this transition for which we have Sex and the City to thank, no matter our hesitations about it. Its focus not simply on single female life, but on relationships among single females, was revelatory.

  Writer, director, and actress Lena Dunham has called female friendship “the true romance” of her show, Girls. And, indeed, the opening scene of its premiere episode showed Dunham’s heroine, Hannah Horvath, waking up in bed, spooning her best friend, Marnie, who has taken refuge with Hannah both in an effort to escape being touched by her boyfriend, and because the two women wanted to stay up late watching Mary Tyler Moore reruns.

  Dunham has spoken publicly about the struggles to not lose herself in her real-world friendship with political adviser Audrey Gelman. “What I want from my life and what you want from your life are very close but not identical,” Dunham told Gelman in a 2012 joint interview, “and the job is to support your vision, not my vision of your vision. . . . Loving without judgment or fear of abandonment is. . . . the toughest activity known to mankind and I think with best friend that can be even more pronounced because you aren’t my mom, we don’t have kids together—but we do have matching tattoos.” In the same interview, Gelman said that she couldn’t imagine them ever parting ways, because “I think our souls are too commingled to ever split.”

  The 2011 comedy Bridesmaids was a box-office hit that made news ostensibly because it proved that women would pay to see other women star in a raunchy feature; it was also remarkable in that the central tension of the story was not between a heterosexual couple, but between best friends, struggling to survive the drift when one of them gets married and meets new people while the other flounders professionally.

  The fury around that drift—the anger that is evidence of how badly a best friend can break your heart, especially when moved aside in favor of a more traditional romantic partnership—was also central to one of Sex and the City’s most memorable scenes, after Carrie Bradshaw quits her job in order to move to Paris with a man. When her best friend, the partnered mother and lawyer Miranda, questions Carrie’s choice to abandon home and career for a relationship, Carrie yells back, “I cannot stay in New York and be single for you!” By the time Sex and the City’s television and cinematic run ended, three of its four protagonists were married. Tellingly, in order to sustain the project’s narrative, which had always been driven by the friendships and not the love affairs of the women on the show, in the second feature film, writers sent all four characters to another country, Abu Dhabi. This geographic departure allowed them to behave as if they did not have husbands to crowd their lives, and thus continue to function as each other’s primary relationships.

  A decade after Sex and the City’s end, television has Broad City, which is even less apologetic about its vision of female friendship eclipsing hetero partnership. Television critic Rachel Syme has argued that it is “a love story . . . about two hapless, pot-smoking, sexually experimental, striving, swearing, struggling, inseparable young gal pals.”15 The two lead characters, Abbi and Ilana, Syme writes, “are intoxicated by . . . each other’s presence, full partners in crime and life” who “live separately but share nearly everything: drugs, stomach issues, sexual fantasies . . .” Syme cites a scene that is the perfect distillation of the intimacy of their dynamic: one in which they cuddle under a blanket, discussing their fear of one day pooping during childbirth. “If it happens to me, you have my permission not to look,” Ilana comforts. “I’m going to see you give birth, then?” Abbi asks. “Bitch, duh,” is the reply. “Who else would be my focal point?”

  This stuff, even the silliest of it, is important. It provides a proper acknowledgment of and an unembarrassed vocabulary about the role women play in each other’s lives. In 2013, the website Buzzfeed ran a list called “22 Ways Your Best Friend is Actually Your Significant Other” (it included signs like cooking together and talking about growing old together, and ended with “. . . you don’t mind people thinking you’re a couple, because platonic or not, this is the best relationship you’ve ever been in.)” The same year, women’s magazine Marie Claire published a story about women in their twenties, thirties, and forties who are each other’s medical contact person, who get mortgages together, who help each other get pregnant. The story’s author cited comedian Amy Poehler’s joke, that on meeting her friend Tina Fey, she thought, “I finally found the woman I want to marry.”

  In 2013, science writer Natalie Angier gave the centrality of female friendship a zoological boost, pointing out that, “In animals as diverse as African elephants and barnyard mice, blue monkeys of Kenya and feral horses of New Zealand, affiliative, long-lasting and mutually beneficial relationships between females turn out to be the basic unit of social life.”

  Some West African chimpanzees, Angier reported, form female bonds that are “resilient, lasting until one member of the bonded pair dies,” while female baboons form friendships
as a way to combat the stresses—male aggression, bossiness, and infanticide—of baboon life. It all sounds pretty familiar, actually.

  “You have to have somebody to hang onto,” a researcher explained to Angier.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  My Solitude, My Self: Single Women on Their Own

  Single. It’s a word that’s woven throughout cultural monuments to unmarried life, from Sex and the Single Girl to Living Single to the 1996 Cameron Crowe film Singles to Beyoncé Knowles’s 2008 song “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It),” from which this volume derives its title. It’s the word that social psychologist Bella DePaulo relied on in her book, Singled Out, as the base of her phrase “singlism,” which she uses to describe the “stereotyping, stigmatizing, and discrimination against people who are single.”

  It’s also a word that plenty of single women loathe.

  Rebecca Wiegand Coale explained that one of her New Year’s resolutions when she was unattached was to stop using the word single to describe herself or any other woman. Rebecca, twenty-nine, saw her circumstances as an unpartnered woman as the opposite of single. When she’d been in a relationship, she explained, she’d felt dependent on one person for emotional support and companionship. She and her ex “did basically everything together, from laundry to going out,” she recalled. The relationship, she said, was a good one. “But it was kind of lonely, because it was just the two of us.”

  When it ended, she said, she began to make friends through soccer and bowling leagues. She made progress in her work life, and went on a networking kick to meet new colleagues. In fact, Rebecca and her business partner and friend, Jessica Massa, coined the term “The Gaggle,” on which they based a website and book, to describe the collection of romantic prospects in their life. “Suddenly,” said Rebecca, “my life was so much richer and so much more full of people to depend on and relate to and connect with. I never felt more fundamentally lonely . . . than when I was in a relationship. And I’ve never felt more supported and connected and fully appreciated than when I was ‘single!’ ” Rebecca has, in the years since she weighed in on the word “single,” married a man with whom, she said in 2014, “I don’t have to sacrifice the full, rich life I built” when unmarried. And she maintains that it was unmarried life, as opposed to her eventual marriage, that put the loneliness of her earlier relationship in perspective.

  I thought of Rebecca’s pushback to the idea of being “single” when I read a 2013 New York magazine profile of Fleetwood Mac singer Stevie Nicks. Questioned about her life as a woman who has never permanently settled with a romantic partner, Nicks replied, “I don’t feel alone. I feel very un-alone. I feel very sparkly and excited about everything. I know women who are going, like, ‘I don’t want to grow old alone.’ And I’m like, ‘See, that doesn’t scare me. . . . ’ I’ll always be surrounded by people. I’m like the crystal ball and these are all the rings of Saturn around me.”

  While the interplanetary part probably doesn’t resonate for those of us who are not witchy rock icons, the part about not feeling solitary as an unmarried woman certainly does apply to many, including Rebecca and including me.

  I saw more people every day when I was single than I do as a married person. I went out more, I talked on the phone with more people, knew more about other people’s lives. I attended more baseball games and concerts; I spent more time at work, and certainly engaged more with colleagues and peers. When I met my husband, we turned in toward each other and our worlds got smaller.

  But, while unpartnered life does not necessarily cut people off from the larger world, it is true that when women are not committed to a significant other, when they do not regularly begin and end their days with a romantic partner, they often wind up logging many hours by themselves, in their own homes, in their own heads. And, for many of them, that’s just fine.

  There is an assumption, put forth by everyone from greeting card companies to Bruce Springsteen, that nobody likes to be alone, least of all women. But many women, long valued in context of their relations to other people, find solitude—both the act of being alone and the attitude of being independent—a surprisingly sweet relief.

  “I really value my time alone,” said Kitty Curtis, a twenty-six-year old hair stylist from New Jersey. When she exited her last relationship, she first felt scared and was eager to find a new boyfriend immediately, but the feeling passed. “I started to value not having to worry about another adult agenda of any sort, not having to worry about anyone else,” Kitty said, “and I got comfy and cozy in my new life. It’s just a really easy life, being alone.”

  Kitty always wanted to travel, but in her two long-term relationships, she said, “I felt like I was constantly having to pull somebody along into a dream.” Her vision of what she wanted “had to be compromised with whatever kind of vision they wanted . . . I was so, so smothered.” By the time she ended her most recent relationship, she said, she felt unencumbered. “Now, I feel like there’s so much to see in the world, so many more things to do. It’s so much more exciting than the idea of combining my dreams with anybody else’s.”

  For some, a desire to be left to their own designs remains a steady drumbeat throughout their lives. For others, the solitary impulse strikes at discrete periods, switching on and off with a yearning to cuddle up or hunker down with other human beings. But, in all cases, women’s yearning for liberty can be just as keen as the pull toward companionship that has been much more widely advertised.

  In her satirical Internet series about women in Western Art for The Toast, writer Mallory Ortberg included an entry entitled “What The Happiest Woman in the World Looks Like:” a painting of a woman sitting alone. “Do you know how rare finding a moment’s peace has been for women throughout human history?” Ortberg wrote. “If you spent the rest of your days alone in a cottage on a solitary Alp, it would not begin to make up for the years your foremothers spent having to listen to men as a profession . . . A woman alone is a beautiful thing.”1

  Freedom

  Frances Kissling, a reproductive rights advocate who was, for a long time, in charge of Catholics for a Free Choice, was born in Queens, the oldest of four in a working-class family. After briefly joining a convent after high school and deciding that she didn’t like it, Frances began her adult life as a sexually exuberant single woman. She has never married and never wanted to. “I’m going to be seventy next year and there is a thing about me, not about circumstances,” Frances told me in 2013. “I am very suited to being alone. I like being alone. I need to be alone.”

  Frances lived with a couple of men and had one live-in relationship that bridged ten years of her twenties and early thirties. It was a good relationship by many measures, she said, until, “Ultimately, we just bored each other to tears.” But, she continued, that relationship is evidence that she can be partnered: “It’s not like I always wanted to be hermetic. But I’m quite a private person and most of the time I have more fun with myself than with other people.” For years, Frances said, she couldn’t fathom the appeal of marriage. As her married friends have aged, she conceded, she has watched some couples grow in complementary ways and has decided that a few “have something now that I find attractive. I’m not looking for it, but I definitely see the benefits for people who are healthy and can build a long-term meaningful connection with each other.”

  But, she added, the things those long-married friends have now derive from the very feature that she finds most repellent about marriage: the quotidian mechanics of cooperation with another human. “I cannot embrace the mundane things in life,” Frances said. “When I was in relationships, the interruption of my very important thinking was intolerable. The occasional intrusion of worrying or caring or considering the other person in moments of spontaneity: suddenly you’re with people and you decide you want to go out to dinner and you have to call this other person and tell them you’re going to dinner, not because you need permission but because it’s the right thing to do.”

&n
bsp; I felt this. After the man I dated in my early twenties broke up with me, I spent a miserable year getting over it. After that, I felt great; unencumbered in the way that Kitty and Frances described. My days belonged to me. A good mood was mine to sustain, a bad one mine to nurse. If I wanted to watch a television program, I watched it. If I didn’t want to eat terrible Chinese take-out, I didn’t eat terrible Chinese take-out just because my boyfriend had a craving. I got to build my life around my desires: my books, my music, my hours of sitting uninterrupted on my stoop smoking cigarettes, and thinking. Most important, I didn’t have the constant crick-crick-crick of being in a relationship with a person who wasn’t a good match scritching away at my brain, making me low-level unhappy even on the happy days.

  Sometimes, when we’re alone, living well feels like a form of revenge against whichever last partner did us wrong. Sometimes, it just feels like making a point, possibly to ourselves, that we don’t have to be romantically attached to enjoy a rewarding, worthy—or even lush—existence. Nora Ephron once told me that, during her single years in her twenties in New York, she often consciously cooked and ate a full, lavish meal for herself, laying out place settings, napkins, and serving platters. On nights she spent at home, she said, “I would time it so that it came out at nine o’clock when there was something I wanted to watch on television with this little table in my living room and I would sit down with my meal for four in front of the TV.” This was how she reminded herself that she could be alone but not have a diminished domestic experience, a way, Ephron said, to end her day and “not feel sad because you were eating yogurt.”

  For some, part of not feeling sad is not allowing filth or carelessness creep in, to not let the absence of what sociologist Eric Klinenberg has described as “surveilling eyes” diminish your living or behavioral standards. For others, it means the private space in which to let their freak flags fly.