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

by Traister, Rebecca

  In many ways, the emotional and economic self-sufficiency of unmarried life is more demanding than the state we have long acknowledged as (married) maturity. Being on one’s own means shouldering one’s own burdens in a way that being coupled rarely demands. It means doing everything—making decisions, taking responsibility, paying bills, cleaning the refrigerator—without the benefits of formal partnership. But we’ve still got a lot of hardwired assumptions that the successful female life is measured not in professional achievements or friendships or even satisfying sexual relationships, but by whether you’re legally coupled.

  In turn, those assumptions are often undergirded by an unconscious conviction that, if a woman is not wed, it’s not because she’s made a set of active choices, but rather that she has not been selected—chosen, desired, valued enough. I remember keenly the day, in the midst of my bad first breakup, that an older male friend, trying to comfort me, explained why he’d decided to propose to his wife: because, “you don’t let merchandise like that sit on the shelf.” I let the implications of his remark wash over me as I sat glumly on my shelf, unpurchased and unloved.

  “Among my very liberal, educated milieu,” said Elliott, the forty-year-old novelist in Washington, “There is a sense of: ‘What happened? How are you still on the shelf? You must be a defective product because nobody bought you.” This is the message she absorbs every time a friend tries to be encouraging by telling her, “I would think everyone would be after you!”

  Despite the fact that they are one of the largest growing demographic in the nation, women who remain single later than many of their peers often feel isolated, not simply in literal ways, but as if their experiences are unique.

  While I was writing this book, I had dinner with a friend of my father-in-law, an unmarried academic in her fifties, living in a Midwestern community where the vast majority of her peers were married. While I held forth on the huge numbers of women now living outside marriage, she looked at me witheringly. This big, bustling world of single women that I (a traditionally married woman, no less) was describing did not match her experience of feeling socially excluded, aberrant, solitary—like the only single woman in a world of wives.

  Nancy Giles, a fifty-two-year-old television commentator who lives in New Jersey, says that, even if she knows rationally that the world is now full of unmarried women, she still experiences an unconscious sensation that “single women’s experiences have been cut off from each other and put on islands where each of us feels like we’re freaks.” Giles believes that feelings of freakishness stem from male confusion about women who, by choice or by happenstance, live life unattached. She remembered the perplexity she inspired in a former radio co-host, a white male comedian, who, she said, didn’t know what to make of her. “He couldn’t put me in a box,” she said. “I wasn’t a Roseanne-type housewife; I wasn’t a woman he could tease for always dating the wrong men; I wasn’t seeing anyone at the time; I wasn’t gay. He would have denied that my being black made a difference. But he couldn’t figure out how to deal with me, because I was just this kind of happy person. Why wasn’t I having dating problems or being upset? Why wasn’t I a man-hater? There was just this big giant question mark over his head.”

  In a 2011 study, researchers at the University of Missouri explored the pressures faced by middle-class, never-married women. They found that these women experienced a heightened sense of deviant visibility within their families and communities (especially at events like weddings, even more especially during bouquet tosses) and that, conversely, they were made to feel invisible and inconsequential in social environments in which the default expectation is that all adult women are wives and/or mothers. The study was headlined, “I’m a Loser, I’m Not Married, Let’s All Just Look at Me.”14

  There remains an anxiety that a lack of marital affiliation might somehow be tied to a lack of existence, especially for women who have for so long been valued and lauded for their connections to others. It’s in the line from When Harry Met Sally, in which Harry tells Sally that what she’s in for, as a young woman headed to New York, is the risk of dying “one of those New York deaths where nobody notices for two weeks until the smell drifts out into the hallway.” It’s a funny line, but also a chilling one, especially for those of us who have feared, on occasion, that a lack of traditional ties leaves us unmoored, not just from nuclear family structures, but from the world.

  Loneliness

  Loneliness is not directly tied to whether you’re partnered. Journalist Judith Shulevitz has pointed to recent studies showing that chronic loneliness is a medical condition that takes place on a biological, cellular level, that at least part of the propensity for the condition is hereditable and that part of the rest of it has to do with conditions we face as newborns and children, long before anyone is being encouraged or discouraged from pairing off with another individual. Contemporary psychologists, Shulevitz reports, “insist that loneliness must be seen as an interior, subjective experience, not an external, objective condition.” Loneliness, in short, writes Shulevitz, “is the want of intimacy.” And a want of intimacy is not necessarily abated through marriage.

  More than one in three adults over the age of forty-five report being lonely; not all these adults are single. And, as anyone who’s ever been in a bad romantic or sexual relationship knows, intimacy doesn’t just show up and make itself at home when you have sex with someone, nor does it necessarily creep in slowly over years; often, in fact, intimacy between romantic partners can fade over time. And there may not be any loneliness as profound as the one you feel when you are lying next to a person to whom you are supposedly tied tighter than anyone else and feeling nothing but unknown, unseen, bereft of connection.

  While reading Meghan O’Rourke’s memoir of losing her mother to cancer, I was struck by the way the grief seemed more intense to her because, in part, she felt it hers to bear alone. O’Rourke, who writes about the disintegration of her marriage during her mother’s illness, memorably recalls an instance in the hospital in which she sees another young woman about her age, obviously in pain, and feels a particular kinship with her, until she sees the woman again, accompanied by a husband and children, and immediately retracts the tentacles of shared experience. “Your grief is not like mine,” she decides.

  O’Rourke’s reasonable assumption is that the burden of her sadness might be alleviated if she had a partner alongside whom she might work through it. But in fact, the break from her husband, about which she writes “it is impossible for me to know whether—or to what degree—the separation was an expression of my grief,” itself provides evidence that romantic partnership does not automatically mitigate grief as she imagines it does for the married woman at the hospital; it is just as possible for conjugal bonds to fall victim to that grief.

  O’Rourke’s alienation from the married woman comes in part because she’s filling in the imaginative blank of that woman’s union with a fantasy of fulfillment. If loneliness is a want of intimacy, then being single lends itself to loneliness because the loving partnerships we imagine in comparison are always, in our minds, intimate; they are not distant or empty or abusive or dysfunctional. We don’t fantasize about being in bad marriages, or about being in what were once good marriages that have since gone stale or sexless or hard, creating their own profound emotional pain. Rather, we fantasize about having a man or woman with whom to share our travails, someone with whom we can discuss our pain and our fears. The partner we conjure when we don’t have one is our special assigned person, whose responsibility and pleasure it is to care for us when we’re sick, to comfort us when we are sad, to rub our feet, and tell us that everything is going to be alright.

  Elliott told me that she thinks, often, about “what would it be like to have someone in your corner, to have that unconditional person who’s rooting for you and you’re rooting for them? It would be so nice to just look at this other person and say, ‘What a shitty day!’ and give each other pep talks.” A
nd while she’s grateful for the solitude she’s had through her thirties, solitude that has afforded her time to do work she’s proud of, she also sometimes feels, she said, “like there’s a boat that’s sailed and I missed it. I just had no idea, could never have predicted how intense the loneliness would be at this juncture of my life.”

  Of course, single people are lonely. Of course. We have all been lonely. For moments, for days, for endless, chilled seasons of sequestration. For some women, the loneliness may stem from, or be exacerbated by, the drain of having to be everything for yourself.

  Exhaustion

  Living independently, even with the means to take care of oneself economically, can be physically and emotionally depleting; getting by alone without economic security, far worse. In addition to the emotional strain, there are the purely practical responsibilities: the cleaning of the house, the setting of the alarm, the job or jobs, the light bulbs, the leaks, clogged drains, the creaks in the night. As we marry later or not at all, we get tired.

  In Rachel Crothers’s 1910 play A Man’s World, about unmarried bohemians in Manhattan, one female character, knackered after years of plying her way in the (then far less accommodating) world, sobs to a much-admired single friend, “I’ve tried just as hard as I can for ten years—and scrimped and scraped and taken snubs and pretended I was ambitious and didn’t care for anything but my work, and look at me—I don’t even know how I am going to pay my next month’s rent. I’m so sick and tired of it all . . . I’d marry any man that asked me. . . . I would. I’d marry anything that could pay the bills. Oh, I am so tired—so tired of it all.”

  Much has been written, in recent years, about opting out, the proclivity of highly educated, often late-married professional women who, upon starting a family, leave their jobs, depending instead on a husband. I’ve often suspected that, as well as being symptomatic of the persistence of unequal divisions of domestic labor and responsibilities, contemporary opting out is also a symptom of the midlife burnout after having lived decades on one’s own in an increasingly work-centered culture.

  I see the raw desire to put one’s feet up after years of having gone it alone with no wife to clean our houses and no husband to earn our money, in both my female and male contemporaries. I witness it in my economically stable single peers, some of whom, closing in on forty with no spouse and no children, have nonetheless quit their demanding jobs, or taken pay cuts in order to reduce their hours.

  Marriage may be a historically constricting institution, but it’s also provided a system for divvying up life’s work, admittedly often on unequal terms: You do the earning, I’ll do the cleaning. But when we do all the earning and all the cleaning ourselves—and then earn and clean and earn and clean and earn and clean some more, by the time we hit midlife, we are beat.

  This speaks to something that many single people often don’t get: socially approved pauses for life events. As I’ve now learned firsthand, there are few times in adult life during which people tell you with enthusiasm to take off, relax, take time for yourself. They come at the following moments: when you marry and when you have children. Of course, for most working Americans, the ideas of time off for honeymoons and paid leave after babies are pipe dreams, but in white-collar professions, single people, and those without children, often find themselves not only without the encouragement to take personal time of their own; they wind up compensating for their colleagues’ breaks by making up the work, slogging through even more hours. In a country that still does not guarantee new parents a dollar of compensation for time taken after birth or adoption, it may seem crazy to suggest that we should start talking about paid time off for those without children or partners. Yet if we want to account for the growing numbers of unmarried people in the professional world, we must begin also to account for the fact that it is not just brides, grooms, and new parents who require the chance to catch their breath, to flourish, and to live full lives.

  Fear

  Single life also, realistically, can entail a sensation of physical insecurity, a sense of danger that often hits at the very same moments that we are enjoying the whizzing highs of social liberty.

  Some of the very best nights of my life in my twenties and early thirties were spent talking late into the night with friends, in various places in New York. Sometimes it was midnight, sometimes four in the morning, when I would begin to make my way home. Those nights always ended with me walking the sidewalks across my neighborhood, or from the subway, aware of the echoing sound of my footsteps on the pavement, happy, yes, but alert to my vulnerability on the street, the windows around me mostly dark. Who would know, not just if I were mugged, but if I simply tripped, sprained an ankle, hit my head? Who was waiting for me to come home? No one was.

  It was the best of life and the worst of it all rolled into one, the meeting of the sublime and terrifying realities of independent existence that was addressed in an 1853 poem by astronomer Maria Mitchell. Written when Mitchell was in her mid-thirties, the poem was addressed to an unknown figure named Sarah. It read, in part:

  Did you never go home alone, Sarah

  It’s nothing so very bad,

  I’ve done it a hundred times, Sarah

  When there wasn’t a man to be had . . .

  There’s a deal to be learned in a midnight walk,

  When you take it all alone,

  If a gentleman’s with you, it’s talk, talk, talk,

  You’ve no eyes and no mind of your own.

  But alone, in dark nights when clouds have threatened

  And you feel a little afraid

  Your senses are all supernaturally quickened

  You study the light and the shade

  You have only to listen and words of cheer

  Come down from the upper air

  Which unless alone you never would hear

  For you’d have no ears to spare15

  The conjoined thrills and perils of life lived physically alone are felt even by those with extraordinary and rewarding social bonds, like Ann and Amina.

  Ann, who described herself in her single Los Angeles life as “happy waking up every day alone and very happy to go to sleep alone,” recalled a night out at a warehouse party with women she called “my core single ladies here in L.A.” When she heard the first notes of Ginuwine’s “Pony,” she leapt to the dance floor, tripped, and found herself laid flat out on a concrete floor. She picked herself up and managed to dance through the rest of the night. But, on the way home with a friend, exuberant and heading for Fatburger, she threw her hands in the air and felt her shoulder pop from its socket. Ann’s friend drove her to what she described as “a really janky twenty-hour urgent care center” at three in the morning.

  As a freelancer with unsteady health insurance, Ann was worried that whatever was wrong with her arm was going to be expensive. They would not allow her friend in to see the doctor with her. Ann began to cry. “They were big fat tears,” she said. “And I don’t cry. Especially not in public. It’s not a point of pride; it’s just that I don’t emote in that way. But there were these big fat tears; I was in a dirty party dress in urgent care.”

  The friend who’d brought her to the clinic was forced to leave; she had to drive to a wedding in Ojai the next morning. Alone, Ann soon remembered that her dress buttoned up the back. With her shoulder out of its socket in the middle of the night, it dawned on her that she would have to sleep in her dress until she could reasonably wake a neighbor to ask for help. She had already called Amina in a panic because Amina was the person who knew the details of Ann’s health plan. But Amina then lived in Washington. “At five in the morning, when I have to get my dress off and get to sleep, that’s not really helpful.”

  It was a moment that challenged Ann’s view of her place in the world. “I am of the belief that there is nothing I, with the help of my friend network, cannot do to make myself one hundred percent happy,” she said. “But, physically, that night, I just couldn’t help myself. I honestly
can’t tell you another moment in my single life when I felt that way, but I got home and I cried some more.”

  No marriage or committed romantic partnership would have been a sure prophylactic against Ann’s despair that night: A husband could have been out of town, could have been nasty about being awakened, could have been cruel, cold, or laughed. As a single woman, Ann might have just as easily hooked up and gone home with someone that night, someone who would have helped her more tenderly than some husbands. Her friend, had she not had to go to Ojai, would otherwise likely have helped her home and out of her dress.

  But coupledom, at its best, provides the hope—and yes, often the practical reality—of companionship, of a warm body whose job it is to unbutton your dress, or to sit with you in the urgent care center when you’re young and have dislodged an arm while dancing at a warehouse, or when you’re old. When you’re sick. When you’re dying.

  Illness

  There have been many studies, touted victoriously by social conservatives, showing marriage to have tremendous salutary benefits. “Marriage itself gives men and women healthier and longer lives,” claim authors Maggie Gallagher (a vociferous anti-gay–marriage and antiabortion activist) and Linda Waite in their 2000 book The Case for Marriage: Why Married People Are Happier, Healthier and Better off Financially. “Researchers find that the married have lower death rates, even after taking initial health status into account. Even sick people who marry live longer than their counterparts who don’t.”16 Or, as Tina Fey once joked, “Don’t worry, lonely women, you’ll be dead soon.”

  However, these studies cannot help but reflect the fact that generally healthy people are more likely to be in a position to marry to begin with, and that economically privileged adults—who can afford better health care, better food, and healthier environments in which to live—are those most likely to marry.