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

by Traister, Rebecca

  Like our platonic friends, our partners, lovers, girlfriends, and boyfriends steer us through loss and grief and illness. I’ve had friends who have been with partners through cancer treatments and diabetes diagnoses, through the death of parents and the loss of jobs, who have later broken up with those people, with relief or with sorrow, good feelings or bitterness. But the experiences of having traveled through these defining moments of adulthood together are etched in them; the connection lingers. Our old partners don’t cease to matter or to exist in our memories or in our makeup just because we don’t marry them.

  Journalist Jen Doll summed it up in her Village Voice piece on single women in New York: “The man who introduced you to really good bourbon; the guy with kids who helped you remember why you do, or don’t, want them for yourself; the bisexual coworker; the ‘poonhound;’ the one that got away; and the one you let get away on purpose—they all have a place in your dating life. Don’t regret them.”

  When and if we do decide to commit permanently to someone, we bring to the partnership the lessons and influence of our other, former partners. That’s not a bad thing.

  And while the marriage rate is low, our rates of unmarried cohabitation are surging. In a report about female reproduction in America in 2008, demographers found that nearly thirty percent of unmarried mothers were living with a committed partner, either of the same sex or the opposite sex.35 Americans are not simply cycling through unmarried partners helter-skelter; they’re moving in, committing to them in a way that may not be marriage, but is not any less real.

  Living together without marrying works for lots of people who, for a variety of reasons, do not want to wed. It can assure legal independence, while giving couples a chance to see how they function together, how well they share space, whether they enjoy quotidian intimacy with each other. Cohabitation can be a leadup to marriage or an alternative to it, a way to gain some of the benefits of long-term partnership—daily contact and affection, bill splitting—without engaging a more formal and thus, confining, set of social and legal expectations. And they may be happier commitments.

  The Gallup Organization visited 136 countries in 2006 and 2007, asking respondents if they had experienced a lot of love on the previous day. The groups least likely to have said that they experienced love were the divorced and widowed and, while married people responded affirmatively more often than single people, unmarried couples who lived together reported even more love than their married counterparts.36

  Independent Your Way to Loneliness

  Anita Hill, pathologized as a desperate and crazed single woman in 1991, has, for many years, been in a long-term relationship with Chuck Malone. She met him at a restaurant not long after moving to Boston to teach at Brandeis University. The two live separately but see each other every day; they would marry, Hill said, “But I don’t want to defer to convention. We’d marry each other, but we don’t see why we should have to marry.”

  Their situation, Hill said, “Works. We are happy as we are.”

  “In some ways, I don’t think of myself as the same single person status as I had before I got involved with Chuck,” said Hill. “But I want people to understand that you can have a good life and not be married.” This message is particularly important, she said, for black women. “We know what the numbers are and we know that specifically among African-American women the percentage of never-married women is higher than the general population,” said Hill. “And I want everyone to understand that you can have a good life, despite what convention says, and be single. That doesn’t mean you have to be against marriage. It just means that there are choices that society should not impose on you.”

  That Hill directs this message specifically at African-American women makes sense. They are the group who are most regularly told that their low marriage rates make them problematic. Many African-American women whom I interviewed for this book expressed a view that the partnership deck is stacked against them, in part because of their race and assumptions people make about them.

  Journalist Dodai Stewart said that online dating worked best for her in her youth, because the men who clicked on her profile were just looking for a fun relationship. As she’s gotten older, she imagines them saying, “I want to settle down and she’s not going to be black.” Stewart has had committed relationships with men who are Chicano and Korean, but said, “The numbers are against me. Black women are the bottom rung. Clicking through, men want to see young and they want to see white or Asian, maybe Latina. It’s not just black guys. It’s Asian guys, white guys . . . nobody wants black women, basically.”

  The dating site OkCupid studied this, and indeed found that “Men don’t write black women back. Or rather, they write them back far less often than they should. Black women reply the most, yet get by far the fewest replies. Essentially, every race—including other blacks—singles them out for the cold shoulder.”37

  Meanwhile, television commentator Nancy Giles despairs of the shortage of attractive men for black women to partner with. She recalled watching Barack Obama speak at the Democratic convention in 2004 with a college friend, and both of them joking “Where was he at Oberlin? Where are all those guys and this new breed of educated, smart, funny black guys? When we went to school they weren’t really there.” When she considers online dating, she feels torn about pursuing men who aren’t black. “It’s difficult as a woman of color, because there are all these issues of betraying your race,” she said, recalling a black friend who ignored the cat-calling of a homeless man on the street, only to have him yell after her, “You probably prefer white men! You’re what’s wrong with the black race!”

  These are among the grim and often contradictory messages thrown at black women: you’re too independent, no one will want you; there aren’t any black men if you do want them; why don’t you want a black man? Do you think you’re too good for a man? You’re what’s wrong with the race. What’s wrong with you?

  “It all goes back to that Newsweek article about getting killed by a terrorist,” said Giles. “It’s mean and depressing. It’s not even subliminal messaging, it’s pretty much liminal: that smart women are going to end up getting punished.” In that old Newsweek article, researchers asserted that an unmarried, thirty-year-old, college-educated woman had a 20 percent chance of marriage and, by forty, no more than a 2.6 percent shot. It was part of a panicky news cycle catalogued scrupulously by journalist Susan Faludi in her 1991 best-seller, Backlash, in which the message sent to independent women was that they faced a purported shortage38 of men to marry.

  The message that high-achieving women will be punished by spinsterhood has not abated in the past three decades, despite the evidence that high-achieving women are increasingly the most likely to marry. And, while almost no ethnicity or religion has been spared pro-marriage messaging, perhaps the most relentless spotlight has been trained on black women, not just by white conservatives looking to punish them politically, but by black men obsessed by black female independence, despite the fact that, as journalist Tami Winfrey Harris has pointed out, while 45.5 percent of black women over fifteen have never been married, 48.9 percent of black men in the same category haven’t been either.39

  Entertainer Steve Harvey has co-hosted several television specials focusing on successful black women whom he has urged to lower their standards to find men. In 2009, he published the best-selling dating advice book, Act Like a Lady; Think Like a Man, and took a similar message to Oprah. In 2011, R&B singer Tyrese gave an interview in which he spoke to black women “on this independent kick [who say] I don’t need no man.” To those women, Tyrese said, “You’re going to independent your way into loneliness.”40

  In the midst of all these messages, it’s easy to miss a reality: While patterns of marriage and independent life for African-Americans have always differed from the patterns of their white counterparts, the purported crisis of permanent singlehood for black women isn’t quite as extreme as it’s made out to be. In the New York
Times, Angela Stanley, writing about how “few things are more irritating than the unsolicited comments I get that black women, like me, are unlikely to marry,” refuted the popular claim that more than 70 percent of black women have never been married by pointing out that that percentage only applied to women between the ages of twenty-five and twenty-nine, and that, by the time black women turned fifty-five, only thirteen percent of them had never been married.

  “Black women marry later,” wrote Stanley. “But they do marry.”

  Susana Morris, English professor at Auburn University in Alabama, said that, while, in her thirties, most of her white friends are married and her black friends remain single, she doesn’t feel anxiety about marriage, “I just would like to go on a date.” Morris wants to find someone she can have a conversation with. “I’m interested in partnership [more than] marriage,” she said. What is anxiety provoking, she continued, “Is that every time you open a magazine, a book, or turn on the television, you hear that something’s wrong with you as a black woman. You’re too fat, too loud, don’t nobody want to marry you. That is anxiety producing.” Echoing Stanley and Anita Hill, Morris argued that the “purposeful misdirection and misinformation” of the media’s pathologizing of single black womanhood masks the fact that “single people are living in a variety of healthy ways that are just not being accounted for.”

  Writer Helena Andrews wrote, in 2012, about how “according to the data—and the media that are obsessed with it—I’m screwed. As a thirty-one-year-old, college-educated black woman who’s never been married, everywhere I turn, the odds of finding a good man are against me. That is, of course, until I turn over every morning to the man sleeping next to me. He is (gasp) black. He is (quelle surprise!) college educated. He isn’t a felon, a deadbeat, a father of illegitimate children, or a cheat—all the categories women like me are forced to choose from, according to the seemingly never-ending stories about the ‘crisis’ of black marriage. Attention, media! There is no crisis in my bedroom.”41

  Marriage Has Its Benefits

  When talking about her unmarried relationship with Chuck Malone, Anita Hill acknowledged that the improvisational nature of their bond is made easier by the fact that they do not have children. “It becomes much more complicated for women who want children and who would like to have a partner raising children with them,” she said. Hill has also begun to understand some of the disadvantages that come with choosing to remain unmarried in a world still designed for married people.

  Yes, as unromantic as it sounds, in a time when options for how to live and how to love have become more varied, the questions of whether and when and why to marry often come down to technicalities: benefits, health care, access, rights, and recognition. In fact, the desire for hospital access, next-of-kin proximity, of inheritance, and of healthcare were part of the root of the gay-rights movement’s push for marriage.

  Getting hitched remains the best, and often the only, way to secure a visa for someone not born into the United States, the precise problem that novelist Elizabeth Gilbert, who had sworn off marriage after the painful divorce that produced her runaway best-selling memoir, Eat, Pray, Love, encountered when her committed partner was barred from reentering the United States. They decided to marry, a circumstance so traumatic that it provoked Gilbert to write a follow-up book, Committed, that sifted through her deep ambivalence about the institution.

  Until the recent enactment of the Affordable Care Act, people often married to secure health insurance. “I love my husband, live with him, and plan to stay with him indefinitely,” wrote Nona Willis-Aronowitz in 2011, “Also, I wish we had never gotten married.” Nona and her boyfriend got hitched only after an emergency-room visit resulted in questions from a health-insurance administrator about whether she could legally continue to cover him as her domestic partner. Nona’s own parents, feminist cultural critic Ellen Willis and sociologist Stanley Aronowitz, both divorced after very youthful marriages in the mid-twentieth century, married each other “grudgingly” when Nona was fifteen, “only because they were worried that their partnership wouldn’t adequately protect their property and assets.” Nona didn’t even attend their wedding; she was busy studying.42 When Nona and her husband married, in order to get him on her health plan, she wore a black dress and flip-flops to Chicago’s City Hall.

  Hard Out There

  Here’s the thing: for many of us, finding a person whom we want to marry, or move in with, or go on vacation with, or split bills with, is not so easy.

  “There are such beings in the World perhaps, one in a Thousand, as the Creature You and I should think perfection,” Jane Austen wrote to a niece. “Where Grace & Spirit are united to Worth, where the Manners are equal to the Heart & Understanding, but such a person may not come your way, or, if he does, he may not be the eldest son of a Man of Fortune, the near relation of your particular friend & belonging to your own Country.”43 Austen understood that it was not even a matter of finding the right person, but the rather more complicated prospect of finding the right person at the right time under the right conditions.

  As it becomes more possible for us to provide for ourselves, it makes sense that our standards might rise even higher—far higher, in fact—than the standards of Austen’s day, when alternatives to marriage were so grim. Contemporary women are perhaps likelier to have a full life that requires protection from the potential harm of a bad match, even when they badly wish to fall in love.

  Elliott, the novelist from Washington, D.C., described herself as deeply sad that she hadn’t settled down with anyone, yet acknowledged that she didn’t regret not settling. “What’s complicated,” she said, “is that if I had really wanted to marry, I would have settled for one of the not-quite right relationships I had in the last ten years, but I didn’t.” On the one hand, she said, “I’m proud that I never settled for less than I wanted, but it’s not like in return I got exactly what I did want.”

  Elliott has noted the changing nature of dating. “You don’t sort of sweep each other off your feet anymore,” she said. The realities of the world become known and better understood. She recalled going on dates with a man who admitted he was more than $100,000 in debt. “There was a time when that wouldn’t have mattered,” said Elliott. “But I don’t have any debt, and I have to admit that it’s scary, if you’ve been fiscally responsible and made your way in the world, to think about partnering up with someone who is so in the red.”

  Sweep-you-off-your-feet-debt-free potential mates do not grow on trees. And the fact that our lives can now be full enough without those spectacular others makes our standards soar even higher. The heightened bar is a side effect of all our independence: Back when women needed a man, truly needed one, to earn money, provide social standing and a roof, needed to be married in order to enjoy a socially sanctioned sex life or have children who wouldn’t be shunned, standards could be lower. They were necessarily lower. A potential mate could more easily get away with offering only a pay check, a penis, and a pulse.

  Today, women want much more, and holding out for better partners is part of how we’re improving—and thereby saving—marriage.

  The lion’s share of finding love is luck, in tandem with privilege, since key to propitious circumstance is opportunity: the opportunities on offer to us when we are born, the resources and options made available to us as we grow.

  These were the circumstances by which I wound up married: One night I was headed back to my apartment; I was planning to work late. When I got off the subway, I decided to stop at a favorite neighborhood restaurant, a place I frequented with my girlfriends, to get some takeout pasta. After I ordered, I sat at the bar to drink a glass of water, and noticed a handsome man sitting next to me, eating by himself at the bar. He was reading a magazine and drinking a glass of wine. I watched him in the mirror above the bar and felt, suddenly, that I wanted to know him. Unconsciously, I dropped my glass of water and it broke on the bar. He looked up, and we began a conversation
.

  I was neither looking nor not looking for love; I was looking for dinner.

  There was no strategy. It might just as easily never have happened. There was nothing special about what I was doing or wearing or how I was acting or my approach to the relationship or whether he called me back. In fact, he was in the late stages of grief and initially hesitant about entering a relationship: If I had listened to the advice from He’s Just Not That Into You I would never have pursued him, never wound up discovering exactly how easily we fell into each other.

  The only action I took in my life that had a direct impact on meeting the man I wound up marrying was that I didn’t marry anyone before him. This wasn’t on purpose: I had wished many times that I could will myself into non-excellent relationships, because I had little evidence that better ones existed, and I thought that maybe I just needed to come to grips with the fact that if I really wanted to be in love, it wasn’t going to be perfect.

  But, mostly, I didn’t pursue people I wasn’t crazy about because I was busy doing other things that I enjoyed more than I enjoyed being with men I wasn’t crazy about. That abstention meant that, when a good relationship with someone I was crazy about became a possibility, I was free to pursue it.

  I wound up happily married because I lived in an era in which I could be happily single.

  Her Best Jeans

  When she was sixty-six, Gloria Steinem, the feminist leader who said that she didn’t want to marry because she couldn’t mate in captivity, who said, “We are becoming the men we wanted to marry,” who once called marriage a union of one-and-a-half people and ran away from her collegiate fiancé, got married.