To paraphrase Beyoncé: For most of my adult life, I was a single woman. She met her current partner in 2021. Her previous relationship ended in 2009. During those 12 years of her life, I was single.
I loved those days. I spent a lot of time building my career as a communications specialist for an international NGO, working internationally, immersing myself in local communities and seizing every opportunity that came my way. Outside of work, I traveled extensively and prioritized my own growth. I practiced yoga and learned how to cook. I wrote a novel. I bought a house and built it. I found and lost friendships. There is so much more to life than relationships, and I immersed myself in this realm. I embraced solitude and relied on myself for sustenance and happiness. For me, intentionally building a happy and fulfilling life has been a huge gift. I’m not alone in thinking this way. The number of single people in the United States has increased significantly in recent decades, and in 2004, 33 percent of those aged 18 to 34 did not have a partner. By 2018, that number had risen to 51%.
When I was single, I had one friend who always asked me if I was dating anyone. No matter what else was going on in her life, all that mattered to her was my relationship status. The rest of my life was just window dressing over that central, important question: Was I chosen by someone else? I tried to be generous with her. I knew she was from a generation of women defined entirely by their relationship status. To be honest, I was just curious because her question touched a nerve.
There was a time when I longed for a partner. Even though I knew it was better to be alone than in a bad relationship, I still longed for some kind of romantic connection. I went on a date. After immersing myself in dating apps, swiping and liking, and going on first dates, I returned to loneliness. Sometimes my date liked me and I wanted more. Sometimes I liked them and wanted more. However, these desires rarely overlapped. I’ve only cheated a few times in 12 years, and each one was more trouble than it was worth. I felt lonely at times, although not as much as people think. I missed having a solid person by my side, someone to drive me home from the hospital after medical procedures, someone to pick up my medicine from the pharmacy when I was sick. But even as I curled up on weekend nights with a novel and a bowl of bubbly lasagna, I never felt alone.
Interestingly, I’ve had a hard time surfacing articles about straight men who choose to remain single. There are many alarming articles about the decline in dating opportunities for straight men as dating standards rise, but there are few articles that feature the voices of men who find value in being single.
But even though the number of single people is increasing, the cultural expectation that we fall in love and get married remains strong. Some people think that life is complete only when they have a happy partner. Singleness is usually positioned as something to be overcome rather than something to be celebrated. For people like me, who have been single for over a decade in a world designed for couples, it’s a puzzle to be solved, not a reality to be accepted.
Below is a collection of articles that provide different perspectives on single life. These works will challenge your perception of what single life is like and encourage you to hold space for the richness that exists independent of romantic partnership. I hope so.
Spinsters (Brialene Hopper, los angeles book reviewsJuly 2015)
The first time I thought about my singleness as an identity was while reading Kate Bolick’s book. spinster, This evolved from this 2011 article. atlantic. I enjoyed this book, but what really spoke to me was Hopper’s scathing review. Hopper does not criticize the book, but imagines what existed in that place. Bolick’s book features five white women writers from the Northeastern United States. The review questions this framework, suggesting a life filled with “friendship, faith, family, community, a sense of political purpose, significant caregiving responsibilities, remarkable professional success, and sometimes, or ultimately, genuine romance.” I imagine a diverse group of radical women who built the . This book review adds weirdness and radicality to a book I loved, as well as an understanding of what a fulfilling life looks like outside of the same old heteronormative and patriarchal patterns. Expand.
For Borick, being unmarried is not just about being an unmarried woman. It’s not about cat collecting, celibacy, or the social humiliation of life as an old man’s card. Rather, it’s luxurious, coveted, and glamorous, worthy of long days of reading, plenty of space to lie in bed, ecstatic self-communion, and a former editor-in-chief of a decorating magazine. dominoyour own fully equipped apartment.
This 2016 article is particularly interesting when read in conjunction with Traister’s recent essay on the resurgence of social pressures on marriage.
From this adaptation All Single Women: Unmarried Women and the Rise of Independent States Written by Rebecca Traister reads like a dispatch from a completely different era. Traister argues that “wherever there is an increase in the number of single women throughout history, there is always a change.”
I also loved other works by the cut-Anna Holmes’ thoughtful thoughts on her decision to remain single. “For certain creative and highly sensitive souls, celibacy was a feature, not a bug,” she writes.
Drawing on her own experiences as a single woman for many years, Traister writes about how a cultural reappraisal of women’s lives can spark significant political change. I trace Traister’s take on ostensibly cultural issues and their impact on our collective political priorities, and how issues such as pay equity and caregiving are changing the role of women in society. I enjoyed how he pointed out how it is ingrained in the world.
Most women today do not refrain from or delay marriage to prove equality. They do this because they have internalized assumptions that would have seemed radical just half a century ago. that they are complete human beings who can live their professional, economic, social, sexual, and parental lives completely on their own, unless they happen to meet someone they wish to legally bind; . Feminism’s most radical idea, the abolition of marriage, has become so widely accepted that it has become a habit, and although its political intentions have been eliminated, it has become increasingly powerful in changing the course of average women’s lives. It has become.
This heartbreaking essay about being single in a world where we are expected to desire romantic partnerships. they, one of my favorite sites for queer news. Brandon Taylor writes beautifully and concisely about his history of childhood sexual abuse and how it affected his life. Like Taylor, I too had experienced sexual trauma in my childhood and found fragments of my own experiences among his writings. Taylor writes movingly about how sexual attention makes him squirm and how he craves the intimacy of close friendship more than romantic connection. Ultimately, he strives to come to terms with himself, knowing that being single is best for him, at least for now. I was very involved in that.
Perhaps that’s the cause of my anxiety. That every time someone touches my body, I have to live with that record. As I was trying to make peace with myself, I suddenly found myself having to contend with another voice. This is something I have to move aside or reconcile as I move slowly, very slowly, at geological speed, toward a deeper union with myself and what I want and don’t want. That’s another thing that shouldn’t happen.
I didn’t expect it to have anything to do with 15th century Catholic nuns, but I was so happy to be proven wrong. Jessa Crispin visits Avila, Spain. There, locals honor the philosopher who pioneered women’s independence more than 500 years ago. In the Catholicism of my youth, women’s only role was to produce and raise more Catholics. However, St. Teresa chose a different path because joining the Church was the only way for a woman to become a philosopher and writer. In doing so, she became an unlikely role model for women who chose to build their lives alone. This work also emphasizes that unmarried women are often the most socially and politically engaged in society, which reflects my own volunteer experience as a single woman. Without a romantic partnership, I could put more energy into my community. During one season, I spent Friday nights volunteering at a children’s hospital, which was more meaningful than socializing in the evenings.
Teresa did not want to be reduced to a mere body, nurtured and sacrificed for the sake of her husband and children. If she had to choose between her body and her brain, she would choose her brain. So she joined the church. This is the only way for a woman to become a philosopher.
We’ve all heard the research that shows married people are generally happier and less lonely than single people. But when Vera DePaulo, a social scientist and longtime bachelor, decided to look into this research, she discovered serious methodological flaws in the way these studies were conducted. This article examines current research on single people and highlights how further research could benefit society as a whole. Single people about the joys of solitude, the importance of building a life based on your values, and why you shouldn’t prioritize one core romantic relationship to the exclusion of everything else. , teaches us a lot.
Ever since social science became interested in the concept of marriage, everyone has supported the idea that getting married someday is the goal and perhaps the way to go. “The idea was that everyone wants to get married and will get married eventually, so why bother studying single people?” she said. In other words, a single person is either someone who has failed in marriage or someone who is waiting for marriage. They are not worth studying as a category in their own right.
Throughout most of my single life, I was lucky enough to live alone. Although I couldn’t always afford it, I sometimes sacrificed other luxuries to have some space for myself. One of the biggest challenges of being single in a world of two-person living is the financial burden it can cause. In this thoughtful and deeply researched article, Anne Helen Petersen delves into how our society is organized to support the needs of the people we partner with. Tax laws, Social Security benefits, pensions, health insurance, IRAs, and countless other aspects of social infrastructure are set up to support married families and disadvantage those who choose to remain single. This especially affects women. Women are expected to live longer than men, but earn less over their lifetime. Women of color, especially black women, are especially punished. This is a sobering reminder that not only policy, but also culture, needs to change when it comes to singles’ rights.
American society is structurally hostile to single people and people living alone. This is not intentional, since it costs a basic amount of money to maintain a household, and sharing that burden among multiple people reduces that amount. There are also other forms of hostility that are deeply embedded in the fabric of everyday life.
Claire Egan I’m a queer freelance writer based in Dublin.She regularly writes articles Newsletter I am writing my first book about life after trauma..
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