All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation (23 page)

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.” And 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.

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.

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 spare
¹⁵

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.

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.

What's more, many of the same studies that turn up increased happiness and good health for married people also show unmarried people to be just as happy, and both groups to be far happier and healthier than those who are divorced, separated, or widowed—all states that derive directly from the condition of having been married. The claim that marriage—just
marriage
, as opposed to a
good
marriage—is a boon to general emotional and physical well-being is probably precarious at best.

But when it comes to chronic physical illness, there does seem to be persuasive evidence that being partnered helps. In 2013, a study published in
The Journal of Clinical Oncology
found that cancer patients who were married had better outcomes than those who were single,
¹⁷
noting that single patients, without partners to nudge them to get to doctors sooner, were 17 percent more likely to already have advanced stage cancer by the time they were diagnosed. Single cancer sufferers were also 53 percent
less likely to get the therapy they needed than married patients, a statistic that likely speaks to the staggering logistical commitments of medical treatment: Having a person to support and love you may be salubrious; having a person to take care of children or earn money while you get chemotherapy or to drive you to that chemotherapy is definitely so.

This is part of what made Lori Gottlieb's paean to settling for someone, anyone, so compelling. In that original
Atlantic
piece, Gottlieb wrote, even of her less than blissfully married friends, “They, like me, would rather feel alone in a marriage than actually be alone, because they, like me, realize that marriage ultimately isn't about cosmic connection—it's about how having a teammate, even if he's not the love of your life, is better than not having one at all.”
¹⁸