Your site is a delight! I came to singlehood late, it's where I should have been all along and I knew it along the way. But my generation was raised to marry - in fact on my 18th birthday mother collared me and said point-blank it was time to find a husband.

There is no misery in the world like being in a bad marriage and I stuck it through 4 kids. Then I remarried (one more child) and was widowed after 35 years. This marriage was close to as-good-as-it-gets and even then I kept wondering why there couldn't be a better way. We were self-employed and worked together and I used to travel alone, a lot--my salvation most likely.

What on earth is the math question for?

Little old ladies who are poor as dirt have their own set of problems - I keep looking for a blog on that subject but we are the invisibles.

Think I was born to be a recluse - moved to a strange (in all ways) small town where I know no one after 2 years and most of the time actually feel that's ok. I have friends--2 dogs, large and larger, and 2 cats, mean and meek.

I'm going nowhere with this, just couldn't resist writing to you.

I started to think about the changes of society when all this fuzz about women being more and more independent from man. This of course would have tremendous changes in society and the way we see the structure and the concepts of family. I'm a "single for life". And as much as I want to have a family and everything, I know that is not THAT important as I'm growing as a very fulfilled person. My career is getting more and more exciting (I'm finishing my Master's now). I work for the Youth Red Cross, I traveled more then many people in the world, and I have a ever growing circle of very good friends, from many distinct places in the world. And I'm very thankful for all this.

The things you talk about is much more then a statement, is a fact that in someway depict our society as something that probably will change the world in a good way that is hard to predict. I don't know what will come out from all this growing "movement" of happy singles, but my guess is that we all are discovering and remodeling the foundations of society in someway. As much as I believe that family is very important for human kind, this new scenario is only an effect of a very known cause: the old concept of family doesn't work anymore. Well, the numbers of divorces say for themselves.

The thing is, we all are diving in a century of self discover. THAT is the most important thing in our life.

When in human history we could have so many opportunities to know our selves and improve intellectual, moral and even spiritually? Only knowing ourselves honestly will change our lives, the lives we are connected to, and most probably in the future, the lives of our family (whatever this may be).

To build a solid house, the foundations must be built in rock, not in sand. With out a solid foundation the house will ruin soon or later.

In the past, to have a family was a necessity, almost in some cases a matter of survival, to obtain freedom or even money (or both). Now the necessity is to know ourselves. I don't know better path to create a new and healthier concept of family, where all the parts are psychologically stable and with enough maturity to face the challenges of mutual life and raise better and longer new generations.

Thanks for your work. It is very important and will get more critical on the next decades.

I had been married for almost 25 years and almost 60 when my husband left me - for a man. It wasn't that he left me for a man that threw me; it was that I was alone. On the 12th day, I joined an online dating service and over a three-year period literally went out with over 100 men. Along the way I kept re-inventing myself until on the 3rd anniversary of joining an online dating service, I was ready to stop. I was also ready to write a book about my experience. I realized that online dating can be a wonderful experience even when you're happy being single. The title is "The Intelligent Woman's Guide To Online Dating." I hope the title speaks for itself.

Bella,
This is no lie: I am glad you ditched deception research and opted to study singles. I come to our little corner of the world on a dily basis. Your blogs provide insight and objective information on what it is to be single. This particular post I think is one of the more inspirational - at least for me. You have put us singles right on the map, where we belong with everyone esle - it seems to be spawning other similar websites, books and thought processes.

Being single is not a plight. We all know this. But society *believes* it is. When I tell coupled or married individuals that I am perfectly content being single, they seem to be off-put. I think it causes people to think really whether they must be in a relationship (lifelong) to be content - and in some cases I think they realize they don't. To me, that seems lonely....

As always, thanks for your insights.

D.C.

Is it really a special time? I was listening to post-election gobbledigook about women in the workforce and was amused. At no time in my family's American history have women -not- worked outside the home, and in most generations there has been at least one female cousin who lived away from the family home and never did marry. This is true across my ethnic group, and I suspect it may also be true in families with last names like "de Paulo")

Tangent: have you seen "My Brilliant Career"? It's a movie taken from a biographical novel about Miles Franklin, a life-long single. She was born at the edge of the Snowy Mountains in Australia in the 1870s.

full grown single:
My co-blogger Lisa actually saw that movie "My Brilliant Career"; it was one of the things that inspired her shortly thereafter to start blogging about the need to unpathologize singleness! I still need to see it, though. . . = ) --CC