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Single people, we are having a moment. That happens sometimes. The culture takes a collective break from its raucous and tiresome matrimania, long enough to notice that single life – wow, there's something to that! – before doing an about-face to rush headlong back to the latest episode of "The Bachelor."
The most recent "moment" before this one happened in late 2011 and early 2012. That's when stories about single life graced the covers of Atlantic magazine, the Washington Post magazine, and Boston magazine; NPR asked us single people to Tell Me More; Going Solo was published; and thoughtful essays appeared at Slate, the Daily Beast, and well, just about everywhere. (You can find all those links, and other relevant ones, here.)
Considering that Americans living their lives outside of the Married Couples Club have comprised more than 40 percent of the adult population for well over a decade, we should not need "moments." We should already have a huge presence in cultural conversations, in politics, the marketplace, and everywhere else. Not a special presence, but an assumed one. Maybe someday.
The 2015 singles' moment is about the many ways of living outside of marriage and nuclear families. In Harper's, the April cover story was "Going It Alone." Aeon published "She Wants to Be Alone." At the Rumpus, the story, "Like a Rock," was in important ways an ode to the rock-solid sustenance of friendship. This weekend in the New York Times, "What the Single Ladies Have Wanted for More than a Century" highlights living arrangements that offer single people both community and privacy (one of the themes of my forthcoming How We Live Now).
The momentum for The Moment has many sources, but probably the most powerful among them is the publication of Kate Bolick's new book, Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own. (I already reviewed the book for Psych Central, where I have my "Single at Heart" blog, so you can find out more about it there. Or type "Bolick Spinster" and find reviews of it in just about every major publication.) As you may have guessed from the title, even if you haven't read the book or any of the reviews, Bolick is reclaiming the spinster label, dusting off its dowdy, dated, and derogatory grime, and presenting it as a proud, shiny contemporary moniker.
So far, I'm all in.
But here's the intriguing twist. Kate Bolick doesn't want single women to have the new and improved spinster label all to themselves:
"My aim is…to offer it [the spinster label] up as a shorthand for holding on to that in you which is independent and self-sufficient, whether you're single or coupled.
"If you're single, whether never-married, divorced, or widowed, you can carry the word spinster like a talisman, a constant reminder that you're in very good company – indeed, part of a long and noble tradition of women past and present living on their own terms."
Then she goes on to explain how coupled people can lay claim to what's good about being a spinster, too.
That inspired Ann Friedman, at Talking Points Memo, to ask, "Honorary spinster: Can I be a 'single lady' without being single?" At Raw Story, Amanda Marcotte had something to say about that, too.
So do I. My first reaction was NO. You don't get to claim The Best of Single Life without actually living single. But then again, I think there are people who are Single at Heart who are coupled or even married. What makes them single at heart is the realization that single life would actually be their most meaningful or authentic life. They ended up coupled, maybe because of societal expectations and pressures, and perhaps stay coupled because of the obligations they've taken on, but now they know – that's not who they really are.
What a nice change, though – coupled people looking at single people's lives not with pity or condescension but envy. A "moment," indeed.
[Notes. Thanks to Vicki Larson for the heads-up about some of these articles. I'll have more to say about Spinster and the conversations around it in other blog posts. Thanks to everyone sending me other relevant articles – I'll get to more of them soon. And thanks, too, to Julia Klein. I don't know her, but in her review of Spinster, she called Singled Out "groundbreaking."]
