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When Will We Be Able to Say, without Getting Ridiculed, that We Want to Stay Single?
Do most singles want to become unsingle?
Posted August 19, 2010
Do most singles want to become unsingle? That's the question I asked recently over at my personal blog. As I argued in Chapter 4 of Singled Out, I think it is a myth that what single people want, more than anything else, is to become unsingle. In my post, I reprinted this excerpt, from p. 84 of Singled Out, in which I described the results from a Pew survey:
"There is an important postscript to the Single Syndrome project, and indeed to all of the industries, such as matchmaking services, online dating sites, and mate-bait book publishing, that have been built on the premise that singles are interested in just one thing. It turns out that, in far bigger numbers than even I had imagined, single people say that they are not ‘looking' at all.
"In the last few months of 2005, the Pew Internet and American Life Project surveyed more than 3,000 American adults of all ages and marital statuses. They asked those who were single (divorced, widowed, or always single) whether they were in a committed relationship. Twenty-six percent said that they were. The biggest group of singles, 55 percent, said that they were not in a committed relationship and that they were not looking for a partner. Only 16 percent of single people said that they were not in a committed relationship and that they were looking. (Three percent did not answer.) Even when the younger singles, ages 18 through 29, were analyzed separately, the number who said that they were not in a committed relationship and were looking for a partner increased only to 22 percent."
Readers have also been discussing the question of whether most singles want to become unsingle in the comments section to this PT post. One person argued that just because singles are not looking for a partner does not mean that they don't ever want one. She also mentioned that among her friends (who are in their 20s), some are not currently looking for a partner, but not one of them wants to stay single.
I have heard that argument ever since I started studying singles.
I think the reader makes an important distinction with her first point - not looking now is not the same as not looking ever. She's right that some singles are focusing on other matters - a job or job training, their education, pursuing various interests, and so forth. Still, 55 percent is a lot of people who are not looking, for whatever reason. More interestingly, what might it mean if lots of people say or give the impression that they are interested in coupling eventually, but for years or even decades, that never ranks very high on their list of active priorities? I'll come back to that.
The observation I've heard so often from 20-somethings, that not one of their friends wants to stay single, is interesting too. The early adult years are a difficult time to be single. As I discussed previously with Wendy Wasson (here and here), they may be the most difficult years. Lots of your peers are preoccupied with dating and mating. If you were not so interested yourself, would you say so or just act like you agree with them? If people with different views do not feel free to speak out, then conventional wisdoms come to be regarded as universal truths. (There's even a term for this in the psychological jargon - pluralistic ignorance.)
Why might singles be reluctant to say how they really do want to live their lives? It is often difficult to feel like the odd person out, no matter what the topic. But with regard to staying single, just look at what you risk by saying so. In another comment from the discussion, a reader argued that some singles are just saying they are happily single because it is too hard "to admit that no one wants them." That's "too emotionally painful and esteem damaging." I bet every Living Single reader who read that comment recognized it as something that other people still think and maybe even say out loud. Rather than subjecting yourself to that, it might seem easier just to go along with the same narrative that everyone else is buying into. You can say that of course you are interested in coupling, but not right now. Two years later? Maybe not quite yet. Ten more years? Pretty soon, I'm getting there.
Perhaps you are not really sure yourself whether you want to stay single. There was never a time when I wanted to get married, but I do remember thinking that maybe the marriage bug just hadn't bitten me yet. There were times when I thought that maybe, eventually, I'd like a long-distance relationship, so that I'd be around a partner only on occasional weekends. It took a long time for me to say to myself, "You know self, this is who you are. You LIKE your single life. That's not going to change."
I'm not saying that the reader's description does not in fact fit some single people. I believe that there are singles who want very much to be coupled, and find it very painful not to be. Maybe they even believe that "no one wants them." My objection is to how quickly other people jump to this denigrating and disdainful interpretation - that if you say you are happily single, you are just fooling yourself; that in fact, no one wants you and you can't deal with that pain. It bothers me that people will often say things like that without apology or qualification. (There are no analogous charges of self-delusion hurled at married people who claim to be happily married.) It adds to the sting of singlism that people not only practice their prejudice and discrimination against singles, but do so unselfconsciously. There are comparable racist, sexist, and homophobic beliefs, but it is not so socially acceptable to state them.
My guess is that we can never truly know how many people want to stay single until that option is routinely recognized as a real and valid possibility. Imagine asking young women or young men in 1956 what they wanted to do with their lives. That's the year in which the age at which Americans first married was as young as it has ever been. Rates of divorce were low, the pill had not yet been approved by the FDA, sex outside of marriage was stigmatized, and children conceived outside of marriage were called "bastards." Sex roles were far more rigid than they are now. Opportunities for women in the workforce were not what they are now.
So if you asked young women in 1956 if they were interested in careers in business, for example, very few would say that they were. Few would say they aspired to be lawyers or Supreme Court justices. Many would claim to be uninterested in working outside of the home in any capacity. Few of the men would say that they would love to be able to stay home with the kids, or that the career that most interests them is nursing.
In 1956, all manner of 20-something year-old women would claim that not one of their friends wants to work outside of the home. They would say that not one of their friends wants to be a business person or a CEO or a lawyer. The men would say that they do not know even one person who wants to cut back on work and stay home with the kids.
We now take it for granted that women and men can have all sorts of different interests, and that those interests are not so rigidly sorted by sex. But a half-century ago, those possibilities were not part of our ordinary cultural conversations. In the conventional wisdom of the time - and in magazines, movies, books, and television shows - women wanted to stay home and men wanted to go out and work in "manly" jobs.
What I am trying to do in my writing and speaking about singles is to widen the range of possible ways to lead a life without getting ridiculed or denigrated or dismissed as self-deceiving. Let's see what happens when more singles admit that they like their single lives and are not seeking to become unsingle. Let's see what happens when there are more unapologetically single characters in novels, movies, and the rest of the media. Let's see what happens when more lifelong singles can step into high-profile public positions and not get shot down or put on the defensive for living single.
When that happens, then let's talk. Will 20-somethings still claim that they do not know even one person who wants to stay single? Will it still be okay for others to say, without qualification or apology, that singles who say they are happy are just fooling themselves because they can't stand the pain of admitting that "no one wants them"?
