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I’ve been studying singlehood for decades, and from the very beginning, I’ve been struck by just how many of the writings about single people have been written for, by, or about single women. I crave more diverse perspectives; we all have so much to learn from them. When I discovered the thoughtful writings of Lucas Bradley on “The Deliberately Single Man,” I immediately asked if he would share some of his ideas with Living Single readers. I am so grateful that he agreed.
Guest Post by Lucas Bradley
As a 37-year-old, life-long single man, I’ve had the privilege of discovering that singlehood has its own distinct, rewarding stages. I think this can be a somewhat surprising revelation for people who have been long-term singles, as nothing in our cultural training leads us to believe this is the case. Instead, we only hear about the rewarding stages couples experience—courtship, the infatuation phase, weddings, settling into the “mature” love of old age. In contrast, watch enough TV and you see being single has only one stage: “I’m miserable, please get me out of here.”
I reached the beginning of one of these pivotal stages around the age of 30. That’s when I really started to dig into how three decades of cultural conditioning that said that being single will never measure up to being coupled affected how I looked at myself and the world around me. I immediately found the work of Bella DePaulo right here on her Living Single blog, and spent hours reading months’ worth of posts. In the years since, I can declare two undisputed facts about the many people whose empowering stories of singlehood have inspired me. One, they have helped me completely reframe how I view my life, and two, they have almost exclusively been women.
Bearing witness to all these amazing women willing to upend narratives about singlehood made me realize how desperately single manhood needed a new framework around which to operate. I have been developing such a framework in my writings about The Deliberately Single Man.
The Deliberately Single Man
Who is the Deliberately Single Man? He cultivates the historically “feminine” qualities of domestic, social, and emotional literacy in order to live a connected and dignified life. For example, domestically, he learns to plan and make healthy meals and is able to develop an aesthetic for his living space that suits his tastes. Socially, he works to maintain ties with those he is close to by initiating get-togethers and remembering birthdays and other milestones. Emotionally, he tries to stay curious and non-judgmental about his thoughts and feelings and cultivate appropriate outlets for his emotions.
The Deliberately Single Man also re-imagines love in a way that empowers those he loves rather than limiting them with a byzantine set of rules and expectations. He recognizes that romantic love is not the only road to wholeness and cultivates many other forms of love available to him. He realizes that his singlehood, far from being what’s holding him back, can actually be the primary engine for his growth as a person.
Mine is just one framework around which single manhood can be reimagined. We need many more like it, because too many single men have been twisting in the wind. That is the result of a culture that combines backwards views of singlehood with toxic, outdated views of manhood. Our patriarchal society still leads us to believe that men are in crisis because of women.
The Disturbing “Incel” Forums
The most explicit and disturbing form of toxic manhood can be found online on “incel,” or involuntarily celibate, forums, where single men who can’t get sex or girlfriends rage about how much they hate women. Much more common is the subtle way mainstream discussions of the “masculinity crisis” lay the blame at the feet of women. Think about how often we see the advancement of women framed as a zero-sum game. If I tell you one of the reasons men are struggling is because of declining rates of educational attainment, and in the next sentence give you the statistics of women’s increasing educational attainment without any other context, it’s too easy to draw the conclusion that men are declining because women are advancing.
All this really goes into overdrive when the handwringing begins about the number of years of their lives today’s men are likely to spend outside of marriage (inevitably framed as a bad thing). Here again, ladies, society is pretty sure this is all your fault. You simply don’t “need” us anymore, what with all of your educational and career advancements and access to capital. And if you do want us, we men are so darned intimidated by you now. Even if you can talk about geopolitics for hours, you’d better make sure you still retain the ability to sputter sentence fragments in between smiles in order not to scare us off.
The anxieties around all these issues occasionally erupt on mainstream news or talk platforms when someone declares that the central reason men are struggling these days is because “they just can’t be ‘men’” in the same sense that their fathers and grandfathers were. Loudly complaining that it’s not 1953 anymore isn’t a life strategy—it’s a self-defeating pity party.
A New Approach to Singlehood and Manhood
The Deliberately Single Man looks at not just singlehood differently, but manhood differently. He sees that the goal of our society’s patriarchal manhood is to assure his dominance by the brute force of social conditioning, all while simultaneously coddling him into a mediocrity that leaves him unable to function without women running substantial parts of his social, emotional, and domestic life. He can resist that. For the Deliberately Single Man, manhood can mean taking responsibility for the development of every inch of every aspect of his life.
His manhood is also marked by knowing when women need to lead, and there is no better case in point than the singlehood positivity movement. Legions of women are now, and have been for a while, showing us what life can look like when this oppressive patriarchal system is cast off. Men, let’s follow their lead and learn from the wisdom they’ve gained to do our part in making that future a reality.
Lucas Bradley is a life-long single man who feels weird telling engaged people “congratulations.” He contemplates single life from his home in Loves Park, Illinois, that he shares with his cat, Perry.
