From Salon: http://www.salon.com/2014/02/05/stop_telling_single_women_theyre_fabulous_partner/
Being unmarried is now a life choice that gives women power. Can we all collectively drop the air of condescension?
Sara Eckel, The Date Report
Wednesday, Feb 5, 2014
I recently tried to schedule a ladies’ night with three single friends, and it quickly became one of those endless email threads that looped and circled for weeks. Amy has voice lessons on Monday. Angela is ziplining on Saturday. Jen is headed to Vermont to study with a Buddhist master, but she’ll be back a week from Thursday…oh, but that’s the night Amy ushers at the local theater! Play rehearsals, sailing clubs, volunteer work, art openings—these are the things that fill my single friends’ calendars. They’re busy working on the town board, serving meals at the local soup kitchen, and hiking by themselves through the Arizona desert.
My married friends are busy too; making time with them more often involves working around their kids’ school activities or dinners with other couples. They do cool nonfamily-related stuff as well—organizing benefits for Darfur, reporting stories on surfers and jazz musicians—but when you live in a house full of people you love (some of whom depend on you for their survival) there is naturally less incentive to take tango lessons or learn to scuba dive.
In other words, my friends—all roughly the same age, all grown-up professionals—are at different life stages. My married friends are at the place where women over 30 are generally expected to be—doing the work-family juggle, Sundays with the in-laws. My single friends, on the other hand, are exploring fairly new and unchartered terrain—the life of single adults who, while open to the right romantic relationship, can manage beautifully on their own.
But please: Don’t call them fabulous. My unmarried friends are smart, interesting women who are engaged in life. There’s no need to wrap them in a feather boa.
We still don’t really know how to talk about single women in our culture. In decades past, they were lonely spinsters, quietly languishing in their studio apartments. Later, they became hollow careerists who paid too high a price for their ambition. Then, sometime in the late 1990s, society awakened to the fact that actually a lot of unmarried women were having a pretty great time and were in no rush to marry now or maybe ever. This was a vast improvement over the old models, but it too quickly descended into caricature—the boozy party girl, the intellectual lightweight whose brainwork mostly revolved around dating rules and snaring those designer boots at 40% off.
In a 2011 Atlantic essay, Kate Bolick did a nice job of presenting a more accurate and nuanced portrait of today’s single women, describing mature, independent professionals who, either by choice or circumstance, happened to not be married. But she also attributed the growing ranks of unmarried women to a rather grim cause—the lack of marriage-worthy men—explaining that women’s educational and economic gains are creating a “new scarcity” of male peers.
Continue reading at: http://www.salon.com/2014/02/05/stop_telling_single_women_theyre_fabulous_partner/
