All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation (41 page)

For the past twelve years, Heidi said, she has chosen to be single and self-sufficient. “I chose it, very specifically,” she said. After the divorce, she quit drinking, pursued therapy, and earned a master's degree from Harvard, the institution that she used to brag about her husband having attended. “I'd thought I needed to marry into it, but my year there showed me that I could own it for myself,” she said.

Heidi's husband loved being married. He is remarried, with children. Heidi and her ex remain friends; he was her lawyer for a business she started with some classmates from Harvard.

Through many lenses, the normalization of divorce has been terrifically liberating for women. It has allowed them to escape bad marriages, thus reducing rates of domestic violence; it has reduced the incidence of wives murdering their husbands and of children growing up in the shadow of miserably riven, but permanently bound, parents. For women like Molly and Heidi, divorce has been key to liberation.

It's also true, however, that divorce is among the most dangerous direct consequences of marriage. As numerous studies have shown, divorce leaves many women more unhappy, unhealthy, and impoverished than not marrying at all.

Thus, it is good news that women are marrying later and less frequently. The divorce rate, which skyrocketed in the 1970s, has been declining, slightly but steadily, since 1980, the years during which women increasingly opted to forego early marriage.
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More strikingly, the people for whom the rates have plunged most dramatically are those who are staying single longest.

Interestingly, the segment of the population for whom the divorce rate has
risen
over the past twenty years is baby boomers (those born between 1946 and 1964), who married, often young, and at a moment before marriage had begun to be reformed.
³³

For those who are somewhere between single and married, or are unsure when or where or if they ever will land on one marital identity or another, there are millions of in-betweens. Hanna Rosin has described her realization that “we've invented this third kind of relationship which is sexually satisfying, emotionally satisfying, has a lot of intimacy and isn't on the road to marriage. It's hard to imagine, but it's a different kind of thing.”
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I don't find it at all hard to imagine! It's how most of the people I've known of my generation have lived our lives: moving in and out of relationships of varying quality and duration. We have fallen in and out of love, in and out of lust. We've had great relationships that took us to new places, emotionally and sometimes geographically, and gruesome duds that have taught us volumes about what we
don't
want from life or partnerships.

Like our platonic friends, our partners, lovers, girlfriends, and boyfriends steer us through loss and grief and illness. I've had friends who have been with partners through cancer treatments and diabetes diagnoses, through the death of parents and the loss of jobs, who have later broken up with those people, with relief or with sorrow, good feelings or bitterness. But the experiences of having traveled through these defining moments of adulthood together are etched in them; the connection lingers. Our old partners don't cease to matter or to exist in our memories or in our makeup just because we don't marry them.

Journalist Jen Doll summed it up in her
Village Voice
piece on single women in New York: “The man who introduced you to really good bourbon; the guy with kids who helped you remember why you do, or don't, want them for yourself; the bisexual coworker; the ‘poonhound;' the one that got away; and the one you let get away on purpose—they all have a place in your dating life. Don't regret them.”

When and if we do decide to commit permanently to someone, we bring to the partnership the lessons and influence of our other, former partners. That's not a bad thing.

And while the marriage rate is low, our rates of unmarried cohabitation are surging. In a report about female reproduction in America in 2008, demographers found that nearly thirty percent of unmarried mothers were living with a committed partner, either of the same sex or the opposite sex.
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Americans are not simply cycling through unmarried partners helter-skelter; they're moving in, committing to them in a way that may not be marriage, but is not any less real.

Living together without marrying works for lots of people who, for a variety of reasons, do not want to wed. It can assure legal independence, while giving couples a chance to see how they function together, how well they share space, whether they enjoy quotidian intimacy with each other. Cohabitation can be a leadup to marriage or an alternative to it, a way to gain some of the benefits of long-term partnership—daily contact and affection, bill splitting—without engaging a more formal and thus, confining, set of social and legal expectations. And they may be happier commitments.

The Gallup Organization visited 136 countries in 2006 and 2007, asking respondents if they had experienced a lot of love on the previous day. The groups least likely to have said that they experienced love were the divorced and widowed and, while married people responded affirmatively more often than single people, unmarried couples who lived together reported even more love than their married counterparts.
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Anita Hill, pathologized as a desperate and crazed single woman in 1991, has, for many years, been in a long-term relationship with Chuck Malone. She met him at a restaurant not long after moving to Boston to teach at Brandeis University. The two live separately but see each other every day; they would marry, Hill said, “But I don't want to defer to convention. We'd marry each other, but we don't see why we should have to marry.”

Their situation, Hill said, “Works. We are happy as we are.”

“In some ways, I don't think of myself as the same single person status as I had before I got involved with Chuck,” said Hill. “But I want people to
understand that you can have a good life and not be married.” This message is particularly important, she said, for black women. “We know what the numbers are and we know that specifically among African-American women the percentage of never-married women is higher than the general population,” said Hill. “And I want everyone to understand that you can have a good life, despite what convention says, and be single. That doesn't mean you have to be against marriage. It just means that there are choices that society should not impose on you.”

That Hill directs this message specifically at African-American women makes sense. They are the group who are most regularly told that their low marriage rates make them problematic. Many African-American women whom I interviewed for this book expressed a view that the partnership deck is stacked against them, in part because of their race and assumptions people make about them.

Journalist Dodai Stewart said that online dating worked best for her in her youth, because the men who clicked on her profile were just looking for a fun relationship. As she's gotten older, she imagines them saying, “I want to settle down and she's not going to be black.” Stewart has had committed relationships with men who are Chicano and Korean, but said, “The numbers are against me. Black women are the bottom rung. Clicking through, men want to see young and they want to see white or Asian, maybe Latina. It's not just black guys. It's Asian guys, white guys . . . nobody wants black women, basically.”

The dating site OkCupid studied this, and indeed found that “Men don't write black women back. Or rather, they write them back far less often than they should. Black women reply the most, yet get by far the fewest replies. Essentially, every race—including other blacks—singles them out for the cold shoulder.”
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Meanwhile, television commentator Nancy Giles despairs of the shortage of attractive men for black women to partner with. She recalled watching Barack Obama speak at the Democratic convention in 2004 with a college friend, and both of them joking “Where was
he
at Oberlin? Where are all those guys and this new breed of educated, smart, funny black guys? When we went to school they weren't really there.” When she considers online dating, she feels torn about pursuing men
who aren't black. “It's difficult as a woman of color, because there are all these issues of betraying your race,” she said, recalling a black friend who ignored the cat-calling of a homeless man on the street, only to have him yell after her, “You probably prefer white men! You're what's wrong with the black race!”

These are among the grim and often contradictory messages thrown at black women: you're too independent, no one will want you; there aren't any black men if you do want them; why don't you want a black man? Do you think you're too good for a man? You're what's wrong with the race. What's wrong with you?

“It all goes back to that
Newsweek
article about getting killed by a terrorist,” said Giles. “It's mean and depressing. It's not even subliminal messaging, it's pretty much liminal: that smart women are going to end up getting punished.” In that old
Newsweek
article, researchers asserted that an unmarried, thirty-year-old, college-educated woman had a 20 percent chance of marriage and, by forty, no more than a 2.6 percent shot. It was part of a panicky news cycle catalogued scrupulously by journalist Susan Faludi in her 1991 best-seller,
Backlash
, in which the message sent to independent women was that they faced a purported shortage
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of men to marry.

The message that high-achieving women will be punished by spinsterhood has not abated in the past three decades, despite the evidence that high-achieving women are increasingly the
most
likely to marry. And, while almost no ethnicity or religion has been spared pro-marriage messaging, perhaps the most relentless spotlight has been trained on black women, not just by white conservatives looking to punish them politically, but by black men obsessed by black female independence, despite the fact that, as journalist Tami Winfrey Harris has pointed out, while 45.5 percent of black women over fifteen have never been married, 48.9 percent of black men in the same category haven't been either.
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Entertainer Steve Harvey has co-hosted several television specials focusing on successful black women whom he has urged to lower their standards to find men. In 2009, he published the best-selling dating advice book,
Act Like a Lady; Think Like a Man
, and took a similar message to
Oprah
. In 2011, R&B singer Tyrese gave an interview in which he
spoke to black women “on this independent kick [who say] I don't need no man.” To those women, Tyrese said, “You're going to independent your way into loneliness.”
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In the midst of all these messages, it's easy to miss a reality: While patterns of marriage and independent life for African-Americans have
always
differed from the patterns of their white counterparts, the purported crisis of permanent singlehood for black women isn't quite as extreme as it's made out to be. In the
New York Times
, Angela Stanley, writing about how “few things are more irritating than the unsolicited comments I get that black women, like me, are unlikely to marry,” refuted the popular claim that more than 70 percent of black women have never been married by pointing out that that percentage only applied to women between the ages of twenty-five and twenty-nine, and that, by the time black women turned fifty-five, only thirteen percent of them had never been married.

“Black women marry later,” wrote Stanley. “But they do marry.”

Susana Morris, English professor at Auburn University in Alabama, said that, while, in her thirties, most of her white friends are married and her black friends remain single, she doesn't feel anxiety about
marriage
, “I just would like to go on a date.” Morris wants to find someone she can have a conversation with. “I'm interested in partnership [more than] marriage,” she said. What
is
anxiety provoking, she continued, “Is that every time you open a magazine, a book, or turn on the television, you hear that something's wrong with you as a black woman. You're too fat, too loud, don't nobody want to marry you.
That
is anxiety producing.” Echoing Stanley and Anita Hill, Morris argued that the “purposeful misdirection and misinformation” of the media's pathologizing of single black womanhood masks the fact that “single people are living in a variety of healthy ways that are just not being accounted for.”

Writer Helena Andrews wrote, in 2012, about how “according to the data—and the media that are obsessed with it—I'm screwed. As a thirty-one-year-old, college-educated black woman who's never been married, everywhere I turn, the odds of finding a good man are against me. That is, of course, until I turn over every morning to the man sleeping next to me. He is (gasp) black. He is (
quelle surprise!
) college educated. He isn't
a felon, a deadbeat, a father of illegitimate children, or a cheat—all the categories women like me are forced to choose from, according to the seemingly never-ending stories about the ‘crisis' of black marriage. Attention, media! There is no crisis in my bedroom.”
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When talking about her unmarried relationship with Chuck Malone, Anita Hill acknowledged that the improvisational nature of their bond is made easier by the fact that they do not have children. “It becomes much more complicated for women who want children and who would like to have a partner raising children with them,” she said. Hill has also begun to understand some of the disadvantages that come with choosing to remain unmarried in a world still designed for married people.