Sex and the Single Girl: The Unmarried Woman's Guide to Men (2 page)

Are there enough single men to go around these days in the U.S. or lots more single women than men? You might think more of
us
but technically that isn’t the case (until a woman is over 40). Ages 25 to 29, the U.S. Census reports 4,509,000 unmarried women, 5,146,000 single men. Ages 35 to 39 still
more
men—3,860,000 of them to 3,656,000 of us. Nice going! Those figures don’t report homosexuality, of course—men not available to females for sex or romance; such delineation could bring the available-men figures down a bit.

I should point out that female homosexuals are acknowledged and taken more than seriously these days, weddings reported in newspapers, chronicled on television. After age 40, women begin to outnumber men and over 60, don’t ask! Ages 65 to 69, 2,031,000 women, 265,000 men. Yikes! It gets
worse.
Ages 70 to 74, 2,412,000 women to 814 men. If your widowed or divorced mommy is looking for somebody to wed, bed or just date, her chances would seem maybe a little stronger than winning the Publisher’s Clearing House sweepstakes—you know, subscribe to
Reader’s Digest
,
G.Q.
and
House Beautiful
and get ready to receive 10 million in your mailbox. These people never get near the word “possible” in their promotion, only the words “get ready to win!” I believe the government has cracked down a little on their promises. Whatever, the dating/mating possibilities for an older single woman seem to be skinny as seaweed.

What do single women complain about in the behavior of their men these days? My industrial-strength charmer-friend Nancy says they don’t know how to give compliments the way we do. Nancy says they could lie a little—“You have the most beautiful body,” “Your lips are ripe raspberries—I could nibble all afternoon,” even compliment on something that isn’t wonderful. She would like to see them carry on in bed the way
we
do. After first exposure of his penis, “Oh, that’s so
beautiful
—do you carry that around with you all day? Don’t you need some kind of support?” Are they fearful of being taken advantage of if they flatter, Nancy wonders. Alas, some single men are already into the “pamper me” syndrome even before a ring circles your fourth digit. “I’ll catch the opening stock prices, honey, okay? You scramble the eggs.”

What about money and the single girl? Some young women seem to fantasize that riches ought to just float down from the treetops. They envy J. Lo and Britney Spears not so much their men and their fame as their moola …
millions
coming in at such a tiny age. Well, in any era, glitzy ones wallow in their golden slush piles but they aren’t us. Would it be maybe a good idea to try to
marry
rich? The idea always surfaces but can’t swim! Our heroine knows rich bachelors are less plentiful than free cosmetic surgery and the small crop can be maddeningly choosy.

Can Tom Cruise and Donald Trump marry
anybody
or not? So let’s skip celebrity bank-account envy or trying to acquire capital by acquiring his and get on with asking our boss to put the raise through before Christmas, socking a bit more into the I.R.A., the mutual fund, the savings account. As mentioned earlier, all categories of women find it easier hauling in money through their work these days if they want to pack the supplies in the knapsack, sharpen the picks, tie the rope around their middles and start climbing! Being a wildly successful career woman, single or married, isn’t all roses and honeysuckle of course.

A successful climber I know (C.E.O. of a small electronics firm, written up in
Forbes
magazine), says she is so exhausted from being a dynamo, stretched tighter than a body stocking over a pitcher of martinis (okay,
you
come up with an analogy!) she is thinking of announcing a baby which she won’t really have—an “escape baby” she calls it—so she can go home, care for two children already there, and resume being a regular human being.

Okay, your single years should surely be delicious at least
some
of the time and I’ll repeat something I said in the original book, still true now: Married women are as often as not envying
you
! I’m grateful to my toesies for my 37 years of being single. David says isn’t it a shame we didn’t know each other earlier, could have married sooner, think of all the years we missed, years that were wasted. David, I tell him, they weren’t wasted! You had two other wives … are they to be considered something for the garbage disposal? One of them gave you a son—not with us now, alas. I had romances. I’ve never gone into detail about them with David but they were frisky enough (if sometimes traumatic) so that I never have to be unfaithful
now
wondering what’s out there in the romance/sex department.

I
know
what’s out there—not as good as what I have. Some famous person—don’t remember who—said “life is what happens while you’re making other plans.” There are soul-numbing, devastating days for single women
and
married ones, even some for the other sex. I’m counting on you to enjoy the good ones, make life special for people around you because you’ve got the love, compassion, the energy, the need inside of you to
do
that! Would you please get started!

I
MARRIED FOR THE
first time at thirty-seven. I got the man I wanted. It
could
be construed as something of a miracle considering how old
I
was and how eligible
he
was.

David is a motion picture producer, forty-four, brainy, charming and sexy. He was sought after by many a Hollywood starlet as well as some less flamboyant but more deadly types. And
I
got him! We have two Mercedes-Benzes, one hundred acres of virgin forest near San Francisco, a Mediterranean house overlooking the Pacific, a full-time maid and a good life.

I am not beautiful, or even pretty. I once had the world’s worst case of acne. I am not bosomy or brilliant. I grew up in a small town. I didn’t go to college. My family was, and is, desperately poor and I have always helped support them. I’m an introvert and I am sometimes mean and cranky.

But
I
don’t think it’s a miracle that I married my husband.

I think I deserved him! For seventeen years I worked hard to become the kind of woman who might interest him. And when he finally walked into my life I was just worldly enough, relaxed enough, financially secure enough (for I also worked hard at my job) and adorned with enough glitter to attract him. He wouldn’t have looked at me when I was twenty, and I wouldn’t have known what to do with
him.

There is a tidal wave of misinformation these days about how many more marriageable women there are than men (that part is true enough) and how tough is the plight of the single woman—spinster, widow, divorcee.

I think a single woman’s biggest problem is coping with the people who are trying to marry her off! She is so driven by herself and her well-meaning but addlepated friends to become married that her whole existence seems to be an apology for
not
being married. Finding
him
is all she can think about or talk about when (a) she may not be psychologically ready for marriage; (b) there is no available husband for every girl at the time she wants one; and (c) her years as a single woman can be too rewarding to rush out of.

Although many’s the time I was sure I would die alone in my spinster’s bed, I could never bring myself to marry just to get married. If I had, I would have missed a great deal of misery along the way, no doubt, but also a great deal of fun.

I think marriage is insurance for the
worst
years of your life. During your best years you don’t need a husband. You do need a man of course every step of the way, and they are often cheaper emotionally and a lot more fun by the dozen.

I believe that as many women over thirty marry out of fear of being alone someday—not necessarily now but
some
day—as for love of or compatibility with a particular man. The plan seems to be to get someone while the getting’s good and by the time you lose your looks he’ll be too securely glued to you to get away.

Isn’t it silly? A man can leave a woman at fifty (though it may cost him some dough) as surely as you can leave dishes in the sink. He can leave any time
before
then too, and so may you leave
him
when you find your football hero developing into the town drunk. Then you have it all to do over again as if you hadn’t gobbled him up in girlish haste.

How much saner and sweeter to marry when you have both jelled. And how much safer to marry with part of the play out of his system
and yours.
It takes guts. It can be lonely out there out of step with the rest of the folks. And you may
not
find somebody later. But since you’re not finding somebody
sooner
as things stand, wouldn’t it be better to stop driving … to stop fretting … to start recognizing what you have
now
?

As for marrying to have children, you can have babies until you’re forty or older. And if you happen to die before
they
are forty, at least you haven’t lingered into their middle age to be a doddering old bore. You also avoid those tiresome years as an unpaid baby sitter.

Frankly, the magazines and their marriage statistics give me a royal pain.

There is a more important truth that magazines never deal with, that single women are too brainwashed to figure out, that married women know but won’t admit, that married men
and
single men endorse in a body, and that is that the single woman, far from being a creature to be pitied and patronized, is emerging as the newest glamour girl of our times.

She is engaging because she lives by her wits. She supports herself. She has had to sharpen her personality and mental resources to a glitter in order to survive in a competitive world and the sharpening looks good. Economically she is a dream. She is not a parasite, a dependent, a scrounger, a sponger or a bum. She is a giver, not a taker, a winner and not a loser.

Why else is she attractive? Because she isn’t married, that’s why! She is free to be The Girl in a man’s life or at least his vision of The Girl, whether he is married or single himself.

When a man thinks of a married woman, no matter how lovely she is, he must inevitably picture her greeting her husband at the door with a martini or warmer welcome, fixing little children’s lunches or scrubbing them down because they’ve fallen into a mudhole. She is somebody else’s wife and somebody else’s mother.

When a man thinks of a single woman, he pictures her alone in her apartment, smooth legs sheathed in pink silk Capri pants, lying tantalizingly among dozens of satin cushions, trying to read but not very successfully, for he is in that room—filling her thoughts, her dreams, her life.

Why else
is
a single woman attractive? She has more time and often more money to spend on herself. She has the extra twenty minutes to exercise every day, an hour to make up her face for their date. She has all day Saturday to whip up a silly, wonderful cotton brocade tea coat to entertain him in next day or hours to find it at a bargain sale.

Besides making herself physically more inviting, she has the freedom to furnish her mind. She can read Proust, learn Spanish, study
Time
,
Newsweek
and
The Wall Street Journal.

Most importantly, a single woman, even if she is a file clerk, moves in the world of men. She knows their language—the language of retailing, advertising, motion pictures, exporting, shipbuilding. Her world is a far more colorful world than the one of P.T.A., Dr. Spock and the jammed clothes dryer.

A single woman never has to drudge. She can get her housework over within one good hour Saturday morning plus one other hour to iron blouses and white collars. She need never break her fingernails or her spirit waxing a playroom or cleaning out the garage.

She has more money for clothes and for trips than any but a wealthily married few.

Sex—What of It?

Theoretically a “nice” single woman has no sex life. What nonsense! She has a better sex life than most of her married friends. She need never be bored with one man per lifetime. Her choice of partners is endless and they seek
her.
They never come to her bed duty-bound. Her married friends refer to her pursuers as wolves, but actually many of them turn out to be lambs—to be shorn and worn by her.

Sex of course is more than the act of coitus. It begins with the delicious feeling of attraction between two people. It may never go further, but sex it is. And a single woman may promote the attraction, bask in the sensation, drink it like wine and pour it over her like blossoms, with never a guilty twinge. She can promise with a look, a touch, a letter or a kiss—and she doesn’t have to deliver. She can be maddeningly hypocritical and, after arousing desire, insist that it be shut off by stating she wants to be chaste for the man she marries. Her pursuer may strangle her with his necktie, but he can’t
argue
with her. A flirtatious married woman is expected to Go Through With Things.

Since for a female getting there is at
least
half the fun, a single woman has reason to prize the luxury of taking long, gossamer, attenuated, pulsating trips before finally arriving in bed. A married woman and her husband have precious little time and energy for romance after they’ve put the house, animals and children to bed. A married woman with her lover is on an even tighter schedule.

During and after an affair, a single woman suffers emotional stress. Do you think a married woman can bring one off more blissfully free of strain? (One of my close friends, married, committed suicide over a feckless lover. Another is currently in a state of fingernail-biting hysteria.) And I would rather be the other woman than the woman who watches a man
stray
from her.

Yet, while indulging her libido, which she has plenty of if she is young and healthy, it
is
still possible for the single woman to be a lady, to be highly respected and even envied if she is successful in her work.