CHAPTER SEVEN
There is a thin and pretty woman in New York who thinks that Bloomingdale’s is the loneliest store in the world because, on Saturdays, so many couples shop there.
—THE NEW YORK TIMES, 1974
There is a single woman in New York, bright and accomplished, who dreads nightfall, when darkness hugs the city and lights go on in warm kitchens.
—THE NEW YORK TIMES, 1987
I am so lonely I could die. I wake, realize I don’t have a boyfriend and put my head in the oven…. I go to parties, night classes, museums, various clubs and mixers with my eyelashes curled hopefully and am wracked with disappointment to find only more hopeful women with curled eyelashes. I go to dinner parties and my throat seizes up with envy as I watch the happy couples, who are my friends. My nights are long with longing. Grief. Also, I have a large bridge in New York to sell you. Ho. Ho. Ho.
—CYNTHIA HEIMEL, PLAYBOY, 1997
To close this book, I naturally set out to identify the preeminent single icons of the moment, and to analyze how they had evolved out of all the many preceding incarnations. Most important, I needed to know if “single icon” as a term was still culturally relevant. The work itself at least seemed easier. After months of handling frail brown-edged magazines and fifth-generation copies of out-of-print books, I enjoyed arriving at my Internet portal of choice and typing in single women. As it turned out, that was like typing in the name of a continent: an entity so massive and complex that thousands of possible routes crossed any small section.
After several hours spent on-line I changed my metaphor. Single life seemed more like a huge, overcrowded refugee camp, the refugees desperate for help in escaping.
Here is the world’s most extensive catalogue of single life and thought, and it is dominated by a highly particularized collection of personal ads, and popular e-dating services, interspersed with creepy bride-buying offerings. (“Bulgarian girls! Russian, as well as from the Belarus and Ukraine! Also beautiful girls who will make fine wives from Greece and Turkey!”) Hoping to find less depressing expressions of single life at this point, I hung around in the ubiquitous chat rooms. But these “rooms,” with their cheesy masquerade-ball requirements, seem as awkward and unnatural a place to communicate as the sixties-era “trystorium.” (That included, as you may remember, rooftop daiquiri parties and go-go coed Laundromats.) The singular Web sites and e-zines (“Leather spinsters on the Web—the e-zine for the Happily Unmarried Woman”; “Young Spinster—No Marriage Prospects, No Apologies”) seemed more promising. Here was a new forum for the sardonic, faux-masochistic single sensibility—the self-deprecating jokiness of female stand-up comics—but mixed with fairly serious tables of contents.
Unfortunately, these sites are infested, as are the personals and chat rooms, with intrusive pop-up windows, the first and highest form of Internet graffiti. Some of these ads are for personal services (“alluring” hair braids; all-over body waxing; phone sex to aid in masturbation), while some hype “reconstruct-your-entire-self” kinds of books accompanied by inspirational CDs. A subcategory of these single books—a specimen rampant on Amazon.com—is the wiseass advice manual or what I think of as the clever novelette. The tone is sarcastic and funny, and each comes with lots of reassuring space between the paragraphs and a shiny “cool-girl” cover. (Cool-girl covers are all alike: They feature a skinny, dark-haired, red-nailed cartoon girl wearing a little black dress. Either her arms are folded, or she is smoking. The titles, in retro fifties-era fonts, announce the Go-Girls Guide or Grrrrrl’s Rules for Love and Life, although some titles are long and have a kind of Borscht Belt cuteness, recalling Sheila Levine Is Dead and Living in New York. My favorite in this category: Even God Is Single, So Why Are You Giving Me a Hard Time?)
After touring the cyber singles world, I happily returned to the land of live subjects. But this last round of interviewing mirrored my experience playing around on the Web: Conversations were so digressive that in the span of minutes the person, talking about workplace dynamics, was very, very angry at some man she had not seen for several years and also, it seemed, if you asked her, that her nieces were the only sane or attractive thing about her sister. A number of women in their twenties talked for a very long time about the fun of writing and posting personals on various agreed-upon “cool” Internet sites. Many of them did it for the “hits,” the number of responses they got to the descriptions they’d written of themselves. Often they did not actually go on these dates. But the hits were a way of “moving self-esteem” and “keeping up.” Other women just stared at me and after checking messages and retracing lipstick wondered what I could possibly have to ask them. In fact, some women over thirty-five seemed to suffer a kind of celebritylike ennui, as if they had heard all the questions before and didn’t really need to hear them again before answering.
Here, a random sampling from my notes:
1) Dates with men are more annoying than ever because many men are either divorced or widowed or just too young and believe it is the “point” of the evening to sit down and talk at length—often “through the entrées”—about themselves. On the other hand, dates are great for just this reason because they’re over quickly and do not require any chancy emotional interest, nor even that one pay attention. Then, from other points of view, that’s not the way it is at all; it’s reverse sexism by horny disappointed women to say that men hog conversation. There is also the view that this is an inaccurate scenario because no one has a date of such length without a less risky meeting for drinks or lunch or on an airplane first.
2) “Older” single women are, in the span of one afternoon and three conversations, first cool pioneers figuring out how to live singly, or make communities, and have children, or else they are unbelievably pathetic losers. People who waited. People who were deluded by feminism. People who will have nasty experiences with Pergonal and Clomid. And depending on the circumstance—the speaker—“old” can occur at 30 or 35 or 40, 50 or 27.
I tried to find a clear passage, a defining subject line, through my notes. Margaret, forty-two, a talk-show booker who’s twice divorced, said, “Forget it…. the single world is teeming.” She did not view it as a continent or a refugee camp. As she saw it, “What you have here is a swamp.”
If distinct single archetypes seem for the moment to have blurred, the conviction that single women are social outcasts—odd women who require constant translation—remains intact. Wherever she is, perhaps in a waiting room or on an airplane or lost in the morass of the Internet, she’ll eventually find a story about her uncertain future and her inevitable regret. As always, the story will include picture of a lone single woman holding a ginger-colored or Siamese Pywacket cat. I’ve got a picture in front of me now as I write, part of a recent Daily News special on women who insist (again and again) that they don’t want to have children. The caption beneath a photo of a long-haired woman with her stretching cat: “Her cats are enough, says busy filmmaker Donna Gilardi, 35, about her decision not, ever, to have children.”
But if one stays with it, ignores all the ads and distractions and contradictions, there are discernible single icons for the new century. To bring them more fully into focus it’s necessary to look at those immediately preceding—the single types that were introduced and viciously attacked during the 1980s and ’90s.
THE BIG CHILL: THE ANTISINGLE EIGHTIES AND NINETIES
During the 1980s bookshelves were crammed with punishing tirades: Otherwise Engaged: The Private Lives of Successful Career Women; A Lesser Life; Smart Women, Foolish Choices, and many tomes that featured the words “biological clock,” a phrase repeated so often I began to think of it as a body part, perhaps a moody colon or a giant cyst. I include as an adjunct to this sad single genre the Cathy cartoon books, which seem innocuous enough until, on the fourth or fifth volume, the self-deprecation starts to seem like a pathological tic. In retrospect, I also think the most popular cat book of the era—and at the time “cat” was its own publishing category—played on stereotypes associated with single women. Garfield was a male cat, but his primary characteristics were borrowed from traits commonly ascribed to single females: he was fat, eccentric, sneaky, and lived in constant anticipation of food because there was nothing else in his life.
These books had various points to make, but the primary conclusions were always, however expressed or disguised, that women had paid an enormous personal price for the successes of feminism, in particular the demands and sacrifices required by their jobs. Married women with children, those said to “juggle”—the euphemism for impossible trade-offs between work and family—were well known to confront physical breakdown if they did not ultimately choose the part-time “mommy track,” meaning the relinquishing of their career goals to work a nontenured, nonpartner three-day week that allowed them to leave at five.
The single woman confronted different kinds of possible and likely breakdowns. One of these, as described by a USA Today reporter in 1989, was “an O.D. of Machisma.” The other can be summarized as a kind of all new quiet spinsterly death by pathos.
This last was best described in a 1991 story, “What About Alice?,” that appeared in The Washington Post. The piece, written by a man, began, “I shall invent a woman.” And he did. A prototypical lawyer, good salary, fairly attractive, and, at thirty, still unwed. As the story begins, it was “dawning on Alice that she [might] never get married. And the same thing seemed to be occurring to many others she knew.” Nobody understood why, but that’s how “things were working out” and it was becoming frustrating. And expensive. Her creator explained:
Alice is tired of celebrating the milestones of others. Sometimes her life is a wearying round of parties and weddings, showers and more parties. She is asked to celebrate what she is coming to see as reminders of her own failure: The engagements, weddings and babies of others. Each invitation is like a flunking report card. These events are not only emotionally draining. They are costly as well.
“Alice,” he wrote, as if addressing all the unmarried law-school grads and unattached MBAs of the universe, “my heart goes out to you. You are the grim smile of every Academy Award loser.” And he concluded by reminding us that Alice did not exist. Had she been real, she’d have “broken your heart.” For all those like her—those contending with their non-chance of marriage, all those still forced to argue (years later!) about Fatal Attraction—it sounded grim. The San Francisco Chronicle summarized the dating climate, circa 1990, as an anti–greeting card: “Modern romance is a mess. To enter this magic land, one must maneuver through a gantlet of expectations, confusing miscommunications, desperate avoidance of intimacy and fears of everything from rejection to sex disease.”
The professional woman “O.D.ing on Machisma” was just as sad. Older than Alice, this single character had spent years struggling against sexism, suppressing anger, and she was thus in her dealings with the world and men especially a brittle and sarcastic presence. The essential icon in this category was TV journalist Murphy Brown, as played by Candace Bergen on the long-running TV series. Murphy was known for many things, but I remember most the dresses that had openings at the shoulders, as designed specially for the show by Donna Karan. These “cold-shouldered” outfits were the power look of the moment, I always thought, because the metaphorical chips on Murphy’s shoulders were so huge they mandated special tailoring. It seemed that women who’d worked their way to a position like Murphy’s were just as pathetic as the Alices, if in a different way. They were tougher, more accomplished, richer, and had fabulous perquisites, all to cover unsuccessfully for the fact that they had forfeited their ability to do anything “female” in life. The macho career woman was depicted as an update on the harsh 1930s career woman, that intersexual, mannish, possibly lesbian postwar working bitch missing a heart. As it was most often expressed in the late 1980s and ’90s, this woman had some kind of cerebral and/or neurological inability to deal with children. (Other people’s children, of course, for it was presumed that she wouldn’t have any of her own.) For example, if there was a baby in her apartment, how was she, a person with important work to do, supposed to know what it wanted?
Movies, again, form an excellent primer. One precursor to this 1990s archetype is Elizabeth Lane, the Barbara Stanwyck character in Christmas in Connecticut (1946), an early Martha Stewart kind of columnist who writes of her farm and her fabulous meals and her babies, although the entire thing is made up. She lives in the city and can’t boil water. At Christmastime, the great Mrs. Elizabeth Lane is asked to play hostess to a war hero. On her farm. With her cows and antiques and babies and all the rest, including a husband, and so the panicked Stanwyck promises to marry a man she detests in order to borrow his farm. She also “borrows” a baby. At one point we hear the baby crying in the other room. Everyone looks at Mrs. Lane. Finally she understands! It’s the baby! “It’s crying!” she says, looking panicked. “Oh, um, I must go to it!” Forty years later Diane Keaton, the harried “tiger lady” in Baby Boom (1987), is not even capable of lifting the infant that’s been left to her by a relative. Even with the improvements since Elizabeth Lane’s day, “J. C.,” the MBA and brilliant marketing executive, cannot get a diaper on the baby. A diaper is not within her conceptual framework.
A related example from real life: When the late film executive Dawn Steel had a baby, people in the Hollywood community asked, jokingly, “Who’s the mother?”
But life among single professional women, or any other single women, simply was not all that harsh. In 1986 the government funded a large six-state study of single women’s sex habits. It turned out that a third of all subjects at one point had cohabited because they did not feel “ready” to get married. With more than half of all marriages failing, and a hefty percentage failing during the first two years, some felt no rush to marry. And, for many women, the question was, “Marry who?” (“All the men I meet are either gay, married, crazy, or just plain boring,” went the popular lament; if it could have fit onto coffee mugs and bumper stickers, it would have.)
Research also showed that women in the eighties and nineties were not as depressed or as suicidal as others liked to think. It had long been a truism, for example, that single women were twice as likely to suffer from depression as married women. But a 1992 study of 18,600 professional middle-class white women and men, single and married, showed that the difference in rates of depression was pretty low. Of all the married women interviewed, 3.5 percent had been diagnosed with major depressive disorders, compared with 4.1 percent of the single women; after divorce, the transition back into singlehood, the rate flew up to 9 percent, then dropped down within eighteen months.
But the results of these surveys, and others like them, were lost or entirely unknown to a generation of younger women, born in and around 1970. The image of highly successful single career women dragging all these personal crises through their lives seemed slightly ridiculous. In many ways, this older generation of women seemed to have handled their lives, especially their personal lives, irresponsibly. I read the following two paragraphs to all women I interviewed who were under thirty-two. The first, as reprinted from a major newsweekly, circa 1990:
With a bulk of baby boomers entering the final stages of their fertile years, the sound of several million biological clocks has become as loud as Big Ben on steroids. I alternated this quote with that of an excerpt from Salon, 2000:
I did a year of unidentified inseminations…that’s “donor-deposit” or “DD,” where the donor remains anonymous. (If it’s “DI,” that means the donor is willing to be identified later.)…I carried my sperm home in a dry ice cooler that’s called a “mini-mate.”
After reading one or sometimes both quotes, almost all of the young women expressed disapproval that ranged from pity to physical disgust.
“No offense to you,” one twenty-three-year-old subject told me firmly, “but I would not want to be your age and not have these ends tied together. That’s really a hopeless way to build a life…. “a mini-mate”? This is so pathetic…. How low can you go?”
It is this generational contempt that gives us the first single archetype of the 1990s and the new century: the young, defiantly post-feminist woman who believes she must take care of the “single situation” in a prompt and businesslike fashion. Before she turns twenty-seven. Or else.
BABY BRIDES AND BABY BOOM BUSTERS
If you suffer, as I do, from a lifelong tendency to listen to three conversations simultaneously in public, “graduate-level eavesdropping” as I think of it, then you must have noticed, circa 1998, a shift in lunchtime conversations and those of women friends out for drinks and dinner. Suddenly they weren’t just discussing men. They were discussing marriage. And they seemed young. I’d gotten married in 1989 at age thirty, and was one of the first of my peers to do so. (Two friends, separately, had spoken to me, asking if I would promise not to have a baby right away; it was too much, too distant and unthinkable; I’d…disappear. And besides, I was too young.)
For the generation below me, all those for whom “women’s lib” is as archaic a term as “abolitionist” or “freedom rider,” postponed marriage and childbearing is a laughable notion. It has been a long, long while since men were legally empowered oppressors and wifery the well-traveled path to madness. The conditions that made marriage so difficult for women—and spurred the protective notion of waiting to develop one’s “full self” before leaping—had disappeared. There were more reasons to marry young, or whenever one could, than to wait. Many young women had lived what Rose, twenty-eight, a book editor, calls
a totally new untraditional life featuring the whole range of experiences starting from a very young age and your parents separating. I mean we had step-siblings on top of step-siblings. We had pot and drinking and sex, even if that was deemphasized because of disease. There was a lot of worry and denial. Oh, I mean, by twenty-one you had done…everything…. And I think everything was too much for that age. I think our view was—I mean, my friends—if the opportunity was there, why not get married?…No, I’m not married, but I would definitely like to be married. A lot of my friends are married…. To be honest, I’m tired of being the odd girl out. It’s a big pain in the butt.
During the early nineties the short-lived Married Woman magazine ran a story called “Old Friends, New Friends.” The subtitle read, “Don’t Feel Guilty if You Want to Put Your Single Friends on Hold and Reserve a Table for Four”; elsewhere in the piece we learned, “It’s only natural to feel a strong urge to edit your address book.”
This might have been written in 1953. But to intended readers, the totalitarian marital outlook of the fifties—an all-new “togetherness”—had nothing at all to do with their own lives in the 1990s. They were, to quote many TV commercials and newsmagazine segments, free single women devising creative solutions to their lives and problems, primarily to the unsettling state of “singleness” in such an unsettled world. They were not “slaves to societal custom…and not cruel to our friends who are not married yet,” explains Tara, who did not get engaged until twenty-six. “I thought through my options and waited…. No one was pushing me to do it. Well, perhaps a little, because that’s what society expects…. But what I wanted was someone in my life to go out with, permanently, and what is wrong with that? Someone to take with you out into life? Just think about what life is these days. Why wouldn’t you want a partner?…Having your friends goes only so far.”
More than one million young couples between the ages of twenty-two and twenty-five, last year agreed.
“There’s just something so very right about confronting the world and your job and the hostility of everything, knowing that there’s someone who is legally and emotionally attached to you,” says Mrs. Caitlin Cardozo, the only young subject who did not wish to have her name changed. “I’m proud of what I’ve achieved in my personal life,” she says. Although she admits that there is “a tiny bit of a stigma connected to marrying at a young age,” she thinks “the people who object or have a problem with this are people in their thirties who have put a lot of emphasis on career, and now don’t know what to think or do about marriage.” She speculates, “Maybe someone like me is threatening to them. Maybe I make them concerned that their own way of doing things, all that cool late-night-at-the-office life, was not very well thought out.”
This view is most wonderfully captured in a 1997 piece in New York magazine about young wealthy girls racing around to weddings as if it were 1952. The piece begins on Park Avenue and features young college graduates, onetime private-school cliques, in Vera Wang’s and Bergdorf’s, looking impatient with the women crouched on the floor fixing the hems of their gowns. One young woman, twenty-one, explains, and I paraphrase, We’re city-bred girls and we’ve had our share of wild times and drugs and fooling around. Getting married is a way to move beyond that phase in life and not to get stuck, in another one, alone.
And as author Sara Bernard assesses things, “The circle of women who seem to be skipping their Mary Tyler Moore Murphy bed phase…is bigger than just the waspy-preppy circuit.” Many others out there had upsetting personal histories that read like that of Rose quoted above, the “untraditional…range of experiences starting…[with] your parents separating.” Many want to marry early or whenever it’s right and, like Mrs. Caitlin Cardozo, believe that it is only older Others who have problems with this scenario.
But now and then someone acknowledges the unique tensions and ambiguities of younger wifehood, many of these conflicts directly related to youth—to the inescapable feeling that a twenty-one-year-old wife has in some sense skipped out on a vital part of her young life. These tensions seem to simmer and sometimes explode when doing housework. As one twenty-four-year-old puts it, “Others are having TGIF-fucking Friday and I’m having to vacuum—rugs and the floors and tiles—because, look, I’m not fucking mopping, thank you, and his parents are coming over in twenty minutes and we both work.”
Vacuuming. Dishes. Laundry. Many younger married women say it seems to be more difficult to do housework as a married person than as a single. “I’ll be vacuuming or changing the beds or the sheets and I’ll get this creeped-out feeling,” says “Jennifer,” twenty-three. “When I was doing those things for myself, I did them because I wanted to, not because I had to—it felt like part of the fun of living on your own, out of your mother’s house. Now there is a sense of ‘I have to do this,’ like there’s something instinctual in my doing this, and I don’t like it. Even if my husband helps, I don’t feel comfortable with it.”
An acquaintance of hers, “Veronica or Betty,” agrees. “I have this strange antipathy to housework, which seems to have to do with this 1950s notion of what is a wife…. I’m really very surprised by this, but it’s almost like I have this Stepford Wives fear of deep cleaning. That’s the true reason I got a maid to help. It wasn’t because I was too busy. I was wondering, What am I doing?”
Part of this discomfort is the natural adjustment to plain life after weddings that are only several steps removed from the grandiosity of Cher in Las Vegas.* And part of it is a genuine ambivalence about so huge a commitment coming so soon after another major life event—graduation—and with very little time off between.
But ultimately housework is a small and manageable part of the bargain.
There is only one word that comes up again and again during conversations with baby brides, and it is not dishes or vacuuming; it is safe. Safe is a shorthand way of saying, “Go out into the world two by two.” And it’s the desire to consecrate and guarantee this safety that lies at the heart of monster weddings. The bigger and more complicated the official ceremony, the more tangibly serious and safe the marriage.
Go into any Barnes & Noble, find the display coffee-table wedding books, and take a look at how many pages are stained with coffee and/or greasy pastries. Last year, based on research at three separate branches and two independent stores, I determined that a special significance had been attached to page 127 of the original Martha Stewart wedding book. Always folded back and/or heavily smeared, the double spread shows a bride, all complex white angles, rushing across a busy Tribeca street holding calla lilies. In ways, it’s just a typical fashion shot—fabulous dress stands out on dingy street. But this picture tells another story. At the moment of the photo, the single woman is outside, alone, dodging trucks on a filthy street. But up ahead is the restaurant—a chic sanctuary, where she will be “the star of her own wedding,” to quote 1960s author Rebecca Greer. She will also be safe. If she doesn’t scurry off to that wedding, however, if she waits, whether intentionally or because her life moves in other directions, she may confront obstacles beyond a lack of desirable partners. No longer scared and unsafe, she may develop a chronic marital ambivalence.
In a 1999 Esquire piece, “The Independent Woman and Other Lies,” Katie Roiphe wrote about young independent women attempting to reconcile their longing for a traditional man and a free life of their own. She envisioned this male savior as “the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit,” or any suit, a gentleman lawyer who’d instinctively pay for her drinks and bring flowers to the brownstone he’d bought for her, where she was at work on her novel and, alternately, taking bubble baths. It’s a fantasy that anyone could pick up and play around with. But Roiphe herself, a published author and Ph.D., already had a great apartment and a life that allowed her to run around New York City at all hours and come home when she felt like it. And, as she thought about it, it was actually difficult to imagine sharing the space, and the life, with someone else. She realized that she had been indoctrinated into the Cult of Independence (my phrase). “It may be one of the bad jokes history plays on us,” she wrote, “…the independence my mother’s generation wanted so much for their daughters was something we could not entirely appreciate or want. It was like a birthday present from a distant relative—wrong size, wrong color, wrong style.” And the “dark and unsettling truth” was that the gift could not be returned. The situation would forever be difficult to reconcile: the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit versus Her.
THE SPINSTER AS BEMUSED SLACKER
The premiere single archetype of the new century is someone who, like Roiphe, probably assumed in college she’d get married, then had a serious career, then had relationships, then…well, it gets hard to say, exactly, in a day-to-day recounting, but one can say life seemed to get very busy. Many boyfriends. Many major projects. Many drinks and events and then, oh, well, you know, it gets to be Christmas and, now, oh, God, not again, she’s sort of rambling…but, hey, she’s a cleverly scripted fictional single who, an amalgam of many real thirtyish never-weds, stands as the latest in singular icons.
There are two primary exemplars of this highly competent but still dithering archetype: Ally McBeal (of David Kelley and former Fox-TV fame) and Bridget Jones (of British journalist Helen Fielding/Renée Zellweger fame). To sketch them, let’s borrow icons from the 1970s, first decade of the modern single working woman. Specifically, imagine cross-pollinating the hyper TV executive Faye Dunaway played in Network with Woody Allen’s Annie Hall.
That’s just a cartoonish idea. What makes Ally and Bridget special types, the essential single icons of the moment, is their ability to find the humor—corny as it sounds, the “humanity”—in some fairly unbearable social situations. Deadpan and highly self-aware, they can laugh at themselves without becoming self-deprecating and/or snide. They can be sad, sob at their desks, and it’s never pathetic because they get over it and go back to work. Emotional states that women are usually punished for—rage, pathos, lust—are here just naturally occurring parts of the character and, by extension, parts of life.
The recently departed Ally McBeal was not terribly appealing at first, with her micromini suits, improbable Gumby body, and the supposed Harvard law education we never actually saw in evidence. But she grew on you. She was beautiful, successful, she could sing, but there were also the basic and unglamorous facts of her life.
She worked horrible hours, during which she tried, without great success, to be one of the guys. She worked, knowing that she also had to share the bathroom, aka “the unisex,” with these guys. Some of whom she had slept with. While they’d been involved with her colleagues. Of course she met men elsewhere—in court (one of them accused her, loudly, right there, of treating him as a sex object), while out buying coffee (one of these, much later, told her he was bisexual), or at the car wash, where she dreamily followed a cute guy inside…the car wash itself, where he happened to work. She arrived at her own office soaking wet. Once she arrived in court with a bowling ball stuck on her finger. Once she was arrested for tripping a woman in a supermarket. And on and on.
As much as she looked like an L.A. Law alumnas, she had distinct elements of Lucille Ball, or Lucille Ball on LSD. As part of almost every script, Ally hallucinated. For a while she saw singer Al Green in many peculiar situations; of course there was the dancing baby, the diapered metaphor of female failure that appeared in her living room. (She was a good sport and danced with it.) Her sex fantasies took up most of her mental life—a much more realistic approach than the Sex and the City model, in which professional single urban women have sex at least four times a day.
Women loved Ally because she tried yet couldn’t pull all of this together, couldn’t make herself any emotionally or intellectually neater, resolved. She was always in flux—as if flux were a physical condition—and she couldn’t imagine, like most women, what personal earthquake might occur to make it better.
Her British counterpart, Bridget Jones, is less professionally accomplished; in fact, she hasn’t done much to speak of at all, but she has the ability to see and understand every nuance of single social life, and to record her observations in the now notorious diary. Women love her slangy comments on “smug marrieds” and “fuckwit” men. And they love that she can’t do anything more to change the social order than can Ally McBeal. And Ally McBeal is cute. Bridget Jones is overweight. But unlike previous chubby single icons, for example, Rhoda Morgenstern, Mary Tyler’s Moore’s old housemate, she doesn’t work the obvious fact into every sentence (the Phyllis Diller school of self-appraisal). Bridget simply records it, along with her cigarette and alcohol intake, and gets on with her life, which often consists of sorting dirty clothes in order to find clean ones. Like Ally, she is self-possessed and funny about her singleton status (an eighteenth-century term updated). She also defends it. One of my favorite scenes in the recent movie adaptation occurs when after a wretched workday Bridget has to attend a dinner party with a horrifying posse of “smug marrieds.” That means a long table full of couples pressed up next to each other in units of two. She’s placed at the head—the evening’s sociological specimen. A man points to his wife’s pregnant belly and makes a tick-tock sound; another man asks why so many career women in their thirties are still not married. She says (I paraphrase), “Maybe it’s because of the fact that their bodies are covered in hideous scales.” No one laughs.
I use the term “slacker spinsters” because these two, like so many women I know in their thirties, seem to be kind of hanging out in the lives that have evolved around them, making sporadic efforts to connect with men, then retreating back to the couch, the TV, or the phone or into an elaborate fantasy. They believe in the possibilities of love, though it’s not clear they fully believe in the beautiful possibilities of marriage. They’ve lived through the same kind of chaos that baby brides list on their résumés. But they’ve come to different conclusions. Primarily, getting married will never guarantee a feeling of safety.
Not that they won’t try. Try hard. Christ, in a desperate situation, they might even read The Rules, or its sort-of sequel, the new “Surrendered Single,” conduct guides for the twenty-first century, as if interpreted by Helen Gurley Brown. But chances are they’d just crack up and throw those books across the room. Where they would land either on the dry cleaning or on a pile of unsorted clothes.
A SINGULAR FURY
Many real-life single women have read The Rules, and now The Surrendered Single, if only from an “anthropological” point of view, or else as a kind of joke. Because how could any intelligent life-form take this best-selling advice as less than hilarious?
Act as if you were born happy!…don’t leave the house without wearing make-up. Put lipstick on even if you’re jogging! If you have a bad nose, get a nose job! Grow your hair long. Men prefer long hair…. Men like women. Don’t act like a man, even if you are the head of your own company…. Don’t tell sarcastic jokes. Don’t be a loud knee-slapping girl.
The Rules and Rules mentality—manipulate, grovel, and lie to get a man—or the Surrendered Single stance—no control, give in, just lie there—does not strike everyone as hilarious or even mildly funny. It makes some women angry. And this angry woman—a New Mad Woman for the Modern Age—gives us a final, more decisive if less adorable archetype than the bemused Ally/Bridget slacker spinster.
“The concept of a person who is out to land men in a deliberately manipulative manner, suggests a frightening dream world,” says Marjorie, twenty-five, unwed, and “seriously not sorry. I’m a documentary filmmaker. I travel all the time. And as a woman I couldn’t take the time out to plot ‘Getting Men.’ This isn’t junior high. Wear lipstick when you are jogging? If this is to be the basis for a relationship, then you might as well not bother…. At least you’d better stop reading. It is so sickening and unfair.”
For these women—the documentary filmmakers, med students, marketing executives, serious artists—dodging the media has become a task as basic to everyday life as recycling plastic seltzer bottles.
For example, there is nothing on the single calendar more irritating than holidays, with all their attendant advice about what it is the single person should do to “survive” them. At least as far as other people are concerned. One particularly annoying festival is the national day of single dread, Valentine’s Day. How many times can a grown woman be expected to read (and I quote from last year, a major newspaper): “Single in New York and Looking for Love: A Special Report on Dating in the New Century,” which here sounds remarkably like the old. A small excerpt:
Looking for love in New York City is harder than finding a seat on an F train to Queens at rush hour. You can get swamped on the platform. Somebody can cut in front of you. The train can go out of service. When it comes to finding that special person—and we’re talking about relationships here, not just sex—a lot of New Yorkers never leave the station…. [these] are a complicated time for singles, between crushing work obligations and confused notions of how men and women should relate to each other.
“It really makes me want to puke,” says Helen, twenty-six, a currently unemployed copywriter who has lived through many Valentine’s Days and found them “more oppressive than Christmas.” She continues:
There is always the huge Valentine story—about how the creative guy proposed to his girlfriend by glueing letters to a Scrabble board. And they are as a couple so urban chic. They are only twenty-three, and yet they live in some amazing loft in TriBeCa and the skinny-girl delicate little bride-to-be is called Amelie or Chantal and she designs, oh, laced gloves or petite evening bags for dogs. And He, the man, wears those nerd glasses and has on a tie for some reason…. You think, these aren’t real people, or these people are models. And of course they have been styled. To get your attention. And to get your goat. TO PISS YOU OFF. I shouldn’t let it happen, have that response, but it’s just very effective advertising.
There’s a kind of story, a series of images, even more bothersome than the corny all-alone holiday story. That is the thousands of stories, in every known form of media—“the relentless hailstorm,” as one former colleague put it—all about having babies and raising kids.
“I think it started with thirtysomething, in the eighties,” says Gail, thirty-nine, a nature photographer.
It was that horrible Hope character bouncing around with a baby in a forty-room house…. I don’t dislike children, please! I just can’t stand the way you are forced to “react” to them in a way that somehow expresses wonderment with a hint of jealousy because you don’t have any. It’s so sad! Another sad reminder…. I feel like I’m watching [on TV] old fifties footage of the baby boom in the ’burbs only it’s set in the present…. You walk down the street, you’re late and rushing, but wait, you can hear it in the distance getting louder—it’s a stampede! Strollers. And these women never think to move their triplets’ stroller. It’s like, okay, I obviously have the right of way, and the culture supports that. You are just a woman who does not have children, is not married, and either you move or you will get run over.
Some, like Gail, call this confrontation “pure arrogance on the part of anxious younger women…the there-but-for-the-grace-of-God shit.” Some wish only to clarify their own views on the child issue. Martha, forty-four, says:
I’m not childless, I am child-free. And neither is my dog a substitute child. My dog is a fine dog. I am not confused on this point…. It’s hard to believe, but I like my life…. I feel like I earned my life and my feelings about it. Because believe me, living in this culture, it is hard not to feel horribly about yourself when you are young and not following the feminine script…. I write nothing permanently out of my own personal script! I’m ready now to do these things, if they come up. I just wasn’t before and that doesn’t make me a monster or a rule-breaker or a bitch who just, obviously, doesn’t like kids because she complains when she is nearly flattened by strollers on Seventy-second Street…. Mothers take a perverse pleasure in punishing nonmothers. “How dare she speak that way? Oh, that hostile body language! She must not have any children!” That’s the refrain of our age.
The media refrain has variations, but in essence it remains the same: No matter what the single woman says, she can’t really be happy. Her life is barren and disappointing. Friends consider her a social exile. She is in danger at all times when on her own, and she could miss out on becoming a mother. She is, as Anthony Trollope wrote of his thinned-out, run-down Lily Dale, “blank, lonely and loveless.” She is living the “long afternoon of unmarried life.” I quote from a classic 1930s spinster novel: “Librarians never marry. And they never die.”
Repeat.
Well, it makes for terrifically grim and sorry copy. And for a long time, I think, women believed it. Or at least they understood there were restrictions, a unique system of singular Jim Crow—unwritten laws concerning where they could go, when, for how long, and with whom. Through the 1960s these matters were actually spelled out in terms so precise the syntax and wording seem borrowed from Deuteronomy.
But though still misunderstood and—thanks to writers and directors—still so often maligned, single life is no longer what we for years have enjoyed calling a half life. There are still archetypes, easily applied methodologies for organizing and controlling the way we think about single women. Then there are the unavoidable live women themselves as opposed to the images.
During the nineteenth century, many real women (as opposed to spinsters and shrews) found it easier and more satisfying to choose women friends over men and/or family for their essential life “partners.” And it’s this long-discouraged practice that accounts for the true appeal of Sex and the City. A simple reading presents a very clever, witty drama concerning a variety—almost every variety—of relationships with men and sexual issues (premature ejaculation; strange bathroom habits; trying to make lovers out of sex toys and humans out of men who are angry, et cetera). But the real action and pleasure and love is among the four girlfriends, who spend all their available time together, discussing all of these other relationships. It’s like life on an imaginary cruise ship—the four separate briefly, go off and have their various trysts in their various rooms, then return to the dining room, where they review the day, drink, and split dessert four ways. The real conflict occurs right there, among the women; it’s in the way they push one another, tell one another the embarrassing absolute truth, hitting on weak spots and self-defeating patterns. And the amazing and perhaps fantastic element is how they don’t walk out on one another. If they do, if there are hurt feelings, everyone participates in the reunion, which will typically involve baskets of homemade muffins and/or blender drinks and new shoes.
And it is now distinctly possible that another generation is going to miss the cues of single-illness, or uncomfortability, altogether. Recently I took a bunch of ten-and eleven-year-olds to see the movie Kate and Leopold, starring Meg Ryan as a thirty-fivish career woman who dresses like and has the body of a good-looking young man. In fact, her boss at the marketing company to which she’s devoted her life compliments her by telling her that she’s not really a woman. She’s like, and this is the good part, she’s like…a man. Her ex-boyfriend, like that of every other alleged spinster character—like Bridget Jones and Ally McBeal—has let her down. She gave him “the best seven years of her life.” He replies: “Those were the best?”
He’s much too preoccupied, anyway, with finding fissures in the space/time continuum and, as the movie starts, has found a portal into the nineteenth century. A handsome duke and inventor somehow follows him back into the present and home to his apartment. Two hours later, Meg, who still lives upstairs from this unfortunate boyfriend, is given every single working woman’s dream choice: Go back in time and be rich and beautiful and beloved by a handsome duke, or stay here and be great at your job. Of course, she goes, by throwing herself off the Brooklyn Bridge, the site of the portal, and landing in the nineteenth century, wearing a blue dress.
I asked the ten-and eleven-year-olds what they thought about it, assuming they would vote for portals and dukes and fancy dresses and any way out of wearing those blah “work clothes” plus having a horrible boss. But they surprised me. One told me there were no “jobs for women except secretaries” and so who would want to live then? Although, hedging, she added that Kate’s life “now” was “totally boring” and her blue dress was “extremely pretty.” A girlfriend of hers suggested that Kate could move to a better apartment and, because she’d been promoted, she could buy all new clothes! She could get “someone who wasn’t a weird geek for a boyfriend!” The first girl then added something that she’d learned in school: “Most people in those times didn’t even live to be thirty.”
Which led to a moment’s reflection. Another girl who had favored Kate’s going back now said, “If she really went back to then, then now, when it’s time for her real life, she’d already be dead.”
She should live well in her own time and, as they said when I was single, “On her own terms.” And no one should say anything more about any of it. There have been too many epitaphs for the single woman, and almost every one of them is pathetic. She is not.