In the grand scheme of things, though, why is this an important issue?
If marriage and couples are supposed to be this magic bullet, and your relationship is the thing that is supposed to define and make the world for you, that’s putting an enormous amount of pressure on that relationship. This book is not against couples — it’s really against the primacy of the couple, the anxious over-importance of the couple that actually makes couples fail because you can’t by definition make a whole world out of one other person. If you try, you’re shrinking your world and your existence in the hope it’s going to cure everything. It creates a lot of distress and at the same time it’s invalidating your other experiences you had when you were by yourself, when you were dreaming up other kinds of associations you might have.
Can you imagine a presidential candidate being unmarried? The only people who can get into high political office while unmarried are basically Supreme Court justices and that creates an enormous amount of anxiety, gossip and innuendo.
I was very happily single for most of the first five years I lived in New York, and almost all of my group of friends were single too. Now I’m in a relationship, which was a little awkward at first, mostly because it involved renegotiating my relationships with my happily single friends, and I was paranoid about creating resentments by, for example, talking too much about my boyfriend.
That probably comes from the fact that couples culture wins every time, so the resentment is that now you’ve become “legitimate.” So the perception is [that you're going to say], “I’m still going to be your friend and I’m going to try to be respectful that you’re in this damned condition even though you’re happy about it.” Hopefully you’ve determined that your relationship doesn’t invalidate the earlier [single] history you had, and they’re simply different moments in your life. You’re most likely the same person you were.
I think that’s very true.
What I’m saying is: You’re still a mess.
I posted this on twitter already, but this interview in Salon with Michael Cobb is fascinating and deserves wider broadcast by me.
Thanks for posting this, you know I am always interested in these. people have so much more legitmacy in the world as a couple, I am starting to feel the flip side of this now I have even been in a relationship for only a few months.
He is right when he says that people don’t see being single as a legitimate option and that was one of the things that irritated me the most when single. People feel sorry for you and regardless of whether you’re happy, indifferent or unhappy about being single, it’s frustrating when you are single for a long time. For some it’s a choice, but for some (me and other friends) it’s just how our life happens/happened to be. Some people are partnered, some are on their own. People act like there is this major difference between you as a person and them, just because your daily living experiences are different, when actually, it is just a matter of luck that we live different lives.
The thing about this article (and others on being single) that is hard for me is, I didn’t like being single. Being single WAS the loneliest I have ever been. I really wanted to find a lovely partner. (I have now.) People don’t like it when you admit that (it makes you a particularly bad feminist).
It would have been easier to be single if I had had more single friends, and if there wasn’t this elevation of couples in society, as the articles says. I also get what he says about the utter weirdness of watching all your friends whom you previously thought quite progressive get married, take on someone else’s name and just let the gender roles roll. I’m not shocked that people have kids and a woman will stay home with them (lots of society and workplace pressure pushing that gender role), but I have been shocked at the number of female friends taking on their guy’s name, and how formerly capable friends suddenly lose the ability to cook (guys) or do basic household maintenance (girls).