State of the single woman

Partly, this is the inevitable stupidity of demographic thinking, the persistent and foolish desire to generalize about a large and diverse population. Glossy magazine editors are particularly prone to this claptrap, to dredging up the same chestnut "insights" over and over again, each time more firmly patting their readers' comfortable prejudices into place. Israel, a former magazine editor and columnist herself, is good at nailing down the classic motifs of the "lifestyle" story, tracing, for example, the generic "interview with a single girl" article through its several permutations over the past seven decades. (The important thing is to close on an ominous note -- in one crude early example, the reporter's subject is literally followed out of the restaurant by a "slinking gray" ghost of her single life yet to come, a "phantom spinster," who has "horrible designs on the security of her later years.")

But while there's nothing wrong with dissecting nasty propaganda, it can only take you so far. Here's a question that doesn't get asked in any of these books: What sort of person decides how to live and what she wants from her 75 years on this planet on the basis of magazine articles and TV shows? How is "sorting out" your opinion on a comic fictional character like Ally McBeal at all related to the hard work of acquiring self-knowledge? What use are role models when the reality, dear reader, is that while I love being single you quite possibly loathe it?

The image that I'm receiving as a result of reading this stuff is of a nation of women hungrily awaiting directions on how to live but invariably dismayed at the results of following them -- and this seems like a bigger problem than the content of the directions themselves. It's remarkable how often the words "supposed to" and "expected to" crop up when women are describing their lives. "Wasn't cohabitational bliss the jackpot I was supposed to spend my 20s desperately pursuing?" one typical contributor to "The Bitch in the House" muses when cohabitation turns out to be less than blissful.

The French philosopher Michel Foucault wrote that liberty is a practice not a condition (meaning you're only free to the extent that you exercise your freedom), but the contemporary middle-class woman excels at reconceiving her liberties as bondage. Commentators on women's lives are apt to lead off with a categorically positive statement like "women have so many choices these days," only to suggest that the choosing has become burdensome. "Now we are expected to play another game," writes Fraser wearily of the burgeoning market for women's erotica in "Solitaire." Even the chance to seek more sexual pleasure gets interpreted as a chore.

Women are hypersensitive to these directives, perceiving them even when they're not really there. On the basis of a spirited denunciation in Elle magazine, I expected Barbara Dafoe Whitehead's new book, "Why There Are No Good Men Left: The Romantic Plight of the New Single Woman," to be an alarmist tract urging young women to marry as early as possible if they ever want to have a family. Instead, it is a well-intentioned enough (if lamentably titled) account of the social conditions that make it harder for those women who want to marry to find suitable husbands if they prefer to marry later in life. Whitehead doesn't insist that all women want to marry (though most do, and most will) or even that they ought to marry young. In fact, it argues that courtship customs need to be revamped to accommodate the fact that many women are not choosing to marry by 22 and that society could be a lot more helpful when they do decide to settle down.

Of course, Whitehead's book, like most books directed at single women, doesn't address those heterosexual women who don't want to marry, or those who aren't averse to marriage but aren't actively seeking it or -- and this is particularly murky territory -- those who assume they want to marry because everyone else does but unconsciously are more ambivalent. Such women are in the minority, although a confirmed bachelorette of my acquaintance thinks that third category is a lot bigger than anyone realizes. Those among them who need consistent and positive "messages" in order to conduct their lives are out of luck. To get the most out of being single, a woman has to develop a skill that is seemingly harder to come by these days than a good man: the ability to be happy even when other people are convinced you can't be.

That's trickier than it sounds. This year's Nobel Prize-winner for economics, Daniel Kahneman, is currently conducting a study on "well-being," observing 1,000 working women in Texas. He told the New York Times that his team not only asks the women how satisfied they are with their lives overall but is also keeping track of how good the women feel on a day-to-day basis (Kahneman calls this "cheerfulness"). "Divorced women, compared to married women, are less satisfied with their lives, which is not surprising," he said. "But they're actually more cheerful when you look at the average mood they're in in the course of the day." In other words, the divorced women feel better more often than the married women. That's as good a definition of happiness as any other, but when asked to evaluate their own lives, the divorced women are less likely to describe themselves as satisfied because they know they're not supposed to be. So therefore they can't be, right?

"I knew that on paper I was the luckiest woman alive," writes one of the contributors to "The Bitch in the House," a married mother who can't fathom why she's "unhappy, bored, anxious." I suspect that for single women, the situation will always be reversed; "on paper" we will never be happy, let alone as lucky as some of us feel. As Whitehead observes, "Society has an interest in the formation of lasting marital unions, especially when they include, or are likely to include, dependent children." Family, class, nation, race -- all of these are keen on self-preservation and therefore unlikely to ever celebrate a choice that doesn't further that goal. The media images and messages will always be dire. No matter what a single woman does with her life, most people will believe, secretly or not, that she can never be truly happy or, to use a word reeking with dubious assumptions, fulfilled.

On paper, it's a pathetic lot, but why live on paper? I recently ran into another single, childless woman at a party and we got to talking about the pleasures of the unmarried life, of the voluptuous delights of doing exactly as we pleased with our time, energy and concentration, of ministering to no one and staying out as late as we wanted. Neither of us has been vexed by a biological clock. We paused for a moment to contemplate our fate. "We beat the system, didn't we?" I said suddenly. She laughed. "You bet we did. And no one will ever know."

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