Welcome to Spinstertown: Not as Seen on TV
A few years ago, at a bar in my hometown on the Friday night before Christmas, one of my friends jokingly called me an “old maid.” This was a person I love who didn’t mean to be hurtful, but it stung enough that I later cried about it at my mother’s kitchen table (my mom, incidentally, is also single — but she was married at one time and has two children to show for it, so “old maid” doesn’t seem to apply to her).
The truth is that most of the time I don’t mind being single. I have meaningful, fulfilling relationships with friends and family members. I’m content spending time by myself. And I have never felt the urgent, intrinsic desire for children that women my age often describe. But I do mind the implications of a loaded term like “old maid:” that I should be ashamed to be single, and that a lack of partner indicates something is wrong with me. Meanwhile, unattached men get to stay “bachelors:” a word that instead of implying they’re unwanted, suggests a defiant refusal to surrender their freedom! Try and think of a male equivalent to “old maid.” You can’t. Because there isn’t one.
In a culture that celebrates women most enthusiastically when we 1) get married and 2) have babies, “old maid” and its even more old-timey cousin “spinster” are shorthand for the prevailing narrative that if a man doesn’t put a ring on it before you’re too old to reproduce, you are destined to become a sad cat lady and die alone — a fate you deserve for being undesirable.
This is unequivocally bullshit.
But “old maid” remains a common stereotype, in part because there are not enough stories in popular culture that accurately depict unmarried, childless women over the age of 40: a category of people society seems uncomfortable acknowledging and determined to pity. A woman can’t possibly have chosen to be on her own, because what woman would dare reject the opportunity to fulfill her innate feminine destiny of marriage and motherhood? Limiting women’s reproductive rights is one way of attempting to force us into performing traditional gender roles, but does failing to illuminate other pathways to happiness and fulfillment contribute to the same outcome?
I’m not 40 yet, but if between now and then I don’t join Team Wife or Team Mom, will anyone ever go out of their way to celebrate me? What might my next 10 years hold if they don’t include planning a wedding, negotiating whose family to eat Thanksgiving dinner with, and keeping small humans alive? As Glynnis MacNicol observed, “No One Tells You This.” So she wrote a memoir and offered up her own story into the void. MacNicol is a writer in New York, so for me this feels like a particularly apt set of blueprints where few existed before. But rather than presenting readers with a checklist or a role model, her book delivers a simple and reassuring message: it’s not just you. (Side note: “Motherhood,” by Sheila Heti, is related essential reading for women who feel ambivalent about having children.)
Reading “No One Tells You This” was like having a conversation with a friend who lives in a city you’re about to move to but have only visited once or twice; a trusted voice who can validate or recalibrate your expectations based on her own experience, as well as offer some words of wisdom. Downtown is a tourist trap, except for this one hidden gem. And no, you are not “incomplete.”
Nearly half the population of U.S. adults over the age of 18 is unmarried, and according to this chart, 31% of Americans over the age of 35 have never been married. Off the top of my head, I can think of more than a dozen single women I know personally who are within five years of my age. Some have been in serious relationships before; others have not. Some are actively dating and looking for a partner; others are not. In this day and age, the experience of being a single adult woman is hardly rarefied or remarkable.
And yet, it feels like societal norms and pop culture narratives haven’t caught up with reality. Although this is slowly changing (thank you, Shonda Rhimes!), mainstream American culture has a long history of failing to depict grown-up single women with authenticity and respect, let alone portraying us as aspirational. If you are female and have remained unattached past conventional childbearing age, what is your life, and what are you? Creepy, demented Miss Havisham? Wonder Woman, but minus the superpowers, magic bracelets, and mandate to save the world? Comically pitiful yet lovable Bridget Jones? Stories about male characters aren’t necessarily obligated to put their romantic relationships front and center, but if a woman is unpartnered onscreen or in print, there remains a stubborn imperative to explain to audiences why, and what she’s doing to correct it. Sex and the City, held up at the time it aired as a groundbreaking portrayal of main characters who were independent women, was still constructed almost entirely around those characters’ romantic relationships.
I wonder if the perpetual scarcity and misrepresentation of single women in pop culture affects the way the rest of the world regards us. I wonder if it is part of why, before questions about our careers or hobbies, we are often asked if we’re “seeing anyone” or how “dating is going;” why, when we go on group vacations, we sleep on air mattresses or couches while coupled travelers get first dibs on accommodations with real beds and doors that close; why we sometimes feel compelled to bring a friend to a wedding as our “plus one” just to ensure an even number at the dinner table, a partner on the dance floor, and a shield to deflect the “always a bridesmaid” vibes (from people who would almost certainly never observe ruefully about a solo male guest, “always a groomsman, never a groom”); and why, in our darkest private moments, we sometimes wonder if maybe our choices — and by extension, our lives — are somehow wrong and shameful.
I wholeheartedly encourage my single women friends to read “No One Tells You This.” But I’d also recommend it to my family, my married friends, my single men friends, and anyone else who’s ready for a new story about being a real-life independent woman in the modern world — the kind of story that we all need more of on our bookshelves and in our Netflix queues.
