Single Girl Confidential Takes on Modern Love

Last week, Jess sent me this NY Times Modern Love column.

I know none of you will click through and read the article, but I strongly suggest that you do. I’ll wait.

Did you read it? Of course you didn’t. Here’s the recap:

A 39 year old woman longs for love. She’s been single for 8 years and pretends to love her single life, but secretly she wonders, “What’s wrong with me?” She then meets the man of her dreams and finally realizes the answer: nothing was wrong with her. She just hadn’t met the right guy.

Jess saw this article in a completely different light than I did. For her thoughts on it, click here. When I read it, however, I was appalled. This is the anti-SGC. This isn’t a woman who is proud, or even comfortable being single. She is Carrie Bradshaw (a fact that she outright denies in the article), a woman who knows what she wants and what she likes, has a great job, a great apartment and great friends, and is still kind of a whiny a-hole because she spends the holidays alone.

This is not me. This is not Jess. This is not anyone I admire or anyone I want to be friends with.

You see, I have a fundamental lack of respect for people who hate being single. This does NOT mean I lack respect for people who are in relationships, or even people who WANT to be in relationships. You want a boyfriend? Great, so do I. But until I get one, I’m not going to sit around crying about it, wondering where my other half is and why no men are paying attention to me. I am well aware of the myriad reasons why no men are paying attention to me (for a full list of everything wrong with me, shoot me an email and I will happily tell all). Is there a man out there capable of loving me in spite of all my flaws? Sure. But it takes two to tango, as they say. Lower your standards as much as you want, but it is still impossible to be in a relationship without the consent of someone else. So in a sense, getting a boyfriend or girlfriend is at least in part a situation beyond your control. And because of that, I refuse to act like being single is the end of the world.

Let’s put it this way. Maybe you, reading this, are single. So am I. You would like someone to come along and make your life perfect and wonderful and full of romantic picnics in the park, anniversaries every 6 months and mushy Facebook wall posts to each other. So would I (minus the romantic picnics and mushy wall posts, that ain’t my style). If neither of us has met someone we love, we’re in the same boat. Are you choosing to cry yourself to sleep at night, cursing Valentine’s Day like it was invented just to spite you? Because I’m not. I choose to find fulfillment in as many aspects of my life as I can. You don’t know how much longer you’re going to be single and neither do i. So why not f’ing enjoy your life in the interim? Cry me a river, build me a bridge and GET OVER IT.

The woman who wrote this article is clearly an intelligent, successful woman. Yet she manages to pigeonhole herself into the very stereotype she swears she’s not. Take this passage, for example:  

“My solace came from the place where single women usually find it: my other single friends. We would gather on weekend nights, swapping funny and tragic stories of our dismal dating lives, reassuring one another of our collective beauty, intelligence and kindness, marveling at the idiocy of men who failed to see this in our friends.”

That sounds like a Sex and the City episode if I ever heard one. But any woman who has ever lived in New York or lived anywhere or who has been single or not been single or who has had a freaking brain knows that Sex and the City is not life.

Why does society expect single women to talk about nothing other than being single? I have lots of single friends. I hang out with them, in various combinations, on the regular. And do you know what we do when we’re together? We talk about life. Our jobs. Our families. The economy. The fun things we did in New York last week. The fun things we want to do in New York the following week.

Do you know why we talk about these things? Because we aren’t robots, programmed for one singular purpose. We are women with our own plans and interests and, perhaps most importantly, our own personalities. Men may come and go, but they do not define us. I especially will not allow the LACK of a man in my life to define me. I’m better than that. And I hope you are too.