The Art of Not Falling Apart

by Christina Patterson

  I tried. I really tried. But at thirty-six, the dating agency told me, I was past my peak. Men of my age, they said, wanted younger women, women who wouldn’t force them into commitment or panic about their eggs. I should, in other words, be grateful for what I could get. It was, I thought, once I had exhausted the file of dog-eared men, an expensive way to make you feel an awful lot worse.

  When internet dating took off, it was at least cheaper. One man, with a ponytail and a bad rash all over his face, told me that he bought vibrators for all his women friends and then stuck a tongue in my mouth that made me think of a lizard. Another bought me chocolates and flowers, chased me for weeks and then ran away. He got back in touch, said he had made a bad mistake and did the whole thing all over again. I felt as if I had been dropped into a sweet shop the size of an Amazon warehouse, one where almost everybody wants to take one bite and then move on to something that looks sweeter.

  I have been single for my whole adult life. This is not what I planned. This is not what many of us plan, but it happens to quite a few of us anyway. Almost a third of us now live on our own. A third of us never marry either, which, in health terms at least, is a shame. Marriage, according to all the research, is better for your life span and better for your health. And it’s an awful lot cheaper to split the bills.

  Society still revolves around couples. If you’re single, this can make you feel like a freak. Holidays are a challenge. Friends who rush to book you for a midweek drink spend weekends holed up with their family. Christmas can leave you feeling like an urchin waiting to be scooped up.

  I know a lot of single women. I’m never sure if this is because there are a lot of us around or if it’s because we tend to gravitate towards people like us. There certainly seem to be more educated, successful women who are single than educated, successful men. For people under thirty, this is just a fact, since more young women now graduate than men. I’ve spent thousands of hours debating the issue with other single friends, usually over a bottle or two of something chilled. Our findings, which have been extensively peer reviewed by other women, over other bottles of wine, are: a) that ‘suitable’ men of our age who are still single tend to go for younger women, b) that the men who are available tend not to be as intelligent or successful as the women we know who are looking for a partner, and c) that an awful lot of men are terrified of a smart, successful woman. Or maybe they’re just terrified of us.

  Not long after I lost my job, I went to see a headhunter recommended by a friend. Juliet Taylor is a partner at an executive search firm. She is bright. She is glamorous. She is single. We got on so well that we often meet for a glass of wine and the last thing we usually talk about is work.

  ‘My singleness comes under challenge all the time,’ she told me on one of these meetings, over a nice glass of Viognier and a bowl of salty snacks. ‘People challenge it unwittingly, through talking about being part of a club I can’t be in. Sometimes, people actively question it. In the village I live in, which is full of seventy-something rather conservative people, it’s anathema for a woman to be single. No one can understand why I’m not married, and they think there must be something dysfunctional, or I must be a lesbian. I have spent quite a lot of time questioning people’s assumptions about why there might be a problem with it.’

  She would, she said, much rather be on her own than in a relationship that feels like a compromise. ‘I have to feel it in my heart to want to be with somebody, and if that feeling isn’t there, thank you very much, we’ll be friends or nothing. So I don’t cop out and I don’t accept a halfway house. Because I’m single-minded, because I’m independent, it’s a really big thing for me to give up my space. I’ll only give it up for someone if there’s something really coming back from that partnership.’

  Hear, hear. On the one hand, I would love to meet someone, but where on earth would I put their stuff? I suppose a Californian might say we were ‘conflicted’.

  My friend Heather has done a lot better on the relationship front than me. In gaps between her relationships, we have been on holiday together, once to Tuscany and three times to Goa. When we stay with each other for weekends we’ll say things like ‘dinner’s ready, darling!’, because we sometimes feel like a couple who get on extremely well, but have given up on sex. Heather moved from London to Dorset fifteen years ago. Since she split up with the father of her son, she has been mostly on her own. ‘I like my own company,’ she told me, when we last huddled round the wood-burning stove in her little thatched cottage, ‘and when I’m single and contented with myself I like not having the angst of an unhappy relationship. I like not having to compromise. I like having the freedom to do what I want to do when I want to do it, and not having to share my space.’

  She lives in a chocolate-box-pretty village. When I go down there, it feels like something out of Lark Rise to Candleford, but there is, it turns out, a tiny worm in this little Garden of Eden. ‘I do sometimes feel,’ she said, ‘that my neighbours look at me with pity. I think they give off a slight sense of “there, but for the grace of God”.’ She has sometimes found herself at a friend’s dinner table, sitting next to an elderly widower, clearly in the hope that sparks will fly. The last one was twenty-three years older than her. ‘I was forty-seven!’ she said. ‘He was seventy. He’s an attractive man, but for God’s sake!’ Another time, she was set up with a friend of a friend. ‘He was very taciturn and uptight, the type that wears thick cords and country tweeds. He was a Tory country solicitor. He was so wrong for me in so many ways. I couldn’t quite believe that she hadn’t seen it.’

  Nor, I have to say, can I. Heather sometimes makes me feel like Margaret Thatcher and I’ve written columns with headlines like ‘How Can We Stop This Drift to the Right?’ We are, of course, grateful when our friends dredge through their address books and manage to muster a single man. You can almost see the triumph in their faces. You can almost sense them wanting applause. Most of mine exhausted their thin supply a very, very long time ago. I sometimes think they might club together and write a letter to The Times. ‘We, the undersigned, friends of Christina Patterson, beg the nation to find her a suitable man.’ My mother would be the first to sign. She once sent me a card that said: ‘Looking for Mr Right?’ Inside was the weary answer: ‘Look in fiction!’

  People in relationships often tell their single friends that they’re too fussy, but when you ask them how they got together they don’t usually say that it was with a clothes peg on their nose. Most of my friends met their partners when they were young. They liked the look of each other, fell into bed and that was that. They didn’t walk around with a clipboard and a questionnaire.

  ‘With hindsight,’ said an academic called Mark I met through a friend, ‘I was a bit too choosy. I was always looking for somebody who was seventy-five to eighty per cent of what I wanted. Some of them were sixty per cent, and I always felt they weren’t quite good enough.’ Mark was honest enough to admit that he was ‘very demanding’ and ‘quite difficult to please’. Cynical friends, he said, ‘would say the problem is me’.

  I have interviewed the poet Benjamin Zephaniah twice. The first time, he was married. The second time he wasn’t. ‘I was emailing this friend,’ he told me, in his office at Brunel University where he teaches, ‘and I was saying “my mum keeps going on at me about finding a girlfriend”. I told her I can’t find anyone who’s vegan, kung-fu fighting, da da da da da da, a whole long list of things, and she wrote back and said, “Benjamin, you’re ridiculous, how can you want so many things from a woman?”’

  Benjamin certainly doesn’t seem lonely. The first time I interviewed him, in a café on Balham High Street, he could hardly get through a sentence without being interrupted by a passing pedestrian wanting to slap him on the back. So did he, I asked, feel lonely? He smiled. It was a big, sweet, toothy smile. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I really like living alone. There are little moments. Sometimes, when something funny’s happened, I think: shit, I want to share this with so
mebody. I saw something on YouTube the other day, and I thought: there are millions of people laughing at this, but I’m laughing at it on my own.’

  But he had recently had a conversation with someone that had made him think. ‘He’s elderly,’ he explained, ‘and on his own and ill. Just as we were finishing the conversation, he said, “Oh, by the way, are you married?” I said no and he said, “Have you got a girlfriend?” and I said no. Then I started joking. I said, “I’ve got all my own space, I can do what I want to do,” and he said, “It’s not funny. You have to find somebody. Now you’re OK. It’s all right when you’re young and fit but when you’re older you need the companionship.” This,’ said Benjamin, and now he wasn’t smiling, ‘is going to sound completely contradictory now, but my biggest fear is growing old alone.’

  I don’t want to grow old alone. I don’t think all that many of us do. But why is finding someone to share your life with so unbelievably hard?

  My friend Mimi Khalvati has been married three times. She is fiercely intelligent and also wise. Would she, I asked as we shared a pot of tea at her flat, be willing to tell me about her experience of marriage? There was a long pause. Mimi is still beautiful, at seventy. She has perfect cheekbones and big, soulful eyes. She is quiet, she is gentle and she is always incredibly polite. She looked out of the window and drew on her cigarette. ‘Fuck ’em!’ she almost shrieked, and I almost jumped. ‘Oh God! I would like to say it is the greatest area of total abject failure in my life.’

  Her first marriage, in Iran when she was nineteen, was, she said, ‘a completely idiotic venture’. By twenty-one, she was divorced. Her second marriage, to the father of her children, took place because she couldn’t get a work permit. ‘I proposed to him in the queue in the Home Office,’ she told me. ‘I said, “Oh, stuff this, let’s go and get married.”’ The marriage was, she explained, happy for a while, but ended because they both ‘changed so dramatically’.

  Her third marriage was the worst. ‘We spent years and years in this on–off relationship, with my endless moan about him being commitment-phobic. In order to prove his commitment, he went to the registry office and got this form for us to get married and then basically talked non-stop until I couldn’t stand it any more and said “all right”. I had one dress, so I wore that. We went to the registry office in Hackney. Then the guy said, “Do you, Edward, take Marion?” and we were both looking round saying “Who’s Edward and Marion?”’

  Edward, it turned out, was her husband’s first name, which he never used. Mimi has always been called Mimi, but the name on her birth certificate was Mariam (not Marion). ‘So that was a joke,’ she said. ‘The thing is, we weren’t serious. All the energy and thought and heart and commitment and dreams and love that people put into marriages weren’t there.’

  It always takes me by surprise when I hear stories like Mimi’s. For so much of my adult life, I have felt that my friends in relationships were the grown-ups and I was the child. I thought they were the ones who were doing things properly and I was the one who was messing things up. I have felt not just embarrassed about being single, but sometimes also ashamed.

  So did she, I asked, feel any sadness about being single? There was another long pause, and another drag on a cigarette. ‘Oh yes,’ she said and her eyes were wistful. ‘How can you not? I don’t really believe one was designed to live a solo life. Not really. But,’ she added, ‘it doesn’t tear me apart. There are times when I feel lonely, but I think it’s more than anything that thing about a rock. I don’t miss the romantic stuff, but I’d love to have more support. But I don’t really think that’s what men are for, actually. There are some men who are like that, but it’s very rare. It’s all the sort of charging around stuff I can’t stand.’

  I know what she means. I’ve seen a lot of men ‘charging around’. Heather has, too. Her last serious relationship was with a man who was handsome and knew it, a man whose ego was so big that feeding it was a full-time job. She is, she says, ‘quite contented’ now and has got more contented as she has got older. ‘But equally,’ she says, ‘I’m at a life stage where I’m thinking: “Oh God, am I really now going to be single for the rest of my life?”’

  Well, am I? If anyone had told me that I’d be single at forty-nine I think I’d have asked them to book me a slot at Dignitas. I want someone to love me. I want someone to go on holiday with, and to snuggle up with at weekends. And I want sex.

  On his death bed, the poet John Betjeman said: ‘I wish I’d had more sex.’ I really hope I don’t end up saying the same on mine. Sex is good for you. According to lots of studies, it makes you healthier, happier and may even prolong your life. But these studies make sex sound like broccoli. I’m not all that keen on broccoli. Sex can be like broccoli. It can be boring, embarrassing, or an exhausting palaver that leaves you dying for a cup of tea and a book. It can also be very, very, very, very nice.

  A few weeks after I walked out of that office on Kensington High Street, I met a man at a conference. We had an interesting conversation about globalization and the fourth industrial revolution, which turned out to be a long-winded way of saying that we had both recently lost our jobs. When he was back in the country a few weeks later, we met for a drink. At the bus stop, he gave me a hug and his shoulder suddenly felt like just the place to put my head. A couple of hours later, we were wrapped in each other’s arms.

  What happened was lovely. It wasn’t explosive, or life-changing, and we both knew that it was unlikely to lead to anything much because we lived 4000 miles apart. But for the few days and nights we spent together, we cuddled and kissed and laughed. He, it turned out, had also had a slightly unwise one-night stand with a Pole. His Pole sounded politer than my Pole. I didn’t begrudge him his polite Pole because he’s a nice man and he cheered me up.

  Motherhood and Michelangelo

  After emailing the opinion editor at The Guardian, I met her for ‘a cup of coffee’, which is the euphemism we all use for a meeting to beg for work. I always hoped these meetings would end with an offer of a contract and a column. In fact, they always ran along similar lines: we’ve had our budgets slashed and we can’t offer anything regular, but do feel free to pitch us some ideas. What this often means is that you spend hours ploughing through the papers in order to cobble together some thoughts and then the email isn’t answered, or the idea is nicked by someone on the staff.

  But the opinion editor at The Guardian was kind. A few days after we met, she gave me a call. Would I, she asked, write something for the website about the NHS policy on cutting umbilical cords? The piece, she explained, would be for the part of the Guardian website called Comment is Free. They don’t exactly expect you to write for free. They pay you £95, which is a fraction of what I got paid for a column before. I said yes, of course.

  I had no idea what the NHS policy was on cutting umbilical cords, or if there was any reason it should change. I have never been anywhere near an umbilical cord. I have certainly never produced one. I always thought I would. I thought I would fall in love, get married and then have lovely babies who turned into lovely toddlers and then, perhaps after a brief teenage blip, devoted daughters and sons. I fell at the first hurdle. On the rare occasions I have been in love it has felt more like being in some outer rim of Dante’s hell than anything that might lead to a three-bedroom maisonette in Cheam. One minute, you think you have found the answer to everything. The birds are singing, the sun is shining, there are rainbows in your heart. The next, you’re staggering around with a bloody stump where you once had a limb. I am, clearly, no expert on how to conduct a successful romance, but I can say with some authority that it’s better if the person who shares your bed and then breaks your heart doesn’t also share your office.

  I wanted a man who loved me, and wanted babies with me, and wanted to be there to watch those babies turn into teachers or football players or poets. I didn’t want to harvest a man for his sperm.

  For my thirtieth birthday party, I did an
invitation with a skull and crossbones. ‘Growing Panic at Grosvenor Park,’ it said, ‘as Christina approaches 30.’ I didn’t need to spell out what the panic was. It was men. It was babies. It was the whole damn caboodle. It was feeling that everyone else was about to get on a train that I was about to miss. Not long after, I went on a trip to Thailand. There were four of us, plus the guide. One night I slept on my own in a tiny tree house in the jungle. Another night, we all slept in a long house in the hills near Chiang Mai with members of an ancient tribe. But even lying in a tree house, listening to the moans of the frogs and the singing of the cicadas, there were moments when I felt like a maiden aunt. The other people on the trip were all in their early twenties. There was a young Australian girl who kept talking about her boyfriend at home, and two Kenyan Asian boys who were going back to arranged marriages. I felt like begging them to ask their parents if they would arrange a marriage for me.

  It now seems a bit mad that I was worrying about this at thirty. So many middle-class women have children so late that they make it feel like the norm. But actually I was right to worry. A woman’s fertility starts to decline in her early thirties. At thirty-five, it starts to plummet. At forty, a woman has only a 5 per cent chance of becoming pregnant in any month. And that’s if she’s actually having sex. If you’re a single woman in your thirties, you live with a ticking clock that sometimes feels more like a bomb.

  Three of my friends managed to find a man just in time to squeeze the baby in (and out). Another one managed it at forty-three. Two of those men didn’t stick around. It was probably best for everyone that they didn’t stick around, but I don’t think lone parenthood, half-shackled to a narcissist who will always be your little darling’s dad, figured all that highly in my friends’ childhood dreams.