The so-called “creative class” of those who work in the knowledge economies share a similar ethos. True, the lucky ones can occasionally enjoy a Ping-Pong game or free food in the office, but they also face enormous demands on their time and energy. They are not only vying for market share in fiercely competitive industries, from software to cinema, advertising to art. They are also trying to break down the barriers between their personal and professional lives, making work the primary site for what Matthew Crawford calls “soulcraft,” and often for their social time too. In Free Agent Nation, the business writer Daniel Pink reports that self-employed entrepreneurs in a wide variety of fields also experience work as completely consuming. Pink calls the tens of millions of Americans who exist this way “soloists” because their “prospects depend mostly on their own individual efforts” rather than on the “benevolence of a large institution.” This change in the nature of work can be liberating, terrifying, exhausting, and exhilarating. As one of his sources puts it: “The worst part about going out on your own is that you have to work twenty-four hours a day. The best part is that you get to choose which twenty-four.”8
There’s less choice in fields such as banking, law, media, or medicine, where managers need not advise anyone to put themselves—or, really, their work—before their relationships, because the job implicitly requires it. In these and other high-power, high-paying professions, some employers demand that young workers spend most of their waking hours—seventy, eighty, ninety per week—in the office, or traveling on business, or checking in from a BlackBerry if they stray into personal time.
Today young professionals routinely cancel lunch dates, evening plans, even entire vacations, because “something’s come up” at work. Take Mark, an investment banker who, when in his mid-twenties, never showed up to the apartment he’d rented with his girlfriend on the West Coast, even after she’d moved into it, because his job suddenly required him to stay back east! Needless to say, their relationship soon ended, and eventually he began to plan his life around the realities of his vocation. “I would still date,” he tells me. “But I sought out much younger women who were not interested in the answer to the dreaded five-word question: ‘Where is this relationship going?’ I wanted to be open to meeting the right woman. But I was also avoiding it because I prioritized my career and spent my social time with coworkers. I thought I’d have time for marriage and kids later on.”
Mark is not the only one who has adapted to the 24/7 work culture by making the office the hub of his social life. One attorney we interviewed says that, after two years of seventy-hour work weeks, his gay colleagues had become his primary peer group. And Justin, the journalist we met in chapter one, says that he doesn’t mind the long hours because “it’s a social environment, you know? I’m surrounded by a lot of people with similar interests. I do a lot of interacting, talking, e-mail, bopping down the hall to discuss a story or just shoot the shit.” He, too, reports that his friends from work are now his most common companions outside the office. “We go out to lunch together. And we have sports teams from outside of work. A tennis team, a softball team. It’s fun.”9
The office is not the only place where the lines between the personal and professional lives of young adults have blurred. Now that smart phones are standard accessories in their cultural universe, and expansive social networks on sites such as Facebook generate constant chatter among “friends” from every sphere of life, the worlds of work and play swirl together in a steady stream of messages that they follow wherever they are. One woman we interviewed, an attorney in her early thirties who works in politics, tells me: “Of my nine-hour day, I’m spending seven hours responding to e-mails”—mostly job related, but many from friends and family, too. “I also have, like, three hundred fifty people in my cell phone,” she explains. It buzzes often, she checks it constantly, and she always tries to respond quickly, even if she’s out with friends and the call or message is from work.
This behavior is not unusual. Although we often associate living alone with social isolation, for most adults the reverse is true. In many cases, those who live alone are socially overextended, and hyperactive use of digital media keeps them even busier.10 The young urban professionals we interviewed report that they struggle more with avoiding the distraction of always available social activity, from evenings with friends to online chatter, than with being disconnected. “Singles in the U.S.: The New Nuclear Family” confirms this. The large-scale study by the market research firm Packaged Facts reports that those who live alone are more likely than others to say that the Internet has changed the way they spend their free time, more likely to be online late at night, and more likely to say that using the Net has cut into their sleep. Not that they are homebodies. According to a Pew Foundation study of social isolation and new technology, heavy users of the Internet and social media are actually more likely than others to have large and diverse social networks, visit public places where strangers may interact, and participate in volunteer organizations.11 Singles and people who live alone are twice as likely as married people to go to bars and dance clubs. They eat out in restaurants more often, are more likely to take art or music classes, attend public events, and go shopping with friends.12 To be sure, many occasionally struggle with loneliness or with the feeling that they need to change something to make their lives feel more complete. But so, too, do their married friends and family members and, really, most everyone during some periods of their lives. Finding a partner or a live-in companion is not enough to solve the social pain of loneliness, which is a fundamental part of the human experience.13
AS THEY HIT their middle and late thirties, however, many singles who live alone begin to question why they haven’t coupled up yet, and whether they would be happier if they did. It’s not easy to answer. Mark, for instance, says that staying single through his thirties allowed him to experience things that his friends who married and had children could only dream about: Living in different countries. Taking adventurous vacations. Dating lots of women and figuring out what kind of partner he wants. He’s also certain that he’s benefitted from spending so much time and effort building a professional network early in his career, because he needed it to find a new job during the recent financial crisis.
As he approached forty, Mark began to believe he had missed out on something important: “I look at my friends who are married and have these adorable young children, and I worry that I made a mistake. My life feels pretty empty sometimes, and I’d like to be part of something more meaningful than what I do at work. I’d actually like to marry the woman I’m dating now. But she may not be interested in starting a family with someone who’s spent the past several years doing the kinds of things I’ve been doing.” Women, he knows, can be suspicious of never-married men in their late thirties and forties. “I need to convince her that I can cut down on the endless work hours and give up the big nights drinking at nightclubs full of single women. I feel like I’m done with that. She’s not sure.”
Of course, as a successful man in a city crowded with single women, Mark enjoys certain luxuries that women his age do not. Most important, he’s in no hurry to answer the question of whether he wants to become a biological parent, and he believes that if things don’t work out with his current girlfriend he can search for another without worrying that his reproductive capacities will have diminished.14 Although some women may be suspicious of long-term bachelors, Mark has no fears about becoming stigmatized. Gentle ribbing from his mother, who’s long past ready for grandchildren, and occasional jealous confessions from married friends who fantasize about being single in New York City are the main ways that his single status comes up.
Women who live alone in their thirties and forties face far more social pressure. Whether single by choice or by chance, most of the women we interviewed report that, after their twenties, concerns about whether and how to find a partner and have children became an inescapable part of their
lives. They notice that certain people—friends, family, even recent acquaintances—are always calling attention to their domestic status. These are the ones who, in nearly every conversation, quickly ask whether they are dating anyone or start suggesting eligible bachelors, and treat everything else as secondary. This experience is common among women who go solo, so much so that many question whether it’s really about them or the projected anxieties of their acquaintances. But nearly all report that it makes them feel stigmatized. Regardless of their personal or professional accomplishments, they see their public identity as “spoiled,” as the sociologist Erving Goffman put it—reduced from something big and complex and interesting to that of the single woman alone.15
Questions about dating are hardly the only source of stigma for young women who live alone. Television programs and magazine stories regularly trot out psychologists with advice on how to make yourself more attractive and find a partner, or sociologists who warn about how much you will suffer if you don’t. (For instance, Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher, authors of The Case for Marriage: “Science tends to confirm Grandma’s wisdom: On the whole, man was not meant to live alone, and neither was woman.”)16 Politicians across the spectrum decry the decline of marriage and the culture of “selfish singles.” Doctors warn their female patients about the risks of delaying childbirth until they reach “advanced maternal age.” Antisingle messages even come from within, since it’s hard not to internalize a lifetime’s worth of messages about the importance of coupling up or having children, not to mention the horrors of spinsterhood.
Women who live alone are all too aware that delaying marriage means reducing the odds of having a biological child. They may not have read the recent study showing that, in the 1970s, only one in ten American women ended her childbearing years—at age forty-five, though for most women it is younger—without giving birth, whereas one in five women do so today.17 But since they know many other women in their situation, they wouldn’t be surprised by the trend. If living alone and being childless in one’s late thirties and early forties has become more common, it hasn’t gotten any easier. Even the most confident and successful solo women we interviewed openly questioned whether they had made the right choices for themselves.
Molly, a Web designer in her late thirties, defines herself as a fierce individualist. “I’ve always liked to have a lot of alone time,” she explains, her soft brown eyes seeking out understanding and her mouth slightly open, making her appear somewhat vulnerable or exposed. “I’m not someone who intertwines that well.” She and her sister grew up as latchkey kids with divorced parents, both of whom used Molly as their mediator. “I wasn’t just the caretaker. I was also, like, the rodeo clown. Everybody always put their stuff on me, and I had to run interference. When I went off to college, I was so excited. I felt like enormous amounts of weight were lifted off of me. I didn’t call home for months.”
Molly moved to Boston after graduation and rented a place with roommates. She went out a lot and had a few relationships, but nothing serious. After six years she moved to New York City, and when she could afford it got a place of her own in Kips Bay. Now Molly’s thirty-seven, and she doesn’t think she’s incomplete without a partner, even when she’s home alone. “I really love being able to create that little vacuum of space for myself,” she says. “I don’t ever feel desolate. Sometimes I don’t even answer the phone if it rings. It’s not like I don’t have good interpersonal relationships. But I think that sometimes they can be too close, and to have that with someone, and also be living together—there’s just like no relief, no time when it’s just me by myself, not having to think about anybody else and whatever. It’s just too close for comfort for me.”
Despite herself, when she was in her twenties and early thirties Molly thought she might enjoy moving in with a partner or getting married. “I did enormous amounts of dating,” she says. “I was looking for the guy.” A few of her relationships lasted a year, at which point she would ask herself, “Do I want to go the distance with this person? And I just always opted against it.” By the time she turned thirty-five, Molly had tired of trying. She was working long hours, and using her hard-won free time to meet men felt wasteful, even self-destructive. She started spending more time hanging out with friends, mostly coworkers and people she’d met on snowboarding trips. “I just like that I don’t have to worry about anybody else’s anything,” she explains. This has made her happier than dating, and so she has decided to stop searching for a man.
Yet not even Molly can escape worrying that she’s making a bad decision or, worse, that her satisfaction living alone reflects a personal failure. Usually she feels fortunate to live at a moment when going solo is a viable option. “Living alone is just something that I like so much,” she says. “If I were living in a different time, when you went from your father’s house to your husband’s house, I wonder if I would have learned as much about myself.” But at low points it’s different: “I just kind of wonder, like, is there something wrong with me, that I’m not with somebody? Was there something that happened many years ago that’s still sort of echoing into my whole life?” No matter how much she enjoys going solo, or how well it suits her, it takes extraordinary strength to feel good about being on her own, Molly explains. When you live alone as a woman, confidence is something you have to build.
Ella, a public interest lawyer in her mid-thirties, is brazen and brilliant, with long blond hair, big blue eyes, and muscular arms. She is also particularly attuned to the challenges of learning to live alone as a woman, and her efforts to overcome them are worth exploring at length. “I see so many women of my age around me who are feeling desperation,” she explains. “Like, ‘I can’t be alone! There’s something wrong with me if I’m alone!’ I don’t feel that at all. I’ve had friends over the last four or five years—women who were hysterical about finding a man. They were lonely and they didn’t know how to be in the world alone. I really don’t ever want to become that way.” She gets upset when she hears people urge women her age to marry undesirable partners. Ella believes that most women would be better off holding out until they find what they are looking for, and if not, learning how to live alone. After all, by the time she had reached her mid-thirties she had already seen several friends endure the trauma of divorce or separation, and she’s skeptical that those who take the advice to “settle” would avoid this fate.
Perhaps Ella would view things differently if it was clear that marriage generated tangible benefits for someone in her situation. But she doesn’t think that the studies documenting the benefits of marriage have much relevance to her case. Ella is a voracious reader, and she knows that men get the lion’s share of the marriage dividend, especially now that a growing number of women are not just outliving, but also outearning their spouses.18 She’s also seen research showing that married women are actually more likely than singles to suffer from depression and that, as they get invested in domesticity, they become less likely to sustain their large social networks or advance in their careers. At this point, her family, close friends, and work projects are her greatest sources of meaning. The challenge, as she sees it, is to make the most of them, and to learn how to enjoy both the solitude and the companionship that her lifestyle affords.
Ella has done this deliberately. Soon after she settled into her current job, she purchased a cozy one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn Heights, where there’s vibrant street life, a wide range of services, and a lot of other singles her age. She became a regular at a local yoga studio, where she not only learned how to focus her mental energy and feel more at ease with herself, but also developed a new set of friends. “I’ve been going there for about four years now, so I know everybody,” Ella explains. “It’s a really tight-knit community, not competitive or weird.” Although she had always seen herself as an outsider, not a joiner, after a few years in the neighborhood she discovered that she had become ensconced there, and she liked it. “
A really nice thing about living in New York is that it’s so anonymous,” Ella says. “But it’s nice to create your niche, especially when you’re living alone. And I really love having lived in one place long enough to walk around and run into people I know every day.”
Ella also likes staying home on occasion and not seeing people. With work and her busy social life to manage, sometimes it feels better to keep to herself. “I’m almost too content on my own,” she acknowledges. But getting this way took some effort. Though Ella has always liked cooking, at first it wasn’t easy to do it without company. The elaborate process of planning, shopping, preparing, cooking, and eating felt strange and wasteful when she did it all solo. She didn’t exactly long for the idealized family dinner, but she was all too aware that many of her contemporaries view dining alone—whether at home or in public—as a sign of social failure, or just plain sad. Moreover, Ella shared the sentiment that some nay-saying singles conveyed to the food writer and editor Judith Jones: “I like to cook for others, to give my friends pleasure. Why would I want to go to all that trouble just for me?”19 Gradually, however, Ella recognized that cooking for one required cultivating a special talent: the will and capacity to use her time, money, and creative energy to fulfill her own needs. It was a challenge worth pursuing, because the skill—as those who have mastered it attest—transcends the kitchen. Fundamentally, it is about learning to take care of yourself.
Going Solo Page 7
