Before long, DePaulo found herself thinking less about deception in the abstract and more about the ways that the public, and singles in particular, had been deceived by claims about the benefits of being married. The issues weren’t merely academic, after all. The federal government and religious organizations were investing millions of dollars in marriage promotion campaigns, and their messages, she believed, did more to marginalize the unmarried majority than to lead them to the altar. These campaigns aren’t merely wasteful, DePaulo argues. They do damage. Not only do they make people feel bad about themselves, they also give the false impression that there’s no way to be a good or happy or worthy person when you’re single and living alone, and that shapes the way everyone perceives people who are on their own. “The truth,” she tells me, “is that today a lot more people than we realize are not looking to become unsingle. They date. They have close friendships. They have successful careers. They’ve just chosen not to be married, and we shouldn’t be trying to change them.”
DePaulo is impassioned and persuasive, but when we talk I cannot help asking her about the wrinkles in her own argument. It’s one thing to live alone when you’re healthy and successful, I offer. But what happens to people living alone when they get sick or lose their jobs and need someone to support them? Do their friends come through as if they were family? If you’re in that situation, are you better off with a spouse?
“I wish we had more systematic research on that,” DePaulo answers, before explaining that this is a policy issue as well as a personal one. “Under the Family and Medical Leave Act, you can’t take time off work to care for a loved one if they aren’t related, and obviously that makes it harder for singles to get assistance. That’s something that needs to change.” In her research she has collected anecdotal accounts of singles whose networks deliver. She refers me to an essay in Health Affairs by the sociologist Margaret K. Nelson, who chronicles her experiences helping to care for a fifty-seven-year-old friend who was single and living alone when she was diagnosed with terminal cancer,12 as well as to time use surveys showing that Americans spend considerable time assisting friends in need. “None of this is definitive,” she concedes. “But what I’ve learned so far makes me believe that this is not a clear-cut issue. And it’s not as if getting married guarantees that you’ll have someone there when you really need them, is it?”
SASHA CAGEN, still ambivalently Quirkyalone, has been struggling with this question. At our lunch in San Francisco, she explains that she’s always believed that having security while living alone requires building “families of friends” who will support each other during times of need. And although today her relationships feel stable, a recent experience has made her question whether her community is as durable as she’d like to imagine it. “My favorite aunt lives in Los Angeles,” Cagen tells me. “She’s a casting agent, and she’s been incredibly successful. She had a partner for about twenty-five years, and they separated about a decade ago. But she’s been single, and living alone, ever since then, and she’s always been totally connected—to friends, to colleagues, to her community. She has had this incredibly rich life.” The aunt, who was then in her sixties, was a role model for the Quirkyalone concept. She showed that it was possible to be alone but not lonesome, independent while immersed in collective life. “But the last few months have been a disaster,” Cagen says. “She got diagnosed with brain cancer, and before we knew it she had gone from being on top of everything to being pretty much incapable of taking care of herself. She needs someone there with her, taking her for treatment and making sure she’s okay. All these things that we normally take for granted, she can’t do them on her own anymore.”
A debilitating terminal disease is the ultimate test of a support network. In the United States, where women are integrated into the labor force and relatives are often separated by thousands of miles, not many families are equipped to handle the challenge. In theory, Cagen had always thought, locally based “urban tribes” could be well suited for intensive caretaking. (Gay men in San Francisco during the AIDS crisis were her model.) In her aunt’s case, however, the family of friends proved unable to meet her growing list of needs. “Her friends were amazing,” Cagen explains. “There were all these people there to support her when she got her diagnosis, and they took turns taking her to the doctor or bringing her meals.” But fighting terminal cancer can be overwhelming for everyone, whether they live alone or are married, and when there are extensive treatments to undergo those who are most involved have no choice but to restructure their lives. The process can take months, even years, and in her aunt’s case the prospects were bleak. Her friends had been so generous and attentive that Cagen’s aunt felt revitalized, and she said she’d never experienced so much love. But her friends had full-time jobs and problems of their own to manage. Someone had to take charge of the situation, and when it became clear that none of her friends could do it, Cagen and her sister did.
Cagen left her job in San Francisco and began commuting to Los Angeles, where she planned to stay for a few months. She had been eager for a change—for a “life churn,” as she calls it—and for a time she considered settling down there so she could continue attending to her aunt. But, like the others in her aunt’s network, Cagen ultimately realized that she couldn’t handle the responsibility. Los Angeles wasn’t her city, and she didn’t want to rebuild her life there. She had also been saving up to travel in South America for a year or so, and she worried that if she didn’t do it then, she never would. Cagen’s family in Rhode Island gathered to devise a new arrangement, concluding that the only way they could be there for her aunt was if she moved back to the East Coast to be there with them. Her aunt agreed, even though it meant leaving her doctors, her friends, her home—her life, really—behind. She wanted to be taken care of by her family, and it was a relief for her to know that, in addition to her friends in Los Angeles, she had her family’s love and support.
For Cagen, her aunt’s situation has raised difficult questions. Her aunt had led an exemplary Quirkyalone lifestyle—indeed she was its inspiration—but it was hard not to see a cautionary tale in her fate. “I just didn’t know what the tale was,” Cagen tells me. “Was it that she lived alone? That she lived far from her family? That she was single and childless? I still don’t really know.” To be sure, it was an improbable situation. Her aunt, who ultimately died in Rhode Island, got sick at a young age, when her friends were still working, and her illness, which ravaged the brain, quickly undermined her capacity to care for herself. Cagen knew that most people who live alone are unlikely to wind up this way, and she didn’t want to interpret her aunt’s tragedy as a consequence of going solo any more than of bad luck. But the entire situation added new urgency to her attempt to make a life churn, part of which involved publicly redefining Quirkyalone in a blog post so that it emphasized the possibilities for being in relationships.
Cagen decided to leave the country, bought a ticket for Brazil, put her things into storage, and set out to live a more anonymous, adventurous life. Before leaving, she posted a message on the Quirkyalone Web site: “More and more quirkyalone is about connection for me, the idea that it’s impossible to be connected to others without being comfortable alone . . . For many of us, I think being quirkyalone is a prerequisite to being in a healthy relationship. It’s about confidence and presence, so you can be fully present for someone else and appreciate them for who they are without judgment or squeezing them into a predefined box or list. Solitude can be experienced alone or with others. With others: it’s just about focusing on the world which you inhabit together.”
The post generated a minor controversy among Quirkyalone’s followers, with some voicing their support for Cagen’s honesty and others condemning her for abandoning the cause. “I was really worried about what would happen when I posted it,” she tells me. “But it turned out to be a great experience—it brought back a lot of the feelings I had when I publis
hed the original Quirkyalone article ten years ago. I’ve been dealing with these issues for so long that it was liberating to share what I was thinking. I know that a few people out there are upset with me. But I’m human, and this is my life. I need to do what’s best for me.”
6.
AGING ALONE
IF SASHA CAGEN’S ACCOUNT of how her family scrambled to support her chronically ill aunt sounds familiar, it’s because situations like this have become increasingly common throughout the developed world. In recent decades, both the number and proportion of people aging alone has skyrocketed, and yet the challenges stemming from this extraordinary transformation fall squarely on the shoulders of individual families like the Cagens, and are rarely discussed in public or political debates. Consider that, in 1950, only one in ten Americans over sixty-five lived alone, whereas today about one in three do, and the prevalence is far higher among the older elderly, those seventy-five and above. The situation is similar in Europe. Despite some national variation, the European Commission estimates that one in three elderly people on the continent lived alone in 2010. In Japan, only one in ten men and one in five women over sixty-five lived alone in 2010, but even this represents a dramatic increase from 1950, and the national government is expecting a “surge” in the next two decades. The same is true in India, China, and South Korea, where demographers are already worrying about the rise of aging alone.1
Worrying is not the only appropriate response to this emerging phenomenon. After all, the longevity revolution, which is the driving force behind the rise of seniors living alone, ranks among the greatest achievements in human history. In fact, until 1930, there was not a single European nation in which 10 percent of the population reached the age of sixty-five. As the Nobel Prize–winning economist Robert William Fogel writes, during the past century “nothing has been more remarkable . . . than the extension of life expectancy, which has increased by about thirty years since 1900 in England, France, and the United States and in equal or larger amounts in such countries as India, China, and Japan.”2 Longevity is just one measure of this achievement. The majority of us don’t merely survive far longer than our predecessors, we also maintain our physical health and capacity for independence for a span of years that would have been unimaginable a century ago.
But alas, our most astounding accomplishments are all too often the sources of our most difficult challenges—think of industrialism, nuclear energy, or the automobile—and longevity is by no means an unqualified good. One problem, for instance, is that at an individual level our lifetimes have expanded unevenly, which means that today it is not uncommon for one spouse or domestic partner to outlive the other by years or even decades, leaving her—and it’s usually her—without a partner when she is most in need of companionship and support. Another problem is that aging alone requires learning to live differently, since challenges that might be simple and mundane during other stages of life—getting to the doctor, filling up free time, maintaining one’s strength—can become unmanageable as our capacities diminish.
This is why being old, alone, and isolated does not merely render us vulnerable when we’re sick or during a crisis, it can also dramatically diminish the quality of life every day. Consider the findings from a study conducted by Australian researchers who distributed diaries to a large sample of people in different age groups and asked them to record how they spent each part of the day. The average adult is alone for about three hours a day. But the story is different for a typical older person who lives alone. Elderly Australians who live on their own spend 12.5 hours a day alone, roughly 80 percent of their waking time. In 2001, Japanese researchers conducted a similar study. It’s not uncommon to hear Americans praise the Japanese for the respect they pay to the elderly. This praise may be deserved, but not because the Japanese do an unusually good job of attending to seniors who live alone. The study found that Japanese people who live alone after age sixty-five spend about twelve of their waking hours by themselves daily; when sleep is included, the number of hours they spend alone rises above twenty.
American senior citizens who live alone have more social contact—but not much more. According to the American Time Use Survey, between 2003 and 2006 the typical elderly singleton spent an average of 10 hours a day alone, 2 hours with family, 2 hours with friends or acquaintances, and 1 hour in some other activity, while the typical married senior spent an average of 5 hours alone, 7.3 hours with a spouse, 1.3 hours with other family, 1 hour with friends or acquaintances, and 1 hour in another activity. The word “average” is important here, because the fact is that older Americans who live alone do not spend two hours every day with family and two hours every day with friends and acquaintances. On many days they see no family and no friends. On some days they have no social contact. They are isolated, not merely alone.
Not many people want to end up this way. Most of us hope to spend our golden years living actively, with loved ones—a spouse, family, good friends—nearby. But we all know that life is unpredictable, particularly once you hit sixty-five or seventy. No one, rich or poor, can fully control their social fate. Marriage is a strong buffer against the threat of isolation. Yet most aging couples are well aware of the unwelcome fact that they are just a heartbeat away from terminal separation. And no one struggles more with solitary living than the recently widowed elderly, whose own risk of sickness, death, and institutionalization increases significantly immediately after a spouse dies.3
What’s puzzling, in light of all this, is that the majority of the single elderly believe that living alone beats any other available option, such as moving in with children or, far worse, a nursing home.4 Most Americans and Europeans (and a rising number of people in other parts of the world, too) place great value on independence, so much so that their sense of integrity and self-respect depends on how autonomous they feel. Giving up their own place to move in with family or professional caretakers decreases the risk of loneliness, isolation, and the related health hazards, but if it comes at the expense of dignity it may not be worth the price. Our cultural preference for living autonomously is a key reason why today more than 11 million elderly Americans and 72 million elderly Europeans live alone, and why in the coming decades many millions more will do so.
The time use studies of older Americans suggest a bleak outlook for those who age alone, with endless hours of solitude broken only by rare and brief visits from friends or family. If these diaries were our only source of information, it would be hard to avoid the conclusion that most older people who live alone would benefit from more social contact, and that if we don’t find ways to provide it, our rapidly aging nation faces severe and widespread troubles. Indeed, during my research I’ve observed so many cases of severe isolation and vulnerability among the solo-dwelling elderly like Mary Ann that it’s hard to see it as anything other than a haunting social problem, one that deserves far more attention than we give it today.
But I’ve also come to appreciate that aging alone is not always a social problem. A number of recent studies report that while living alone is now rampant among the elderly, social isolation may be less pervasive than we think. Drawing on a survey of more than 3,000 older Americans between ages fifty-seven and eighty-five, Cornell University sociologist Benjamin Cornwell confirmed that those who live alone have less overall social contact and weaker relationships than those who are married. Surprisingly, however, he also discovered that single seniors have the same number of friends and core discussion partners as their married peers, and that they are actually more likely to socialize with friends and neighbors. In England, one team of medical researchers reported that the overall level of loneliness “has shown little change in the past fifty years” despite the incredible rise of aging alone; another group found that elderly people living alone don’t suffer more mental or physical illness than those living with others and, even more surprisingly, that “stated satisfaction with life was somewhat higher in
those living alone.”5
None of this should imply that, in the abstract, most single elderly people would rather go solo. On the contrary, those who have lost a spouse or domestic partner with whom they’ve grown old wish things had turned out differently and that their companion was still beside them. But they are also realistic about the options they face after a loss, and they understand that getting their partner back isn’t one of them. What’s new and intriguing is that in recent decades the great majority of older widows, widowers, and divorcees have found ways to remake their lives as singletons and to stay that way as long as they can.
ONE CRUCIAL REASON that so many elderly singles are going solo is that the experience need not be either miserable or isolating. In the United States, where remarriage is far more common than it is in comparable nations, a startlingly low 2 percent of elderly widows and 20 percent of elderly widowers ever remarry. (The gender disparity is largely attributable to the fact that at ages sixty-five and above there are about three women for every two men, and three women for every one man at ages eighty-five and above.) Studies show that these low rates of remarriage are due not only to a shortage of available partners, but also to a lack of interest in coupling up again. According to the sociologist Deborah Carr, at eighteen months after the death of a spouse, a mere one in four elderly men and one in six elderly women say they are interested in remarrying, one in three men and one in seven women are interested in dating someday, while one in four men and only one in eleven women are interested in dating now.6
Going Solo Page 16
