All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

by Traister, Rebecca

  Nussbaum also reveled in the fact that people were put off by Sex and the City. “I really loved how scary it was to people,” she told me. Compared to earlier depictions of single women as determined and lovable, or sad and desperate, the sexually voracious Carrie and Samantha frightened men. Nussbaum continued, “The show knew Carrie was fucked-up and flawed, that she wasn’t some sweet plucky avatar of ‘Why can’t she find love?’ It was refreshing because it set the stage for women to be flawed, angry, strange, needy and otherwise nonadorable.”

  The complexities of the women in Sex and the City helped make them synonymous with the city, which is one of the reasons that in time, I grew to appreciate it more. Because I knew how flawed, angry, strange, and otherwise nonadorable a place New York City could be, even after its pleasures eventually began to reveal themselves to me.

  Five years after I moved to New York, I was able to leave roommates behind and rent my own alcove studio, and my relationship with New York changed almost instantly. In my own apartment, I became happier than I had ever been. My flat was small and not fancy, but I loved every inch of it. I used to have nightmares about having accidentally given up that apartment; in the dreams, I’d be looking into it through its big windows, desperate to get back in.

  Getting my own place coincided with an expansion of my social sphere, an increased ease in my professional life; I’d never felt more formed, more adult, and more at home than I did on the first morning I awoke in that apartment. If Sex and the City used shoes and closets and cocktails as material emblems of larger freedoms, I reveled in my own pricey symbolism; 450 square feet of unrenovated rental apartment.

  However, while I was conducting interviews for this book, journalist Jessica Bennet described to me one of her lasting memories of single urban despair: After having broken up with her long-term boyfriend, she recalled the sense of exhaustion, defeat, and loneliness she felt while trying to lug an air conditioner up four flights of stairs to her apartment. As she spoke, she provoked in me a very vivid memory:

  I’m standing outside a Lowe’s Hardware store, just four blocks from the new apartment—my very own apartment—into which I have recently moved and which I adore. It’s early summer, five-and-a-half years after my arrival in New York, and I have never felt so happy, so capable. But it’s so hot, over 100 degrees. And the air conditioner is so heavy. I can’t pick it up, let alone carry it home. I’m so happy, I tell myself. I’m so capable. But I’m so tired. And so lonely.

  Who’s going to help me? Not the city—this great city, with its independence and its friends and its spaces—the city is what got me into this mess. With its no cars and its sweltering pavement and its steep stoops and its array of similarly unmarried friends, who are wonderful but who also don’t have cars, and are, also, in the midst of this unexpected heat wave, wrestling their own air conditioners into windows and weeping with the hot, sweaty solitude of it.

  No, the only thing I want at that moment is a partner: not someone to do this for me, exactly, but to do it with me. I am twenty-seven years old and I want a goddamn husband.

  And, at almost exactly the moment that I think this, perhaps even utter it under my breath, a taxi driven by a woman—still a rarity in New York—drops off another Lowe’s customer. I look longingly at the car and the driver rolls down her window and asks if I want to get in. I don’t have cash. Do I have cash at home? She asks. Yes. This woman gets out of the cab, helps me lift the air conditioner into the trunk. When she pulls up at my apartment, my new landlord is there, smoking a cigarette on the stoop. He helps me the rest of the way.

  I scoot back out to pay the cabbie and thank her. “You looked stuck,” she says in an Eastern European accent. “Sometimes, you just need a lift.”

  Sex and the City got unlocked from HBO and began airing in syndication at around the same time that I moved into my own apartment. I never did watch the series all the way through, but enjoyed the episodes I’d land on. For a while, it seemed that I always flipped to the same one, about Fleet Week. It was a half hour that ended with Carrie riffing on Didion, opining that if “You only get one great love, New York may just be mine.”

  I loved that line. By the time I carved out my own space in the metropolis, I had come to agree with it.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Dangerous as Lucifer Matches: The Friendships of Women

  In 2009, two women living in Washington, D.C., were invited to a Gossip Girl viewing party. Ann Friedman, then twenty-seven, arrived with a boyfriend; Aminatou Sow, then twenty-four, was wearing a homemade “Chuck + Blair” shirt, in reference to two of the show’s nubile protagonists. They noticed each other right away.

  Amina said she knew immediately that Ann—funny, tall, loquacious—was someone she wanted in her life. Even as they left the party that first night, she hoped that Ann and her then-beau would be walking in her direction; They weren’t. “I remember being really heartbroken,” Amina said. But when she got home, she discovered that Ann had already friended her on Facebook and knew then that they were “meant to be.”

  In a bit of social kismet, both women were invited to another event the very next day. They started hanging out all the time, discovered they shared pop culture and fashion interests. Ann was a journalist, Amina a digital strategist; as a way to get to know each other, they started a pop culture blog, called “Instaboner,” that chronicled their literary, political, and stylistic obsessions. “We learned to speak the same language,” said Amina.

  “We were instantly close,” agreed Ann, in a separate interview.

  Though their connection wasn’t sexual, the process of falling for each other was almost romantic. With Amina, Ann said, she found “the thing I always wanted but didn’t get from relationships with men: pushing me to be better without seeming like they were constantly disappointed in me.” She very quickly began to rely on Amina for emotional support, personal advice, and professional counsel. “All these things people say they turn to a partner for, I turn to Amina for,” said Ann.

  Among the largely unacknowledged truths of female life is that women’s primary, foundational, formative relationships are as likely to be with each other as they are with the men we’ve been told since childhood are supposed to be the people who complete us.

  Female friendship has been the bedrock of women’s lives for as long as there have been women. In earlier eras, when there was less chance that a marriage, entered early, often for practical economic and social reasons, would provide emotional or intellectual succor, female friends offered intimate ballast.

  Now, when marriages may ideally offer far more in the way of soulful satisfaction but increasingly tend to begin later in life, if at all, women find themselves growing into themselves, shaping their identities, dreams and goals not necessarily in tandem with a man or within a traditional family structure, but instead alongside other women. Their friends.

  Aminatou Sow was born in Guinea. The daughter of a Muslim diplomat father, her mother one of the first women to get an engineering degree in Guinea, Amina grew up in Nigeria, Belgium, and France, and attended the University of Texas at Austin. She moved back to Belgium briefly after college, to care for her father and siblings after the sudden death of her mother, but soon returned to the United States for work, and, within nine months, received female genital mutilation asylum that enabled her to stay.

  Ann Friedman was raised in Eastern Iowa. Her parents are Catholic, and she went to the University of Missouri.

  “I grew up in this very international world,” said Amina. “Ann is a Midwestern girl. In lots of ways we’re so far apart. There are a lot of things about us that complement each other and a lot of things we don’t see eye to eye on.”

  Among the things they had in common was their interest in and commitment to personal independence.

  For Amina, whose parents were the first in their families to marry for love and not as part of an arranged union, and whose grandfather had three wives and twenty-one children, living a
lone, unmarried, into her late twenties is an almost political statement. Singlehood, she said, simply “isn’t part of the world where I come. It is a thing that never, ever happens.” She is the first woman in her family to live alone, the first to make as much money as she does.

  Ann, who broke up with the boyfriend she’d brought to the Gossip Girl party several months after she and Amina became friends, has found enormous satisfaction in her adult singleness. In large part, she said, that’s because in the years she’s spent officially uncoupled, she’s found that friendships have become paramount. “There is not a romantic relationship or a sexual relationship with a man that has even come close in two years,” she said. Both women believe in what they call “chosen families.”

  “I don’t mean just on a feminist or academic level,” Ann clarified, “I mean that I believe if you choose to invest in people, the people you invest heavily in heavily invest in you, and that is emotionally sustaining.” It’s an idea that is gaining some ground in scientific circles. As Natalie Angier reports, after years of anthropologists dismissing nonblood familial ties as “fictive kin,” researchers have “recently pushed back against that distinction, arguing that self-constructed families are no less real or meaningful than conventional ones,”and are beginning to refer to them as “voluntary kin.”1 The distinction between voluntary kin and what we think of as regular friendship, Angier writes, is that the relationships “often become central to one’s identity [and] may serve important life functions: They may provide a sense of belonging, as well as financial and emotional relief.”

  Ann described her friends, Amina chief among them, as “my emotional support, my everything.” And Amina said, “I always tell Ann she’s the single most important relationship in my life, not to put pressure on her, but because it’s true. It feels like I’ve known her forever.”

  A couple of years after Ann and Amina began to twine their lives around each other, Ann decided to leave Washington to pursue a work opportunity. The separation was devastating.

  Amina remembered, in detail, the things they did together to gear up for her best friend’s departure: the packing and the deaccessioning of Ann’s stuff and the good-bye partying. On the morning that Ann set off across the country—moving first to Austin, Texas, then on to Los Angeles—Amina recalled how hard she cried. “I went and got coffee at seven in the morning, and I was hysterical,” she said. “It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.”

  I knew exactly how she felt.

  Sara

  Sara and I met as office peons in 1999, but did not instantly hit it off. After several years of distant socializing through our shared network of friends, we found ourselves sitting together at a party after we’d both been through romantic breakups. Comparing notes on our recently smashed hearts, we began to build a relationship of our own.

  We became friends in a period of our lives when the demands of our jobs were just heating up, when the roots we were putting down in the city were just getting deep. Sara and I each had lots of commitments, lots of ambitions; we were lucky enough to be engaged by our work. In each other, we found respite, recognition, a shared eagerness to relax, take stock, and talk about it all. We became each other’s party dates, point people. My colleagues knew Sara, Sara’s colleagues knew me; we each knew everything about the other’s colleagues. We knew all of each other’s family stories and, eventually, we knew each other’s families.

  My relationship with Sara had a low-slung thrum of beer, cigarettes, and the kind of quotidian familiarity we think of as being available mostly to long-term mates, or possibly siblings. Sure, we talked about crushes, unspooled tales of unrequited desires, described exciting or ill-advised hookups, and guided each other through the visceral mishaps, from missed periods to condoms lost within bodily recesses, to which the female body is regularly subjected. But the sheer volume of time we spent talking meant that those exchanges represented a tiny fraction of our interactions.

  In truth, we were often more likely to compare weird rashes or spend hours sorting out our work drama than we were to talk about, say, our own orgasms or anyone else’s penis. We helped each other find new apartments and get raises. We advised each other on budgeting, obsessed about presidential elections, shared books and went to the movies, dealt with exterminators, and watched awards shows together.

  When it comes to friendships, even amongst the most tightly knit, exclusivity isn’t required. As Ann would say to me, “The good thing about female friendships is that they’re not exactly Highlander. It’s not like ‘there can only be one.’ ”

  So, it’s not even that we were “best friends.” Or rather, we each had lots of “bests.” Together, Sara and I shared a close network of four other friends with whom we vacationed, but we also maintained separate relationships with our own circles. I had my friends from home and college, the colleagues to whom I had become close, and one married friend with whose family I spent a lot of time. Sara had her Pittsburgh people, her own college crowd, and her own work friends. Even when we weren’t close to each other’s friends, we knew all about them; we were all kind of in it together.

  Without realizing it, we were recreating contemporary versions of very old webs of support. Historian Carroll Smith-Rosenberg has written, in references to women’s relationships of the nineteenth century, “Friends did not form isolated dyads but were normally part of highly integrated networks.”2

  Friendships provided the core of what I wanted from adulthood—connection, shared sensibilities, enjoyment—and, as Ann said about her friendship with Amina, a big part of what I’d wanted from romantic and sexual relationships with men, but had not yet experienced. Unlike my few romances, which had mostly depleted me, my female friendships were replenishing, and their salubrious effect expanded into other layers of my life: They made other things I yearned for, like better work, fairer remuneration, increased self-assurance, and even just fun seem more attainable.

  Female friendship was not some consolation prize, some romance also-ran. Women who find affinity with each other are not settling. In fact, they may be doing the opposite, finding something vital that was lacking in their romantic entanglements, and thus setting their standards healthily higher.

  “I’m just not sure there’s somebody for everybody,” says Amina, of her view of finding future partnership. “But also all of those things you’re supposed to get out of a male partner I get out of my friendships, not just Ann. I had to build this family for myself. And I’m deeply invested in that for myself. It’s where I bring my grievances; it’s where I go to get healed. I just don’t know if that’s sustainable in a partnership with a man. And it’s also just not a priority. My friends are my first priority.”

  Four years after we first met, the man Sara had been seeing was offered a great job in Boston. They dated long distance for a year. But then they had to make a decision; he was intent on staying in Boston, despite the fact that it was not a city that offered her much professional opportunity.

  Watching Sara wrestle with her choices was painful. She was thirty. She loved New York. She had a great, well-paying job. She was crazy about her apartment. She adored her friends. But she also cared for her boyfriend; she wanted to try to make a life with him, to see what happened.

  It was the kind of upheaval, smack in the middle of adulthood, which was messy enough to make me consider, back then, the wisdom of early marriage. When we’re young, after all, our lives are so much more pliant, can be joined without too much fuss. When we grow on our own, we take on responsibility, report to bosses, become bosses; we get our own bank accounts, acquire our own debts, sign our own leases. The infrastructure of our adulthood takes shape, connects to other lives; it firms up and gets less bendable. The prospect of breaking it all apart and rebuilding it elsewhere becomes a far more daunting project than it might have been had we just married someone at twenty-two, and done all that construction together.

  The day Sara moved to Boston, after weeks of
packing up and giving away her stuff, a bunch of friends closed up the U-Haul and gave long hugs and shouted our goodbyes as she drove off. When she was gone and I was alone, I cried.

  Make no mistake: I believed that Sara should go. I wanted her to be happy and I understood that what we wanted for ourselves and for each other were not only strong friendships and rewarding work and good times, but also warm and functional relationships with romantic and sexual partners. Both of us were clear on our desires for love, commitment, family. The only way to build all those things, I thought at the time, was to leave independent life behind.

  I didn’t want to think of our friendship, our multi-textured life together, as some stand-in or placeholder for “realer” relationships with partners, but it was undeniable that part of what we did for each other was about practicing and preserving intimacy in our lives—remembering how to share and bicker and compromise and connect, how to work through jealousy and be bored together—even during years when we did not have traditionally romantic partners with whom to learn these human skills.

  What’s more, we pushed each other to become hardier versions of ourselves, more able (and, I suspected, more likely) to form healthy, happy alliances with partners. Friendship had helped make Sara’s relationship possible; through one particularly self-pitying lens, I saw it as the rocket that propelled a shuttle into orbit . . . and then, inevitably, fell away. I was able to identify with Amina’s story about Ann’s move a decade later because, for me, Sara’s departure was among the hardest losses of my adult life, far more destabilizing than my earlier breakup with a boyfriend.