single – Massage by Virginia

Living Well, Part II

Lately I’ve been having a surprising number of conversations that go something like this…

-Are you married?

-No

-Do you have children?

-Nope.

-Oh. I’m sorry.

Usually the person asking the questions is a relative stranger, and the conversation ends with some sort of awkward pause during which I’m not sure what to say.

Apparently I’ve reached an age where to be single is unquestionably indicative of some sort of personal failing (at best) or a massive character flaw.

And being childless (or child-free, as I prefer to think of it)? In a word, pitiable.

It surprises and saddens me a little to learn that so many people consider a woman’s fulfillment to be so singularly tied to marriage and children. This goes back to a topic I discussed earlier this year in Scare-City and the Single Life: The Future is Now.

On the whole, it seems to me that people who are married are not necessarily any happier than those who are single. Perversely, it seems that many married people live vicariously through their single friends, and those who are single long to find “the one.” It’s funny because most marriages nowadays end in divorce. So, is finding “the one” more of a fairy tale now than ever?

Maybe the real theme here is that a great many people are not satisfied with the here and now. They spend much time longing for the future, or the past.

I think living well has a lot to do with being satisfied with the here and now, rather than saying “I’ll be happy when….” This isn’t to say we shouldn’t have goals, plans, and hopes for the future. But if those get in the way of living fully today, or if we feel that life can’t start until we have the perfect partner or the perfect family, then we may be denying ourselves the joys of the journey.

Each stage of life has its unique pleasures. When we allow ourselves to experience those fully, we are truly living well.

Secret Single Behaviors: A Party for One?

One of my favorite television shows, Sex and the City, featured an episode where the characters discussed their secret single behaviors, such as eating saltines with jelly while reading fashion magazines, for example. While I’m not much for fashion magazines in general (or saltines, for that matter), in light of the last couple of posts discussing relationships, I do want to take some time to focus on the benefits of being single and on the value of solitude. This relates to a question posed in one of my earlier posts, “What legitimizes your life?”

Is a Friday evening spent perusing fashion magazines inherently less valuable than a Friday evening spent at a club with friends? Or in the arms of a lover or a spouse? For a lot of people, the presence of others is legitimizing. “How do I know I had fun on Friday night? Well, I have the stories of my friends to prove it. We were all there (wherever there is) and we all shared an experience.” Now, I’m not denying the value of shared experience, but there seems to be an overall misconception about the value of solitude. Solitude has gotten a bad rap: we’ve all heard the stories in the news where some unsavory character or another is described as a “loner.”

Being alone is scary for a lot of people. Some of this has to do with social attitudes toward being alone, which feed the fear that alone-ness means being unwanted or unloved, or indicates some fatal character flaw or, worse still, some level of mental illness. Achieving a basic level of comfort with alone-ness may well require examining or deactivating these fears. Just as there’s a strong mythology around the process of coupling, there’s an equally strong mythology around being alone.

When we’re alone, we only have ourselves for company. And when we are alone, we have a greater opportunity to see ourselves more clearly, particularly if we don’t engage in distractions like television or the internet. There’s always the chance we might not like what we see. Regardless, it’s an important opportunity to get comfortable with the different aspects of ourselves, to actually make friends with ourselves.

Self-study or self-knowledge, called svadhyaya, is an important aspect of any yoga practice. Svadhyaya is really about having a relationship with yourself. Understanding your likes and dislikes, also known as attachments or aversions (depending on the degree of emotional response involved). Asking important and sometimes difficult questions: “What do I not want to give up, and why? What do I avoid at all costs, and why? And, do my attachments and aversions serve me?” Part of svadhyaya is being curious and non-judgmental toward yourself, even going so far as to make peace with parts of yourself that you may not like.

Having a solid relationship with yourself is a foundation for building satisfying relationships with others (romantic or otherwise). Knowing what your own preferences are helps make it easier to communicate with others about what your needs are in a relationship, which is vital to establishing successful relationships. Being without a significant other is an opportunity: to discover who you are, what you prefer, and to be, in a word, selfish. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Relationships involve compromise; with a foundation of self-knowledge, it’s possible to know which compromises can be made generously and gracefully, and which others come at the cost of fulfillment, peace, or well-being.

So, rather than looking at those times without a relationship as periods of limbo, where we wait for our “real” life to start, we can begin a process of legitimizing them and valuing them. We may even choose to be alone for certain periods of our lives, recognizing the benefits that solitude can provide, especially for scholarly pursuits, creative endeavors, or periods of healing and emotional growth. If we approach alone-ness as a state that has value, we truly have the potential to make it an opportunity for growth and development. And, to make it an opportunity to do whatever it is we love to do: to create our own “party for one.”

Scare-City and the Single Life: The Future is Now

I recently read Kate Bolick’s article “All the Single Ladies” from the November 2011 issue of The Atlantic, in which she discusses the present unique situation of single women in America and how much male-female relationships have changed over the last few decades. As a 30-something single woman, I find it fascinating to learn that there’s statistical backup for the things that I hear my single girlfriends say, usually along the lines of “there are just no good men out there.”

According to Bolick, there actually has been a significant drop in the number of available men. On top of that, many of the men who are available are now less educated and making less money than ever before. Mere decades ago, it was almost expected that a woman would marry a man who would take care of her, in a variety of ways. And now, based on my own personal observations, and those of Bolick, this is less likely than ever to happen.

I’m inclined to ask, “So what’s the problem?” I don’t mean to be obtuse. I know what the problem is: My girlfriends want to get married. And not just my girlfriends. Many, many women are out there looking for Mr. Right. But it strikes me that the problem is not so much the scarcity of Mr. Right, but rather a lack of imagination and initiative in creating other options. And it’s really not single women who are to blame for this. Virtually our entire social structure is based on “couple-dom.” Movies, music, and television shows about the trials and tribulations (and finally, the rewards) of finding The One abound. In other words, there is a vast mythology surrounding the process of coupling.

You might be asking yourself, what does any of this have to do with spiritual practice? I promise you it has everything to do with it! One of the tenets of spiritual practice is non-duality. This essentially is the opposite of an either/or mentality: rather a both/and approach to life. An integrated approach based on holism and acknowledging polarities, being not only willing and able to acknowledge conflicting needs within ourselves, but being comfortable doing so. In short, what’s needed is an ability to know what’s true for each of us, intrinsically, to acknowledge its ever-shifting nature, and simply to let it be, relating authentically to others in the moment.

In the article, Bolick touches on her own desire for both “autonomy and intimacy.” And why shouldn’t she have relationships that include both? Now that women have more education, more earning power, and more autonomy than ever before, why shouldn’t they – why shouldn’t we – use that power to create the relationships that meet our needs, to write our own relationship contracts, so to speak?

How can we do that? First of all, it’s important to establish a present moment, process-oriented mentality. In other words, the future is now. Life doesn’t start when Mr. Right shows up. He may never show up…and it really doesn’t matter. Why? Because you don’t need Mr. Right to start meeting your needs and to create the life of your dreams. Bolick herself observes, “If I stopped seeing my present life as provisional, perhaps I’d be a little…happier. Perhaps I could actually get down to the business of what it means to be a real single woman.” This astute observation gets to the heart of a very important matter, which centers around the question, “What legitimizes your life?”

The mindset that being single is illegitimate, that people who are unmarried or exist outside of couple-dom don’t have “real” lives and therefore are to be pitied, is simply outmoded and no longer useful. Marriage is no longer a given, as evidenced by the rising number of singles. Let’s begin the process of letting go of our fantasies of Mr. Right and Happily Ever After, and celebrate the fact that we no longer have to fear becoming old maids. Let’s begin writing our own stories: It’s time to start imagining and creating the lives we want…by exploring paradigms outside of couple-dom.