A few weeks ago, I had brunch with three friends, all single women over 40. We sipped coffee and discussed various aspects of our lives, including but not limited to: raising a one-year-old, preparing a business for a trade show, teaching English abroad, setting proper freelance rates, campaigning for a city mayoral candidate, and getting started on the garden.

We also talked about dating, but not that much. A couple of friends had been on some promising Match.com dates; another was tentatively optimistic about a budding relationship with a woman she’d met on a blind date.

These gatherings had me thinking about a fascinating question posed at the end of Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own, by Kate Bolick: “Are women people yet?”

Which is to say: Are women able to develop identities that are independent of their relationship status – wife, mother, singleton, etc. – or are we still primarily defined this way?

In Spinster, Bolick attempts to make sense of her own decision to avoid marriage by studying the lives of five women writers from the 19th to mid-20th centuries. Bolick calls these women her “awakeners,” and she seamlessly weaves their stories with the social histories of their eras, making Spinster a thoroughly engrossing read and an important reminder that women were creating independent lives for themselves long before Mary Richards and Carrie Bradshaw. By providing a historical and literary perspective on the single woman, she reclaims the word “spinster” and brings dignity and gravitas to a subject that is often reduced to gags about drunk-dialing and shoe-shopping.

I spent a luxurious Sunday afternoon reading Spinster, practically in one sitting. But in the days afterward, something about the book was bothering me, and I realised the problem wasn’t what it said, but what it had left out.

Bolick shows us single women who defy the insulting stereotypes – the boozy party girl, the daffy cat lady. And then there is Bolick herself: a serial monogamist in her teens and twenties, Bolick writes that she embarked on her spinster journey because the relationships of her early adulthood were so satisfying; she wanted to see how the other half lived.

While this turns out to be harder than she’d expected, in general her life may strike readers, especially other single women, as divine. She describes her interesting writing and editing career, her full social calendar of literary parties, and her encounters with terrific-sounding guys whom she keeps pushing away – and whom she appears to have met the old-fashioned way, through her social connections, rather than via Tinder or OkCupid. We also learn early in the book that she now has a boyfriend dedicated enough to travel to Maine and help make party favours for her 40th-birthday clambake.

A book that presents a 40-year-old single woman as having agency in her romantic life shouldn’t feel new, but sadly it does. It’s also a notable contrast to her essay, “All the Single Ladies”, which she published in The Atlantic in 2011, documenting her single life; in it, she expressed more ambivalence and offered no doting boyfriend at the end. While the essay was wildly popular, it was also raw meat for trolls, and the comments section was laced with the usual invective hurled at single women: “immature”, "sad", "glib", "ditsy", "desperate".

If Bolick is attempting to preempt this kind of chatter in Spinster, it’s easy to understand why. But it also puts her in a bind. By making clear that she has no trouble attracting eligible men (“Sometimes it felt as if I couldn’t walk down the street without winding up on a date”), she does an excellent job of demonstrating that she’s not pathetic. But she also plays into the cultural bias that male desire lends women credibility.

Spinster has an aspirational quality reminiscent of Eat Pray Love, Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir about her solo travels through Italy, India, and Indonesia. Gilbert’s experience is not only completely unattainable to the woman driving her Camry to the office park, it’s also bookended by the man she divorced and the man she would later marry. Cheryl Strayed’s Wild is a much grittier version of the woman’s quest-for-independence tale – and to be perfectly honest, I think she’s a total badass – but it also begins with Strayed leaving a good man and ends with a well-to-do lawyer giving her his card as she stands by the bridge where, in four years’ time, she’d take her wedding vows with another man.

These women’s lives are their lives. Of course, they’re entitled to their romantic happiness, and their extraordinary stories have yielded great books. But there is something depressing about the fact that the major voices in the woman-going-it-alone genre are never alone for all that long. Are women only able to lead respectable single lives when they have the power of refusal? Do you have to make it clear that guys dig you?

Ann Friedman gets it: she too struggled with the transition from singlehood to coupledom, and in a compelling Talking Points Memo piece on Spinster, admits that before she met her boyfriend she was quite eager to inform others that her singleness was a choice: “I was single-and-not-looking, a sub-category I used to differentiate myself from those other, desperate single women marching to the predictable drumbeat of societal expectations and their biological clocks. I was not like regular single women, I was a cool single woman.”

I appreciate that Friedman cops to this, because these distinctions are the essential problem. There is nothing wrong with mentioning your relationship status in an essay (especially if that is the topic) but, whether you intend it or not, by doing so you’re effectively warding off a certain kind of stigma. You’re informing the reader that you’re not one of those women – the uncool kind.

I should know. I didn’t start writing seriously about being single until after I married. But before that, I was exactly the kind of uncool single woman Friedman meant to distance herself from. In the time between graduating from college and meeting my husband at 39, I had one serious relationship, which lasted for three years. I spent the bulk of my adult life unattached – and not by choice. I was the woman at the bar with hopeful eyes and bright lipstick. I was chick at the coffee joint, making awkward conversation with a stranger I’d met on the Internet. I was the neighbour at the mailbox feeling a pang in my chest with the arrival of each new wedding invitation or baby announcement.

I knew that in society’s eyes this made me sad and ridiculous, an understating that me feel awful – until it pissed me off. Until I finally realised that my unsated desire for romantic love didn’t make me a joke – it made me a human being. At that point, I decided I probably didn’t need more maturity or self-esteem; I just needed a little luck.

I mostly kept this observation to myself. I didn’t have faith that my newfound resolve could withstand the skepticism of well-meaning couples or the general single-woman disdain of the culture at large. Close friends knew how I felt, but in general I maintained the ruse – assuring others I was happy on my own, strategically dropping the name of whatever dude on Match.com I was having drinks with. It wasn’t until I was married that I had the nerve to write about how hard those years were, or about the wildly unfair way we treat single women.

So where does this leave my single friends?

They bear little resemblance to the singleton clichés. They don’t drink very much. They rarely talk about shopping or beauty treatments. And they never seem preoccupied with whether or not some dude texted. In fact, we can hang out for entire evenings without anyone glancing at her phone.

But all things being equal, they’d each prefer to be in a serious relationship. If you ask, they will talk openly and unapologetically about how the OkCupid search is going. But if you don’t ask, it probably won’t come up – like I said, they have other things on their minds.

I know two women who moved in with their parents so that they could afford to have a baby on their own. This wasn’t a choice they made because they wanted to experience the joys of parenting alone; nor are they attempting to shift the cultural paradigm and usher in a new era of the extended family. They are simply women who got to their late 30s, hadn’t met the guy, and made sober decisions based their circumstances. Unlike Bolick, their lives aren’t characterized by a glittery array of options, but rather unsentimental assessments of what life has offered them, and what it has not.

I’m all for women – single and married – having wonderful lives. I applaud the continued conversation about women and their choices – to remain single, to not have kids – and I think Spinster is an important contribution to it.

But we can’t ignore the fact that for most people life isn’t a banquet where you lightly select your preferred archetype – adventurous singleton, blissful mother, having-it-all superwoman. Most of us are just working with what we have.

It’s not Bolick’s fault that male desire shelters women from scorn. But until women writing about singleness no longer feel compelled to set themselves up as the cool girl who either has a man or could get one at any time, I’d say the answer to her question is: ‘no, we’re not people yet’.

Sourced from Daily Life, Sydney Morning Herald.

This article caught my eye and given I have a vested interest in the situation I figured others might like it too. 

Sara Eckel is the author of It’s Not You: 27 (Wrong) Reasons You’re Single. You can also find her on Twitter and Facebook.

This article was edited from a piece originally published by Dame Magazine.