Viewpoint: Why are couples so mean to single people?
In a world that celebrates romance and finding The One, people can be rather rude to single people, writes James Friel.
No-one is supposed to be single.
In the course of my
life, I have loved and lost and sometimes won, and always strangers have
been kind. But I have, it appears, been set on a life of single
blessedness.
And I haven't minded.
Or rather, I realise, I haven't minded enough. But now I kind of do.
Take dinner parties. There comes a moment, and that question: "Why don't
you have a partner?"
It is usually asked
by one of a couple, with always a swivel of the eye to his or her other
half, so really two people are asking this question.
And I struggle to
answer: "I have never found the right person... I am a sad and sorry
manchild... I am incapable of love... I am a deviant, and prefer
giraffes."
Any answer will fail
to satisfy. The questioner expects no happy answer. I am only covering
up my bone-deep, life-corroding loneliness. The questioners know this,
and the insight they believe it affords comforts them. They are safe.
They look down from
the high castle of coupledom, protected from such a fate. But if I were
to ask: "Why have you settled for him? Why are you stuck with her? Were
you so afraid of being alone?" such questions would be thought rude,
intrusive.
Last week a friend of
mine went on a date. A foolish thing to do. The man she met had been
married three times and had a child by each wife. An example of
emotional continence I'm sure you'll agree. And he asked my friend,
single and childless, why she had failed at life.
It was a shortish date. Failed at life?
Single people can
also feel this way about other single people, and about themselves. You
see, no one is supposed to be single. If we are, we must account for our
deficiencies.
A recent book claims on its cover that single people might be the most reviled sexual minority today. But it's not just today.
Take the word
"spinster". It is withering and unkind. The word, of course, is
innocent, but its connotations are unhappy, dismissive and
disrespectful.
A few years back, in
an age of Bridget Jones-type heroines, the novelist Carol Clewlow
wondered about a female reader of her own generation, a woman who had
long decided not to twin her destiny with another's. She wrote a novel
about this single state. About spinsters.
She called it Spinsta.
She delivered Spinsta
to her agent, who was delighted, as were her publishers. A campaign was
initiated. Various columnists and celebrities were to be asked to
consider and celebrate this word, but then another word came back from
the booksellers.
That word was "no".
They would not stock and no one would pick up a book with such an ugly
word as its title. The novel was retitled Not Married, Not Bothered.
When I speak of this subject with women, the conversation, the anecdotes, are plentiful, wry and amusing.
With other men, gay or straight, the talk is more wistful, hesitant, inconclusive, and even a little pained.
Legal now, the gay
man must also account for not having a partner. We even agitate for
marriage. To be recognised as couples not just by the law - which is
right - but by God, which is redundant. But couples rely on such iron
definitions, need them.
Someone might take
them to be single, and no one is supposed to be single. And yet I am.
Carol Clewlow described me as a male spinster. I admit I was a little
bothered until she added "like George Clooney".
Cool, I thought. I
could go with that. But Google "male spinster" and there is much bother
at the term. Top of the search list is an unreasonably popular piece
from London's Evening Standard.
It reads: "A male
spinster is an unmarried man over the age of 35, a moniker that implies
at best these men have 'issues' and at worst are sociopaths. One fears
for these men, just as society has traditionally feared for the single
women. They cannot see how lonely they will be."
How kind this fear
sounds. No-one is supposed to be single. To be single must mean to be
lonely but far lonelier are those who fear being alone.
Namely, the "I" who
is incomplete without a "you". The "me" who is without substance or
purpose unless rhymed with a "we". Those tyrannised by the need, the
obligation, to go about this world in pairs.
In order to argue for
the single person, it seems one must criticise the couple; the culture
that coerces us into coupledom, the religions, the familial pressures,
the pop songs, the movies, the game shows, the gossip, the unavoidable,
inescapable pressure to conjoin, to love.
Freud has it that we
become ill if we do not love, and songs tell us we must succumb to a
love that - bonding us - will devastate us too. I am nothing, nothing,
nothing, if I don't have you. How kind is such a love? Isn't it a little
punitive?
Laura Kipnis, in Against Love, has a chapter called Domestic Gulag, and the prison rules a couple must follow:
You can't leave the house without saying where you are going
You can't not say what time you will return
You can't leave the bathroom door open - it's offensive
You can't leave the bathroom door closed
You can't have secrets
Nine and half pages
later, Kipnis concludes: "The specifics don't matter. What matters is
the operative word, can't. Thus is love obtained."
And Michael Cobb
reminds us in a book called Single that Plato defined love as our name
for the pursuit of the whole, our desire to be made complete. But Plato
has Aristophanes remind us that this pursuit - this need to be
completed, this quest for coupledom - is a punishment.
Perhaps single people
secretly wish to reclaim an original state of being, somehow sense that
we do not need to be completed by another, somehow sense that we are
able to complete ourselves. The single person might just be too
self-possessed.
Perhaps we are too honest to be coupled. Perhaps we cannot tell another person: "I love only you. And I will love you forever."
It's quite difficult to tell someone the more truthful: "I love you, you know, for now."
Sorry. The single person might just be too self-possessed.
Personally, I don't
wish to make satiric judgements against the couple because such
judgements - patronising, dismissive and even fearful - are what I
resent when asked to explain why I persist in being single.
I want to describe
myself more positively and not against some grain that abrades both me
and anyone else who believes and lives differently.
My favourite
character in literature is the difficult, unclubbable Lucy Snowe from
Charlotte Bronte's Villette. At the conclusion of her slippery and
singular tale, she manages in her lone voice to define herself as wife,
widow and spinster all at once and so none of these at all but - simply,
complicatedly - her own marvellous, darkly brave and tricksy self.
And I would rescue,
too, that martyr, the maligned Miss Havisham. Because I don't believe
the single person has a sceptical or reductive notion of love but
suspect, rather, that they might be compelled by an even higher, almost
unrealisable, conception of it.
In the world through
which we move, increasingly, we do not expect our relationships to
endure. Increasingly, our relative affluence and advances in new
technology allow us to live comfortably alone.
Increasingly, this is
what we seem to be doing: we are choosing to live alone. We need
stories not about how to become couples. They are legion. We need
stories about how to be single, and how to be kept amazed and awake by a
joy of our own manufacture.
Although I was born single, I never considered that this would continue to be my fate.
This piece is based
on an edited version of James Friel's Four Thought on BBC Radio 4.
Listen again via the Radio 4 website or Four Thought podcast.
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