5.
ON AN UNUSUALLY HOT Monday night in June 2008, a long line of singles—mostly women, many in heels—snaked around the edge of San Francisco’s Kabuki Cinema until it reached a long pink carpet in the lobby. Ordinarily, the first night of the workweek is slow at the Kabuki, but this was a special occasion. Five local women, all of whom had written about being single, had organized a special screening of Sex and the City, complete with Carrie Cosmos, goody bags (translucent shoe boxes, actually, whose contents included gym passes, a makeup kit, and a prepaid card for thirty minutes of adult videos online), and an after-party in the theater’s bar. The women had met two months earlier, when they were copanelists at a sold-out forum called “Single in the City.” The event was so successful that they decided to organize a follow-up, and what could be better than gathering to watch the ongoing exploits of that fabulous foursome, Carrie, Samantha, Miranda, and Charlotte? The Kabuki was willing to host, on the condition that the five authors agreed to buy every ticket for the theater in advance and handle the sales. This turned out not to be cause for concern: The gala sold out less than four days after it was announced on the authors’ home pages and social network sites, and the crowd was so eager to get there that scores showed up an hour before screen time. The group even included a singular Bay Area celebrity: Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist.
The buzz surrounding the party came as no surprise to co-organizer Sasha Cagen, the author of Quirkyalone: A Manifesto for Uncompromising Romantics and the leader of an incipient movement that advocates for those who enjoy being single and are not particularly anxious about finding a partner. Cagen, a creative and charismatic Barnard graduate who’s now in her mid-thirties, took up the cause ten years ago when she wrote an essay called “People Like Us: The Quirkyalones.” “I am,” she wrote, “what you might call deeply single. Almost never in a relationship.” Cagen had always considered herself an oddball, but then she noticed how many lonely romantics were out there, unaware that, together, they had inadvertently become a social force. “We are the puzzle pieces who seldom fit with other puzzle pieces. Romantics, idealists, eccentrics, we inhabit singledom as our natural resting state. In a world where proms and marriage define the social order, we are, by force of our personalities and inner strength, rebels.” Cagen estimated that about 5 percent of the population was Quirkyalone, and she realized that they need not feel lonely or isolated: “A community of like-minded souls is essential . . . When one Quirkyalone finds another, oohh la la. The earth quakes.”
The article hit a nerve. The Utne Reader requested permission to reprint it, and Cagen says she got “thousands of letters, e-mails, mix tapes, with the chorus ‘Thank God, I thought I was the only one on the planet who felt this way.’” She started a Web site, Quirkyalone.net, which includes her own writing, media coverage of the movement, and a number of “Quirkyforums,” including discussion threads on friendship, politics, sex, and work. By 2003, Cagen had secured a book contract to write a full-fledged manifesto, and she decided to turn February 14 into a counterholiday, International Quirkyalone Day. Cagen organized events in San Francisco, New York, Providence, and Glasgow that year, and by 2010 the growing ranks of Quirkyalones had planned holiday celebrations in forty cities on four continents. By the end of that year, more than 6,700 people had registered to post items on Quirkyalone forums, and tens of thousands more had visited the Web site. Calls for local events issued from Indianapolis, Istanbul, and Iceland, as well as all the big cities where singletons come together to be alone.
Cagen is now something of a hero for the growing ranks of singletons who are learning to feel secure with their status, and she is often their public face. She appears frequently on popular national television and radio programs to explain that going solo is a viable, legitimate, and not necessarily lonely way to dwell in a city—a point that is surprisingly controversial given how many people are already living alone. And she seems to be everywhere on February 14, because the media never tires of contrasting the Quirkyalones with couples who are paying dearly for roses and prix fixe meals at romantic restaurants. (The singles don’t suffer from the comparison, since they usually celebrate their counterholiday in crowded dance clubs where everyone appears to be having fun.) But recently Cagen has been feeling increasingly uncomfortable with her role in the movement, and her responsibilities to those who see her as a symbol of independent womanhood have become burdensome, even oppressive. I have met with her a few times over the years to discuss her evolving relationship to the Quirkyalone concept and to the community she helped bring into existence, and in every conversation she has dwelled on the fact that her very public liberation has been personally restricting.
Cagen has sustained her passion for promoting the status of singletons, though she sometimes finds it repetitive because, as she puts it, “organizing Quirkyalone Day has become a bit like throwing the same wedding every year.” She has grown tired of living alone, and as she approaches her late thirties she finds herself longing for a long-term romantic partner. A husband, even. “I’ve always been open to the possibility of finding the right guy and getting married,” she tells me as we share lunch in San Francisco’s Mission District. “And Quirkyalone was never about being alone—it was about being connected, to yourself and to other people too. Now I’m ready for a different experience. I’ve lived alone for a long time, and at this point in my life I’d grow a lot more if I were partnered. To be honest, I worry that if I keep on making this the center of my life I’m going to wind up being single forever.”
Her experience helps illuminate a fundamental feature of the singleton society, one that poses problems for those who try to improve the status and well-being of those who live alone: Few people who live alone are inclined to define themselves that way, let alone to organize political campaigns that enlist those who share their fate. Many, including Cagen, of all people, are willing to push back against the cultural pressure to marry and advocate for those who prefer to go solo, but also see living alone as a temporary, if perhaps recurrent, stage in the cycle of life. Others expect to be on their own much longer but simply do not identify as singletons because other categories—man or woman, black or white, rich or poor, young or old, gay or straight—frame their self-perceptions.
In the abstract, at least, there is no reason that domestic status should figure into someone’s identity. In practice, however, people who live alone have discovered that others—from friends and family to the growing number of businesses that are beginning to create special products to suit their needs and interests—do define them that way. Many believe that they are treated unfairly in their personal and public lives, and a growing number have decided that they’d be better off coming together as a group. Some, like the Quirkyalones, seek acceptance, legitimacy, and community, but others want more: Better access to health care, housing, and social security. More fairness in the tax code. Less workplace discrimination. Greater representation in politics. A stronger public voice. These things don’t come easily for any group of people, and particularly not for one that’s as heterogeneous as singles (who, after all, include people from eighteen to one hundred, some of whom live alone and some of whom do not). It’s not yet clear whether it’s possible to form a collective identity based on being a singleton, or to inspire a movement for social change with the slogan “Solo dwellers of the world, unite!” But there’s no shortage of entrepreneurial singletons who see themselves as a vanguard and are committed to trying.
KIM CALVERT IS AN UNLIKELY ACTIVIST, or at least that’s my first impression when she and her chatty white cockatoo, Mimi, greet me in her elegant Santa Monica home. Mimi is not her only daytime companion. A few months before my visit, Kim had converted several rooms near the entryway into office space for the small staff she’d recruited to launch Singular Communications, which published Singular magazine until 2009 and now produces the Web site and social networking service SingularCity.com, targeting affluent Angelenos who live alone. A journalist and dot-com veteran in her late forties, Kim counts herself among the ranks of people who live alone but are resolutely opposed to identifying themselves as single. “It’s a word that just has horrible associations for me,” she says as we sit in her verdant courtyard garden. “It makes me think of desperate, unhappy people who can’t get a date, and that’s never been who I am.”1
I hardly need convincing. Calvert is a New Yorker’s vision of Los Angeles beauty, with long blond hair, a well-toned body, perfect skin, and warm brown eyes. She’s dressed fashionably but casually, in jeans, a tie-dyed long-sleeve shirt, a silver necklace, and large brown sunglasses flipped to the top of her head. Her demeanor is professional and serious, but the venture we are there to discuss was inspired by profoundly personal experiences, and her tone lifts noticeably as she explains it. Calvert belongs to a women’s group designed for professionals who want help living up to their aspirations. Soon after joining, she noticed that they were spending a lot of their time together discussing relationships, or their lack thereof. “There are about fifteen of us,” she explains, “but only three are married. And the rest of us would always use some of our speaking time to justify to everyone what we were doing to find a husband. At some point I was listening to a friend who was clearly happy without being married, and I started to ask, ‘What are we doing? Why can’t we just accept that this is who we are and get on with our lives?’”
Marriage hadn’t done much for Calvert, anyway. She had given it a try fifteen years earlier, despite the fact that she had never pictured herself settling down, and it was an unmitigated disaster. “I’m a free spirit,” Calvert tells me. “And when I got married, I suddenly felt like I had to report where I was going, who I was with, what time I was going to be home. It was like being a child again. I’d known this man for years and always loved talking with him. Suddenly, I wanted to push him out of my life.”
Calvert believes that there are millions of men and women who are better off going solo, and her Singular enterprise, which she cofounded with the wealthy sixty-five-year-old divorcé and entrepreneur David Wright, could help some of those who live alone appreciate what they already have. “There is a mission to this,” she explains. “We want to liberate single people from the bondage of old ideas that are blocking their ability to have a great life today. And that means fighting against the huge industry out there that makes money by making single people feel bad about who they are. Think about those TV shows that do makeovers so people can finally be desirable, finally get married, finally be happy. They program us to think that it’s awful to be single and tell us that we need to be fixed. We have to overcome that.”
At Singular Communications, the first step involved redefining the experience. “Singular,” Calvert says, connotes someone special and distinctive, so on each cover the words “SEXY SAVVY SINGLE” ran above the magazine’s name. Then she targeted an audience: people more or less like her. In an editor’s letter for the premiere issue, Calvert wrote, “I like being single. I like my life. I have great friends, I’m active, involved in my community and have the career of my dreams. I love my alone time—to read, write, meditate and be me without compromise. I don’t need another half to be whole. I am complete. And yes, I love men, I love romance, I love intimacy—but it’s so much better now that I’ve banished the marriage agenda . . . So if you can identify with me, if you’re comfortable being single, if you enjoy an active, social lifestyle . . . Singular magazine is for you.”
Actually, getting a copy of Singular involved more than identifying with Calvert’s message. The thick, glossy magazine was mailed only to affluent single Los Angeles residents, and was designed for high-end tastes. There were full-page ads from Jaguar, Beverly Hills Porsche, Residences at the Ritz, Bang & Olufsen, Greystone charter jets, and Fiji water. Cover stories profiled glamorous unmarried celebrities such as Leonardo DiCaprio and Serena Williams. Contributors named their favorite self-indulgences in their bios, with responses including massage (one man says he prefers Hawaiian massages with two therapists at once), good red wine, chocolate, and new gadgets from Apple. There were pages of product reviews and endorsements, for everything from personal concierge service to health clubs and new dental technologies. But most of the content was decidedly singular: an article criticizing singles for “sit[ting] back passively” in public affairs rather than organizing as a political bloc; a column on the “Myth of the Perfect Catch,” which warns readers about falling in love with their fantasy of who a person is rather than with the real human being; and a story about a psychologist who witnesses so much dishonesty and infidelity in her patients’ relationships that she grows skeptical of marriage.
As for SingularCity.com, it includes original content (such as a feature on “The Rules for Staying Single”) and a forum where members can meet. Calvert describes it as “an online city with citizen members, a place where you can start old-fashioned relationships in a high-tech environment, which is important in a city that can feel as alienating as LA.” SingularCity also sponsors regular get-togethers, from movies to happy hours to more formal parties. While Calvert insists that these are completely different from ordinary singles events “where people who can’t get a date go in hope of finding the person they’ll marry,” she concedes that “people are probably trying to hook up there, just like everywhere else.” Her agenda, after all, is to connect people and help them feel comfortable no matter how they choose to live. “We’re not opposed to marriage,” she tells me. “But people need to realize that singles are the new majority, and our job is helping to establish their voice.”
A FEW MONTHS AFTER I record these words in Santa Monica, I hear them repeated, almost verbatim, in a one-room office on a busy commercial street in Brooklyn, from a woman who couldn’t possibly look or sound any less like Kim Calvert. Nicky Grist, who until mid-2011 was the executive director of the Alternatives to Marriage Project, or AtMP, has a cool, analytic intelligence, as well as degrees from Yale and Princeton and twenty years of work experience with community organizations and government agencies. She’s a light-skinned African American Jew in her early forties, and when we meet the first time she’s wearing a stylish blue suit, striped purple socks, and closely cropped black hair with a few specks of gray. Her voice is soft and a bit squeaky, but it gains depth and volume when she speaks out about a charged political subject. This happens often during our interview, because we’re discussing the topic that has consumed her for five years now: the fair and equal treatment of the nearly 100 million unmarried adult Americans, nearly a third of whom live alone.
Grist says she discovered AtMP in 2005 the way most people do: searching the Internet to learn the costs and benefits of marriage. It was not an academic investigation. Grist’s domestic partner, a New York City fire lieutenant, had proposed to her, partly because getting access to his health insurance would allow her to quit her job and look for something better. Yet Grist had always been opposed to marriage, on the grounds that it was discriminatory against gays and, historically at least, a bad deal for women. “I had billions of reasons for being skeptical about marriage,” she tells me. “One of them being that my parents’ marriage would have been illegal in sixteen states when they did it, because she was white and Jewish and he was a Caribbean black. But this time there was a good reason to consider it. I needed a way out [of my job].” She started googling the topic, and within a few minutes she found that the AtMP Web site had answers for nearly all of her questions. “I also thought, ‘Wow! This is an incredible organization.’ It was the only place out there helping single people figure out the consequences of being unmarried. It’s not just access to health insurance. There are workplace discrimination issues, housing discrimination issues, estate planning issues, political issues, tax issues. And they had it all laid out for you. It was great.”
As she scanned through the Web site, Grist noticed that the Alternatives to Marriage Project was looking for an executive director, and suddenly she started thinking that she might have found yet another excuse to leave her job. Even though the organization was based in Albany, where a young unmarried couple had founded it in 1998, Grist decided to apply anyway. They liked her so much they not only hired her, but also let her move the headquarters to Brooklyn. “I took a 50 percent pay cut,” Grist says. “And I went from a good-sized organization to one with an annual budget of about $35,000 per year. But it’s worth it because it’s such a luxury to work for an organization where none of my values are being compromised.” Advocating for alternatives to marriage may sound like a radical occupation, but Grist insists that it’s utterly mainstream. “Most Americans aren’t married, and most households do not contain a married couple. If you look at it that way, we’re promoting the interests of the majority. And it’s not like we’re making outrageous demands. All we want is a society that recognizes how many of us are living outside of this institution, and has laws that support us.”
The Alternatives to Marriage Project works on behalf of unmarried people in all kinds of situations, including gay and straight domestic partnerships and families led by single parents. These constituents usually have a story about why they’ve opted out of marriage or been denied the option, and they see themselves as part of a group with common interests. People who live alone aren’t like that. One reason, Grist explains, is that a lot of them are looking for a partner and can’t identify with those who are not. “There are really two potential groups: those who are happy or at least accepting of singlehood, and those who are just saving up for their weddings. The first group, which we call the ‘solo singles’ or ‘unmarried unpartnereds,’ cares about marital status discrimination and gets involved in what we do. The second group—much of it anyway—doesn’t have a problem with that discrimination. They just want to hop over to the other side of the marital divide so it’ll all be fine.” This poses serious problems for AtMP’s political work. “It’s hard to organize any group,” Grist says, “and it’s especially hard when they don’t have a shared identity or interests.” In the aggregate, people who live alone endure many of the same problems and penalties. But since they rarely form an aggregate, it’s unclear how any organization can help to improve their fate.
Consider one potential bloc of singletons whose status has garnered attention in policy circles during the 2000s: the African American middle class. According to research led by University of Maryland sociologist Kris Marsh, African Americans who have never married and live alone are the fastest-growing segment of the black middle-class population, and women are especially likely to be part of this group. African Americans who live alone, Marsh argues, are “not just a phenomenon of early adulthood,” but are instead “on a trajectory to becoming the most prominent household within the black middle class if not the entire black community.”2
What’s driving this increase? Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson argues that two major social changes—the dramatic disappearance of industrial jobs once occupied by African American men, and the subsequent mass incarceration of men from these same communities—has generated a rising class of “unmarriageable males” and thereby reduced the intraracial marriage market. But this is not the entire story. For decades, marriages between black men and white women have been more common than marriages between white men and black women, and in the 2000s they were more than twice as common. This is one reason why, as Yale sociologists Natalie Nitsche and Hannah Brückner report, “black women are twice as likely as white women to never have married by age forty-five and twice as likely to be divorced, widowed, or separated.” Another is the expanding gap in education. Today black women are far more likely than black men to obtain a college or graduate school degree, and they’re also more likely to discover that the price of their success is that it’s harder to find a spouse.3
Faced with such bleak options, the emerging generation of African American professionals increasingly shuns marriage as a means of securing middle-class status and, as Marsh argues, “stabilizes its position by not marrying and continuing to live alone.”4 But gaining stability in one dimension of their lives can bring suffering in another. In her study “The Sexless Lives of College-Educated Black Women: When Education Means No Man, Marriage, or Baby,” Yale sociologist Averil Clarke claims that conventional measures of inequality fail to register the personal costs of educational attainment and economic achievement among black professionals. The stigma of being single and childless can be especially severe for black women, she shows, because of the expectations of their families and communities. But so is the stigma of being a single mother, which means unmarried black professionals lose, whatever they do.
The plight of single black professionals, whether male or female, means they have a lot to gain by participating in groups like the Alternatives to Marriage Project. Yet, to Nicky Grist’s consternation, recruiting them into the organization’s campaigns against marital status discrimination has been difficult; they have other political priorities and personal aspirations to pursue. Moreover, groups like AtMP have to compete with far wealthier organizations—including religious institutions and the federal government—whose marriage promotion campaigns only further marginalize people who live alone. “It drives me crazy to see things like Black Marriage Day,” Grist says. “Or, to name my real pet peeve, the use of public antipoverty funds to pay for billboards saying marriage is good for you. What kind of message does this send to people who might want the privileges and benefits that come with marriage but can’t get them? It denies and stigmatizes the real-life experiences of most taxpayers. It’s completely unfair.”
Though the challenges are daunting, more and more political organizations are attempting to build bases of constituents who identify with the real-life experiences of going solo. The sheer numbers of unmarried people make them too tempting a target: If only they could be mobilized . . . imagine the power they could exert! This logic drove Page Gardner to found Women’s Voices, Women Vote (WVWV), the first organization dedicated to increasing civic participation among unmarried women across the United States. Gardner, a Democratic political strategist and married mother of two in Northern Virginia, started WVWV in 2003 after learning that 20 million single women did not go to the polls in the historically close 2000 election, making them—by some estimates—the nation’s largest group of nonvoters. “In their day-to-day lives, surely these women knew of their individual power,” Gardner wrote. “With WVWV, I wanted to convince them of their individual and collective power.”5
When the 2008 presidential campaign started, Gardner did everything in her power to turn single women into the new soccer moms or NASCAR dads. Yet single women are not typical swing voters. On the contrary, Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg’s firm calls them “the largest progressive voting bloc in the country,” and they have a long record of supporting liberal candidates who favor causes such as gun control, public education, expanded access to health care, and prochoice policies. In 2008, Gardner’s main challenge was persuading single women to register and turn out on election day, and she knew this wouldn’t be easy. Compared with married women, single women were about 9 percent less likely to register and 13 percent less likely to vote in 2004. They were also far more likely than married women to vote for John Kerry than for George W. Bush, and Gardner believes that getting even a slightly higher fraction of unmarried women to the polls could have changed the outcome of that election.
During the 2008 primaries, the prospect that Hillary Clinton would top the Democratic ticket boosted WVWV’s initiatives. Clinton may not be single, but she was hugely popular among unmarried women and her candidacy inspired a burst of engagement. But when Barack Obama won the nomination and pundits began arguing that sexism had played a role in her loss, the organization had to keep its constituents from losing faith. Women’s Voices, Women Vote stepped up its voter registration campaign, which included a “20 million reasons” public service announcement recorded by celebrities, single mothers, and widows, as well as more than a million direct mailings and countless media appearances in which Gardner urged candidates to help rally single voters. By election week, the organization had generated more than 900,000 registration applications and sent about a million vote-by-mail forms to single women in the swing states of Ohio, Colorado, Iowa, Nevada, and Montana. Gardner predicted that a record number of unmarried women would make it to the voting booth, and that thereafter political officials would recognize them as a powerful interest group.
Did the campaign make a difference? According to WVWV’s numbers, in 2008 single women were just 2 percent more likely to register and 1 percent more likely to vote than they were four years earlier. But in absolute numbers the increase looks more substantial, from 27.9 million single female voters in 2004 to 30.5 million in 2008, and their margin of support for the Democratic candidate rose from 62 percent (for Kerry) to 70 percent (for Obama). (Married women, by contrast, voted 50 percent for John McCain to 47 percent for Obama.)6 Soon after the election, Women’s Voices, Women Vote issued a report whose title, “Unmarried Women Change America,” conveys Gardner’s view of their impact. “Unmarried women played a pivotal role in making this history and changing this nation,” it stated. “Barack Obama would have lost the women’s vote and the 2008 election if it were not for the contribution of the unmarried woman.”7
Not everyone shares this interpretation. Nicky Grist, for instance, says that Alternatives to Marriage actually dropped its voting project after the election because the organization had invested so much energy in it but was disappointed by the modest increase in turnout. Moreover, the political issues that matter to her constituents, such as decoupling health insurance from marital status (so you don’t lose your coverage if you divorce or become widowed from a partner whose employer provides it) and getting marital status discrimination included in the Fair Housing Act, got little traction in the early years of the Obama administration. In the media, not many analysts credited unmarried women with helping provide Democrats their margin of victory, and, with the exception of WVWV, not many organizations claimed it. As they prepared for the 2010 midterm elections, Gardner and her colleagues worried that the single women’s voting bloc had still not solidified. “Based on our nationwide projections, there are likely to be 35.3 percent fewer unmarried women voting in 2010 than in 2008,” warned one of their reports. “That’s 10.8 million voters.”8 But since unmarried women remain the nation’s fastest-growing demographic group, there’s good reason to believe that others, including Republicans and conservative get-out-the-vote groups, will soon begin competing for their allegiance. The incentives for engaging unmarried Americans are too great to ignore.
WHILE GROUPS LIKE ALTERNATIVES to Marriage Project have struggled to organize singletons as a political bloc, producers of consumer goods and services are finding that they can effectively organize those who shop solo into an emerging market segment. They also have real incentive to do this, since singles (not all of whom live alone) account for more than 35 percent of total consumer spending, or about $1.6 trillion annually.
The Packaged Facts market study “Singles in the U.S.: The New Nuclear Family” compares the lifestyle and consumption patterns of all variety of unmarried adults, including those in Gen X and Gen Y, seniors, childless singles, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and those who live alone. The report notes that while singles are hardly absent in the media and in advertising, they are generally depicted as stereotypes: glamorous young professionals who spend their evenings in clubs and fancy restaurants or, conversely, lonely old people who suffer home alone. These images, Packaged Facts warns, turn off the very consumers that advertisers are trying to attract. “It’s important for marketers to realize that singles are increasingly viewing their unmarried state as a choice, rather than a temporary and undesirable situation,” the study explains.9 The solution? Packaged Facts offers plenty of strategic advice on how to target-market each of the singles market segments, and the $3,500 price tag on its report suggests the value of this information.
A similar study, published in 2008 by Euromonitor International, offers a global guide to the emerging market of singles and singletons, identifying not only their generic tastes and habits but also specific products that appeal to their demographic in different settings. “Single Living: How Atomisation—The Rise of Singles and One-Person Households—Is Affecting Consumer Purchasing Habits” reports that the rise of living alone has generated unprecedented demand for apartments (not houses), compact furniture and appliances (no need for an oversize refrigerator, dishwasher, or coffee machine when you cook alone), one-seat automobiles and motorbikes, and all kinds of personal services. The global “ready meal” market, for instance, does more than $73 billion in business, up nearly 40 percent since 2002. In Sweden, the nation with the greatest proportion of people who live alone, a company called GOOH! has developed a “home meal replacement concept,” offering “fresh, restaurant-quality dishes with the pricing and convenience of fast food . . . which can be reheated on-site or taken home.” In Japan, the market for dried ready meals has expanded rapidly, driven by single women’s demand for simple, healthy nourishment such as dehydrated savory porridge. Throughout the developed world, singletons are proving to be heavy users of mobile media, as well as of cafés, bars, and restaurants. They may not show the signs of their indulgences, however, since they are also more likely to exercise at the gym.10
With marketing analysts tracking their behavior so closely, it’s no surprise that entrepreneurs are developing new businesses that cater to the needs of people who live alone. One of these is Singelringen, which is Swedish for “single ring.” Designed in 2005 by Johan Wahlbäck, who was born in Stockholm and spent much of his youth in New York and Texas, the turquoise and sterling silver ring allows singles to publicly signal their status. According to the company’s Web site, “By wearing your Singelringen, you declare that it is OK to be single. You may wish to find the one, or you are quite satisfied with life as it is. Regardless, you will show to everyone that you accept and stand for what you are.” Not many rings get feature coverage on national television, but in 2006 the Today show reported that the Singelringen “comes without commitment” and had become “a pretty hot item.” It has been mentioned in People, OK!, and In Touch magazines and was promoted at that San Francisco Sex and the City event. Like Sasha Cagen, who wore a Singelringen that night, Wahlbäck says he’s hoping to help build solidarity.
But selling to a community is hardly the same as organizing it, and not many entrepreneurs have the interest and will to do both. One exception is Sherri Langburt, who we met in chapter two when she faced discrimination in her office and her housing search. Langburt launched Single Edition in late 2007 after spending most of her twenties and thirties on her own. “I started the company because everything online for singles was about dating,” Langburt tells me as we sit in her “second office,” a café near her apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. “But when I lived alone, my life wasn’t all about dating. I had a lot of other concerns, things I wanted to learn about or try, and there were no resources to support my lifestyle. No good information about things like traveling alone or cooking for one. Obviously I wasn’t the only person interested in content like that. Every day I hear more stories of people who are living alone and figuring out how to enjoy themselves. People who were married and then divorced and now say, ‘I do not want to do that again.’ Single Edition is for them.”
Langburt had spent years as an executive at Weight Watchers, a for-profit corporation that prides itself on building communities and improving people’s lives. Single Edition is based on a similar model. When Langburt started the company, she had produced a lot of editorial content, including advice on everyday challenges, such as controlling your portion size when eating alone or finding the right products for a one-person home, as well as on more momentous issues, from career management to financial planning and dealing with parents who pester you about not being married. She had also lined up a network of experts who were willing to contribute in exchange for the recognition, since they too ran businesses—in fitness, law, fashion, nutrition, and, yes, dating—that catered to single clients. And she found a Web designer who was willing to build the site on the barter system. After the launch, Langburt dedicated herself to finding companies interested in marketing to singles. “I was calling ad agencies and saying, ‘We need a sponsor. How about Kraft Singles? They’d be perfect. Or Häagen-Dazs, which has those single-serving cups?’ I called everyone, met with everyone. And there were days when no one would even talk to me. I could hardly sleep.”
The problem, Langburt discovered, was that advertisers insisted that singles didn’t identify primarily as singles and couldn’t be targeted that way—except by dating services. They market to boomers or to thirtysomethings or to affluent city dwellers, any of whom may happen to be single, but they always aim to convey an aspirational message, and they don’t think anyone aspires to be on their own. “I just disagree with this strategy,” Langburt tells me. “And my whole business is based on a bet that I’m right. Singles do identify as singles—it’s often the first thing they say about themselves. There’s no reason to be ashamed of it anymore, especially if they’re in a big city. No one cares. You can be anything. You can eat alone. Go out alone. It doesn’t matter. You just have to be okay with it.” Her theory is that once advertisers recognize this, they’ll immediately have access to a rapidly growing market of singletons who are likely to stay that way long enough to make some major purchases. Clothing. Vacations. Cars. A home.
By 2010 Langburt was making progress. She had organized three sold-out events in which hundreds of singles gathered to hear speakers discuss issues such as health, security, and adventure when you’re on your own. Fox was interested in developing videos for the singles marketplace. Spark Networks, which runs specialized dating services such as JDate, made her a columnist. Norwegian Cruise Line, which had just announced plans to offer special rooms for solo travelers, was considering a deal with her company, and marketing executives who’d refused her phone calls two years earlier were now taking her concepts to their clients and partners. “My fantasy is that once a few big advertisers get it, then everyone will follow and the business will just take off. Someday, I’d like Single Edition to be for singles what the AARP is for seniors. I’m sure that when they started people said that no one wants to identify as a senior, too. That was fifty years ago. Think about how much has changed.”
CHANGING THE WAY we think about singles is the life’s work of Bella DePaulo, who coined the term “singlism” to raise consciousness about prejudices toward the unmarried majority. DePaulo has helped Langburt and Kim Calvert develop their businesses, but she is clearly motivated by cultural rather than commercial concerns. “Crusading against singlism is not a great way to get wealthy,” she tells me. “I wish it were! The organizations that invite me to speak have no money whatsoever. Last week I visited a community college that asked me to take the train rather than fly and then could only put me up for one night. And for my blog, which takes a huge amount of work, I probably get less than a penny a click. Sometimes I laugh about it. I’ve got a PhD from Harvard, after all! But I love doing this. It feels completely necessary, because there’s so much misinformation out there, so little awareness. I do this because it matters.”
Since 2006, when her book Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After was published, DePaulo has become something like the minister of truth for the solo nation. When a politician makes a baseless claim about the hazards of living alone or the benefits of marriage, it’s only a matter of hours before she’s posted a refutation on her blog for Psychology Today. When a scholar or serious journalist does it, she sharpens her razors and attacks. A few days before our conversation, DePaulo took umbrage with a New York Times op-ed about Sandra Bullock’s post-Oscar marital humiliation in which David Brooks mentions a study that claims (in his words) that “being married produces a psychic gain equivalent to more than $100,000 a year.” This infuriated DePaulo, and she immediately fired off a response: “Studies that compare the currently married to everyone else (which is the vast majority of marital status studies) can tell us nothing about the implications of getting married for happiness, health, or anything else. That’s because the currently married are the people who are left after setting aside the 40-some percent of people who got married, hated it, and got divorced. It is like saying that the new drug Shamster is very effective, based on a study in which the experiences of nearly half the people who took the drug were discounted, because it most certainly did not work for them.”11
At the outset of her career, DePaulo had never imagined getting involved in the public debate about married and unmarried America. She was a scholar of deception, and didn’t get interested in the marriage literature until she noticed that colleagues, with whom she enjoyed lunches and formal interactions on workdays, never included her in their more casual weekend and evening plans. “I didn’t know if it was personal or because I was single,” she recounts. “I started talking with my single friends and they’d say, ‘Yes! The same thing happens to me.’ Then they would add other stories about the ways they were treated. And all of us felt that we were being excluded—not just from social events, but from networks that shaped our professional lives. Clearly I had hit a nerve.”
At the time, DePaulo’s only knowledge of the marriage literature was what she saw in the media. “The headlines always said that being married was the best thing for you. I had no reason to doubt it. I just thought I’d hunt for the weak spots, the cases when it wasn’t true.” But when she scrutinized the literature, she found more than just a few unfounded arguments—it seemed to her that nearly all the claims about the benefits of marriage could be easily refuted by anyone with advanced knowledge of statistics. The comparisons were misleading because they failed to account for the fate of people whose marriages ended in divorces. And even the more careful studies didn’t definitively establish whether being financially, physically, and emotionally healthy was the cause or the consequence of marital longevity. DePaulo says she remembers thinking to herself, “Journalists aren’t the only ones being sloppy. Almost everything in the so-called science on marriage is bunk!”
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 published 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.”