Living Alone, Dark Sides and Unconditional Love.

The other day while watching my favorite news program I ran across an interview with the author Eric Kleinberg that has finally unearthed a phenomenon I have been living and breathing for years. He says that it "is the biggest social change of the last 50 or 60 years that we have failed to name or identify". What is this change you ask? "It's not just that so many Americans are unmarried, which is something we have talked about, but that people are living alone and for long stretches of their lives."

Here are the facts:
" In 1950, 22 percent of American adults were single. Four million lived alone. They accounted for 9 percent of all households. Fast-forward to today, more than 50 percent of American adults are single -- 31 million, about one out of every seven, live alone. They make up 28 percent of all households. "

Yes folks it's happening. The more evolved human beings get, the more we realize that being alone is really not so bad. I've been single and alone for most of my life and, while that's probably going to have to change if I ever want a family, I am not a spinster or a loser. I am not sad and depressed or socially isolated. It may surprise some of you that I am happy and content. I'm the first to admit that I do have commitment issues but instead of stumbling through relationships where I don't know what the hell I'm doing, I would rather sit back and observe my friend's relationships to see if I can learn anything. Learning how people coexist is still a subject that baffles me, but I hope to learn as much about it as I can before I do it on my own.

What I have learned is this: Find out your lover's dark side before you decide to spend the rest of your life with them. Because the fact is everybody has a dark side and it is usually stubborn. Marriage and kids may shed some light into one's obscure corners of the soul, but it does not change them. These corners make up who we are.

Living alone allows you to flourish in your darkness form a healthy relationship to it and accept it rather than judge it. Most people enter into relationships in the euphoric state of love where all the darkness is cute and adorable. After about five years the reality sets in: the person you married is not a knight in shining armor, he's just a dude with bad teeth and a slight drinking problem.

To me, the reality can be the most beautiful part of love. To say to someone, " I have seen your darkest moments and the moments that shine the brightest and I still love you". That is the only wedding vow I will ever need. So long as we have our separate areas of the house. Because loving someone's dark side is one thing, living with it is another.

The solution to this conundrum is a glorious idea I picked up from a very independently minded girlfriend I know and love: when you do get married live in separate houses. Or , in the very least, have separate areas to do all the dark things you usually do when you're alone. Every man deserves his man cave and every woman deserves their own bathroom. Love cannot exorcise one's demons, but it can do something way more profound. Love can say, " hey I see your dark side, and I love you anyways. Now let me go to my man cave and watch this basketball game while grabbing my package and I will see you after you pop your zits and drink way too much wine with dinner. " Unconditional love at it's finest.

There is one very crucial caveat to my theory. Separate houses, man caves and private bathrooms cost money. And that is the main reason why most people in America can choose to live alone. Eric's research confirms this. "In fact, you see very little living alone in poor nations or in poor neighborhoods. On the other hand, there are some affluent societies where virtually no one lives alone, for instance, Saudi Arabia. One big difference in a place like Saudi Arabia is that women don't have the kind of independence they have in the United States or in other countries where there's high levels of living alone."

So basically people choose to live in families because they have no other choice. And I feel that every month when I pay my rent all by myself. It costs money to live alone. But are the emotional costs of living with someone who's darkness engulfs your own worth having half your rent paid?

The bottom line is this: We have choices now. Choose what is right for you and strive for the ultimate goal: Unconditional love. Because the confidence you feel by getting married and having " your day" will fade, your Prince Charming will one day fart in bed and bust out their "hits of the 90's" CD collection, and while families are beautiful, they are not the solution to every problem that you faced when you lived on your own.

Move over Families. Time to make room for these new singletons. We make up 28 percent of the population now. Like it or not we are here to stay. Dark sides and all.



Work Cited:
Klienberg, Eric. "Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Going Alone."http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/social_issues/jan-june12/goingsolo_03-27.html?print Retrieved 4.3.2012

To All My Single Momma's: You Are Not Alone.

The funny thing about the quote I use to introduce this blog is that men are no longer the "superior chaste" in The United States. That ship sailed in 2008 after the economy tanked and women became the breadwinners of middle class America. The ship is not entirely gone. But as more women bring home the bacon, the faster that ship heads out towards the horizon.

One of the many unintended consequences of this shift of economic responsibility? Less and less people are getting married. And for all my single momma's out there I want you to know one thing: You are not alone.

There is a massive shift happening in America. And I'm sure that everyone has an opinion about it. But as W. Bradford Wilcox, a sociologist at the University of Virginia, said in an article in the Times, “marriage is not as fundamental to society” as it once was.

But it's not just sociologists that have discovered the dying phenomenon, it's women across America:

“Most of my friends say it’s just a piece of paper, and it doesn’t work out anyway.” - young mother

"'Women used to rely on men, but we don’t need to anymore,' said Teresa Fragoso, 25, a single mother in Lorain. 'We support ourselves. We support our kids.'"

"Brittany Kidd was 13 when her father ran off with one of her mother’s friends, plunging her mother into depression and leaving the family financially unstable. She didn't marry because she 'didn't want to end up like her mom'."

What is surprising is that most of these women I have quoted live in lower economic households. “Marriage has become a luxury good,” said Frank Furstenberg, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania. More women in upper and middle class families are married when they have a child. But more woman living in lower economic strati have to endure the realities of raising a child on their own.

"It used to be called illegitimacy. Now it is the new normal. After steadily rising for five decades, the share of children born to unmarried women has crossed a threshold: more than half of births to American women under 30 occur outside marriage." ( Jason De Parle, Sabrina Tabernise LA Times) the article goes on to say, "Among mothers of all ages, a majority — 59 percent in 2009 — are married when they have children. But the surge of births outside marriage among younger women — nearly two-thirds of children in the United States are born to mothers under 30"

Two thirds! That is a mind boggling statistic. What's going on with this next generation? There are so many reasons why women are having children without a ring. Despite what these reasons are, it is important to remember that this is something almost unheard of not that long ago. These women that are boldly making choices to support their offspring on their own would be labeled as loose, sluts, sinners and the like. In some institutions and American towns they still are. The difference between now and then?

Women have choices now. These statistics prove that women define ourselves by truth not by patriarchal dogma. And that is s something to be grateful for.

I'd like to go on record and confess that I still dream of my wedding day. I have my bridesmaids and their dress colors all picked out. This is ingrained in my DNA by a mother that woke me up in the middle of the night to watch Princess Diana marry her Prince. We all know how that turned out. If that's not a beacon for how warped the idolization of marriage is, I don't know what is. (Part of the reason I started this blog was to understand why I am so tethered to these obviously antiquated dreams of mine.)

My view of marriage is changing though. When I was in High School I wanted to be married with kids by the ripe old age of 27. ( Talk about a ship that has sailed!) Now that I am 37, I would hope that when I marry I have been with my love for many many years, maybe even have had a couple kids together. I want my marriage to celebrate love, not be a tool to stay financially afloat as some form of cultural capital that affirms my social status. My point is the dream of getting married is still lodged in my DNA like an old nail in a wall that I forgot to hang a picture on. Has this nail been dislodged for the generation coming up behind me? These statistics seem to be suggesting that this is true.

I have friends that are single moms by choice, and others that have been happily surprised by motherhood. Regardless of how their single motherhood came to be, I hope that all my sisters raising kids on their own find love. I hope you get married because you are in love not because you need the extra paycheck in the household. And I hope they realize that no matter what you're church, family, or society tells you, you are valuable regardless of your marital status. You are boldly changing what family means to America and proving just how strong women can be. Walk proud my beautiful matriarchs. Because despite how it may feel on those nights when the stress seems insurmountable, this incredible shift is proving one thing: You Are Not Alone.

Valentines Day

Valentine's day. We don't get it off work. So as far as I'm concerned, it's not a holiday.

As a single women, this holiday is the day that the men I date disappear for fear of becoming too committed, where women flaunt their boyfriends and the gifts they get from them as if this is some hard-earned reward for having sex with them, and where I feel like shit because I don't get to have sex or get flowers. But don't feel sorry for me.

There was one magical Valentine's day in my life. It was a cold winter night in Brooklyn. Leah, one of my best friends in the whole world, was alone. We were both in this weird state of shock because a very special family member of her boyfriend Tim was killed when flight 3406 crashed in Buffalo. Tim found out the news on his birthday.

Life, death, loss? I've had to deal with this kind of heavy stuff for my whole life. It's a huge contributor to my fear of commitment. And it's this type of concrete reality lodged into my DNA that makes heart balloons and flowers seem insignificant and plastic to me.

This Valentine's day felt like it was forcing Leah and I to be alone. With Tim gone to Buffalo for the funeral and I insistent on forgetting the holiday existed, it seemed the perfect night for Leah and I to forget about love and all things that have to do with hearts and candy, remain in our respectful hermit caves and watch Real Housewives of New York.

But we didn't.

Leah's usually vibrant dark eyes were downcast that night. When I arrived at The Loft, usually alive with music, voices and barking dogs, everything was eerily quiet. Braving the cold Brooklyn air, we headed out into the winter night all dressed up with somewhere to go. My tights were gold and shimmery, my lipstick a bright red. Somewhere in the corners of my jaded mind, I had hoped I might meet someone that night. Another lonely soul that hated Valentine's day the way I did.

We were expecting to go to a Soul Food restaurant bar, that had dancing and music. We wanted to dance, be merry and attempt to lift the heaviness from our hearts and brains. And we were starving. We opened the door to the bar ready to party. What we found was a very long bar leading to an empty dance floor. There were five people in the entire place.

This night could have turned out to be one of those dud nights where nothing happens. But somehow within the contrast of Valentine' day and the shock of tragedy, there was this kernel of love between us that cut through reality and turned this night into a memory I will take to my grave. Leah was my Valentine that night. A soul mate for life. Now that's something to celebrate.

Arielle Ford, author of "The Soul Mate Secret" describes a soul mate as:
1. Someone that you love unconditionally
2. Someone that when you look into their eyes you have the experience of being "home".
3. Someone you can be your true self with.

This is the definition of a soul mate that I align my heart with. And I believe that every person has many soul mates in life. The myth of one soul mate per person is ridiculous. Tim and Leah are soul mates, Leah and I are soul mates, Tim and I are soul mates, and on that night, Tim was mourning one of his soul mates gone too soon. That's the reality of life. Sometimes we loose soul mates, sometimes we only see them once a year. I have many people in my life that match Arielle's definition. I don't need candy and flowers to make it so.

That night in Brooklyn, Leah and I sat at the bar and ate the most delicious meal in the world. We didn't talk about how awful it was to be alone on Valentine's day. We just appreciated the mac and cheese, sweet potato pie, yummy wine, each other's company and the fact that we were alive. A Valentine's day cannot go by without me missing my good friend in New York and craving sweet potato pie. On that night, love was real. It existed through tragedy, through a Brooklyn winter, through our conversation, even in the food we were eating.

Don't get me wrong, I still feel a pang in my heart when I see some really happy woman receiving flowers from her beloved. But don't feel sorry for me. For every part of me that is jealous there's another part of me that believes every day is a holiday for single people. Watching the trials and tribulations of people in relationships, I can understand why couples need a day to force them to be nice to each other. But If we're going to call it a holiday we should at least get it off work.

The Other

" The category of the Other is as primordial as consciousness itself. In the most primitive societies, in the most ancient mythologies, one finds expression of a duality - that of the Self and the Other". ( De Beauvoir xxii)

So what is this little italicized word that insists on flaunting itself all over Ms. De Beauvior's work? It's questions like this that keep me stuck on her essay for a moment. When Beauvoir speaks of "The Other" in terms of women and our status in society, she is basically saying that men exist as the absolute, women as their reflection. "Thus humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him. She is not regarded as an autonomous human being". (Beavoir, xxii)

In other words, if human beings were a sentence, men would be the subject and women the object. The object cannot exist without the subject if it is going to make a complete sentence.

How did this duality manifest in our society? Here's a few quotes to refresh our memories.

" The female is a female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities...we should regard the female nature as afflicted with a natural defectiveness" - Aristotle

" Every woman student who goes into medicine or law robs us of a job" - Male Med Student

"Went to her house to get her out of the pad
Dumb hoe says something stupid that made me mad
She said somethin' that I couldn't believe
So I grabbed the stupid bitch by her nappy ass weave" Eazy - E


Generally things are not as bad as they have been in the past. I think we can all agree on that. What is interesting to me is how women in modern, western societies have taken on this concept of The Other and embedded it into our self esteem. Somewhere in our DNA lies a subscription to the notion that we are objects needing a subject to make a complete sentence of our lives. Completely unaware that this specific context in which to view ourselves came from millenniums of oppression. We do it to ourselves and society reflects this back to us. Messages from the media, movies, and our own DNA have created this automatic reflex of defining ourselves in relativity to a man.

Consider the latest episode of Real Housewives of Atlanta. I understand that most reality TV shows are usually fake or relying on some narrative for the cast to follow. But this TV franchise is the closest I can get to a female peatrie dish of upper class American females. I understand why my brother says that it "gives him nightmares". But I can't get enough of it.

In this episode we see two examples of how our society and women themselves subscribe to the philosophy that if they don't have a man, then there is something wrong with them.

Exhibit A. Kim's Found the One. - If your not familiar with Kim, she's the only white girl on this show that chronicles the real lives of seven women living in Atlanta, Georgia. Blonde, voluptuous and not afraid to party, she has found herself domesticated this season after having a baby with the love of her life. Her father mentions how Kim and her man balance each other out. Which was pretty cool. But then he says, " Only took ya thirty three years. Better late than never." What? Thirty three!

Of course, after hearing him say this, I fretted for a moment. It's the automatic reaction of a single woman in her late thirties. Thoughts such as, " I'll never find a man", " I'm too old to find a mate, who will ever be attracted to me?" struck through my head like the beak of the bird in a cuckoo clock. It's automatic. I can't help it. But then come the other thoughts.

If you were to poll all of the other women in the show on their marital status the results would be as follows:

• Unmarried Glorified Prostitute.

• Divorced.

• Unmarried Single Mom, going through a divorce.

• Married, but having problems.
  

• ...and then there's the lucky one. Phaedra. She's a lawyer who is happily married to a, very hot younger, ex-con, husband. She's my hero.

All of these women are Kim's age or older and only two of them are married. So what reality is Kim's dad holding her too? Compared to the rest of her cast mates, Kim found the love of her life at a young age! We don't live in the generations where the majority of couples met and married in their twenties. We're subjects now! We've got other shit to deal with. ( Career, paying rent, raising children on our own etc., etc. etc.) Finding a man takes longer than it did when we were living under male hegemony, rapaciously searching for a husband by age twenty five so we did not end up and old maid at thirty. Society needs to catch up.

And by society I mean my own brain.

I need to stop thinking of myself as relative to men too. My world does not become any better or more complete when I find my man. It just changes. So there's no need for me, or for Kim's dad to fret. Kim found her man at the right time for her. And I for one am very happy for her.

Diane Sawyer did not marry until she was forty. Bethenny Frankel did not marry until she was thirty nine. Both women spent their lives working on building careers that made them millionare's. And they still found time to meet amazing men and fall in love. Were they "less than" before they met their mates? If this is what happens when you live your life without a husband than why are women not prescribing to THIS ideal?

Exhibit B - Marlow's fight with Sheree.

Here's a situation where Marlow (the glorified prostitute) and Sheree ( snobby divorcee with a great ass) get in a fight. Their fight is about Marlow not being invited to Sheree's friend's dinner party. What it turns into is jealousy over who has more money and how many material possessions are paid for in cash. Once Marlow becomes frustrated at the conversation, she turns to Sheree and says, " Anyway, that's why you don't have a man. Go hang with those faggots with your ugly stupid ass" ( I swear I'm not making this shit up). Sheree goes berserk and they end up having a heated conversation complete with comments regarding Aston Martin's, Marlow's eighty year old white sugar daddy, and a flurry of hand gestures and finger waves.

My point here is that Marlow used the one phrase that goes to the core of every single women's insecurities. Not being pretty enough, or funny enough, slutty enough, or chaste enough to keep a man. And even though this is sensitive ground for us, as seen by the immediate escalation of the argument, it comes from a reality that is simply not real. We all know that a woman is just as beautiful, confident and attractive whether or not they have a man on their arm. So why is this such a sensitive topic for us? It's a topic based on antiquated lies, promoted by fairy tales not reality.

Beavoir claims that , " no group ever sets itself up as the One without at once setting up the Other over and against itself." ( Beavoir xxi) Today, men don't do this to us as much as we do it to each other. Ways that females have ingrained their former male oppression can be seen on the school yard. Little girls excluding their fellow classmates because they are not pretty or cool enough. Or at adult parties, where one woman is single and all the others are married? I can attest to feeling like a foreigner in situations like these. In fact, as a single woman in her late thirties, I have been The Other in relation to married women far more than with men.

So whether you are a momma, a stewardess, a CEO or a student, what's important is to just be aware of these very tenuous patriarchal lies. They're only as strong as we let them be. I don't mind being objectified by EAZY- E, so long as I recognize and am aware of where his ideologies come from so I don't embed them into my own self esteem. ( yes I did just use "ideologies" and "EAZY - E" in one sentence).

I don't judge those who are attached to this old stuff because I am to. It's primordial. We gotta dig deep to uncover this stuff. But that doesn't mean we can't observe these messages from within us and from the media, parcel out which one's are true and which one's are lies, and then have a laugh at the lies so we may discard them and create new realities from truth. In fact, it's crucial that we do this. If for no other reason than I would die if I heard my niece say this to her friend:

" That's why you don't have a man!". I'd be mortified.

Check Check 1,2,3. Is This Thing On?

I'm a writer. So it's kind of inane that I haven't created a blog yet. And when I thought about what I should write about, I figured it better be something that I'm an expert in so I can impart some form of wisdom onto my dear readers. Hmmmm. Expert. What am I an expert at?

Creating playlists on Itunes? - Perhaps.

Attracting unavailable men? - Getting closer.

Being a single woman in her late thirties? - Yes that's it! I think I got it!!

I have loved. I have lost. I have paid my rent and bills all by myself for most of my adult life. I have been the subject of my life, not the object to someone else's. Yes, ladies and gents, this blog is going to be about modern feminism. I do hope to be in an equal partnership with a man one day, but if there is anything that can come out of my years of feeling condescended to because I did not have a man to cling to, it is this blog. See what I did there? Turning lemons into lemonade.

Simone de Beauvoir, one of the OG writers on this subject, has said,"the subject is irritating, especially to women; and it is not new. Enough ink has been spilled in the quarreling over feminism, now practically over, and perhaps, we should say no more about it." ( Beauvoir, xx) She's right. The word feminism is attached to so many negative connotations, I don't even like to mention it anymore. But talking about women and gender issues is vital. If for no other reason than when Beauvior was writing, women couldn't even vote. Yet today - over sixty years after Ms. Beauvior wrote her seminal work entitled, "The Second Sex", women are still treated as property, still feel less than without a boyfriend or husband, still do not have equal pay, and still remain in abusive relationships.

We've come very far ladies. But we're not done yet. If you don't believe me I have two words for you:

Kim Kardashian. ( Becoming a millionaire wasn't fairytale enough. Ya HAD to go and do the over the top wedding?)

No? Still not convinced? How bout' these two words?

Demi Moore ( Your in your late forties and still smokin' hot! Who cares if that douchebag left you?)

This blog celebrates the fact that we are currently moving past feminist and anti-feminist ideals. Gone are the days when we could bash men because we felt oppressed by them. The quest for true liberty is not that black and white anymore. We've got the money, we've got some power. Now what?

The intent of this blog is to uncover how we are still tethered to roots of our past oppressions regardless of how far we have come. Unlike slavery or the holocaust, which give Black and Jewish oppression a clear demarcation in time, "women's dependency on men is not the result of a historical event or social change. It was not something that occurred." (Beauvior, xxi) This is one reason why we are a blinded by the invisible chains that keep us dependent on men/attention whores/competitive against our fellow sisters etc. etc. etc.

This blog is about investigating, discussing and taking responsibility for how we are a party of the shit deal we were handed many many eons ago.

I'm guilty of this. Your guilty of it. So let's talk about it shall we?

For anybody that would like to join, collaborate, or post something on here, please let me know. I'd be happy to share this space with you. And of course, I look forward to your comments and questions as they will fuel more fruitful discussions as opposed to me blathering on and on with my California-sized ego.

Agree with me. Disagree with me. But let's talk it out.