Sometimes, it’s easier on the shelf.
“People who are single at heart lead their best, most authentic lives on their own. It’s ridiculous to assume that everyone who is alone is lonely.”
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“You don’t want to be left on the shelf, do you?” There was a time when those words, freighted with pity and misogyny, sent ripples of fear down the spines of unmarried, twenty-something women everywhere.
In the 1950s and earlier, women were discouraged from working after marriage. Laws often terminated their employment once they wed, and they were also taught that their ultimate fulfillment came from marriage and children. The wage gap was much broader, and career opportunities for women were scarce. Society was heavily centered around the family model, making financial stability uncertain for women, not to mention reliable contraception was unavailable.
If a woman chose not to marry or remained single past her early 20s, she was labeled an “old maid” and other disparaging terms like spinster.
Argh.
Thankfully, much has changed. The term “spinster,” with its sexist connotations, was officially removed from the marriage register in 2005 due to the Civil Partnership Act. Today, becoming a spouse is no longer considered essential or defining for women.
But it hasn’t gone. And it hasn’t been replaced by anything more empowering or accurate.
What should unmarried women call themselves? Free women? No. That might be an insult to everyone else. Perpetual singles? It sounds like a pack of cheese slices that will sit in the back of your fridge indefinitely. Musings aside, this need for a new identity is crucial as more women are choosing to opt out of marriage.
The statistics reflect this shift. In the United States, the median age for first marriages has increased from a low of 20.1 years for women and 22.5 years for men in 1956 to 27.1 years for women and 29.2 years for men in 2016. This trend is also observed globally, with 89% of the world’s population living in countries where marriage rates are declining.
All these women “left on the shelf.”
Hardly.
These women are financially stable, have access to reliable contraception, and no longer face societal pressure to marry. They enjoy the spontaneity of a single life, doing what they want when they want, flourishing, and living fully, spreading their feminine wings without a man.
Take my cousin Sarah, a 30-year-old software engineer from Sydney who loves her single life. She enjoys hiking, learning new programming languages, and participating in hackathons. Sarah appreciates the flexibility of being single, which allows her to pursue her passions and career without compromising.
Thanks to the second wave of feminism, which brought significant legislative changes–criminalizing marital rape, decriminalizing abortion, and outlawing gender-based pay disparities. Women gained access to paid maternity leave, childcare, and refuges. These advancements would undoubtedly be celebrated and enjoyed by women across the world.
We no longer need a man to survive or gain social acceptance. We are no longer labeled the dreaded “spinster word.” And if we are, we don’t care because we’re too busy making peace with who and what we are.
We are discovering our strengths and weaknesses, mastering emotional autonomy, building life skills, and carving our paths. More women are also choosing not to remarry following a divorce, opting to fly solo instead and finally embrace a chance to reclaim themselves.
Linda, a 45-year-old nurse living on my street, chose not to remarry after her divorce. She invested her time in her children, career, and hobbies. Linda took up gardening and even started a community garden project. She told me she feels impassioned and enjoys the peace of her single status, and she’s not alone. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard a woman vow never to get involved with another man after ending a long-term relationship.
“No way,” she says. “I’ve had enough. I don’t want to get involved with another man.”
And frankly, we don’t care if you don’t want us. We’ll be the “old maids,” sitting on the shelf and being happy. We have our cats and dogs. We are connected with family and our sisters, and we source love through them. We are the solo dwellers, reclaiming our history and reversing the patriarchal brainwashing to find our happily single sanity.
Yes. We can choose.
Women everywhere are waking up to discover they prefer to create a good life as single people. They choose to remain single as a conscious choice to avoid the drama and complications that can come with relationships. We’re much less financially dependent on men, and the idea that a woman’s greatest fulfillment is marriage and children is now a “sometimes” situation.
We have become more empowered and educated, and we work. We work to keep our dreams alive. We work on ourselves, our humanity, and our creative gifts. We appreciate our hearts and have learned how to protect them.
Women have learned that finding faithful partners or people who are our intellectual equals is so challenging. We are tired of dealing with controlling men, abusive men, violent men, game-playing men — untrustworthy, unreliable, and immature men.
These are the kind of men who chip away at our self-esteem, complicate our lives and our children’s lives, use and violate us, and then walk away, leaving us to pick up the broken pieces in the aftermath.
These are the kind of men who tell us what to wear, how to behave, what we should and shouldn’t say, control our money, manipulate, lie, cheat, and coerce us into sex as an obligation.
Things have changed. You are not imagining this.
Women do not need men as they once did, and men do not have the power they once did. It was never healthy to afford one-half of the world’s population more power anyway. A male-controlled system can’t be sustained because it is not in the best interests of women, and here we are, challenging and changing old, stale thinking.
We don’t believe relationships based solely on dependence are healthy. When a relationship is built entirely on dependence, it becomes vulnerable to abuse. It’s about power dynamics.
Understand that this freedom allows women to choose partners based on higher needs beyond mere survival, leading to better, healthier relationships with good men — faithful, respectful, loving, and emotionally mature men who have acquired and practiced their lessons over a lifetime.
So, if men still want and need women, they need to step up their relating skills and treat women a whole lot better because we know that sometimes it’s easier on the shelf.
Welcome to the new normal.
Single women thrive here.
