2017/02/28

Maybe you should just be single

There's a lot of single women in Taiwan. Part of that is that there are more women than men in this country, but then there's the phenomenon of all the foreign brides that are marrying into Taiwan. This is a complicated and painful issue, but let's look at it from the level of the personal this time.


Finding ‘the one’ as ‘the happy ending’
You see, I don’t believe that my relationship constitutes a happy ending. I don’t want a “happy ending”. I don’t want an ending at all, particularly not while I’m still in my goddamn twenties—I want a long life full of work and adventure. I absolutely don’t see partnership as the end of that adventure. And I still believe that being single is the right choice for a great many young women. 


Marriage: still an economic relationship at heart
Buried under the avalanche of hearts and flowers is an uncomfortable fact: romantic partnership is, and always has been, an economic arrangement. The economics may have changed in recent decades, as many women have gained more financial independence, but it’s still about the money. It’s about who does the domestic labour, the emotional labour, the work of healing the walking wounded of late capitalism. It’s about organising people into isolated, efficient, self-reproducing units and making them feel bad when it either fails to happen or fails to bring them happiness. 


Being single should not equal failure, being partnered should not equal downplaying our whole selves
Today, whatever else we are, women are still taught that we have failed if we are not loved by men. I’ve lost count of the men who seem to believe that the trump card they hold in any debate is “but you’re unattractive”. “But I wouldn’t date you.” How we feel about them doesn’t matter. Young women are meant to prioritise men’s romantic approval, and young men often struggle to imagine a world in which we might have other priorities.

The trouble is that in order to win that approval, we are supposed to lessen our power in every other aspect of life. We are supposed to downplay our intelligence, to worry if we have more financial or professional success than our partner. We can be creative and ambitious, but never more so than the men in our lives, lest we threaten them. And there are so few men that are worth making that sort of sacrifice for.


Who does the work that love demands?
“In patriarchal culture,” as bell hooks observes in All About Love: New Visions, “men are especially inclined to see love as something they should receive without expending effort. More often than not they do not want to do the work that love demands.” Even the very best and sweetest of men have too often been raised with the expectation that once a woman is in their lives romantically, they will no longer have to do most of the basic chores involved in taking care of themselves. When I’ve spoken critically about this monolithic ideal of romantic love in the past, most of the pushback I’ve received has been from men, some of it violent, and no wonder. Men usually have far more to gain from this sort of traditional arrangement. Men are allowed to think of romantic love as a feeling, an experience, a gift that they expect to be given as a reward for being their awesome selves. That sounds like a great deal to me. I wouldn’t want that challenged.

Women, by contrast, learn from an early age that love is work. That in order to be loved, we will need to work hard, and if we want to stay loved we will need to work harder. We take care of people, soothe hurt feelings, organise chaotic lives and care for men who never learned to care for themselves, regardless of whether or not we’re constitutionally suited for such work. We do this because we are told that if we don’t, we will die alone and nobody will find us until an army of cats has eaten all the skin off our faces.
 
Little boys are told they should “get” girlfriends, but they are not encouraged to seriously consider their future roles as boyfriends and husbands. Coupledom, for men, is not supposed to involve a surrendering of the self, as it is for women. Young men do not worry about how they will achieve a “work-life balance”, nor does the “life” aspect of that equation translate to “partnership and childcare”. When commentators speak of women’s “work-life balance”, they’re not talking about how much time a woman will have, at the end of the day, to work on her memoirs, or travel the world, or spend time with her friends. “Life”, for women, is envisioned as a long trajectory towards marriage. “Life”, for men, is meant to be bigger than that.


Emotional Labor
There would be serious social consequences if we collectively refused to do the emotional management that being a wife or girlfriend usually involves—so it’s important that we’re bullied into it, made to feel like we’re unworthy and unloveable unless we’re somebody’s girl. Today, we’re even expected to deliver the girlfriend experience in the workplace, as “affective labour”—the daily slog of keeping people happy—becomes a necessary part of the low-waged, customer-facing, service-level jobs in which women and girls are over-represented.


Finding a man who’ll treat you like a human being: hard? Or the hardest?
That’s an ideological reason to be single. Now here’s a practical one. The truth is that most men in their teens and twenties have not yet learned to treat women like human beings, and some never do. It’s not entirely their fault. It’s how this culture trains them to behave, and in spite of it all, there are a few decent, kind and progressive young men out there who are looking for truly equal partnerships with women.
 
The trouble is that there aren’t enough of them for all the brilliant, beautiful, fiercely compassionate women and girls out there who could really do with someone like that in their lives. Those men are like unicorns. If you meet one, that’s great. You might think you’ve met one already—I’ve often thought so—but evidence and experience suggest that a great many unicorns are, in fact, just horses with unconvincing horns. If you don’t manage to catch a real unicorn, it doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you. Either way, you should have a plan B.


Demanding more of love
Rejecting that sort of partnership doesn’t mean rejecting the whole notion of love. On the contrary: it means demanding more of love. … There are many different routes to a life of love and adventure and personally, I don’t intend to travel down any one of them in the sidecar. So we need to start telling stories about singleness—and coupled independence—that are about more than manicures and frantic day-drinking.

We need to start remembering all of the women down the centuries who chose to remain unpartnered so that they could make art and change history without a man hanging around expecting dinner and a smile. We need to start remembering that the modern equivalents of these women are all around us, and little girls need not be terrified of becoming them. More than half of women over eighteen are unmarried. More than half of marriages end in divorce. It is more than time to abandon the idea that a single woman has failed in life.