Originally published in February 2020.
I got contact lenses when I was 12. Arguably too young but with glasses as thick as mine and braces getting cemented to my teeth within the month, my parents took pity. My first contact lenses were bright green. Most people don’t get colored lenses their first time around, but throughout my childhood my mother’s were purple (true story), so I felt like green was an option. I miss them on occasion — an overlooked 90s trend I kind of wish would come back.
The first time I ever tried to put them in, it took 45 minutes. The part-time wage, recently de-virgined teenager at LensCrafters who was charged with teaching me how to stick a flimsy membrane the size of a dime in my eye was more concerned with her chipped Urban Decay nail polish than with my soggy attempts at success.
“You’re still not getting it,” she hrmphed.
Yes, Christy, I am aware of that. I’m a 12-year-old who reads at college level not a newborn cocker spaniel pup, I have full command of what’s happening here. Rather than telling me what I was doing wrong or showing me the correct form, she just sat there and mouth breathed while I learned how to do it on my own.
I’ve loved words as long as I’ve known them. It’s a relationship that’s spanned three and a half decades, I think it’s gonna make it. Words are capable of entertaining us, provoking thought, generating emotion, they’re absolutely infinite. I look at a blank page on my laptop in much the same way you’d look at the night sky. That statement might sound like runny cheese upon hearing it, but I hid in books as a child, and I’ve healed with essay as an adult. They’ve soothed me, inspired me, earned my living — if that’s not wondrous to us I’m concerned for our species, I really am.
I’ve always viewed what I can do with words as precious, my meager but meaningful superpower. But what I can do with them is only half of it. What they can do to me is another bag of cats altogether.
I can’t control the words of others, but I’m their backboard nonetheless, a thing to bounce opinions and directives off of that doesn’t show signs of wear until after years of weathering in a driveway. Along with all the possibility and wonder of words comes the profound tendency for some of them to make me feel like festering curb water.
The way the word “still” is used as it pertains to single women is subtle swordsmithing. When we’re not single, but still single, there are all manner of implications that come along with that. All of them are trash, I just want to say that up front.
The word “still” is the English language’s most genteel way of telling someone they’re a failure. Aren’t manners hilarious? Words are my first love but I’d have a torrid affair with manners in Capri in a heartbeat. Rather than telling the truth and saving time and confusion, we swaddle difficult news in manners and tell ourselves we’re in the right while we tell others they’re wrong.
We could just come right out with it and stab people in the torso with “you’re wrong,” but instead we prefer the paper cutty nature of “still.” It’s so much more delicate, don’t you think?
“You’re still missing it.”
“This still isn’t working.”
“It still doesn’t look right.”
We expect you to do a thing by a certain time, and if you haven’t done it by that time, you’re not doing it, you’re still doing it. See the difference? One day I was single, the next day I was still single. I love words, but still and I need some space.
Still implies that you’ve failed, but also that you’ve exceeded your allotted time, which for me is the much harder hit to take. I like to know that I catch onto concepts quickly, that I can learn anything, and overall that I’m really goddamn smart — whether I am or not. I’m in perpetual competition with my own cerebral cortex, really.
It’s the time thing. I wasn’t always still single, for a long time I was just single — if not just…a person. Single as a concept wasn’t even a thing for awhile! That “while” being my early to mid twenties, naturally. The younger you are, the fewer requirements society imposes on you, the fewer things you’re required to be without being seen as a failure. In my twenties, I was a woman. In my thirties, I’m now a single woman who doesn’t have children yet. Ugh, yet. That’s another sonofabitch.
Still wasn’t there one day, and it was all anyone could say the next.
“I can’t believe you’re still single.”
“How are you still single?”
“You’re still single? I don’t get it!”
Did I miss something? I’ve been here the whole time, when did I accrue this modifier? Objection.
If you’re just “single,” aka every age until 27, there’s some wiggle room to imply all kinds of positive things. Maybe you’re “taking time alone,” “working on yourself,” “focusing on your career,” or whatever flavor of social media quote the world wants to assign to a woman who doesn’t need a reason for being single because another way to say that is just existing as a human. My point is that if you’re just single, there’s societal room for that to be okay. If you’re still single, it means you shouldn’t be.
The world wants you to be one thing, and if you’re not that thing, you’re alternative to what you should be. This deals mostly with the societal supposed-tos assigned to women. The perfectly partnered, societally conforming, giftwrapped traits that if you buck them at all, you’re seen as living an “alternative lifestyle” and should just go ahead and purchase the oversized round glasses and countless pairs of dangly earrings right now. And buy plants, don’t forget the plants.
Being expected to fit into a form set by someone other than myself gives me a rash. Just because I’m not the way the world wants me to be, that doesn’t mean that what I am is bad. I love that phrase, “alternative lifestyle.” Like there was some conscious choice made to revolt against society, my own special mission to face the wrong way in an elevator.
Women are supposed to be all kinds of things. Pretty, smart (but not too smart), kind, employed (but not too employed), good at cooking, good with kids, confident (but not too confident), loving, loyal, thin (but with a huge ass), ladylike but then also secretly into sexual kink — I could go on. But my favorite supposed-to is the one we have the least amount of control over: Women are supposed to be young. Forever.
What’s really meant by “she’s still single” is that she’s old. She’s old, she’s getting old, she’s passing her prime whateverthefuck, she’s old! And women aren’t supposed to be old. We’re not supposed to look it, act it, or be it, even if we are it. There’s nothing more societally treasured than female youth, and nothing more repulsive than female maturity. As if we have an ability to choose our age, or the age by which we accomplish society’s little supposed-tos.
Think we don’t value female youth more than anything else? Go to Walgreens and count the number of anti-aging products available for women, then go to the aggressively navy blue aisle for men and try to find the same shit. Helping women stay young forever is a $250 billion dollar industry, and climbing. Your country’s primary exports might be steel and soybeans but its most valuable commodity is the youth of its women.
I love when male standup comics launch into their disbelief over the amount of time women spend in the bathroom. “You spend like two hours in there and when you come out, I gotta tell ya babe, you look exactly the same.”
Do we? Do we really, Steven? Would you like to know why? Would you like to know how much time, money, effort, and ritual animal sacrifice we go through so that day after day, night after night, decade after decade, we look the same?!
We pay a lot of money to freeze ourselves in time to maintain the societally prescribed level of visual youth we need to be considered attractive. We look the same? You’re welcome, Steven. You are fucking welcome.
Still just means we’re old. It’s fine. Don’t wrap it in manners, cover it in edible glitter, just say it. If a woman is single, it means she’s young. If a woman is still single, it means she’s getting old. It isn’t some secret, I’m well aware of the DOB on my passport and the sciatic discomfort I feel every time I pick something up off the ground, you’re not pulling any wool over me here.
But what I’d like to modify is the notion that a woman over a certain age is still single. Maybe she’s just single, whatever her age, and the idea that she has to be partnered by a certain age or else feel the sting of failure is actually the thing that’s aging poorly.
***
When I was 26 I ended a relationship, and I’ve been single ever since. I will be 38 this June, and basically what I’ll have to show for my efforts will be a well-exercised swiping thumb and an annotated map of convenient date locations in Brooklyn. Twelve years. You can become qualified to work for NASA in less time.
I’ve been on countless first dates, fewer second dates, and like maybe a third date and a half. There’s madness in it, and confusion about how statistically I didn’t meet someone to spend time with by accident eventually.
Ah, still — you old so-and-so. A word seemingly compact and harmless and yet hiding a newly sharpened beheading axe within the folds of its robe. Is there any word that can make you feel like a disappointment more quickly?
And maybe it has a point. With 12 years of Nivea-moisturized skin in the game, how have I not yet scored? It’s impressive really, over a decade of effort and nothing to show for it, someone get Guinness on the horn.
All that effort leading to nothing, surely I must be doing something wrong. There’s no possible way an intelligent, successful, perfectly conversational and sufficiently attractive woman could put effort into dating for that long and still come out single on the other side, right?
It couldn’t possibly be the institution of modern day dating itself, there’s no way that’s the issue here. There’s no way that with dating apps and Amazon.com sharing the same basic binary code that courting as we know it has become a distant, barely there display of faces through phones that has removed all humanity from interaction. That can’t be it. It’s gotta be me, I’m ruining this for myself somehow.
I don’t know how many dates I’ve been on. I don’t know how many people I’ve matched with. Tinder once sent me a push notification to inform me that since joining their hellapp I’d been right-swiped by 25,000 people. What the fuck am I supposed to do with that information? Are they saying there’s a pile of 25,000 men inside my phone and if I pay $59.99 for a three month package I can spend all my waking toilet hours swiping through them until I find my husband? Bet me money he’s not number 24,999.
How much thumb time are we talking here? It’s definitely going to come down to effort. You know, since there are literally no compatibility features available other than gender, age, and location and for some reason they’re still not filtering out Hoboken? No, he’s definitely somewhere in there, I just have to find him, swipe through everyone else first but then find him, this is on me. Twenty five thousand men? He’s in there somewhere, in this economy.
I’m doing dating wrong, that must be why I’m still single. It has to be me, my methods, my personality, the way I look, the way I behave, the amount of money I earn, my political views, the fact that I have a cat, don’t want kids, and hate motorcycles, this is all my fault.
Or it’s my opinions! Oh god the opinions. About…you know things, that’s got to be it. I once went on a first date with a man who had hair in his profile photos, didn’t in real life, and stared down at the bar for the duration of the date, never once contributing to the conversation. He seemed confused by the drink menu. He once looked up from his stoic stare into the mahogany to say “You have a lot of opinions.” What I should have said in response was, “and my shoe rack is better company than you,” but instead I told him I had work to do before an early meeting the next day, and scampered home.
I can’t believe you’re still single. How has nothing worked out for you yet?
I’m definitely doing something wrong. When I get messages from men that are nothing more than wink emojis, one-word responses, or outright inquiries for sexual favors because the modern dating paradigm has taught them that’s okay, it’s gotta be me, right? I must be doing something wrong before these men even communicate with me. That must be why I’m still single.
Or it could be my messaging strategy. Heaven knows I’m happy to send the first message, and on Bumble I’m even required to do so! It must be that I’ve always said the wrong thing, right off the bat. Never mind that I’ve tried years worth of varying my first messages, getting creative, taking a simplified approach, being funny, not being funny, responding to something in their profile even though so many of them have three bathroom selfies, no words, and barbed wire tattoos, it’s fine. I’m sure eventually I will crack the code that gets more than one in fifty men to respond to me. Yes I said one in fifty. I count.
Maybe I’m not standing out in the crowd? Of course I know I have to “say more than hi,” men have given me this command in many a profile, those charmers. I’d never just say hello and expect a man to say hello + a simple and courteous inquiry in response, I’m not stupid. What do I think this is, the 90s? No, in this modern dating age it could be that I’m just not using the right kind of bait. Maybe in my first message to a “match,” I should offer to arrive at our first date free of underwear? Send a shot of my cleavage perhaps? A photo of my open mouth?
I don’t put enough sex out there, I really don’t. I need to lead with offers of sex, sexual fantasies, and other free porn supplemental materials, that’s what I should do. The issue of course being I don’t actually want to use online dating for sex. I’d prefer to let a relationship develop into a sexual one, rather than sex developing into a relationship, that physical backwardness is really uncomfortable for me, but I’ve been informed it’s me that’s backwards. It doesn’t matter if I don’t want to use online dating for sex, that’s what it’s for.
Once, a man messaged me for the first time by saying, and I quote, “Do you like face rides with mustachio’ed men?”
I had some fight left in me that day, so I wrote back, “Does that actually ever work for you?”
He responded, “You know what Tinder is, right?”
You know what Tinder is, right? Silly female, you know that Tinder is a place men come for free sex, as opposed to paying a sex worker for the commodity they want. Why do that, when Tinder is a place for free, effortless sex? It’s Seamless For Pussy, but free! Let’s trademark it. Piles and piles of women just waiting to give men free sex, that’s what Tinder is. It’s not a dating app, OMG what are you, a nun? Never mind that its tagline is “Match. Chat. Date.” Date, ha! Lol, Shani. You know when they say that, they really mean: “Match. Subway to Williamsburg. Fuck.” You know what Tinder is, right?
It’s something I’m doing wrong, that must be it. That must be why I’m still single. I used dating apps to try to meet someone to date. That’s ludicrous! I either need to delete the apps or learn to drop trou, it’s one or the other.
As an aside, I’ve had my sex phase. I’m tempted to leave my best friend’s phone number here so she can corroborate, but she has shit to do. There was a time in my life when sex was for sport, and I get that a lot of the people on dating apps are currently in that phase of their lives, too. I won’t get into details, but I’m not going to wake up at 58 and wish I’d sown more wild, forageable herbs, let’s put it that way. But still, I don’t think my current life phase — the one that wants to know a guy’s last name before I see his dick — should preclude me from online dating entirely.
I don’t think I should be left out just because I don’t want to be an unpaid sex worker. Because if you play the tape through to the end, that’s all I am to him. When we’re finished, he’s rolling over onto his side, checking his phone (probably Tinder), and if I try to make conversation he’ll grunt something about needing to be up early in the morning. I’ll dress myself, grab my bag, and say goodbye to someone whose face barely looks up from a blue glow to respond. He’ll never answer a text from me again, but he’ll view all my Instagram stories and in seven months he’ll ask me if I want to hang tonight. If that’s what “you know what Tinder is, right?” wants from me, I’m charging him money.
Alright then let’s assess what happens when I take things offline. The first dates — though why we call meeting a stranger a date I’ll never know, I think they’re essentially just saying slightly more to a person than you’d say to a seatmate on an airplane, you’re just dressed cuter and drinking better wine — are punishing. That’s what society wants to hear about, right Karen? The dating horror stories? Little comic strips of a single woman’s dating life? The weirdo that breeds turtles, the one who wore flip flops in winter, the dude who only drinks Sprite, that shit?
Yes, all of those things happen. But really what happens more than anything else is that the dates are just…meh. Nothing bad, nothing good, just a benign two-hour conversation with a guy I’ll never see again. I’ve been on more of these dates than any other kind. Maybe we’re both from Texas, maybe we both write for a living, we find things in common to chat about. But the real takeaway from the evening is that there is nothing there, there. Just meh. And a bill for $40 each, of course.
Why do I assume there should be a connection? The volume of people on dating apps and the inability of machines to predict human chemistry mean that going on a date with someone you found online is literally no different than going out with the tenth man who happens to walk by you on the street. We don’t have connection potential with everyone. It’s actually a pretty rare thing. I live in a city of 8.6 million people. The odds that any random two of us are going to crave more time with each other after two glasses of post-work wine are pretty goddamned slim.
“I can’t believe you’re still single.”
There we go again, using “still” to blame the single woman for the thing she wants to change, tries to change, and can’t change — no matter what. Could I be terrible at dating? Sure. But I’m not. We’re not. The situation is terrible, and the women participating in it, having a terrible time in it, and never meeting someone to date as a result of it are seen as sad failures for not being able to do a terrible thing right. Can’t believe I’m still single? Try dating.
Maybe we don’t have to be “good” at a process that’s honestly really difficult to go through. Maybe single women aren’t on a societal schedule. Maybe we don’t have to feel like we didn’t make the shot at the buzzer for the entirely of our over-30 single lives. Maybe the life we lead is following a different architectural structure than the lives of others, but it’s just as firm and sound and not quite the trembling Jenga tower the world makes it out to be. I am not still single, but I am still fighting the notion that it’s okay to reference me that way.
Of course we should view “still” when used in a single woman sentence as a compliment. That’s certainly its original intent.
“I can’t believe you’re still single.”
Implying of course that the single woman is amazing, anyone would be lucky to have her, etc. It’s tossed out over dinner, casual picnics on old sheets in the park, and it doesn’t mean the person saying it intends to insult me. Quite the opposite. From their perspective, it’s truly a perplexing situation. My friends and relatives love me, so they can’t understand why no one else, does, either. But it’s also impossible to understand the way “still” can hurt, if it’s never been used on you as a single woman.
Maybe they mean no harm when they use that word to describe my singleness. Maybe they just care about me, want me to be happy, and they’re confused as to why no man on earth has yet seen in me what they see. Which is sweet, even kind. I don’t think people who say “still” to me intend an insult. Maybe they’re just uninformed, happily partnered, and choosing words — those magical ingredients — completely casually.
And obviously they’ve never been on Tinder.
***
Women are human clocks, we know this. Our bodies mark time like a metronome for our species. Pre menstrual, menstrual, menopausal, Sagittarius, etc. Our bodies have an internal time mechanism that knows when and when not to bleed, and exactly how long to grow a person. Fuck me if that’s not magic. I’d like to talk to whoever’s in charge of evolution to see if we can’t eventually develop the ability to make the weather change by clapping three times because honestly I think that’s on the table.
I’ve always seen power in what we are capable of, in the ways our bodies keep time for human life. I don’t want to have children, but that doesn’t preclude me from seeing the wonder and beauty in the fact that we can. There’s far more magic to us by the way, but as it pertains to the word still, our reproductive abilities are a huge part of the reason that word gets tacked onto our description.
Overall I have no idea why society has always been so motivated to pressure women to partner up. Maybe they’re worried if we’re single we’ll have too much time on our hands and we’ll be able to craft that world domination plan we keep in the back of the drawer. If by world domination you mean an off-grid tiny house community in rural Maine where we make our own tea and keep bees, then sure.
I don’t know why society wants us all neatly tucked into couples, but I do know that babies are their favorite way to encourage it.
If you focus on babies, there’s a perfectly logical reason to call a woman still single. Looking at it from a biological standpoint and ignoring fostering, adopting, and modern science altogether, there’s no better way to guilt and pressure a woman into desperately seeking coupledom than her own goddamned body.
That’s not a uterus, Jane, it’s an egg timer. Partner up as fast as you can, while your eggs are still plentiful and fresh. Women will understand the situation if we compare their bodies to something they’re familiar with, like dairy products, right? These things expire, girls, just like your Yoplait. Those eggs are rotting with each passing second — get out there!
I lived about 80% of my life wanting children. No that’s not true, I lived 80% of my life assuming I wanted children, because that’s what you do. You grow up and have kids. It’s not a crazy notion, it’s a very common life stage that I grew up not wanting exactly, but expecting. It’s assembly line-like in its regularity, that’s how many women eventually have children. I know I’m an outlier in this area, don’t worry. The decaying nature of my reproductive system was always twitching in the back of my brain, not out of a desire to have kids, but just from the logic behind it. I can only have kids for so long, and if I don’t partner up soon I’ll either have to have them immediately, like literally honeymoon babies, or I won’t be able to have them at all. It’s biology.
It really did push me to “try” harder, to go on dates when I didn’t want to, to view every moment out of my home as an opportunity to “meet someone.” I felt like there was a timer I was playing against, for sure. It was far from all of my motivation, I genuinely wanted someone to…you know, care about me. But it was there. It was a thing I never questioned, because why would I? You grow up and you have kids.
But then my friends started having kids.
At first they were a novelty, the first few babies fascinating me like 6th grade science. All the new parents I knew were from back home in Texas, and I was a sardine-like Delta flight away in New York. I saw them for one brunch over the holidays and held their little wiggly miracles in their University of Texas onesies and smelled their baby smell which is fantastic. Until they poop. I never had to deal with any of the poop.
Any of it! I didn’t notice or ever have to see that the time they’d chosen to meet me coincided perfectly with naptime. I didn’t have to pack the suitcase full of tactical gear that allowed them to leave home base. We’d hang out in a big group, so I didn’t have to notice how fractured their attention was, because they were all taking turns in conversation. As much as I’d have given anything to be around them all the time, I eventually came to see just how different their lives were with kids, and how incompatible those lives were with mine.
It was more visible with the Brooklyn babies. The coworkers who left at 5pm on the dot every day to relieve the nanny. They’d treat their one happy hour a quarter with the same excitement I might assign to a Caribbean vacation, and there was always the sense that attending it meant that they owed their spouse a debt somehow. Sharing a meal with a girlfriend and her high-chair-aged kid was particularly illuminating. Her charitably asking me questions and pretending to be interested in my answers which were interrupted every time the baby grabbed an item from the table it had no business with. A conversation halted every ten seconds. I don’t judge these changes to my friends’ lives as bad. I just came to recognize them as changes I didn’t want.
It was so clear to me that once you became a mother, you existed for someone else, to care for someone else, and that your life revolved around someone else. Someone else you’d love unconditionally and forever, who’d bring you immeasurable amounts of joy, but someone else nonetheless. And if it’s what you want, that’s fantastic. But the change is so drastic, so permeating, you’d better really fucking want it.
Around the time most of my friends began Xeroxing themselves, I was just coming around to the idea that a life lived alone was a life I could truly enjoy. I was starting to see all of the freedoms afforded to me by single life, all of the possibilities and the volume of control I had over absolutely every second of my day. When I saw my friends have kids, I realized how much of that I’d have to give up. As in all of it.
The first time I ever allowed myself to admit I didn’t want children, it was born (lol) out of a feeling of unfairness. I was just now starting to like single life and now you’re telling me I have to end it? Soon? For someone else? I didn’t want the things I loved about single life to end, maybe ever.
I decide what I do and when I do it. I decide where I go and when I go there. I decide where I live, what kind of space I live in, the kinds of things that are inside that space, what I cook in my home, when I sleep and wake up, 100% of my time is spent making decisions driven by me. If I were to have a baby, my decisions would be driven by a baby. I’ve gotta tell ya, I’m not on board.
It was a massive self-admission, the not wanting to be a mom thing. There’s uncertainty and fear in it, sure. This, much like motherhood, is a decision you can’t take back. What if I regret the decision one day? But I think I’ve lived enough of my life in service of “one day,” and am now more concerned with being who I really am, and admitting what I really want, right now. The truth is that once I gave myself permission to acknowledge I didn’t want children, I felt less “still” single than I had in a long time, and less driven to couple by time-sensitive factors than ever. I still do.
A woman’s choice to have or not have children is entirely personal and quite frankly none of my business, but I am comfortable saying that it’s not a reason for society to pressure women to partner. Because the baby thing, the time thing, shifts the blame to her. There’s nothing wrong with her until someone tells her there’s something wrong, and then after they tell her something’s wrong, they tell her it’s all her fault.
By this logic a single woman isn’t letting society — you know, the one doing the pressuring — down by being single, she’s letting herself down, because she’s not a mother yet, and if she doesn’t hurry up and find a husband, she never will be. Don’t you want to be a mother, Judith? Yeah, maybe Judith does want to be a mother, but the world isn’t allowed to use that to make her feel like she’s behind schedule. Women keep time for all of humanity, we can certainly set the pace for our own goddamned lives.
I don’t want to feel like a failure. Especially not in situations that I want to change, but no matter how hard I try, no matter the method, no matter whose 5-for-a-dollar advice I listen to, I can’t. If something is wrong, and I can’t fix it, but it’s somehow my fault anyway, there’s a word for that, too: bullshit.