GIVE ME A BREAK:THE STIGMA of being a "spinster" belongs back in the 1950s, or so I thought as a married person who hasn't dated since, oh, about 1884. I had assumed that prejudices about single womanhood had decayed like Miss Havisham's wedding feast. I really didn't expect that single women might still feel like agoraphobic Miss Havisham herself, secluded from life in a house full of cobwebs with her dress rotting from her body.
Maybe Dickens’s portrayal of a woman trapped in the emotional moment of being dumped is too strong a metaphor for these times – but I have to wonder, considering an experience I had last week.
I have always secretly envied single women. They have their own personal space, their own money, their own endeavours, their own social lives – each of these glorious freedoms unthreatened by the ravenous demands of a husband and children, who will devour you whole if you’re not careful. When you’re single, you can cook what you want when you want, your home can be an expression of your own taste, and you never have to compromise your individuality in response to the competing needs of husband and offspring. Better still, you can visit the Chanel counter in Brown Thomas without fear of stealing food from your kids’ mouths.
If you want to write a book, you can get lost in it without the guilty knowledge that the price of your solitary hours of creativity is not being there on Saturday morning to see your son defend that goal. You have what Virginia Woolf always wanted – a room of your own.
I imagined that single women lived complex lives and had lovers they could keep or reject as they pleased, could travel when they felt like it and were free to make more demands in their relationships, free from the marital reality that it’s not what your lover does in bed that’s important, but where he throws his dirty socks.
I thought all this before I tried to find a single childless woman in her 30s who would talk to me – on the record – for an article on the modern Irish family, based on the Family Support Agency’s report on new family forms. There I was, blithely working the phone, feeling certain that finding a single white female in Ireland would be far easier than finding a married gay couple or a single black lone mother. This is the Oprah generation, after all. Confessing all has become practically routine, and not just for footballers’ wives and politicians on the defensive.
But as I worked the phone, a single female colleague who overheard my attempts warned me that finding a single childless female willing to talk would be impossible. Pish posh, I thought.
I was reassured when a single female friend said proudly that female singlehood has a proud Irish history. Generations of women in her clan were single and self-sufficient, and they preferred this lifestyle to being at the beck and call of a husband and family. But would she recommend a single female friend to talk to me? No, too private.
Then, another single female acquaintance spoke in the most positive terms about her social circle of thirty- and fortysomethings, male and female, who all socialise together, holiday together, support one another and have an all round wonderful life. But would she go on the record? No.
Finally I found a woman willing to talk. She spoke convincingly about her independent lifestyle and busy social calendar.
She was nearing 40 and wasn’t carrying her biological alarm clock around in her pocket. Far from it: she had grown beyond the social pressure she’d felt in her late 20s to mate before she was “left on the shelf”.
She had, on occasion, looked at her sisters with husbands and children and asked herself what she was giving up. Yet, while she hadn’t chosen that path in life, there were rewards for being single and independent.
Quite sensibly, she believed that no woman can have everything, and she was happy with her lot.
Delighted to have found a single woman in her 30s to participate in the article, I began writing up her story. Then I got a call. She had changed her mind. Why? I asked. “I’m afraid I’ll look pathetic,” she answered.
“But there’s nothing pathetic about you – quite the contrary. You’re independent and you have a great life,” I said.
“You may think that, but I don’t want to appear as though I’m setting out my stall in the newspaper. That really would look pathetic.”
When my single female colleague heard I’d lost the story, she said “I told you so. Single women will not talk.”
I still can’t fathom what’s so pathetic about being single and female. It’s worrying that, in an age of supposed openness and equality where we don’t need feminism any more, a single woman could still feel that she was an item on a shelf who hadn’t been sold. Gay marrieds will talk, lone mothers will talk, pretty much everyone will talk about anything – yet single childless womanhood seems to be taboo.
Maybe we really are living in the 19th century – in terms of women’s liberation, at least.