Here’s an article about the terrible loneliness of single, childless women in middle age:
Gen X women are the loneliest generation of adults right now because they’re the first group who were promised friendship would be enough
I’m glad the article exists but the framing is strange. The passive voice is doing a lot of work in the title. “They were promised”, by whom? Who does this kind of promising? Who takes such promises seriously?
An adult person is fully responsible for their life strategy. If you make a decision to stay single, you own the decision. The article is right in that a single, childless life is different at its core from the life of a married parent. And it’s not about people remembering your appointments or having names to put on the emergency contact form. Here’s how the article puts it, and it’s completely mistaken:
What partnership gives is something different: the person who knows how Monday went because they were in the next room for it, who asks about the appointment without being reminded there was one, who witnesses the ordinary days and not just the significant ones.
Seeing things this way is a tragic, tragic mistake, and I don’t use this word lightly. You can’t treat people like objects, like consumer goods that are supposed to give, give, give. It’s not about what people can give you. It’s about what you can give them. As a wife, a husband, a parent, or an unmarried friend, the whole point is the enjoyment of giving. If you made a decision to organize your life outside of the regular arrangement of marriage and parenthood, it is your task to conceptualize your own life.
The article never abandons its stance of pouty, aggrieved passivity. Here’s another example:
What they’re starting to let themselves want isn’t complicated or dramatic. It’s mostly the ordinary things a primary relationship provides quietly—someone to come home to, someone who asks, someone who is just there for the ordinary version of them and not only the version that shows up when there’s something to get through. They were told they didn’t need those things, that wanting them was something they’d outgrown or never needed in the first place.
Again, here’s the idea that “a primary relationship”, which is a clunky way of saying “marriage”, is supposed to “provide.” Again, there’s the passivity of “they were told” by some unnamed forces that, seemingly, control these supposedly independent women to an extraordinary degree.
A small child is a raging maw of need. There is never enough love, attention, and care that you can give them. There is always room for more. You fill your child with love like a seemingly bottomless vessel. It is only gradually that a child accumulates enough of this fuel to start to learn to enjoy giving. An adult who sees their role primarily as somebody who needs to be given instead of somebody who gives will not be happy whether they are married or single. Because such person is not really an adult.
Female liberation somehow turned into being liberated from adulthood. I observe this in fiction, and we can clearly see it in this article. Friendships are the most important thing in life to a child between toddlerhood and adulthood. What the article describes are extremely infantile women. Singlehood is not the cause. It’s an effect. Mind you, I’m not saying this about all single people. I am speaking specifically about the type of women described in this article.
The article discusses an existing phenomenon. It fails, however, because the author is incapable of locating the real reason for what she describes.
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