Anita Rao
I have long felt ambivalent about marriage. And while I know it might make my parents shudder, my choice to do it has way more to do with taxes than believing in happily ever after. Don't get me wrong, I love my partner. But my eyes are also wide open about just how much our culture and institutions unfairly privilege couples. One study showed that unmarried people pay upwards of $1 million more for things like healthcare and taxes in their lifetime than their married counterparts. But with more people than ever before unpartnered in this country, maybe it's time for the tide to turn. And for us to learn new stories about who chooses to be single.
Mel
I have been single for going on three years now. It was an intentional decision I made to spend more time with myself, to get to know myself, to dive deeper into my purpose and my relationship with God.
Carla
I was doing more of the things I love, seeing more of the important people in my life and making more progress on my dreams and my plans than I had when I was coupled. And I really didn't fancy giving any of that up.
Anonymous Listener
For me anyway, it was not like one day I decided I was just going to be single and that's it. It was a combination of events and things that happened. And then, when I realized the path I was on, I decided I liked it a lot.
Anita Rao
Those are listeners Mel, Carla and someone who wished to be anonymous. I'm Anita Rao, and this is Embodied, our show about sex, relationships and your health.
American culture feeds us very particular stories about single people. Marge's unhappy spinster sisters on The Simpsons are a prime example. Or if you look at literally any sitcom about 20 and 30-somethings in the big city, the message is that you've got to find love in order to be happy. Well, I want you to meet someone who's determined to change the narrative.
Dr. Kris Marsh
I'm going to embrace my singlehood, I'm going to celebrate my singlehood. I'm going to write a book as an ode to single folks, as a love story to single folks.
Anita Rao
Dr. Kris Marsh is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Maryland. And that book she wrote? It's called "The Love Jones Cohort: Single and Living Alone in the Black Middle Class." Something you should know about Kris is there is one question she is not going to answer: why are you single?
Dr. Kris Marsh
When we ask single folks why they're single, but we don't ask married folks why they're married, we continue to privilege marriage. I explicitly say after reading this book, I hope you're just as likely to ask somebody why they're married as you are to ask somebody why you're single. If we continue to ask only the singles, again, we're ostracizing them. We could be stigmatizing them. And we're privileging marriage, and we need to stop doing that.
Anita Rao
So singlehood is often thought as this transitory stage: you're single because you are waiting to find a partner. What was the turning point for you when you embraced singlehood not as something temporary?
Dr. Kris Marsh
So the turning point for me was probably when I started really writing this book. I talked to 74 people that were single, and I said, you know, I really want to be single. If I decide to partner, it's gotta make sense. And there's not a lot of stuff that makes sense out here, to me, right now. We just don't talk enough about singles. And when we do talk about singles, it's often the deficit model. Why don't you have a partner? Why don't you have children? And I'm really trying to push back against that narrative and really destigmatize singlehood and think of it as a different lifestyle that we just don't talk about enough. I want to add more context, more nuance, to the conversation. Moving away from this heteronormative family type where it's a mother, a father, 2.5 kids and, in this case, a black picket fence. I really want us to valorize, celebrate and think about singlehood as an alternative to that normalization of marriage.
Anita Rao
So you said you met and talked with a range of people — men and women, folks of different ages. What are some of the stories that they told you that challenge what we think we know about why people make this choice?
Dr. Kris Marsh
So most of my work focuses on people that are Black Americans. And one of the things that we have to understand is when we talk about singlehood, we often talk about it from the individual perspective. But we also really have to articulate a structural conversation as it relates to singlehood. So what I'm trying to get at is that if we think about singlehood only at the individual level, people may say, "Woe is me, something's wrong with me because I'm single." Or people might say, "Something's wrong with you because you're single." But for Black Americans in particular, we have to understand how structural forces constrain our personal choices. If I were to put that differently, I would say how racism constrains our personal choices. If I were to give an example, I would say, if I, Kris Marsh, wanted to marry another heterosexual man who has a PhD, who owns his own property, makes $150,000 and has estate planning, my dating pool is constrained. So one of the things that was really interesting about talking to these people is that sometimes they understood about the structural, but a lot of times, they were keeping it at the individual. And I'm just trying to articulate that it's not necessarily just an individual conversation. We need to also have a structural conversation about singlehood.
Anita Rao
So structural racism has shrunk the dating pool, but that doesn't mean that everyone that you talked to was single because of circumstance. There are many folks who were choosing to be single. So tell me about those folks and what's important about lifting up their narratives.
Dr. Kris Marsh
So a lot of people were choosing to be single. And they said they had a standard, they were not willing to adjust their standard. If somebody didn't meet their standard, they were very happy with their singlehood. And we often talk about, like, Black women, and we often police Black women and tell Black women what they should and should not do. And so a lot of the people were very confident. They stood happily in their singleness, and they didn't care what other people thought and what other people assumed about them being single. And they often talked a lot about how we privilege romantic relationships. Non-romantic, nurturing relationships was a key element that just kept coming up — especially with the Black women. How they were in relationships, but they weren't romantic relationships. They were non-romantic, nurturing relationships. And that really helped them stand confidently in their singleness — having other friends that can help them get through this single lifestyle.
Anita Rao
We're going to talk throughout the show about what we know and what we don't know about singlehood from, kind of, a zoomed out perspective, but a lot of the data and a lot of the personal narratives that do exist are written mostly by white cisgender women. And I'd love to talk with you a bit about that, and why, for you, it was really important to have a very intersectional approach to thinking about singlehood for this book.
Dr. Kris Marsh
What I'm really trying to get people to understand is that, yes, singlehood is hot, it's sexy. It's a topic that people are really starting to talk about, but part of the reason is because cis white women are actually doing this. But I went back to, like, data from 1880 up until the present, and I, kind of, show that Black women had been doing singlehood for quite some time. Whether or not it's by choice or by force, or an amalgamation of both, Black women have been doing this. So I'm afraid that the singlehood research is going to have a white gaze or a white face. And so, everybody knows that I'm pushing hard back against that narrative, saying we need to pay respect and homage to Black women and give them their flowers, because they clearly have shown us how to do singlehood and how to do it well.
Anita Rao
So there is that sexy, beautiful, freeing side of the experience. There's also a ton of stigma experienced by single people. And it's not just cultural, it's actually baked into a lot of our institutions. So maybe you can talk to me about this from your own personal life, some examples that you've seen of feeling like things were stacked against you as someone who's single.
Dr. Kris Marsh
Right so, it's really funny because I often say that, as a single person, I want to be defined as a family. Or I don't necessarily have to be defined as a family, but I want the benefits of a family. Here's three examples where I think that this is built into the structure, and it's annoying as a single person. If I want to go to get my cell phone family plan, I can't get a discount on my one plan. I want the family rate plan on my one cell phone. If I want to go on vacation, I have to pay the single occupancy rate versus the double occupancy rate, which we know is more expensive. And then one example that everybody can wrap their minds around is the tax structure. The tax structure has a singlehood penalty built into its structure, and it has a marriage advantage for certain kinds of married households. So all of those things affect me every single day. So I really think we need to understand that we're discriminating against single folks in plain sight, and we just don't even acknowledge it or know it. And we need to understand that they are a part of this conversation, and we need to get the same benefits as other family structures.
Anita Rao
There are so many ways that our society privileges coupled folks — just Google "the single tax" and you will find plenty more examples. But in spite of the financial piece, more and more people in this country are choosing to live without a spouse or partner — almost 40% according to the Pew Research Center. And for some of them, the driving factor is that they can live life on their own terms.
Carla
The biggest thing for me has been that I'm a natural night owl, and I always have been. Finding flow and creativity and doing my best creative work between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m. They're definitely not times that work well with having a partner or a family or any kind of normal routine. But fortunately, I work for myself, and I live by myself and I don't have a partner or children to consider. So I can flex my schedule to work late and sleep late when I want to. And it has been life-changing, not always feeling exhausted at the start of my working day, being able to start when it works for me.
Anonymous Listener
I learned that I'm very strong. And that no matter what comes along, I have the resources within myself to solve those problems or reach out to someone who can help me.
Christina
I've learned that men my age want to be taken care of — that's at least my experience. And I have enough on my plate, taking care of myself. I have a really severe chronic illness, so I function in, kind of, a different culture than biotypical people. Where my rest schedule and my diet are very particular to me and my situation. I know from experience, integrating another person into my life, on a day-to-day basis, in the same space — it's, like, a huge culture clash, and it's really not worth it to me.
Anita Rao
Like those listeners, Aisha Jenkins also found clarity when she embraced singlehood. It gave her the freedom she needed to fulfill one of her lifelong dreams: becoming a mother. But it took some time to get to that decision. For the first three decades of her life, she followed a more traditional path. The first person she ever dated was her college boyfriend, who she met when she was 19. After they graduated, they got married.
Aisha Jenkins
So I was just cruising on this path. Cruising so much so that I was not fully listening and processing the information that my husband was telling me that he wanted in a relationship. And I think when it finally came to the point where I had established a career that I loved, and I was in a marriage, I wanted to bring kids into the marriage — the relationship. And we started having the conversations, and he started bringing up the things that he told me while we were dating that I just said, "He can't be serious about total control. He can't be serious about making all of the decisions — including the decisions for the children — while I would be primary caregiver." And then, at one point, my career collided with the conversation. I was traveling as part of my job on a fairly regular basis, and I said, "I'd like to start a family." I was emotional, I was passionate about it. And he said, "I did not sign up to be the primary caregiver for a child. So if you continue with this career, you need to arrange childcare for when you're out of town."
Anita Rao
Wow. Okay. So that was some pretty clear messaging from him. You left that relationship, and then you started to ask yourself some big questions about what you wanted for your future and how you were going to make that happen. How did you start to think about uncoupling relationships and parenthood? And what was it like to embrace that idea for you?
Aisha Jenkins
So once I got divorced, I was pretty much out there. I was single, I was 29-30. And I was like, I will try my luck with the online dating scene. And while I did meet a lot of interesting people, I kept running into either men who did not have kids and possibly did not want kids. And then men who'd had one or two kids. And so I dated men with children during that time. And I always, kind of, came semi-second, semi-third, and it didn't sit well with me. And I finally arrived at having a real conversation with myself that I had always known that I wanted children. That had been a constant, whether or not I was in a relationship. And having to deal with the drama that came with the people I was in a relationship with — I was not too keen on that. I Google searched, I was looking for getting pregnant on my own using a sperm bank. And I stumbled upon a single mothers by choice organization being led by the community of women, whether they were mothers already or just people, you know, out in the world. But I posed the question, how do I go about having a baby on my own? How do I get started? And I did a ton of research before I realized, I can do this. I looked at my bank account. I looked at where I was in my career, where I was in my life. I realized, I don't think I want to get married again, but this baby thing? I want that. And so the rest is, kind of, history. I started down a path, and I didn't look back.
Anita Rao
I know that a conversation with your foster mom was really pivotal in you feeling like you could give yourself permission. Talk to me about that conversation and what was important that she said to you.
Aisha Jenkins
So I think that there's a lovely, kind of, relationship that happens among Black women — even if we don't speak about the challenges that exist as being part of a marriage, as just navigating this world. And my foster mom is a woman — she was in her mid-50s, close to 60. She had found religion after getting divorced, and she had perspective on her side. And I've always valued older people when making life choices and their perspective. And so, I found myself, one day, crying. And when I cried to my sisters, my sisters told me, "You have everything. You just don't have this one thing, you're so ungrateful." Right, transference. When I talked to my foster mom, she simply told me, "If you want to have a baby, go have a baby." And just as simple as that, it was the universe — it was another woman — giving me permission. But it was more than that, because I did grow up in the Christian church. And it was, I have your back. You can go ahead and make this decision, and I will support you, and I will stand in the gap for you. And I think, those are some of the things that I like to offer the people who come into my community saying that this is a choice that I'm making, and I'm scared, and I'm nervous. But having the permission from another Black woman, an older Black woman who knows all of the historical context around the Black family, and having chosen divorce, and now, having this very real conversation with someone who's younger that you can guide — I think that it was tremendously valuable. And I thank her. My girls finally got to meet her last year, after the pandemic. And it was just, like, these are the two people who would have never existed without you supporting me the way that you did, and I thank you.
Anita Rao
One thing that popular culture gets right about single people? The vital role that friends play in their lives. What I've witnessed anecdotally in my own friend circles also plays out in the sociological data. Compared to married people, single people have more friends and bigger social networks, while married people's lives are more insular — regardless of whether or not they have kids. As Dr. Marsh mentioned earlier, those non-romantic relationships are key for all of us. One of our listeners named Christina shared the same sentiment.
Christina
I'd rather put my energy into maintaining a group of close friends rather than a partner, because I think you get more of your needs met with a group of friends. Because you can't put as many of your needs onto a partner as you can if you distribute them among a group of people who all have different strengths and weaknesses.
Dr. Kris Marsh
Friends are a central role in singlehood. And the scholarship that I've done, the cohort that I interviewed, non-romantic, nurturing relationships have come up over and over again. It's always funny to me how people say, like, "Well, I don't want to die alone, so I'm going to get married." And I push back, and I retort back to them and say, "Why, because you're married, you think your spouse is going to show up for you?" Your friends will be there for you. I have a different set of friends for many different reasons. Some that I go golfing with, some that I go to church with, some that I go to brunch with. I appreciate my friends, and it's really important for me to have a network of friends. And when you're single, never married, no children, as you age — one of my colleagues, Elyakim Kislev, wrote a book called, "Happy Singlehood." And one of the arguments, subtle arguments, he's making in his work is that people that are long-term, never married, actually, tend to be happier as they age. Part of the reason is because they built a network of friends. They didn't put all of their eggs in the marriage basket. Because if you are married and you have a partner or you have a spouse, you have to be everything to them. That is daunting. You have to be their confidant, their therapist, their cooker, their cleaner, all of that — well, you don't have to do that. But you're their business partner, you're the CFO, you're the CEO in the household. That can be so daunting. So I would argue, everybody needs to go out there and get themselves some play dates. And the people that I interviewed, the cohort, the Black women really had and valued these non-romantic, nurturing relationships. The Black men in the cohort didn't really have these non-romantic, nurturing relationships. Part of the reason why they didn't is because they were concerned that they may be thought of as being soft, or being gay because they were trying to have these non-romantic, nurturing relationships with other Black men.
Anita Rao
Aisha, I know for you, you have been very intentional about building a community — specifically of other Black women who are single mothers by choice. And I would love to know how you make space for those friendships and cultivate those friendships with everything else you have going on.
Aisha Jenkins
I've been intentional about creating community. And due to virtualization technology and the robustness of that technology from the pandemic, I've created the Facebook group called, "Melanated Single Mothers By Choice." And I find that we can have deeper, more nuanced relationships when we come into community together. And then we do that virtually, and then when we're able to get together physically, in each other's presence — oh my gosh, it's just amazing. Now, I was the last in my family to have children, so I knew that I would have to be intentional about creating community. And from my past, I've been really good at creating and cultivating and nurturing those relationships. So by the time I had children, I already knew the steps. I knew that I had a deep village that I could call on. I think the pandemic, kind of, threw a rock or, just, shattered everything as a single parent by choice. Because what makes it work really well and seamlessly is having adequate childcare, adequate village support. And that all got stripped away for quite a long time during the pandemic. But through virtualization and having virtual communities, I formed relationships then — even new relationships, at that point, that I call on now. They're stronger, more deep relationships. And so I think you have to be intentional.
And as Kris said, yes, I think as — women are socialized, to an extent, to nurture relationships. And especially Black women, those relationships are important, and we value those relationships. I don't need a ton of physical support because I got this, right? My life is simple with my girls. But it's that emotional support, it's the conversations. You know, I find myself listening to podcasts and audiobooks because I like having girlfriends in my head. I laugh as I'm putting the kids to bed, I laugh as I'm cooking dinner, and I'm talking on the phone. So those relationships really matter, and they come in a number of different forms. And you can get all of your needs met without over — putting too much weight on any one relationship. And that's the value of building community and having a village. Because the old adage still holds true. I chose single motherhood, but I still believe it takes a village to raise a child.
Justin
I've consciously chosen to be single, as I believe societal norms often unfairly judge individuals based on their relationship status. It's as though being in a relationship is the golden standard, the thing that we all need to pursue. So rather than succumbing to these pressures, I find it's more empowering to fully embrace my present circumstances. This decision to embrace being single doesn't mean I'm opposed to the idea of being in a relationship. If love crosses my path, this could be a really beautiful chapter in my life. Many of us in our society — and this includes myself — we often harbor this intrinsic belief that our lives won't be complete until we discover that one perfect partner. We postpone our happiness waiting for the elusive "other half" to make an appearance in our lives. However, it seems absurd to navigate through life under the assumption that we are somehow incomplete. The truth is that each of us is a whole, unique individual, fully capable of being complete in our own right.
Anita Rao
That was a listener named Justin. Men in the U.S. are more likely to be unpartnered than women are, and that's something that's shifted in this country over the last few decades. But a lot of the information that's out there about choosing it to be single is written by and about cisgender women. That's something that writer Lucas Bradley discovered about a decade ago when he was considering his own commitment to singleness.
Lucas Bradley
I had a bit of a crisis in my life. I was in a really bad place in my career. And I really got to a point where I, just, had to start questioning, really, everything that I believed. And singlehood wound up near the top of that list. And so, as I started asking myself, okay, what does it mean to be a single man in this culture? What kind of messages have I received? As I go online, and I started looking into these things, by and large, there's a lot of content out there by single men and driven towards single men that I found very disempowering. And it's content that oftentimes seems to be very misogynistic, and, just, otherwise telling single men that they, just, don't have a lot of options to live a good life. It struck me that I might just have to start thinking about — and then, I started to get into writing about — the vision of single manhood that I was experiencing in my life and that I wanted to put out into the world.
Anita Rao
And you created your own framework, and you call it "Deliberately Single Man," which I love. And I love how thoughtful you've been about what this framework looks like. Could you tell us a little bit about what it means to you to be a deliberately single man?
Lucas Bradley
Absolutely. So I, kind of, broke that framework down into two major sections. The first has to do with embracing what have been typically associated with, or I should say, qualities that have been typically associated with women. So I thought primarily about being skilled socially, being skilled emotionally and being skilled domestically. The other, kind of, way I approached this was looking at, just, how we think about love in general. And the priority that's given to romantic love in our culture, and what it might mean to have a more expansive view of love.
Anita Rao
How have you been able to pursue that reframing of love? I know we heard earlier from Dr. Marsh about how some of the men that she spoke with struggled a little bit to create those intimate relationships with other men because of existing stereotypes and misunderstandings about what male intimacy can look like.
Lucas Bradley
Sure, sure. So, I think, what often happens is that men look toward romantic partners for those kinds of outlets. And as somebody who is trying to deliberately cultivate his singlehood, one of the major things I have to think about is, how do I approach my social life? And to me, that means being as expansive as possible. It's looking at the world and seeing that there's connections that can be made everywhere. I'm not a hugely social person, I don't want a wide social circle. But everywhere I go, I meet people who are worth knowing. And in order to cultivate those relationships, I first had to realize the value that they inherently have.
I think oftentimes, we get so focused on, here are the relationships that mean something. So again, the romantic relationships, having these priorities, but also, being "one of the guys," so to speak. So you have a group of friends that are around your age, and, you know, you think of the stereotype of, okay, you get together and you watch sports and things of that nature. But the way I've approached my relationships is looking at, really, everybody as a potential friend — that includes people of all different ages, of all different genders and of all different backgrounds. And that, to me, has really brought some unexpectedly beautiful relationships into my life.
Throughout my life, I've had a lot of friendships with women. I've had some male friendships, but overwhelmingly, the connections I've made have been with women — and they've all been platonic. And what I was really finding, as I, kind of, thought about my own connections — but also what I was seeing around me, and what I was seeing in the culture — is that it can oftentimes be very difficult for men and women to be friends because of the messaging we get. And what oftentimes happens when people partner up is that there's a set of expectations in that relationship that your partner will never be friends with someone you are, quote, unquote, "threatened by." And so we wall ourselves off from half of humanity when we start adopting these kinds of frameworks in our mind toward human relationships. And a lot of these frameworks are influenced by what we believe about marriage and romantic partnership.
Anita Rao
Lucas is super thoughtful about all of this because he has spent a lot of time mulling it over, and shares many of those thoughts on his Substack newsletter, "A Single Point of Light." We're gonna include a link to that in the show notes. One of the things we knew he would have a take on: where to start when you're building a life of singlehood that goes against the traditional path.
Lucas Bradley
First and foremost, it is the proverbial journey of 1,000 miles that begins with one step. You — I'm not going to sugarcoat it, it's not always easy work to do. Because oftentimes, we don't have models for what a meaningful single life looks like. And I've found, especially over the years, that heterosexual men do not have models of what a dignified and meaningful single life looks like. And so, if you're a person who's looking to go in that direction, if you feel like this is, kind of, where your orientation lies, and this is how you want to live, it's not going to all happen, all into place, all at once. It's going to be, literally, trying something little, every single day. And watching those things build up over time, over months and years. So those small steps — it can be anything from, again, looking at being skilled, socially, emotionally and domestically. It could look like remembering to send birthday cards to people. It could look like learning how to cook something new, and, just, doing a lot of trial by error when it comes to building the skills that it takes to really live a single life with with a lot of depth and passion. Because it is, it's — if you think it's going to happen overnight, you're probably going to get down on yourself pretty quick. But if you're truly living from the inside out, and you know that this is the way you want to live, it's going to come, but it's going to come over a period of time.
Anita Rao
Embodied is a production of North Carolina Public Radio-WUNC, a listener-supported station. If you want to lend your support to this podcast and WUNC's other shows on demand, consider a contribution at wunc.org now.
This episode was produced by Paige Perez and edited by Amanda Magnus. Kaia Findlay also produces for our show, Jenni Lawson is our sound engineer and Quilla wrote our theme music. Our intern is Madison Speyer, and I am so sad to say that this is the last episode Madison is working on with us. Madison has been with the Embodied team since last summer and really revolutionized our social media feeds. They have an eye for art, design and beauty, and we are so grateful to have worked with them. Take a look at our Instagram feed to marvel at Madison's work. Madison, we are going to miss you.
Thanks also to everyone who contributed to this episode, including Christina, Michelle, Justin, Mel and Carla. If you have a story to share with us, thoughts about a recent episode or ideas about a topic you want us to cover, leave us a message at our virtual mailbox: SpeakPipe. Find the link in our show notes.
Until next time, I'm Anita Rao, taking on the taboo with you.