I’m fifty-four years old and I have always been single. I love my single life. But for a long time I
rarely said that out loud. I thought I was the only happy single person.
I didn’t love everything about my single life. I didn’t like that “poor thing” look I’d get when others
first learned that I was single. I didn’t like their assumption that I must be miserable and lonely
and pining for a partner.
There were other things I didn’t like that I thought I could pin on my single status, but I wasn’t
really sure. For example, sometimes at work colleagues with partners would assume that I could
cover the tasks that no one else wanted. Maybe they presumed that since I was single, I didn’t
have a life and so had nothing better to do with my time. Socially, I was invited to lunch with my
coupled colleagues during the week but not to their dinner and movie outings over the weekends.
Tentatively at first, I began asking other single people if they thought they were viewed and
treated differently than coupled people just because they were single. The responses were
overwhelming. It was time to proceed beyond anecdotes.