How to Be Single

It's the most annoying question and they just can't help asking you. You'll be asked it at family gatherings, particularly weddings. Men will ask you it on first dates. Therapists will ask you over and over again. And you'll ask yourself it far too often. It's the question that has no good answer, and that never makes anyone feel better. It's the question, that when people
stop
asking it, makes you feel even worse.

And yet, I can't help but ask.
Why are you single?
You seem like an awfully nice person. And very attractive.
I just don't understand it.

But times are changing. In almost every country around the world, the trend is for people to remain single longer and to divorce more easily. As more and more women become economically independent, their need for personal freedom increases, and that often results in not marrying so quickly.

A human being's desire to mate, to pair up, to be part of a couple, will never change. But the way we go about it, how badly we need it, what we are willing to sacrifice for it, most definitely is.

So maybe the question isn't anymore, “
Why
are you single?” Maybe the question you should be asking yourself is “
How
are you single?” It's a big new world out there and the rules keep changing.

So, tell me ladies, how's it going?

—J
ULIE
J
ENSON

How Georgia Is Single

“I JUST WANT TO HAVE FUN! NOW THAT I'M SINGLE I JUST WANT TO HAVE FUN! YOU SINGLE PEOPLE ARE ALWAYS HAVING FUN!!
WHEN ARE WE GOING TO GO OUT AND HAVE FUN?!!!
”

She is screaming,
screaming
at me on the phone. “I WANT TO KILL MYSELF, JULIE. I DON'T WANT TO LIVE WITH THIS MUCH PAIN. REALLY. I WANT TO DIE. YOU HAVE TO MAKE ME FEEL LIKE EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE OKAY! YOU HAVE TO TAKE ME OUT AND REMIND ME THAT I'M YOUNG AND ALIVE AND CAN HAVE LOTS AND LOTS OF FUN! OR GOD KNOWS WHAT I MIGHT DO!!!” Dale, Georgia's husband, had left her for another woman two weeks ago and she was obviously a tad upset.

The call came at 8:45 in the morning. I was at the Starbucks on Forty-fourth and Eighth, balancing a cardboard tray of coffees in one hand, my cell phone and this conversation in the other, my hair in my face, grande mochaccinos tilting toward my left breast, all while paying the nice young twentysomething at the cash register. I'm a multitasker.

I had already been up for four hours. As a publicist for a large New York publishing house, part of my job is to cart our writers around from interview to interview as they promote their books. On this morning I was responsible for thirty-one-year-old writer Jennifer Baldwin. Her book,
How to Keep Your Husband Attracted to You During Pregnancy,
became an instant bestseller. Women all around the country couldn't buy the book fast enough. Because, of course, how to keep your husband attracted to you during your pregnancy should be the main concern for a woman during that very special time in her life. So this week we were making the prestigious morning show rounds.
Today, The View, Regis and Kelly.
WPIX, NBC, and CNN, so far that day, ate it up. How could you not love a segment showing eight-months-pregnant women how to strip for their men? Now the author, her personal publicist, her literary agent, and the agent's assistant were all anxiously waiting for me in the Town Car that was parked outside. I held the lifeline to their caffeine fix.

“Do you really feel like you want to kill yourself, Georgia? Because if you do, I'll call 911 right now and get an ambulance over there.” I'd read somewhere that you should take all suicide talk seriously, even though I think all she was really doing was making sure I would take her out drinking.

“FORGET THE AMBULANCE, JULIE, YOU'RE THE ORGANIZER, THE ONE WHO MAKES THINGS HAPPEN—CALL THOSE SINGLE FRIENDS OF YOURS, THE ONES YOU ARE ALWAYS HAVING FUN WITH—AND LET'S GO OUT AND HAVE FUN!”

As I continued my balancing act toward the car, I thought about how tired that thought made me. But I knew Georgia was going through a difficult period and it would probably get much worse before it got better.

It's a tale as old as time. Dale and Georgia had kids, stopped having regular sex, and began fighting. They became distant, and then Dale told Georgia he was in love with a twenty-seven-year-old
whore gutter trash
samba teacher, that he met at Equinox. Call me crazy, but I'm thinking hot sex might have had something to do with this. Also, and I don't want to be disloyal, and I would never even
suggest
Georgia was at fault
in any way
because
Dale is an asshole,
and
we hate him now,
but I can't resist saying, Georgia completely took Dale for granted.

Now, to be fair, I am particularly judgmental about the Married Women Who Take Their Husbands for Granted Syndrome. When I see a very wet man hold an umbrella out to his wife after he has just walked five blocks to pick up the car and drive it back to the restaurant and she doesn't even say thank you, honestly, it makes me very cranky. So I noticed that Georgia took Dale for granted, particularly when she would talk to him in
that tone.
The tone that you can dress up and call what you want, but the truth is it's plain old-fashioned contempt. The tone is disgust. The tone is impatience. The tone is a vocal eye roll. It is the undeniable proof that marriage is a horribly flawed institution let out in a single “I told you, the popcorn popper is on the shelf
over the refrigerator.
” If you were able to fly around the world, collecting the tone as it is let out of all the disgruntled married men's and women's mouths, cart it back to some desert in Nevada, and release it—the earth would literally sink into itself, imploding in sheer global irritation.

Georgia talked to Dale in that tone. And of course that wasn't the only reason for their split. People are irritating and that's what marriage is: good days and bad days. And, really, what do I know? I'm thirty-eight years old and I have been single for six years. (Yes, I said six.) Not celibate, not out of commission, but definitely, fully, officially, here-goes-another-holiday-season-alone single. So in my imaginings, I would always treat my man right. I would never speak harshly to him. I would always let him know that he was desired and respected and my number one priority. And I would always look hot and I'd always be sweet, and if he asked, I would grow a long fishtail and gills and swim with him in the ocean topless.

So now Georgia has gone from semicontented wife and mother to a somewhat suicidal single mother with two children. And she wants to
party.

Something must happen when you become single again. A self-preservation instinct must kick in that resembles having a complete lobotomy. Because Georgia suddenly has traveled back in time to when she was twenty-eight and now just wants to go out “to some bars, you know, to meet guys,” forgetting that we are actually in our late thirties and some of us have been doing that without a break for years now. And frankly, I don't want to go out and meet guys. I don't want to spend an hour using one of the many hot appliances I own to straighten my hair so I can feel attractive enough to go out drinking. I want to go to bed early so I can get up early so I can make my smoothie and go out and run in the morning. I am a marathoner. Not in the literal sense; I run only three miles a day. But as a single person. I know how to pace myself. I am aware of how long a run it can be. Georgia, of course, wants to line up the babysitters and start sprinting.

“IT'S YOUR OBLIGATION TO HAVE FUN WITH ME! I DON'T KNOW ANY OTHER SINGLE PERSON EXCEPT YOU! YOU HAVE TO GO OUT WITH ME. I WANT TO GO OUT WITH YOUR SINGLE FRIENDS! YOU GUYS ARE ALWAYS GOING OUT!! NOW THAT I'M SINGLE, I WANT TO GO OUT TOO!!!”

She is also forgetting that she is the same woman who would always look at me with such pity when I would talk about my single life and exclaim in one breath “OhmyGodthat'ssosadIwanttodie.”

But Georgia would do something that all my other happily married or coupled friends would never even think of doing: she would pick up the phone and organize a dinner party and scrounge up some single men for me to meet. Or she'd go to her pediatrician and ask if he knew any eligible bachelors. She was actively involved in my search for the Good Man, no matter how comfortable and self-satisfied she might have felt herself. And that is a rare and beautiful quality. And that is why on that Friday morning, as I was mopping up coffee from my white shirt, I agreed to call up three of my other single friends and see if they would go out and party with my newly single, slightly hysterical friend.

How Alice Is Single

Georgia is right. We're having so much fun, my single friends and I. Really. Oh my God, being single is hilarious. For instance, let me tell you about the sidesplitting uproariousness that is Alice. For a living, she gets incredibly underpaid to defend the rights of the impoverished people of New York City—against callous judges, ruthless prosecutors, and an overburdened system in general. She has dedicated herself to trying to help the underdog by bucking the system, beating the man, and guarding our Constitution. Oh yeah, and every once in a while she has to defend a rapist or murderer that she knows is guilty and whom she often succeeds in putting back onto the streets. Oops. You win some, you…win some.

Alice is a Legal Aid attorney. While the Constitution guarantees the right to a lawyer, it unfortunately can't promise that you'll be defended by Alice. First of all, she is gorgeous. Which, of course, is superficial, who cares. Because those jurors sitting in that drab industrial green jury room with the fluorescent lighting, and that eighty-year-old judge presiding over the general misery of it all, well, they'll take whatever aesthetic pleasure they can find. And when redheaded, sexy Alice talks to you with her deep, soothing voice and her thick, I'm-one-of-the-people-but-much-more-adorable Staten Island–Italian accent, you would drive into Sing Sing and break out every last prisoner, if that's what she asked of you.

She was so startling in her legal acumen and plain old-fashioned charisma that she became the youngest law professor at NYU. By day Alice was saving the world, and by night she was inspiring yuppie born-and-bred law students to forget their dreams of nice Manhattan co-ops and Hampton summer shares to go into Legal Aid law and do something important. She was outrageously successful. She made insubordination and compassion cool again. She got them to actually believe that helping people was more important than making money.

She was a Goddess.

Yeah. I say
was,
because I'm kind of lying. The truth hurts too much. Alice is no longer a Legal Aid attorney.

“Okay, this is the
only
time I believe in the death penalty.” Alice, being a fantastic friend, was helping me transport books from my office on Fiftieth Street and Eighth Avenue to a book signing on Seventeenth Street. (The book was
The Idiot's Guide to Being an Idiot
and was, of course, a big hit.)

“The only exception to the rule is any man who goes out with a thirty-three-year-old woman until she's thirty-eight and then discovers he has commitment issues; who gives that woman the impression that he has no problem with marriage and being with her for the rest of her life; who keeps telling her it's going to happen, until finally, one day he tells her that he doesn't think ‘marriage is really for him.'” Alice put her fingers in her mouth and let out a whistle that could stop traffic. A cab veered over to pick us up.

“Pop the trunk, please,” Alice said, forcefully grabbing a box of the
Idiot
books from my arms and throwing them in the trunk.

“That was shitty,” I conceded.

“It was more than shitty. It was criminal. It was a crime against my ovaries. It was a felony against my biological time clock. He stole five of my precious childbearing years from me and that should be considered grand larceny of motherhood and be punishable by hanging.” She was ripping each box out of my hands and hurling them now. I thought it best to let her finish this on her own. When she was done, we walked to opposite sides of the cab to get in and she continued talking to me over the cab roof without taking a breath.

“I'm not going to take this lying down. I'm a powerful woman, I'm in control. I can make up for lost time, I can.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I'm going to quit my job and start dating.” Alice got into her side of the cab and slammed the door.

Confused, I sank into the cab. “I'm sorry, what?”

“Union Square Barnes and Noble,” Alice barked to the cabdriver. Then to me, “That's right. I'm going to sign up for every online service, I'm going to send out a mass email to all my friends to set me up with any single guys they know. I'm going to go out every night and I'm going to meet someone fast.”

“You're quitting your job
to date
?” I tried to say this with the least amount of horror and judgment in my voice.

“Exactly.” She kept nodding her head vigorously, as if I knew just what she was talking about. “I'll keep teaching, I have to make some money. But basically, yeah, it's my new job. You heard me.”

So now my dear do-gooder Superwoman, Xena the Warrior Princess, Erin Brockovich, friend Alice, is still spending all her time and energy trying to help the underdog. But this time the underdog is herself: a thirty-eight-year-old single woman in New York City. She's still trying to stick it to “the man.” But this time the man is Trevor, who took up all that precious time of hers and has now made her feel old, unlovable, and frightened.

And when Alice is asked what she does with all her newly free time that she once used to help keep young, first-time offenders away from Rikers and imminent horrifying physical abuse, she often goes into this little speech: “Besides the Internet, and the fix-ups, I just make sure I go to everything I get invited to, every conference or luncheon or dinner party. No matter how shitty I feel. Remember when I had that really bad flu? I got out of the house and went to a singles night at New York Theatre Workshop. The night after my hand surgery I took some Percocet and went to that huge benefit for the Central Park Conservancy. You never know what night it will be when you meet the man who's going to change your life. But then I also have hobbies. I purposely do what I love to do, because you know, when you least expect it, that could be when you meet someone.”

“When you least expect it?” I asked, during one of Alice's diatribes. “Alice, you have decided to quit your job to dedicate your life to meeting someone. How can you ever,
ever
least expect it?”