Bachelor Girl_ The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century - Betsy Israel [126]
After touring the cyber singles world, I happily returned to the land of live subjects. But this last round of interviewing mirrored my experience playing around on the Web: Conversations were so digressive that in the span of minutes the person, talking about workplace dynamics, was very, very angry at some man she had not seen for several years and also, it seemed, if you asked her, that her nieces were the only sane or attractive thing about her sister. A number of women in their twenties talked for a very long time about the fun of writing and posting personals on various agreed-upon “cool” Internet sites. Many of them did it for the “hits,” the number of responses they got to the descriptions they’d written of themselves. Often they did not actually go on these dates. But the hits were a way of “moving self-esteem” and “keeping up.” Other women just stared at me and after checking messages and retracing lipstick wondered what I could possibly have to ask them. In fact, some women over thirty-five seemed to suffer a kind of celebritylike ennui, as if they had heard all the questions before and didn’t really need to hear them again before answering.
Here, a random sampling from my notes:
1) Dates with men are more annoying than ever because many men are either divorced or widowed or just too young and believe it is the “point” of the evening to sit down and talk at length—often “through the entrées”—about themselves. On the other hand, dates are great for just this reason because they’re over quickly and do not require any chancy emotional interest, nor even that one pay attention. Then, from other points of view, that’s not the way it is at all; it’s reverse sexism by horny disappointed women to say that men hog conversation. There is also the view that this is an inaccurate scenario because no one has a date of such length without a less risky meeting for drinks or lunch or on an airplane first.
2) “Older” single women are, in the span of one afternoon and three conversations, first cool pioneers figuring out how to live singly, or make communities, and have children, or else they are unbelievably pathetic losers. People who waited. People who were deluded by feminism. People who will have nasty experiences with Pergonal and Clomid. And depending on the circumstance—the speaker—“old” can occur at 30 or 35 or 40, 50 or 27.
I tried to find a clear passage, a defining subject line, through my notes. Margaret, forty-two, a talk-show booker who’s twice divorced, said, “Forget it…. the single world is teeming.” She did not view it as a continent or a refugee camp. As she saw it, “What you have here is a swamp.”
If distinct single archetypes seem for the moment to have blurred, the conviction that single women are social outcasts—odd women who require constant translation—remains intact. Wherever she is, perhaps in a waiting room or on an airplane or lost in the morass of the Internet, she’ll eventually find a story about her uncertain future and her inevitable regret. As always, the story will include picture of a lone single woman holding a ginger-colored or Siamese Pywacket cat. I’ve got a picture in front of me now as I write, part of a recent Daily News special on women who insist (again and again) that they don’t want to have children. The caption beneath a photo of a long-haired woman with her stretching cat: “Her cats are enough, says busy filmmaker Donna Gilardi, 35, about her decision not, ever, to have children.”
But