I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Tuesday Book Club, I share an idea from a book.
What would it mean to choose singlehood affirmatively? Not to say to myself, “I’m ok being single… for now.” But to say, “I want to be single for the indefinite future, likely for the rest of my life. I am not going to go on online dating apps or entertain the romantic attentions of people I meet in public. I am not going to make plans with old flames to meet up in Banff.”
In her book Transformative Experience, philosopher L.A. Paul addresses the question of how we can make big choices and commitment in our lives without really knowing how they will turn out, or what the version of ourselves that results from the choice will prefer. Paul opens the book with the vampire problem, a thought experiment about how you could (or could not) rationally choose to become a vampire given information about such a transformation from people who had already made the choice. She concludes that you could not rationally choose such a transformation, because the you after becoming a vampire would be so different from the you making the choice:
So, in many ways, large and small, as we live our lives, we find ourselves confronted with a brute fact about how little we can know about our futures, just when it is most important to us that we do know. For many big life choices, we only learn what we need to know after we’ve done it, and we change ourselves in the process of doing it. I’ll argue that, in the end, the best response to this situation is to choose based on whether we want to discover who we’ll become.
I’ve had singlehood thrust upon me, though, like someone who unfortunately got in the way of a hungry vampire looking for a sip of the red bliss. I have never affirmativelly chosen singlehood.
Or is that true? I did live with a partner for a very short time and that convinced me that (1) he and I were terrible together and (2) I was ready to own my own house again. I bought a house, invited both my mother and my adult daughter to live with me in it, and created my own “living alone” life.
Yet I’ve continued to date, to contemplate partnering up, to try it at times.
my temporally extended self
Paul writes, “transformative experiences can involve change that occurs over a period of time, or occurs in the distant future from the time at which you must make the decision to act….. [Sometimes] your current time slice must make a choice that determines the lived experience of a time slice in your distant future.”
Choosing a long-term partnership, especially a marrage, involves committing yourself to a lifestyle in the future that you can’t predict right now. My mother married her second husband when she was middle-aged. She didn’t know then that the last few years of his life, she would find herself devoted to his care. She likely would have chosen to marry him anyway, given the difficulties.
Choosing to remain single, to commit to singlehood at midlife, involves a different calculus: Will there be people around to care for me if I need it as I age? Many older single people worry about this. Having a surgical procedure may be the first time someone confronts their aloneness: who will drive me home and stay with me for the required 24 hours (or however long the surgeon instructs)?
If you have enough money, of course, you can pay for the care you need.
Paul looks at this question of deciding for our future selves in the case of marriage:
[Choosing] to get married can require you to choose without knowing what the future you are choosing will be like. The decision involves making a commitment, after forming the attachment to your spouse, to discovery: that is, however you discover the experience to be, you will be a full participant in the temporally extended event of your marriage, such that you, together with your spouse, face whatever revelation your married life will bring.
There are revelations in living alone too; one need only visit r/LivingAlone to read about them. Here’s one:
I discovered after two failed marriages over the course of 20 years that I am happier and thrive more when I am unpartnered. It took several years of finally giving myself the space/permission to live alone and learn who I truly am when I am not in relation to someone else. Turns out, I’m pretty great! My life is peaceful now. I generally enjoy the solitude and I seek out time with friends when I feel like being social.
The first half of my adult life was defined by failed relationships. The second half will be defined by peaceful self validation. I am enough, I always have been.
My own experience of becoming a vampire
The process of becoming affirmatively single has been, for me, like becoming a vampire. Before it happened I didn’t want it. I was so sure I was meant to be partnered again. I spent my teens through my forties and even into my mid-fifties either in a relationship or seeking one. But time passed and events happened after my divorce. The single times were more pleasant than the partnered. I started to figure out who I was on my own, or who I might be.
Here are the things I love about living on my own:
- Doing whatever I want when I want, almost all the time.
- Sleeping alone, accompanied by my dogs who keep me safe, going to bed when I want and waking up when I want. I’m a natural early bird. Trying to coordinate with a night owl is just stressful.
- Making my house the way I want it: as feminine as I want it, as straightened as I want it, as art-filled as I want it. And as quiet as I want it. The man I lived with liked to have the television on all the time. It was like being tortured.
- Curiously, one of the best parts about living on my own is being entirely responsible for my household. If something goes wrong — a toilet flapper disintegrates for example — I have to figure out which one to buy and I have to install it myself. I have to hire window washers, HVAC servicers, or any other home maintenance providers I need. I don’t wait around for anyone else to do it.
- I can have as many pets as I want, Douglas County pet rules be damned.
- I keep the A/C and heat at levels to my liking. As a post-menopausal woman who eschews hormone replacement, I am often overheated. I prefer the house temperature to be in the low sixties, which I can achieve on summer mornings through the use of the attic fan, if the air outside is cool enough, or in the winter by keeping the temperature for heating low.
- I eat what I want, when I want. That usually means a breakfast and a lunch but no dinner, and the two meals I do eat are casual: hot cereal for breakfast and a salad at lunch.
There’s no way I could have imagined enjoying this life as much as I do. I didn’t know enough to.
Paul writes of transformative experiences like this:
Even where the transition is gradual, so that you can rationally evolve your point of view forward through the immediate future, you may have very little epistemic access to what it will be like to be you after an extended temporal period. The depth of the subjective poverty involved in transformative choice can come out when you reflect on a past experience and realize just how little you knew beforehand about what it would be like to undergo it. (Consider how little you knew, say, ten years ago, about what it would be like to be you right now.)
When I was in the midst of my divorce I thought that the worst possible outcome would be if I ended up alone and my ex-husband ended up partnered. That is where I have arrived, and perhaps it was what I was aiming towards all along. Or perhaps it is simply happy happenstance.
Older women choosing singlehood and living alone
Research shows that a majority of single women age 40 and over are not looking to date. At midlife and later, women more than men find the single life affirming. Older men often look to women to care for them, both physically and emotionally. Men more than women seek an active sexual relationship at midlife and later, even if they have trouble physically (fortunately, there are pills for that). Women are more likely to have a network of friends and family to rely on; men are famously reliant on women as their main source of emotional support.
And yet even given all of these rational reasons for me to choose singlehood, I didn’t want to until I was seemingly forced into it, for lack of being able to find a sustaining relationship that I wanted to be in.
Paul writes:
[We] should come to terms with the fact that our lives as we really live them, as individuals with first personal perspectives on the world, are not just lived as a series of events where, from whatever particular point we are at in our lives, we know how we are determining our subjective future selves. Certain kinds of experiences simply have to be lived before we can know what we need and want to know about them.
If we leave things like this, then we should conclude that the ideal of self-realization through choice and control of our subjective futures, understood in terms of knowledgably mapping out and selecting possible futures for ourselves, is a chimera.
Instead, Paul suggests you take an existentialist approach to choice: choose something for the sake of having the experience, and for the revelations it will provide, and for the values that the choice expresses.
But isn’t all this somewhat irrelevant to me? I didn’t rationally choose to arrive at late midlife as a single person. I tried again and again to not choose that.
What is relevant is where I started, wondering about choosing singlehood affirmatively, for the indefinite future. While I know what it’s like to be single right now, I actually don’t know a lot about what it would mean to choose it for the next ten years.