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Chapter 21. Single Women at Midlife: The Always, Already Dumped
- Rutgers University Press
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A single life is a happy life A single life is lovely. I am single and no man’s wife And no man can control me. —Appalachian folk song As a single woman in my forties, I am an expert on getting dumped. I understand the experience of being dumped because I live it every day. If dumped is a term we use as an angry response to being left—being left alone— then those of us who live singly are leftovers, products of the dump, refuse. While some singles recycle and others settle into peaceful coexistence with their coupled brethren, the increasing number of people who live alone is becoming an unsightly reminder that the couple, although it is still privileged, is no longer the exclusive social experience of American life. Dumped is a powerful word. It suggests some kind of exile or separation. It is a rent in the social fabric which represents coupling as the most worthwhile human relationship. To be dumped is certainly not just the province of the recently separated or divorced. If a woman is ever-single at midlife, her experience of being dumped is far more existential. She must bear the social insult of having something wrong with her because she never “settled down” with anyone. Not only have lovers dumped her, but so has society dumped its judgment on her. The midlife single woman, to use post-modernist parlance, is “always already” Single Women at Midlife The Always, Already Dumped NANCY BERKE Single Women at Midlife 2 4 3 dumped. If we pay attention to the quantitative research favored by the corporate-driven media, she is too old to be eligible for any offers of love that might be still available as she enters the twilight of her sexual attractiveness. If we apply a cultural interpretation to the Bernie Siegel school of self-healing, she has probably done something to ensure or deserve her singular status. Perhaps by her narcissism, or her drivenness, or her feminism, or her pickiness , or her perfectionism, or her countercultural kinkiness, she has destroyed whatever possibility she had of finding happiness with a member of the opposite (or same) sex.1 This always already dumped status to which I refer denotes the pressure that the single woman feels to become part of a socially sanctioned unit—the couple. Couples symbolically remind the singular outsider that she is a social misfit, a failure at societal convention, a threatening loner in an increasingly politically terrified world. While many a woman who is single at midlife will argue that she is happy alone (although social science steadfastly tries to undermine this singular satisfaction with suspect studies and statistics), she exists within a social space that has defined her solo status as a kind of deviance. From the midlife single woman’s perspective, Simone de Beauvior’s famous comment in The Second Sex that woman is other takes on new meaning: if woman is other, then the older single woman is really other. Unlike the older woman who is dumped by her long-term partner and must deal for the very first time with being on her own, the always already dumped has had years of preparation for becoming an older single woman. Perhaps her attempts at partnership have been thwarted. Or she may just desire to reinvent her life outside the socially sanctioned couple. While her choice to remain single may be satisfying, it is always under the scrutiny of the patriarchal panopticon, whose high beams follow her everywhere with the stenciled pronouncement , “Aren’t you lonely without a mate?” Even though a woman may choose not to pursue a particular relationship, her choices are always already determined through complex, socially mediated circumstances. In fact, it would take several Proustian volumes to explore an ever-single woman’s subterranean decision making with regard to the vicissitudes of her romantic history. “Was I born to be single or have circumstances made me this way?” she asks herself. When the actress Mae West declared, “I’m single because I was born that way,” she imbued singleness with a prurient edge. As a sex goddess of Hollywood’s golden age, she could make herself more appealing by alluding to her singular status. Yet will this same coy suggestion be appreciated when it casually drops off the less-than-sultry lips of the ordinary midlife single woman? [54.147.0.155] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 06:56 GMT) 2 4 4 N A...