One night I got home from my restaurant job and googled, “Too much of a wave to ever be in a relationship.” A wave is a self-help synonym for an anxiously attached person. This search was motivated by a handsome bartender at work who was withdrawing his flirtations as I began to return them.

The search returned a Psychology Today article by Ken Page called The Wave of Distancing.

Ken Page is a psychotherapist from the Bronx, the gay son of Holocaust survivors. He spent twenty years as a single person, the first ten bar hopping in New York, the next ten carefully studying his stubborn singlehood. In his late thirties and into his forties, he began to decode bonding (without the help of the internet!), and is now married to a deeply kind and loving man named Greg. Yes I know his husband’s name.

Ken Page’s life’s work is to help others who find themselves in his old predicament: unwanted, long-term singlehood. He pursues his mission with the vigor of someone carrying an urgent message. Now that I’ve cleared the first few hurdles, I too find myself cornering people at parties, explaining that love is about revelation, shame is ok, and the loving-yourself-more thing is a terrible mistake. If I ever meet Ken Page in person I will surely fall to the ground, surely I will ruin my eye makeup.

By the time I found this article, I was knee deep in podcasts and books on how to make love stay. My Spotify homepage and nightstand library exposed what I believed was my biggest liability: the fact that I wanted a relationship.

Recently, I read a post on Substack about how marriage and dyadic relationships are a tool of the patriarchy. They are one part of a complex system that, according to this author, moved property and wealth from the matrilineal to the patrilineal line. Women’s sexuality had to be controlled in order to confirm paternity, and then marriage/ kids were pedaled as the point of life for all femmes. I loved this article and I hope all of you read it. I also restacked it and like a grasshopper making a speech in the New York stock exchange, I added, “but wanting a relationship is okay too!” It made a big splash. Not.

It is not lost on me that the general zeitgeist of our times is the need to wake up from the dream of marriage to the reality of having one’s labor exploited and one’s sexuality controlled by a social institution. In writing to folks about how to end unwanted singlehood, I sometimes feel like I have the gravitas of a teenager obsessed with her crush, maybe a youth group leader.

I’m also aware that indifference toward romantic love is a coveted stance–“I”m not looking for a partner right now” kind-of-vibe. I often hear from new clients that they want to stop obsessing over being single and figure out a way to be happy on their own. On its face, this is a very worthy goal. I once held it myself. Implicit in this yearning however, is the fact that these clients want to murder the little part of them who keeps sneaking out at midnight to fill them with a deep loneliness and panic that they might always be alone. They come to me hoping that I can help them suffocate that part into submission, and replace it with a calm sense of self love and fulfillment. Then, the myth goes, the partner will arrive without them even looking. Maybe. But who cares anyway because they are happy without one.

I do a deep inner sigh when I hear this line of thinking. I find it has typically been sold to them by well-meaning therapists who never struggled with the experience of long-term singlehood. The confidence these therapists hold around their own ability to bond is unconscious. They don’t know what it is like to live with the panic, backed by years of evidence, that you might never have a partner. In fact, they are afraid of that panic. They feel, as the culture does, that the panic will drive away potential partners. Out of care for their clients, the therapists try to get them to feel a calm indifference about being single, even as their little attachment systems are firing off alarms. It only deepens the shame of wanting something as pedestrian as a partner, as embarrassing as falling in love.

Oh to want a partnership, even in the throes of patriarchy and all the trouble with coupling. Oh to want a partnership, even when you could just be in love with your life or yourself or art or something.

As Sartre said, “Hell is other people.” I would add “and I need them.”

When Ken Page suggested that wanting a relationship was not antithetical to having one, I didn't even resist the idea. I’d been holding back a dam for years, and I just let it break. Water poured down into the parched ecosystem below. A big swath of my inner landscape felt possible to share. The pressure to keep my longing and fear under wraps lifted like a fog.

For those of you who don’t have a romantic relationship and don’t want one, I celebrate you and your gorgeous path of self discovery. For all the young Noras in the audience who want to care less about a relationship but definitely do not, I squeeze you in my biggest Auntie squeeze. May your longing be your fuel. May it be lightning.

For My Single Ladies

a poem by Shannon Kirkpatrick

For my single ladies
looking for love;
for the women on
Tinder and
Match and
OkCupid and
Bumble and
Hinge;

For the women
speed dating and
bar hopping and
pushing their phone numbers across the table and
flirty-glancing across the room and
asking friends about a setup and
thinking about signing up with a matchmaker and
wracking their brains about what else they might try.

For the women who know:
real life is not as glamorous as “Sex and the City.”

For the women who have heard it all:
“Men don’t want women who are smarter than them”
“Men don’t want women who are richer than them”
“Men don’t want women taller than them”
“Men don’t want women who are too independent”
“Men don’t want women who are too needy”
“Men don’t want women who are too fat/skinny/old/young/smart/dumb/rich/poor/sexy/virginal/Madonna/whore”
For women who have heard all the well-meaning advice:
“Be more flirty”
“Be more chill”
“Be more confident”
“Be more alluring”
“Change your profile pics”
“Rearrange your profile pics”
“Make your profile more accessible”
“Give men something easy to comment on”
“Send more messages on the apps”
“Change your dating app prompts”
“Learn how to play the game”

For the women who are afraid of becoming cat lady maiden aunt old maid 
spinster dried up sexless harpy pathetic prude.

For the women who are afraid of dying alone
tired of being lonely.
Who are tired of dick pics, ghosting, endless swiping;
Who dread
Valentine’s Day
New Year’s Eve
wedding invitations
couples at dinner parties
the judgmental looks from waiters in restaurants when you say “table for one.”

For all the women who sit on the couch and wish someone else was there to bring them a glass of wine and help do the dishes and ask how their day was and make chicken soup when they’re sick and kiss good night and drive them to the doctor when they get a weird pain and help hold the ladder when replacing a lightbulb and complain to when they’ve had a bad day and lean on at that scary part in the movie and hold them when they feel frightened and hold them when they feel lonely and

hold them.

Help hold their dreams.
Help hold their longings.
Help hold their desires.
Help bear witness to the highs and lows of their lives.

And someone to hold in return.

For the women whose mothers grandmothers sisters aunts friends all say
“When are you getting married?” or
“You’re so great – I can’t believe you don’t have a man yet!”
For the women who woke up at 38 and said to themselves
“How am I still fucking single?”

For the single ladies who despise the fairy tale
and yearn for it too.
Who know that no man completes you,
but nevertheless want a partner.
For the single woman who relishes walking around the house naked
and can spend Saturday night any old way she wants to
and still tries to book a Saturday night date;

For the woman who is
strong
loud
independent
self-sufficient
capable
and longs for partnership anyway…

Your.  Yearning.  Is.  Luminous.

Big thanks to Shannon for letting me include her poem in this newsletter.

XO,

Nora

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