Since When Does Single Suck?

Ed. Note: If anything in the previous entry contradicts anything in this entry, disregard the previous. And if you’d be so kind as to chalk it up to progress, I’d be very grateful.

I don’t drop too many personal details on this diary, for obvious reasons. There are a few readers out there who know my name isn’t really Jill (it was sort of a high-school nickname). They also know I’m thirty-something, somewhere (depending on your preference) between average and attractive, smart, gainfully and contractually employed, creative, and independent. I take good care of myself, have my own comfortably-furnished two-bedroom apartment and am working in fits and starts toward a degree I need more for the job prospects than the education. I have a loving, functional family and about a dozen really good friends scattered across the globe who put up with my neuroses and still like me enough to invite me to visit. I’m not advertising or stroking my ego or even suggesting I’m anything special. I’m just stating the fact that I’m not doing too badly for myself by conservative standards.

The one thing I don’t have is the only thing anyone seems to care about these days. I have been completely single for more than a year; a little over three, actually, if you don’t count a brief affair with a pushy divorcee and a two-month fling with a 21-year-old that ended disastrously over a weekend in Paris. (My friends tell me it’s a great trainwreck of a story; I’ll get around to telling it here one of these days.) The thing is, I’m starting to get the feeling that I’m supposed to feel bad about this.

Tonight I was sitting in my living room, feet up on my coffee table enjoying an after-dinner glass of wine and Sex and the City reruns on TBS when I got this kind of disturbing feeling at the back of my brain. It was kind of like when your sock scrunches down into the heel of your sneaker; it’s not painful enough to register, but you know you’re vaguely uncomfortable. I poked around the inside of my head for the source, but got distracted by a commercial break for an online dating service. That’s when it hit me.

As I sit here on my comfy couch in my schoolteacher glasses, messy ponytail and unmatched socks, I represent the cliché of the lonely, over-thirty, single girl. Bridget Jones singing “All By Myself” into a rolled-up newspaper (or was it a wine bottle?). Dead Like Me’s Delores Herbig with ‘Her-big brown eyes’, housekeeping website and diabetic cat. The old maid for the new millennium. Even those icons of single-girl empowerment – Carrie, Miranda, Samantha and Charlotte – subtly imply that the elusiveness of the Logical Next Step in grown-up life is something to lose sleep over. Everywhere I look there are little reminders that someone ‘my age’ should be married, mortgaged and up to her ears in diapers, or at the very least feel deep longing for these things. If you’re not married, you should be engaged. If you can’t be engaged, at least get out there and date your panties off. And if you’re not doing that, well for chrissakes at least have the sense to feel lonely and desperate about it!

I don’t usually watch this much TV, but last night I caught the indie flick Me, Myself, I starring Rachel Griffith as Pamela, a successful, slightly neurotic, over-thirty career woman envious of her married-with-children friends. She gets hit by a car and switches lives with her other self – the Pamela that accepted her college sweetheart’s proposal, popped out three obnoxious kids and is now banging her hubby’s annoying buddy on the sly in a desperate grasp at some variety. Watching the flummoxed Single Pamela try to juggle potty training, house cleaning, hubby griping, and authoring a boring magazine column made me slightly nauseous. Literally, my stomach started to get that sharp, sour feeling that surfaces whenever my boss walks into my office. Even as she started to get the hang of keeping everyone happy while rediscovering her own needs, I just could not see myself doing the same thing under any circumstances.

It’s not like I’ve never noticed it before, but tonight the thoughts that have been nagging at me since I sifted through some old high-school notebooks over Christmas crystallized into an important realization. I have regrets, but not getting married, never buying a house, and the dwindling biological possibility of giving birth do not count among them. Try as I might, I just can’t feel bad about not coming home every day to a houseful of people who expect me to cook their dinner, kiss their boo-boos, pack their lunches, and shepherd them gracefully into each day with a cheery morning greeting and a fresh batch of oatmeal. Or whatever. I feel like I would suffocate.

It’s possible I’m overreacting. There is, I suppose, the distant possibility that if I were to strike the right-guy-right-time-right-place trifecta, I might possibly change my mind, but right now the thought of having someone cohabitate with me for any more than a day makes me tired. I think about dating and all I see is drama, drama, drama. I think about marriage and I can’t understand how or why people attempt it. I do love kids, but after a couple of hours I just want to dump them on their parents and go home to a long bath and a bottle of wine. I’m selfish, I know. I don’t even want the responsibility of houseplants. I’d love a pet, but I could be anywhere by this time next year, and it just seems more practical to spend that $500 nonrefundable security deposit on camera equipment I won’t have to find a new home for. Again.

I reason that at least I know this about myself, right? How much more tragic would it be to have jumped into family life and realize ten years too late that I don’t know who I am or what I want? I imagine it’s probably possible to discover those things even in that context, but I bet it’s a lot harder given the amount of noise and distraction inherent to raising a family. By any relationship standard you have to be willing to sacrifice or at least compromise your own wants to make it work, and…I don’t think I’m really ready for that. Am I immature? Hm. That’s a possibility, I guess. Sour grapes? Nah, I honestly don’t think so. Commitment-phobic? I suspect not with someone I could trust. So what, then? I keep getting the message that my attitude toward the normal progression of adult life is not normal, so what is my problem?

My college ethics professor, an odd, hobbity-owly-type man whom I adored, once worked up a numerology reading for me on a lark, using my name and date of birth. The ‘reading’ was thoughtfully detailed and reasonably accurate as far as my character was concerned, but there was an element, he said, of delay that “suggests that your life will not progress as smoothly as that of many others” and that although my love is loyal and I would “want to find someone with whom to share a committed relationship…[you] may find…such a commitment is restricting to your goals.” As much as I don’t believe in fortune-telling or future-predicting of any kind, I can see where he’s coming from because I realized something else while sifting through my teenage memories this past week. All my life I have wanted nothing more than to do something purposeful with my life, something that reaches beyond me, even going so far as to render the ‘me’ part incidental. It’s not that I feel I have to repay a debt to society – after al

l, what the hell has society ever done for me aside from making me feel insecure about my relationship status, career choices and the size of my butt? It’s more of that ‘of him to whom much is given, much is required’ kind of thing. I’m not upset that I’m over thirty and single, as much as I am deeply bothered by the fact that I have made it halfway to retirement and accomplished nearly nothing of any significance. I haven’t even figured out how I’m going to do it yet. I am pretty certain, however, that if I have to choose between a manhunt and a quest for a purpose, I know exactly which road I’m taking.

Because I post here, I don’t really have anything to post here. I might try someday anyway. What is your Wish for the World? I don’t accept notes, but that doesn’t mean you can’t comment.