Living single: Why alone is enough

Society and Hollywood would have you believe that it's a sin to be single. But there are benefits to staying solo, say women like Amy Cohen. In her sassy memoir, “The Late Bloomer's Revolution,” the author recounts her inspiring adventures — like a week-long bike trip through the Canadian Rockies — as a not-quite-so-young single woman. An excerpt.

Recently, I went for a mammogram. This was not my first, as I’d had a false alarm at twenty-five when I found a firm, peanut-sized lump under my arm. At the time I was living in Los Angeles, a city that is to buxom, young blondes, what birds are to the Galapagos Islands. This was why, even though I got my test at a major teaching hospital, my technician looked as if she could be serving Tailgate buckets at Hooters. When I untied my gown, revealing myself to be naked from the waist up, she clapped.

“I’m psyched!” She squealed. “You’re so flat! You’re going to be so easy! The last woman I had — ” She cupped her hands and let them sway and dangle around her waist. “Was, like, huge. It was a nightmare. And the woman before her was, like, a B cup, but you’re so flat! You made my day!”

My more recent technician was also young, with a sweet, earnest voice. She wore a lab coat over her neat, black clothes and her hair slicked into a serious-minded bun. After she told me my result was fine, she sat down to fill out some papers. As she did, she sighed loudly. I asked what was wrong.

“All my friends are getting married,” she said. “I’m worried. I’m the only one left.”

“Really?” I said. “How old are you?”

She shook her head, woefully. “Twenty-six. Why, how old are you?”

“Mmmm. Thirty-eight.” I reached over to her. “You have nothing to worry about. Trust me. Absolutely nothing.”

She asked me if, at her age, I had worried about ending up alone.

“Well,” I said, a little too brightly. “Apparently, not enough.”

The fact was that I had started worrying, really worrying, that I might actually end up alone as it dawned on me that my once irrational fear was slowly becoming a reality. Apparently, without realizing it, I had been assuming that I would eventually settle down by age thirty-six. Latest thirty-seven, but it would never come to that. That was just crazy talk. I figured I’d be on my own for a few years, just long enough to hone my independence on trips to Cuba, Vietnam, and the hardware store, and then I’d find my great love. But now I was two years over my limit and counting.

The first time I got really nervous was at my friend Madeline’s party for her son’s birthday, a large gathering where guests, many of whom I’d known from college, were encouraged to bring their young children. A whole room in the apartment was partitioned, crammed with a musical Jumperoo, a sticky alphabet mat, and something called the “Baby Einstein Activity Center,” a learning toy meant to encourage innovative, complex thought, on which all the babies punched and drooled.

I tried to spend time in the children’s play room, but it was cramped, and no one offered to let me hold their screaming toddler, so I just stood there smiling and nodding and repeating, “what a cutie!” I eventually moved to the buffet table, where I met, Gert, an aggressively tan woman who had just lost her husband to a stroke on the golf course, and a shy aunt named Rhonda who told me, in her barely audible, evaporating voice, that she had been divorced over fifty years before. Rhonda wore large, round glasses and her long hair piled over her face. She carried herself like someone who assumed that even after you’d met her ten times, you’d forget who she was. Gert was bolder, and at two in the afternoon, on her third gin and tonic. She wore a gray flannel ensemble: turtleneck and pants, with chunky, wooden jewelry that clacked loudly every time she moved.

As my friends launched into a hearty version of “Where is Thumbkin?” in the next room, I sat on the couch with Gert and Rhonda, talking about the state of the Democratic party after Bill Clinton.

“The problem for the Democrats is the word `liberal,’ ” Gert said. “It used to mean having a conscience, and now the Republicans are using it to mean `communist,’ as if having affordable health insurance is somehow un-American.”

Rhonda agreed.

“Oprah should run for President,” She said, softly. “She’d win easily. Did you see her show on makeovers for women over Fifty?”

“It’s so true,” Gert said. “You can have ten women in a room who don’t have anything in common — religion, race, class, even where they stand on abortion — but they’ll all agree on Oprah.” She pointed her finger at me, her nails painted in a pale salmon. “I’m old enough to be your grandmother, but you and I agree, don’t we?”

“I like her,” I said.

“It’s true,” Rhonda said. “There’s nothing more unifying than Oprah.”

Now the other room was singing, “Old MacDonald,” loud mooing followed by quacking. Two women I knew from college walked toward me, hunched over their little boys, who tumbled forward. They looked alike these young moms — trim and bookish, wearing sweatshirts that could endure spit up and juice spills.

“Hi,” they both called over.

“Hi,” I called back.

The women continued down the hall. One of the little boys started to cry and his mother scooped him up.

“Who’s a Mr. Whiney puss?” she said, kissing him.

Gert turned to Rhonda. “Do you think I should redo my kitchen or get another face lift?”

The conversation continued until I realized that I felt more comfortable with a widow and an aging divorcee than I did with many people my own age. Once I had viewed women like Gert and Rhonda as “those people,” unlucky women who had somehow found themselves alone, but now I wondered, were “those people” actually “my people?” Had I already become one of “those women” without knowing it? I’d always imagined that ending up alone was a sluggish, steady process, years of ominous warnings that were ignored or even flouted, but now I was starting to think that maybe ending up alone was like getting your wallet stolen. Something that leaves you asking, “Hey, Wait a minute, when did that happen? I was looking the whole time.”

Apparently I had been fearing this for longer than I realized, as I’d noticed a change recently in the way I joked about being single. I used to talk about searching for love, saying things like, “I want to find an older man who wouldn’t have considered me in his prime.” And, “I’m starting to think that when people refer to the `great depression of the thirties’ they’re talking about my thirties.” But lately I joked about ending up alone: I have visions of myself living in a single room occupancy hotel, obese from a steady diet of government cheese, wearing a muu-muu stained with cheap wine and tears, while banging on my wheelchair with a spatula. I would joke about this to friends, pretending that I was kidding — a muu-muu, Ha! — but the truth was, ending up alone was as scary as anything I could imagine.

Adding to the problem, when I typed the words “famous unmarried women” into Google, the words “Famous Old Maids” came up, which included a web site called, “Famous Freaks.” Among those mentioned was, “Lucia, the Puppet-Lady,” who was, at one time, the smallest woman in the world, weighing “less than most cats.” She was unmarried, which was how she came up in the search, but was also “surprisingly happy for someone so small” and among the highest-paid midgets of her day. Another web site referred to unmarried women who were “handpicked by God.” As I read on, I realized these women are often referred to as nuns. All of which made me realize that if I were going to be alone for awhile or even longer, I had to find a way to picture it that didn’t involve a traveling sideshow or lifetime vow of chastity.

I decided to take a trip. It wasn’t the romantic getaway I’d dreamed of: the tour of French vineyards, where a Sommelier says, “we enjoy za wine now and zen later time for love. No?” But it was something. I chose a week long bike trip to the Canadian Rockies, riding from Banff to Jasper. For many people, this would have been a refreshing, even challenging exploration of vibrant mountain terrain, but since I learned only to ride a bike three summers ago and still didn’t know how to stop once I was in motion, it had the potential to be the kind of free spirited, good fun that would land me in a full body cast. For life.

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