ESSAY SUMMARY
Singlehood, Men, and Me is an inquiry into love, self-belonging and the stories women inherit about partnership. Beginning with my own history, I consider how family, grief, abandonment, culture and gender can shape what we come to recognise as love, what we tolerate in its name, and the futures we imagine relationships will make possible. The essay moves outward from personal experience to examine the different ways men and women can be prepared for intimacy, the gendered labour that can accumulate inside heterosexual relationships, and what happens when a woman becomes deeply needed while remaining only partially known. I am also interested in the body: in desire, sexual scripts, the distinction between being wanted and being valued, and the question of whether women are permitted to experience themselves as subjects of their own erotic lives. Singlehood becomes a way of thinking about all of this more clearly. What might become possible when romantic partnership is no longer treated as the event that gives a woman’s life its legitimacy? How might intimacy be distributed across friendship, family, community, creativity and other forms of love? And how do we honour what a chosen life gives us without pretending it contains everything? Running beneath the essay is grief: for what we inherited, for what we once accepted, for the selves we became in order to be loved, and for the lives made less available by every meaningful choice. The essay ultimately sits with a question larger than relationship status: how do we build lives that feel recognisably our own while remaining open to love, connection and the inevitable losses that accompany being human?
“Women have a right to belong to themselves.”
EXCERPT 1
Grief may have disguised itself as desire.
What felt like my own longing may also have carried something inherited from an unfinished life I had loved closely.
One of the unsettling things about desire is that because we experience it intimately, we assume it originated entirely within us. But desire has a history. Families give it language. Culture gives it images. Grief gives it urgency. Repetition can make something familiar enough that we begin to experience it as inevitable.
Which parts of my romantic imagination were authored by me, and which were handed down?
“Potential does not become partnership simply because you wait faithfully beside it.”
EXCERPT 2
This is where heterosexual partnership can become a strange collision of socialisation. One person arrives practised in anticipation. Another arrives accustomed to being anticipated. One has learned that love means noticing. Another has learned that being loved means being noticed. One enters expecting to maintain the relationship. Another enters expecting the relationship to be a place where they are maintained.
Of course, plenty of couples disrupt these patterns. Plenty of men are emotionally available, domestically competent, nurturing and relationally responsible. Plenty of women have never been socialised into care or have consciously rejected it. The point is not that gender determines relational capacity. It is that gender can shape the training ground on which that capacity develops.
And the societal grief beneath all of this? A grief for women who learned to carry too much. A grief for men who were taught to amputate parts of themselves in order to qualify as masculine. A grief for relationships that become sites of resentment because people arrived with radically different expectations of what love was supposed to require. A grief for forms of intimacy that might have been possible had everyone been given fuller permission to become emotionally, practically and relationally adult.
“A penis is not the custodian of a woman’s erotic life.”
EXCERPT 3
If I choose singlehood, I may experience less romantic intimacy, fewer forms of partnered care and no shared couple-history. If I choose partnership, I may experience less solitude, autonomy, and creative immersion.
Neither life contains everything. Recognising this removes the fantasy that somewhere there is a perfect arrangement in which nothing has to be given up. There isn't. Every sufficiently meaningful commitment creates a world. And every world has borders.
This is where grief becomes useful to me philosophically. Grief is often interpreted as evidence that something has gone wrong. Sometimes it is. But grief can also be the natural response to recognising value in what we did not choose. You can love your child and sometimes grieve the child-free life you did not live.
You can love your spouse and wonder who you might have become had you remained alone. You can love your career and grieve the time it required. You can love the country you migrated to and still ache for the one you left. You can love singlehood and occasionally wish somebody else were carrying the grocery bags, remembering the medical appointment, reaching for your hand in bed.
The presence of bittersweet grief does not necessarily indict the choice. Sometimes it means the alternative contained something beautiful too. A chosen life can still contain grief for the lives we did not choose.
