Solitario Soy

89.9 million American adults are unmarried. This is now 41% of US adults. 26% of US households consist of single people living alone, with urban centers like New York City boasting even higher percentages of single-person households (48% for Manhattan). Someone may have predicted this a few decades ago, but I don’t know that they understand the phenomenon and where it’s going. The Urban Anthropologist will now take a stab at it.

Singlehood wasn’t particularly easy until around World War II. Anyone who saw the PBS reality series 1900 House knows that. It took far too long to prepare food, clean house, and do laundry for anyone to have been able to do it for themselves during non-working hours. Only the very wealthy could have afforded to have enough servants to do these things for them. Technology came along and then it became possible to shop fewer times per week, prepare food in half an hour or less, and vacuum the carpets in less than an hour. Anyone who wanted to try their wings could do it if they could afford the rent, but it was still regarded as a temporary state until the right marriage prospect appeared on the horizon. Reliable contraception came along in the 60s. Humans have been having premarital sex and attempting to control their fertility since before civilization, but now it was possible to do so with peace of mind.

Of course, all that makes it much easier to be single in the modern world. We face such paradoxes because of it. Supermarket packaging is for families, not even couples. We pay school taxes for children we don’t have. Yet we tend to advance more easily at work because we take up the slack when our married and childed colleagues leave early (early is any time up to 6PM). At times this seems like the corporate world is conspiring to create two classes of people: Breeders and drones, the latter because after a sixty hour work week who has the energy to look for a relationship?


WHO ARE THE SINGLES WE OBSERVE?

Single and Productive

Your office has at least a few of these: Corporate drones whose free time becomes non-existent because their bosses know they can be persuaded to work later than marrieds or parents. They log sixty hours or more per week to earn bonuses, promotions, or praise from clients only to realize one day that it’s been five years since their last date, six since their last relationship, and ten since their last real vacation. They often have friends who are in the same position and they sometimes talk about this when they’re willing to let their guard down. The Urban Anthropologist once had a department head who eventually hired a department full of unmarrieds without children and is still wondering whether this was deliberate in the modern culture of overwork.

Another extreme is the single entrepreneur, who is often married to the company he or she creates. That person's workday usually never ends.


Single and Creative

It has been said that most male creative geniuses do their best work when they are single, in the name of impressing the female of the species. Is this why actors and famous musicians are more popular and successful while they are still single? There are a number of them who, despite the influences of their own cultures, remain single well into their thirties and forties. Of course, we can make certain assumptions: They can be extremely choosy because of their endless opportunities, they may enjoy the constant feast of fleshly temptation, the women they encounter may not want to compete with all the women of the world or… do they have as little time for real relationships as the rest of us? Are they married to their art as others are to corporate directives?

And to what degree are these corporate and artistic martyrs role models for the future?


Single Forever

Is lifetime singlehood a good or bad thing? The Urban Anthropologist feels that the jury is out on this issue. Singlehood happens for a variety of reasons from the socially awkward to the socially adept there is no single reason that it happens. Society may have looked down on the never-married and the divorced for as long as any generation can remember but it has always benefited from the existence of single people.

Modern singles fill deficits in tax rolls that support schools and other public works. Some individual singles within extended families help to pay for younger relatives’ educations. Special mention needs to be made of those to embrace careers like teaching, especially since in many important urban centers like my beloved New York these important professionals are grossly underpaid (which will be another article for another day). Many find satisfaction in their creativity, which has free rein out of the confines of relationships and their rules.

Many authorities still debate the psychological futures of children raised by single parents. Is singlehood in their future? Single mothers are no longer branded by society in the manner of Hester Prynne, but are their children any better off for that? Are there more single people today because there have been more single mothers?

Until someone figures it out, most single urban souls will continue in whatever balance of solitude and social interaction works for them, secure in the knowledge that they live in a time and a place where it’s possible without servants to interfere with our privacy.