The Pressure To Be Single

Is this just freedom to give up on each other

Screenshot: YouTube

I keep hearing about how there’s too much pressure to settle down. Apparently everyone wants to know when you’re getting married, when you’re having kids. Being single is stigmatised, shamed, pitied. We supposedly feel so rushed to find partners that we choose wrong, and that’s why relationships are failing. It’s this pressure to couple up, this fear of being alone. This pressure, on young women in particular, is “overwhelming”, a “violence”, a “cruelty”.

But this has never been my experience. My whole life I’ve only ever felt the opposite, an overwhelming pressure to be single. In the secular liberal world I used to think there were no expectations, no pressure. There is, though: the pressure today is to avoid anything that might stick, to run through life without getting snagged on any responsibilities, without getting tethered to someone else too early. I’m sure in some cultures, some families, there is still pressure to find someone. But I have felt rushed to do many things in modern life, and settling down has never been one of them.

If anything, I think young women feel this pressure to be single more than men. In a recent podcast Emma Watson said that women are made to “feel like they have no worth” or “haven’t succeeded yet in life” until they settle down. But I have such a hard time understanding this. In my world it’s the opposite: the young woman who settles down has always been seen as wasting her potential; the single, childfree, even divorced woman is strong, wise, knows her worth. Most of the time people aren’t wondering why young women aren’t having kids but why we would at all. Nobody really mentions it, let alone pushes it. And I’m sure it wasn’t always like this, but lately I see young men praised for committing, while young women are warned. We are proud of young men, we pity young women.

Parents worry about their daughters, too. I see this all the time. If you meet someone too soon, fall for them too fast, that’s when your family worries for you. Parents are judgemental only when it comes to commitment. They worry about their daughter closing down options; they feel she is too young to commit, even when she is the same age they were, sometimes older. Announce you’re getting married in your twenties and complete strangers will rush to tell you horror stories about affairs and divorce and heartbreak. Why would you do that to yourself? Don’t do what I did, throw those years away. We don’t scrutinise the 25-year-old who is still single but the one who settles down. In fact this feels like the only life decision left to disapprove of, the only one acceptable to judge. Wanting to commit is the one desire that is discouraged, treated with suspicion, the only thing in the modern world we are ever told to delay.

So now we have to break the news to our parents that a relationship might be, God forbid, serious. It feels like a betrayal almost, a betrayal of endless possibility. You get the feeling you have consigned yourself to something, surrendered somehow. Commitment comes with all these caveats and disclaimers: don’t worry I won’t lose myself, no I won’t fall behind with my work, yes I have escape plans and exit strategies. We explain ourselves, defend ourselves, plead for permission to take responsibility. Because the conclusion our parents drew from failed marriages was that they got together too young, that commitment itself is dangerous. And so not only do we have to push past the trauma of our parents’ divorce, but brace for their projection and resentment, their dread and disappointment, the fear we are repeating their mistakes.

Hard to blame them, though. This is the culture they were formed by. Fundamental to liberalism is a suspicion of restraint, which inevitably becomes suspicion of human relationships. It promises liberation from every last tie until we are free of everything, including each other. The position we idolise is one of being permanently suspended, in time, in place; voluntarily stepping out of that state and making yourself vulnerable is suspect. Both sexes feel this, I think, but because women were seen as having more to be liberated from, our devotion in particular became dangerous, a liability.

The dominant pressure in liberal culture, then, is to delay, to detach, to stay permanently available. We are permitted only one loyalty, and that’s to ourselves. The longer you stay single the stronger you are; the women with the most worth keep waiting. Partners are acceptable so long as they are accessories, add-ons. Otherwise it’s irrational, embarrassing even. And yes of course young women are still getting into relationships, still want to meet someone, but even those who desperately want commitment feel pressure to suppress this, to apologise for it, to allow their time to be wasted, to pretend they are fine alone.

The pressure is getting to us. More people are single than ever; more of us are living on our own. And there is a growing gap between men and women. According to the Survey Center on American Life, single women are much more likely than men to say they aren’t dating because they have “more important priorities”. Over half of young single men are open to dating, compared to only 36% of young single women. And while 38% of women under 30 think marriage is outdated and old-fashioned, only 29% of young men do. Even teen girls are now less likely than boys to say they want to get married someday. By 2030, 45% of women in the U.S. between 25 and 44 will be single. And so if there is overwhelming pressure to settle down, if this is a violence and a cruelty inflicted on us, then we are very good at ignoring it.

I’m not saying we need to rush into things that aren’t right. I am saying we need to have a more honest conversation. We are arguing against a problem that hasn’t been true for a long while, not for my entire lifetime, not ever in my world. We have talked to death the pressure of getting married young but we never talk about what this pressure does, the pressure to delay, the pressure to keep searching, the pressure to do life alone. The pressure not to fall too hard and too fast, not to intertwine and entangle, never to lose control, to keep lives and hearts uncrossed. This impossible tightrope we are trying to walk, this vain attempt to fall in love while still standing perfectly upright, without ever losing our footing, depending on someone without losing an inch of independence. The pressure and pain of holding each other at arm’s length at all times, our lives perfectly partitioned, the stakes permanently low.

And pressure to do what instead? To do this impossible thing, to self-actualise alone. Pressure to become whole, healed, enlightened. Pressure to get comfortable alone, to learn how to be happy alone. Pressure to love ourselves, pressure to solve ourselves. Pressure to become the “right version” of ourselves. Pressure to delay, pressure to distrust. Pressure to leave people behind, pressure to take them for granted. And we have to talk about what we miss here, what we are deprived of and restricted from, what the freedom we are really gaining is, is it just the freedom to give up on each other.

This, I think, is what women like Emma are really describing. They do feel pressure, but a different kind, this new kind, of course they feel rushed and hurried because our culture tells them they need to cram a lifetime of self-actualisation into their twenties before they commit to anyone or anything. There is a gnawing feeling now, but it’s mostly that we are wasting time with someone, losing potential and opportunities, hemming ourselves in for no reason. The overwhelming fear is not that we might not find someone but that we might not find ourselves. And so we have this urgency, this constant compressing feeling that time is closing in on us, that there is all this to achieve and discover and understand about who we are, and so we are terrified of getting older, terrified of getting trapped, because we have all this to do, all this personal growth and self-discovery to get through before we take on a single responsibility.

But we can’t self-actualise alone. We become ourselves through other people. Happiness comes from caring for others yet we are telling a generation to put that off for as long as possible, to arrange their lives so almost nothing is ever asked of them. And relationships are failing, yes, but not because we are rushing. Even with all this freedom and so few expectations dating feels harder than ever, so we pretend the original problem is still there, the problem of pressure and obligation, when for the most part it isn’t. This is new. Something tells me relationships are failing now because we are spending too long learning to be single, getting used to being alone, living for ourselves, this utter deviation in human history. And because we got it wrong. We thought the answer to the failed marriages and broken families and mess we made over the past few decades was less commitment when it was clearly more.

I think we need to change things for the next generation. For girls growing up today, we should try to lift some of this pressure, relieve some of this freedom, liberate them to feel, to love, to follow their hearts. Give them permission to stop if someone gets in their way, if love interrupts their plans, and help them to see that as a gift. They deserve the freedom to be tied, the freedom to be bound. Because what this pressure to be single really is, what we are really inflicting on young people, what really is a violence, a cruelty, and what this has been a euphemism for, all along, is the pressure to be alone.

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If you appreciated this essay, I expand on my thoughts on modern dating and relationships in my upcoming book, GIRLS®, available now for pre-order!

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