11-11-2022, 07:50 AM
1. The Sex and the City spinster
Sex and the City demolished the “poor me, I’m single” storyline. Gone was the frumpiness, the celibacy, the small and sad spinster life. Those four single women were brilliant, beautiful, bold, and stylish. Whatever they wanted, they went for it.
Sadly, though, it did not end well. Or at least not for those of us who want something far more imaginative and spinster-loving than the tired old tale that closes with protagonists who are single no more, having been deposited into the arms of a committed romantic partner. Boring!
2. The spinster who loves her time alone
The pitied spinster is imagined as holed up in a wretched place, all by herself. An important variety of new spinster also has a place of her own, but she loves it. She savors her solitude and embraces her single life. In Briallen Hopper’s book, this is the spinster who “may find herself immersed in an ocean-deep existential solitude that remains impervious to Tinder or brunch.”
Social science research has identified different kinds of loners, including men as well as women. I’ve described those here. (I don’t use the word “loner” as a pejorative.) In my own research on people who are “single at heart”—people for whom single life is their best life—I found that they tend to cherish the time they have to themselves, rather than fretting that they could end up feeling lonely.
From a literary perspective, Kate Bolick offers these varieties of people who live alone:
3. The sociable spinster whose love runs wide and deep
The irony of the isolated and lonely spinster stereotype is that a lot of research suggests that just the opposite is true. Single people have more friends than married people do, they do more to stay in touch with their friends, relatives, neighbors, and coworkers, and they get more happiness out of the time they spend socializing.
The interconnected single woman is the spinster who, as Brianna Hopper describes her, “may forge powerful forms of female love, friendship, commitment, and community, like the Boston marriage, the matriarchal family, or the settlement house.” Or, from literature, “Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, a 1915 utopian novel about a communal, matriarchal society of Amazons raising their female children together as one family.”
In Spinster, Bolick also writes about single women’s communal living arrangements. She, too, believed that spinsters can forge “an intricate lacework of friendships varying in intensity and closeness that could be, it seemed, just as sustaining as a nuclear family, and possibly more appealing.” (Kay Trimberger made a similar argument a decade earlier in The New Single Woman.)
https://www.psychologytoday.com/sg/blog/...-spinsters
Sex and the City demolished the “poor me, I’m single” storyline. Gone was the frumpiness, the celibacy, the small and sad spinster life. Those four single women were brilliant, beautiful, bold, and stylish. Whatever they wanted, they went for it.
Sadly, though, it did not end well. Or at least not for those of us who want something far more imaginative and spinster-loving than the tired old tale that closes with protagonists who are single no more, having been deposited into the arms of a committed romantic partner. Boring!
2. The spinster who loves her time alone
The pitied spinster is imagined as holed up in a wretched place, all by herself. An important variety of new spinster also has a place of her own, but she loves it. She savors her solitude and embraces her single life. In Briallen Hopper’s book, this is the spinster who “may find herself immersed in an ocean-deep existential solitude that remains impervious to Tinder or brunch.”
Social science research has identified different kinds of loners, including men as well as women. I’ve described those here. (I don’t use the word “loner” as a pejorative.) In my own research on people who are “single at heart”—people for whom single life is their best life—I found that they tend to cherish the time they have to themselves, rather than fretting that they could end up feeling lonely.
From a literary perspective, Kate Bolick offers these varieties of people who live alone:
- The artist or bohemian is the “most glamorized version.”
- “The loner [who] is romanticized as a rebel, as long as he’s a he…”
- “The recluse or hermit—the secular person who shuns human society in all forms.” Bolick notes that this variety of loner “tends to be regarded as eccentric, usually with disdain.” But we don’t have to go along with that prejudice.
- The turbulently alone have tempestuous romantic relationships and end up “seesawing between periods of intense connection and isolation.”
- The “gregarious recluse” who is “easily drained by being around others, but…energized by parties and conversation.”
- “Social aloners” such as monks and nuns who “live alone with like-minded people.”
3. The sociable spinster whose love runs wide and deep
The irony of the isolated and lonely spinster stereotype is that a lot of research suggests that just the opposite is true. Single people have more friends than married people do, they do more to stay in touch with their friends, relatives, neighbors, and coworkers, and they get more happiness out of the time they spend socializing.
The interconnected single woman is the spinster who, as Brianna Hopper describes her, “may forge powerful forms of female love, friendship, commitment, and community, like the Boston marriage, the matriarchal family, or the settlement house.” Or, from literature, “Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, a 1915 utopian novel about a communal, matriarchal society of Amazons raising their female children together as one family.”
In Spinster, Bolick also writes about single women’s communal living arrangements. She, too, believed that spinsters can forge “an intricate lacework of friendships varying in intensity and closeness that could be, it seemed, just as sustaining as a nuclear family, and possibly more appealing.” (Kay Trimberger made a similar argument a decade earlier in The New Single Woman.)
https://www.psychologytoday.com/sg/blog/...-spinsters