To think more women would stay single if it wasn't for societal pressure

[penelopepitstopsgain]

When you consider women live longer when single, are less likely to suffer mental, emotional and physical distress (16 women and children have been murdered to date since lockdown in the UK) there is a strong public health case that staying single is better for women; yet society often frowns on it and other women often"pity" single women.

FWIW i'm in a LTR, but I've never had an issue being single... in many cases it's been preferable for my peace of mind!

On here you see it time and time again.. women hanging on to the lowest forms of life sometimes with horrific consequences for them and their children, all for that dreaded fear of being alone and it got me thinking..

If there was a PR campaign that positioned being single as the healthy option it is, more women would be brave enough to opt out.

YABU - Women want relationships and society has no influence

YANBU - If single was the norm more women would make that choice

I also think that women have forgotten how powerful and amazing they are, which is why they let other people decide for them, rather than decide for themselves.

This is your one precious life! Don't let anyone else push you into anything.

Trust what you want to do yourself.

@soupdragon I just looked it up online.

It says "monogamy is rare in the animal kingdom, only 3-5% form life long bonds"

As part of the promo campaign can you add that single women are not a threat to anyone elses husband, good looking or gruesome? My mum has been single a long time and the amount of possessive bitchiness encountered is ridiculous. She's absolutely not interested in a relationship and talking to a bloke at a village fete has no deeper meaning. 🙄

If you think about it, isn't being with one person your whole life - a ridiculous idea?

It makes you miss out on so many other people.

And it was women who were mostly told to be monogamous in the past. Men were always out there being with loads of people.

It was a form of control on women.

Being with other people is HARD BLOODY WORK. Particularly if you have been socialised in some way or other to be responsible for them. The problem with social conditioning is that women have now been socialised to feel responsible for EVERYTHING - children, home, man;s feelings and wellbeing, financial situation, economic independence, sex life, elder care, EVERYTHING.

There would be something intensely liberating about only considering oneself. Which is what most men are socialised to do.

I'd be interested to know, now we have long term data, whether being in a same sex relationship has any implications for the longevity and risk of death factors highlighted above. I mean obviously individual differences will occur but I'd be very interested to know if, for example, two women in a relationship by and large increase their longevity compared to single women or not.

I do feel like my relationships with women tend to be mutually nourishing whereas my relationships with men tend to be quite draining, or at best neutral and rather cursory. Not just romantic relationships.

As for what people have said about the pity to envy conversion, I'd say it would be for women:

Single in 20s/30s: Pitied and pressured
Single in 40s: maximum pity but diminishing pressure as society considers one irredeemably 'on the shelf'
Single in 50s-60s: envy period
Single 60+: pity increases as you're 'on your own', more likely not to have children to 'look after you', declining health and increasing needs making it a riskier proposition. Having said that, given most men tend to take less good care of their health and die sooner, the idea that a partner is necessarily a boon in this period is possibly illusory in practice.

I can't say that societal pressure had been a problem for me at the time I got married. The problem was that subtle societal conditioning had been there throughout my childhood/adolescence, so that by the time I did marry, it was hard to override the sense that I had a happy enough single life. If marriage had been presented as just one option, I may have thought much longer and harder about the choice I made.

I'm not saying that it was a bad choice, although occasionally I have wondered. It seems to be working much better for me now, during the lockdown, than it did before, and I would now far rather be married to the man I am than be a singleton.

For his Father of the Bride speech which my Dad gave at my sister's wedding, years before my own, he said that his and my mum's marriage had changed as the territory of their lives had changed, and now I can see what he meant.

I don’t think it’s about societal pressure. It’s mostly about the fear of being alone for most.

I’m really bad at living with other people and even I dislike the thought of living alone for the rest of my life. Not enough to stay with a horrible partner but enough that I put up with things from DH that I’d never accept from a flat mate for example because he’s promised to stick around until one of us keels over.

**If you think about it, isn't being with one person your whole life - a ridiculous idea?

@annamaria14 Yes! Looks like prison to me!

There's also a big difference between being single at 40 and 70. Also depends on how large and close your family is.

@Annamaria14

What I've decided to do with my life is not subscribe to positive-sounding but meaningless hype about female power that ignores biology.

As I said up thread, I'm more than confident in myself. I don't NEED bs like "monogamy is a construct" in order to be comfortable with my existence.

If you rely on denying science to support your theories, you may want to examine why you find that necessary. What's making you uncomfortable with monogamy? Do you think it's not for you? Have other relationships been unsatisfactory or have you been cheated on? Do you

(By the way, you want to be single - you do you. No skin off my nose. But you don't need to promote it as a lifestyle, and you can absolutely expect people to challenge you on a scientific nonsense)

I'm 58 and I haven't been 'single' (i.e. not in a relationship) for longer than a six-month period since I was 16 years old. Realistically, I know I'll probably outlive my husband and live the last 10-20 years of my life alone, and I can't say it's what I would prefer. Even a bad relationship (mine is OK to good) is company, and it's what I'm used to. It wouldn't stop me leaving if he was a vicious abuser, but it would stop me leaving if he was just, say, a boring dickhead. I think a lot of women stay in relationships because things just aren't quite as bad as leaving. I know many women are more resilient than I am, but most men have good points, even if they're not a perfect match for us, so perhaps we delude ourselves that those are enough. How many times have we all read on MN, "But he's such a good father...' about some obvious knob who should be kicked out immediately?

Another important factor is one's boreability I think - something being on lockdown has taught me is that my DP is incredibly easily bored and I am NEVER bored. never. So being alone is rubbish for him because he needs someone to 'stimulate' him (ooh err!) somehow - suggest an activity, instigate a conversation, etc, or even just to need things doing that he can do - whereas I can simply sit and think and be quite self-sufficient. Give me a full bookshelf and Netflix and I'm honestly done for the year quite happily.

So I think it depends as well on one's inner world and capacity for sloitude. I know my partner would rather live with someone he disliked a lot more than he does me than live alone.

Most women instinctively want to have children. That is biology, not social conditioning.

You can't possibly know or prove this because it's impossible to remove social conditioning.

Japan is interesting, larger percentage of women choosing to stay single and childless because the career/financial/social implications of being an wife and a mother are significant.

I was speaking to a male friend last week. He is lovely in many ways, but he is also selfish and disrespectful about women. He said that he was thinking about getting a girlfriend so that "she could take care of him".

He told me about his brother's wife. That his brother does not do anything for himself, that if anything needs to be done, he says "that's sarah's shit", Sarah is his wife.

For example, if they have to book plabe tickets, he will say "that's sarah's shit" and make his wife do it. And make his wife do basically everything:

I said "what about what she wants". And he looked shocked. If he talks about other friends of his, he talks about their girlfriends taking care of them, looking after them, etc.

That is why he wants a relationship - so that a woman will look after his every need.

I would much rather be single!!

Women really need to start putting themselves first more. Remember this is your precious life. Make it he happiest for yourself. Being single is a perfectly good choice.

*plane tickets

The greatest pressure is financial rather than societal. Unless you're wealthy it's hard to afford life as a single person, especially one of the basic essentials, safe housing.

@julybaby32 I know exactly how you feel. Not everyone, but a large proportion of society sees childless women (but not childless men) as less important and as failures. For example, DV victims in England without dependent children have no legal right to housing. Likewise disabled women without children under 18. (They have the right to "help" which can mean being given information, not housing). I always wanted children (came to MN originally for TTC) and knowing how I'm perceived makes the so far lack of them worse for me. It really rubs it in.

I agree with a previous poster it's human nature in a lot of people, male or female, to have relationships even if just for companionship.

@thecatsthecats

You might want to do some anthropological and zoological reading.
Marriage/lifetime partnerships in humans is absolutely a societal construct, primarily driven by religious beliefs, and the value of women as 'property' you only have to look at traditional wedding ceremonies to see that.

There are many cultures in the world where humans do not pair bond for life
The Mosuo in China do not marry, and many societies practice polygamy or loose pair bonding. If lifetime partnerships were evolutionarily driven, then these societies would not have survived.

@SnakesandKnives Is perfectly correct when she suggests that the evolutionary evidence for constructs like marriage is weak. We're social animals but there's no evidence that lifetime pairbonding is anything other than a religious/societal construct.

If you get married to conform to societal pressure then of course your marriage won't work.
I think we need to be honest with ourselves and our motives for marriage.
Some just fall in love with the dream wedding, their big day, whereas they need to be more honest about their intentions and not just go into marriage blind.

@thecatsthecats sure, you do you. I would just love the next generation of women to not be as controlled as we were.

I think that being in a relationship is a great choice, but also that being single is.

What I am challenging is the societal pressure that told every woman she must be in a relationship, when that was utter nonsense.

It is your individual choice that is important. If we want to be in relationship grea, if we want to be single - great - it is absolutely fine for women to be single for our entire lives.

Lets make sure there are more choices and less pressure for women in the next generation.

The happiest people I know are women who are single by choice.

I think becoming longterm single or having more casual relationships will keep becoming more mainstream/common.

I do think some people just have to be in a relationship all the time. There was a thread a while ago about perfect partners, I said what I valued was kindness, honesty, monogamy and generally being considerate, someone replied saying if I expected those things I would be single forever. Well, there’s nothing wrong with being single, they’re hardly outrageous demands and my partner does match all of those things.

I think some people struggle to value a relationship that is different to their own, I personally want a partner to be someone I live with and then marry. Other people never want to live with someone, marry, be sexually exclusive etc. That’s fine and their relationship is just as valuable to a more traditional one.

VeniceQueen2004 you have a point about the boreability. I'm single, and while I have the DC living with me, we largely do our own things.

We do have meals together and plenty of chats then, but we can also entertain ourselves quite happily.

My ex, however, is likely to be finding lockdown hard. Because he used me as his entertainment, expecting me to listen when he spoke, watch TV with him, etc, but getting grumpy if we dared to speak to him when he was reading/watching tv/doing something else. I lost a good number of friends as my world ended up revolving round him.

I'm so, so relieved I'm not with him during lockdown.

I try to bring up my girls (and my boy) with the maxim that "if you meet someone who treats you well, and who you treat well and who loves you, and who you love, you may wish to get married/ be in a ltr/ have kids" but I only ever present it as an option and as part of a well-rounded and full life.

Whereas my mum used to always say "when you get married. when you have kids" and the kind of person I would do these things with - in terms of character- was never mentioned.

Subtle, but hopefully it will make a difference. I always try to emphasise that a strong and meaningful frienship is the starting point - and the main part - of any relationship.

I had no interest in having children until I hit 35, then it hit me like a ton of bricks and I very determinedly sought out a partner having been single most of my life. So it was definitely biology in my case. My friends were childless abs actually two of them deserted me post children so it certainly wasn’t peer pressure.

@RuffleCrow that is so lovely, that you speak to your children like that :)