Shani Silver is tired of the same one-note conversations about singlehood. She wants to reframe the way people feel about being unattached.
Being single means different things to different people. For many, it can be a state of liberation and empowerment, an opportunity to get to know your true self, and to understand what your wants and needs are. Being single is not synonymous with not wanting a relationship, it's not synonymous with hating dating, it's not a rejection of romantic partnership. And yet, our society's outdated and negative views on singlehood still persist, fuelling the stigma attached to the state of simply being on your own.
With her podcast A Single Serving, Silver has built a community of likeminded individuals who want to celebrate singlehood and change the way our culture thinks and talks about single life.
The writer and podcaster has written a book, A Single Revolution, that aims to challenge the thinking that being single means you need to change who you are in order to find a partner. The book gets to the core of what single people really need: the freedom to feel good about their way of life.
You can read an excerpt from the first chapter of A Single Revolution below. The book is available to purchase via Amazon.
Being single isn't a wrong way to be. This is a very basic and essential concept that single women need to understand, because its inverse is the very thing that keeps us hating our singlehood and repeating behaviors that contribute to our own misery. I don't blame us for feeling wrong; it's the only way society has ever told us single women are allowed to feel. Everything created for or about single women pertains to dating, love, sex, and finding partnership, and literally nothing else.
Dating app, after dating app, after dating app, after dating app. Dating show, after competitive dating show, after instant-marriage show where someone gets hitched to an actual stranger, and so on. Honestly, whoever greenlights these things needs a good kick in the teeth.
Charming coffee mugs and wine glasses attempt to turn solitude into quips and jokes, suggesting that "you're not drinking alone if the cat is home." As if being alone, drinking wine alone, or owning a cat are even remotely sad truths. Really? Is that all they've got to make fun of us with? Good things? Sounds like lazy writing to me.
The world spins singlehood as sad and wrong in any number of ways, and if it ever does spin being single as right, it paints singlehood as a permanent choice that a woman has to make, drawing a line in the sand and firmly declaring herself as someone who has "sworn off dating" to be "single by choice." That's the only way singlehood is depicted with even a shred of positivity, when you essentially commit yourself to it instead of a partner.
But what if that's not what you want? What if you want a relationship but don't think you should be unhappy until you find one? Who said single women have to choose either misery or permanence? It's possible, and allowed, to love your singlehood and want a relationship at the same time. I live that way every day.
If everything in our culture ever made for single women pertains to dating and finding love, then seriously, what are we supposed to think about our singlehood? If the focal point of all conversations about single women is "finding someone," what does that tell us about what the world thinks matters most? What does that say about what should matter most to us?
These messages also appear passively in the ways single women are portrayed. Think about the stories we tell about single women and the ways we've been raised in society to think about ourselves, as reflected back to us by how television, movies, songs, and endless artforms choose to style us. We're either the sad and desperate single, the hot mess, the pathetic friend, or the crazy old lady. The only happy endings we're allowed involve partnership. Even female superheroes have love interests (that they never get to keep, for some reason). There is a societal aversion to telling stories about happy single women who are doing great in life. The message single women receive in return is this: Single is wrong. Fix your singleness by finding a partner, or else you're wrong.
Things that happen to single people aren't inherently less important than things that happen to people in couples, but the way we celebrate them is completely unbalanced.
What about the ways coupled people are celebrated? What messages do those celebratory effusements communicate to single women? Notice the reaction when a single woman tells her family she just bought her first house, and then the reaction when her sister tells them she just got engaged. What's the more exciting news, in the family's eyes? Why is something a person worked for less worthy of celebrating than something a person found? We take each other out to dinner to celebrate new jobs with guaranteed salaries and benefits, but we throw multi-thousand-dollar weddings that ignore the statistical likelihood of a lasting marriage based on the current global divorce rate. Things that happen to single people aren't inherently less important than things that happen to people in couples, but the way we celebrate them is completely unbalanced. I'm just saying.
I know there's no celebration in singlehood. None that comes from outside of ourselves, anyway. Even when we accomplish things, there's always a film on top of it, like it needs a good Windexing. It's the notion that our accomplishments don't mean as much because we don't have "someone to share them with." Everything couples get to experience is communicated to us as good and precious. Singles, on the other hand, are digging through a digital dumpster, looking for the thing coupled people have that lets their life accomplishments finally matter.
The difficulty gets deeper, doesn't it? It gets more direct. And it often comes from people we love.
"How are you single? Are you dating? How are you dating? I bet you haven't tried this yet. Try this! This will fix your singleness. How have you not found someone yet? I can't believe you're still single."
What in the toasty hell are we supposed to do with these questions and suggestions? These constant micro-intrusions into our personal lives? I think they're actually less about someone trying to help us and more about some- one trying to feel helpful. Do they really care? How can our singlehood possibly affect others so much that it's always their first question when we sit down to dinner? Our single- hood doesn't actually affect anyone else at all. They're just approaching it as if it’s a wrong state, because that’s what they've been taught, too. Can you imagine the reverse?
"How are you married? How happy is your marriage? Have you tried therapy? Try this kind of therapy, it will fix your unhappy marriage. I can't believe someone married you."
We never say such things to married people, because we've been taught that couplehood is sacred, protected, and right. Singlehood is appropriate for invasive small talk, but couplehood is none of our business. It's a completely illogical imbalance of respect. You don't become more worthy of respect simply because you’re in a couple. You're not suddenly more human or more adult, but society doesn't understand that yet. A huge benefit in changing the way we think and feel about our own singlehood is that we stop letting society get away with this garbage.
These messages take root. When all we're shown is how prized couplehood is, and how shameful or "lesser" single- hood is, of course we're going to have a low opinion of our own singlehood.
The biggest problem with the opinions of singlehood that we develop over our lifetimes is they don't belong to us. If we've never questioned where our opinions come from, we're likely to passively think being single is wrong. Entertaining the idea that single isn't actually the wrong way to be becomes a radical act. If you're miserable and consumed by the feeling you need to "find someone," there's a way out of that feeling that doesn't involve anyone else. It involves getting fucking radical.
We're taught to seek the life state where people will finally think we're "done," so we can be treated as whole, valid human beings instead of lesser sacks of sadness who should totally go talk to that guy at the other end of the bar, he's so cute! (Always said loud enough for the guy to hear, of course.) I know it can feel uncomfortable to go against the broadly accepted notions and opinions surrounding singlehood. But do you feel "comfortable" with the way you think about your singlehood now? It always feels weird to think and act differently from the norm, but I can tell you the feelings of validity and worthiness you'll find on the other side are worth it.
We aren't less than other people. We aren't a lower status or class than people in couples. If you've never heard anyone say this to you before, I wish I was there to give you a hug and go to lunch with you, and we could split any appetizers you want. I know it can take time to get used to new ideas, so please be patient with and kind to yourself. The fact that singlehood isn't wrong is a new thing to hear, but it has always been true.
A Single Revolution by Shani Silver is out now via Amazon.
