What is it like being a single woman today? A groundbreaking work of scope, wit, and exceptional empathy, The Improvised Woman answers that complex question, while in the process capturing-and celebrating-the real lives of single American women. Over the past seven years, journalist and essayist Marcelle Clements asked over one hundred women from across the country-young and old, never married, divorced and widowed, childless and single mothers-to talk about being single. How did they get there? Were they sorry or glad? What is the texture of their experience? The heart of this book is the individual voices of the women answering these questions, heard in all their tenacity and humor. " The Improvised Woman doesn't glide over the messy contradictions that accompany being human. . . . Clements gives her interviewees center stage to speak their minds, and appends a series of thoughtful, witty essays."'” Newsweek "[Clements] is wise, non-judgmental and patient as she gains the trust of these women, who appear to be as interested in this study as the author is-and as readers, especially other single women, will be."'” Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Marcelle Clements, a journalist and critic, is also the author of The Dog Is Us: And Other Observations, and Rock Me, a novel. She lives in New York City.

Chapter One

HOW I GOT FROM THERE

TO HERE

Does It Really Matter Whose

Fault It Was?

Of all the tragic and amusing declarations women make regarding being single, surely the oddest is a certain ritual observation usually stated with an air of mock horrified astonishment, as if the speaker still hadn't come to terms with a bizarre reality. "There are no men!" one woman will proclaim to another. The delivery almost makes it sound like a joke.

    Many assumptions greet this coded announcement. You know that when a single woman announces, "There are no men!" she doesn't mean there are no men. Or that she has no interest in men. She may be perfectly willing--eager, in some cases--to be living with someone or married or having a pleasant and sweet albeit temporary romance, or even just hitting the hay with someone now and then. It doesn't mean that she is incapable of desire or that there are no men who desire her. Indeed, she may be having a passionate affair with a man (or more than one), though in all likelihood she is not. It's not that there are no men, it's that there are no men she wants to want, or who would want her the way she wants to be wanted.

    What the statement "There are no men!" is really announcing is that the speaker refuses to be perceived as available for just any man who comes along. That she'd rather be alone than in a terrible relationship and that even a mediocre relationship can feel terrible. And maybe she'd rather be alone, period. It is her awareness of choices that separates the single woman from the pitiable "single" of '70s and '80s lore, the distressed and appalling love seeker who used to go out looking for Mr. Right and come home with Mr. Goodbar. The female "single" was not merely unmarried, she was assumed to be frantically longing to marry ... "anyone." She was an icon of despair and crypto-passivity. Descending from an entirely different set of roots, the evolved, purely single woman, on the other hand, can be anything: desperate or hopeful or simply busy with something else. She is extremely unlikely to conceptualize her life so simplistically that she could refer to the "right man" with a straight face.

    Of course, as we know all too well, there are still plenty of "singles" around, plenty of distress and appalling love-seeking, cheap wine, personal ads. Perhaps I need not remind you of the horrors brought to us courtesy of the new technology: the innumerable images in television commercials of people with weird hair fervently promoting computerized dating ventures. In many places in America this is deemed to be the norm. At the very least, it's the association that people have with single women. But I propose that this retro consciousness is less prevalant than we are constantly told. That there are still women who would do anything for "a date" (a date?) is certain, but it's absurd to represent their quest as the only game in town. It's too easy to sell them products, and hope, and make fun of them, once the stereotype is implacably set, just as it's easy to identify the poor black teenagers who monopolize our national image of single mothers. The more interesting truth is that these pathetic singles and poor young women may have a kind of personal style and aspiration that hasn't been noticed in the rush to pigeonhole them as pitiful stereotypes--at the very least a doubleness. If they were asked different questions than "Are you desperate?" their decisions might not seem quite as desperate.

    In any event, there are millions of women who are different, who are conscious of having made a choice to be single, at least temporarily. What's generally picked up on, especially by people who feel confused by the idea of any real life outside the couple or the traditional family, is either their wishing for relationships or their inability to stay in them. But, again, when asked different questions, these women's consciousness is quickly revealed as much more ambivalent and rich than either of these cliches. And it's not difficult to find them if one has a reason to do so. My sense is that the desperate single belongs to the past. Despair of the future is more complicated than getting a husband, not getting a husband, losing a husband--or a wife. It is both men and women who, in the present, grapple with uncertainties to an extraordinary degree.

    For the new single woman, even someone who is the right man for the moment can seem the wrong potential husband. Perhaps, in the parlance of the times, the relationship just doesn't have enough "sparks" or sufficient "commonality," or it suffers from an inability of the parties to "sustain" commitment or "achieve" intimacy. Too many problems "need to be worked out." Or it has just come to feel like it's not worth the trouble. Perhaps she views him as intolerant of her flaws, cold or tyrannical, potentially abusive, a cheat, a deadbeat, a pathological workaholic. Perhaps he's narcissistic, stifling, sexist or sexless, or simply uninterested. Perhaps he's gay. And some of the types that used to appeal are now turnoffs. A once-attractive man may have a problem with the "girls" if he's a go-to-bed-with-your-boots-on alcoholic, a sexual compulsive, relentlessly rejecting, closed and uncommunicative, neurotically elusive. Men who are enigmatically repressed, egomaniacs, relentless Casanovas, or pathological jocks are no longer so much in favor. Of course, most women will fall for one or more of those outdated bad boys of yesteryear one or more times. But if she is unfortunate enough to marry him, such a woman is increasingly likely to eventually come to and divorce him. Once they break up, she'll get herself to a therapist or a support group, and she'll at least try not to remarry him or his ilk.

    And then there's the problem of money, work, and unequal contributions. In her book The Second Shift, Arlie Hoshschild points out that there is "an indirect way in which the woman pays at home for economic discrimination outside the home." Women work roughly fifteen hours longer each week than men, amounting to an extra month of twenty-four-hour days a year. And that figure has gone up since Hochschild's 1989 book.

    The higher the income of a couple, the more likely it is that the woman is contributing more than half. Money magazine reported recently that 75 percent of married female executives at Fortune 1000 companies outearn their husbands. This is not a phenomenon of the underclass. The more educated and prosperous a woman is, we know, the less likely she is to marry or remarry. There is a popular assumption that this is evidence of a feminine failure: These women aren't marrying or remarrying because they can't find husbands. But it might be much more accurate to say that they can't find husbands whose wives they want to be. Indeed, in a story headed "Divorced, Middle-Aged and Happy: Women, Especially, Adjust to the '90s," Jane Gross of the New York Times tells us that demographers and sociologists who interpret divorce and remarriage rate "agree that there is an overriding explanation, and it contradicts the mildewed stereotype about women desperate to tie the knot and men itching for adventure. These experts say that increasingly it is women who now look skeptically at marriage, often viewing it as a bad bargain if they have gained financial and sexual independence."

    The motivation may be less pragmatic. Perhaps he's boring, which an astonishing number of women now find a sufficient deterrent, unwilling to continue pretending this is a frivolous consideration. Or he may play so hard to get that it's a turnoff. In this category, today's man is baffling, much more so than the previous generation's. Whatever the reasons--and there are doubtless many--men now express their desire, or lack of it, in an oblique and puzzling manner. A number of women have told me they feel a tremendous switch has occurred, and men have become exasperating teases. Of course, no one has statistics on the ratio, but I'd wager that for every unyielding tease, there's another guy who'd ask for nothing better than tenderness, sex, and companionship. What happens between the interstices of desire and consummation and failed union? What went wrong? Who got too angry or too greedy or too tough or too confused? I must tell you that, just as you might expect, many of my subjects thought that men were more to blame. But the topic no longer comes up very frequently. After all, it's been hashed over endlessly, with no acceptable resolution. Does it really matter whose fault it was? It has become so much more complicated than that.

    "He's too young for me." "He's married to his work." "He's still hung up over his last relationship." "All the good ones are taken" often succeeds the declaration that there are no men. What some women will assure you is that the right man is somebody else's husband. Then the conversation sometimes meanders over to the subject of affairs with married men, leading to arguments about whether such affairs are incredibly convenient or self-destructive, which can then easily lead to references to painful relationships with abusive lovers before shifting back to what is both the starting point and the inevitable conclusion: There are no men.

    However, once this ground has been duly covered between friends (usually new friends, since any woman's old friends already know her beliefs), the conversation then veers--to considerations of problems at work, to closely argued discussions on whether it is too late to take up meditation, to should one allow one's child to play Nintendo, to important queries regarding lipstick colors, or to various speculations as to whether the Republicans will get the presidency back.

    In my experience, the tone of these conversations is not sarcastic or bitter. It reflects the humor of people who have learned to live with something difficult and interesting. Nor are these women cavalier or numb. When queried further, they usually seem not uncaring but wistful. A friend who was widowed several years ago recently said to me: "Yes, I could remarry if I found someone I really liked. At one point I was contemplating it, and I thought, Ohh ... the idea of going through somebody else's whatever all over again. And I thought to myself, Don't shut yourself off because it's too much trouble. It's difficult to be with someone. It's easier to just stay separate. I can imagine, in a fantasy sort of way, Yes, if the right person came along I could get married again, but the reality of it is I don't believe I could go through it all over again. I'm tired of it. But I don't think that's a good thing."

    Many single women are "still looking," and, indeed, many eventually find what they are looking for, or some equivalent. Many, on the other hand, describe themselves specifically as "not waiting." They'll say, "If it happens, that's great, but I'm not going to hang around waiting." In this way, all the bets are hedged: Any problematic remaining traces of the old-think are taken care of by the cliche (or myth?) that circulates among women that all the great relationships happen when you're not waiting.

    Are there women who can't get husbands? Are there women "too crazy" or "too angry" to get along with a man? No doubt. On the other hand, as it is often pointed out, women who are incredibly mad, mean, neurotic, ridiculous, or whatever can often somehow get into relationships and stay in them. We do know there are many women (single and married) who feel rejected no matter what, and this has little to do with whether anyone desires them.

    But increasingly, women seem tired of the search (and of waiting to be found). Your individual single woman is not leaving out the possibility of a "miracle," as it is often characterized, but eventually, unless she is a retro-masochist, at some point she may throw her hands up, saying, "OK, I give up. And now can I get back to my life, please?" Women who have thrown their hands up tend to joke about it. "I've become a nun," they'll say. (Or, in these Zen-oriented, gender-fluid times: "I've become a monk." Or, simply: "I have no life.") Other women will wander from tepid relationship to tepid relationship or stay far too long in wishy-washy romances or sexually ardent but emotionally empty affairs. But there is a new consciousness about these old stories, and a woman with such a perspective will tell her friends, "I'm wasting my time." Some women have wonderful, passionate lives and express their sexuality however and with whomever they want in impetuous love affairs. (Not many women do, but, in theory, it can be done.) Of course, sometimes someone will be taken by surprise and fall in love ("I can't believe it," she'll say. "This wasn't supposed to happen") and end up in a long-term relationship with someone ("a miracle" or, in the words of one now happily married woman, "Hope triumphs over experience"). However, in all the many times I've heard a woman declare to any number of other women that there are no men, I've never heard an argument. Never!

    "There are no men," then, is less about men than it is about women. It's not really about looking for a husband or a lover, it's about not having found a role as a wife or as a lover that makes sufficient sense on a long-term basis. It informs the interlocutor not that there are no men, but that there are no relationships that seem workable. It essentially signals a defection from the old school where women were taught that if you can't be with the one you love, you'll love the one you're with. Not only is it an announcement of dissatisfaction, it also, since it makes no assumptions of entitlement and asks for nothing, predicates an entirely new combination of irony and defiance on the single woman's part. It is certainly a way of complaining, but it also declares one's freedom.

    Yet women I interviewed could not give a straight answer to the question: Why are you single? They said they didn't know. They said perhaps it was only because they could afford it financially. They said it was one thing after the other. They said they had never meant for it to happen, but life had led them here somehow. Most could not say whether they were going to stay single, for another year or a decade or a lifetime.

    The exceptions were the aged and the very young, whose responses were essentially, "Why shouldn't I be?" My oldest subject, a ninety-four-year-old widow and the veteran of a happy marriage, told me she certainly would not remarry, though she has a boyfriend who would be willing. "Why should I give up my independence and my privacy?" she asked with comfortable certitude. Many women say they become more and more independent as they age, while older men become more dependent. According to a piece in the New York Times entitled "What? Me Marry? Widows Say No," older widows are especially likely to choose not to remarry. Again, the odds (about five women to every man) are usually cited in this connection--as if four out of five widows can't find anyone willing to marry them. But the remarriage rate goes dawn in proportion to rising income, and a woman who would presumably be one of the "better" catches is more likely not to remarry. What's especially striking is that the researchers say it's often the women who had good relationships who prefer to stay alone: "These women, especially the ones who have had successful marriages and careers," one clinical sociologist is quoted in the article as saying, "are whole unto themselves. They don't have anything to prove."

    As for the young, whatever their race, economic level, or background, they already take much of the change for granted, even while their befuddled mothers, teachers, and other putative role models are still groping for definition. A CBS--New York Times poll of teenagers produced results so startling that they rated front-page coverage. POLL OF TEENAGERS FINDS BOYS HOLD MORE TRADITIONAL VIEWS ON FAMILY, said one headline. According to this study, "The girls surveyed were more likely than the boys to say they could have a happy life even if they do not marry and that they would consider becoming a single parent." Only 61 percent of the boys said they could have a happy life if they didn't get married, while 73 percent of the girls said they could be happy without being married.

    Only one quarter of the girls said they had to be married to be happy! This is not just a trend, it's a new order, especially since this is the stage of a girl's life when she is in the thick of romantic fantasy. It is not her need for romance that has changed, it is the direction that it takes. Just a few decades ago, a woman officially became an old maid at twenty-four. Now she expects to work and have fun.

    The women in the huge demographic group in between very young and old-old are considerably more disoriented. They do wonder to themselves how they got from there to here--there as little girls, carefully taught to assume a "normal" role, to here in an era where very few of the old certainties seem relevant. They recall their girlhood fantasies, they remember the vision of the prince on the notorious white horse. And, realistically, they're aware of their grown-up-woman needs for intimate human exchanges and connection. Nearly all at least sometimes wish for a feeling of home, the End of Loneliness, and some wonderful combination of friendship and sex. But finding comfort in marriage has become rare. Your married friends will tell you that they really work at their relationship, and those are the ones in the "good" marriages. Married or not, we all know very well that marriage isn't what anyone had expected, let alone hoped for. That some are addressing these problems from within marriage and others from without is not usually recognized, probably because, in the official hierarchy, marriage is still considered to be on a higher rung. But the reality is that while there are a few truly "good" marriages to be seen, even the good-enough marriage is still felt by many married women to be an arrangement that most benefits the man. "Marriage used to be a very straightforward deal," says one three-times-married woman. "The husband provided the money and the security, and the wife provided emotional and intellectual support, a home, children, sex. But now the men aren't even doing their part, so you have to do both. You have to provide support and children and sex and a second income? It's a bad deal."

    Many formerly married women describe how nothing so specific ever really destroyed their marriages, but time and again they felt the interest and the intensity wane in a relationship, the quality of the dialogue deteriorated to an unacceptably low level. For many people, marriage doesn't end loneliness, it recycles it.

    Yet single women have no collective sense of being a pivotal social force. Our society doesn't prepare women to be single, and there is no recognizable subculture, no movement, to provide definition. There is no concert of gestures, no organization, no named social entity. And so for a surprising number, there is no constructed awareness of this new trajectory. There is a startling contradiction in the disparity between the dramatic statistics of the demographic change and the extraordinary vagueness about its place in history.

    Even the word is slippery, and very few women actually think of themselves as "single" except when they're filling out forms. They'll say, "I live alone" or "I'm raising children on my own." More and more, they don't even say, "I've never been married" or "I'm divorced" unless you ask. It's as if they had no easily discernible pattern to refer to, except for those that were the paths not taken. Although they often generalized, "Married people think that ...," not one single woman I interviewed began a sentence with the words "Single women think that ..."

    Who are these women who take out their own mortgages, who travel on their own, who raise children on their own, who are able to love and leave, or who tolerate being loved and left? While the problems that plague the institution of marriage are endlessly masticated, few mirrors are held up for those outside the institution. Despite the fact that their numbers are quickly increasing, that they are collectively a crucial cog in the workplace, that their different view of the family is both reflecting and contributing to colossal changes in how the entire country lives, there is no sense of a constituency of any sort.

    "Was it a choice?" I asked my subjects. It was and it wasn't, they often said, as if they couldn't quite believe that they have actually come to a position that still seems radical: "I would never give up my independence," said a middle-aged widow. "It's become the most important thing in the world to me." Then she paused and looked thoughtful. "I don't really know what happened ..." she continued, as if her previous statement hadn't been explanation enough.

    A friend in her forties who had just gone through a gruesome divorce and began living alone, getting her bearings, said it is both far preferable and anxiety provoking. "I know this is a real choice; this is the best hope for me at this time. It's because I have hope for myself that I can get through whatever I have to go through living alone. But it's just that every now and then I go in and out of it. It's like getting a radio frequency. Sometimes I get it clearly, and sometimes I just lose it entirely...."

    In the course of the conversations that follow, I found myself so often steeped in ambiguity that I had to remind myself of all the very real manifestations of this radical shift. For every three married women in America there are two single women. Eleven million are widowed, ten million are divorced, and, most surprising, more than nineteen million are never married. Beyond the 40 percent drop in remarriage, it is this figure that most dramatically shows the scope of social transformation. In 1970, only one in six Americans over eighteen had never married. By 1995, fully one quarter had never been married.

    The economic factor alone is inescapable. Single women head more than twelve million households. While we are bombarded with statistics showing how many unmarried welfare recipients we are supporting, one only need turn on the television and watch the ads to get the other side of the story. There's a young single woman explaining she is going to IKEA to furnish her apartment because she may or may not continue to live alone, and this place is only big enough for her, but why wait? There's the black single woman being treated very, very politely by the bank officer who is trying to persuade her to take a mortgage out from his financial institution. Most telling perhaps is the ad for gold jewelry that is specifically targeted to women: "The gift you give yourself."

    If their voice is flagrantly missing from the American dialogue, it is because forty-three million single women seem to have no unified vision of themselves as an American type. No ideology induces them not to get married or not to stay married and they therefore invariably characterize their decisions as personal. There was so much variation in my interviews, so much individual history had come into play, that for a long time I found it difficult to specify what they had in common beyond their legal status. Except, I sensed, an undefinable something.... Perhaps, precisely, their lack of definition.

    But, of course, that was it. Single women in the '90s have left behind the old contexts. They've always been marginal, defined by what they were not. But, along with the certitude that marriage is irrevocable, even the notion of who is an outsider has changed. Divorce and remarriage rates are evidence that the membranes are now permeable. Women are in relationships or not, or they are for a long time and then they're not. They're angry at men or they're not, or they constantly change their minds about whether they are or not. They have lovers or they're chaste. They don't want to have anything to do with men, or they can't get enough of them. They may be feminine in the old sense (inviting, attractively fragile) and/or feminine in the new sense (independent, combative, resilient, masculine), or both.

    As a result, taken as a group, single women's most distinguishing characteristic is an extraordinary degree of cultural ambiguity. They're improvising their living arrangements, their financial arrangements, their sexual relationships, their friendships, their sense of social place. Alternately perceived as ridiculous or impressive, pathetic or enviable, possessed of the most unpredictable of futures, they have no common image. The culture has no fix on single women.

    It took me a long time to identify it, but there's an atmosphere I now associate intimately with my subject. It is a floaty feeling, an injection of the ineffable into the imperatives of daily life. It emanates even from women who seem to be extremely bound to the literal, by obligations to work or family. Despite the flat conclusiveness of the phrase "there are no men," this new consciousness, strangely combining loss and freedom, is rich with undiscovered meaning.

    But more to the point at any one moment in the life of a single woman are all the decisions to be made and problems to be reckoned with. And the days add up, of course, fast, and it all goes by, and so if you have any occasion at all to ponder the question "How did I get from there to here?" it is in a spirit of tremendous puzzlement.

HERE CAME THE BRIDE

Of course, there are powerful images from long ago. I asked:

What fantasies did you have of yourself as a woman when

you were a little girl? Did you imagine a wedding

where you were the bride?

SUSANNNAH W., who is in her late 40s, recently went through the excruciating breakup of a ten-year relationship.

    Growing up I didn't have any fantasy of marriage. No, I clearly remember thinking, I'm never going to get married. The only fantasy I had started one day when I was walking home from junior high school. I still remember what street I was on ... and, oddly enough, I thought to myself, I want to be a lawyer. Why, I don't know. It could have been Della in the Perry Mason series--I thought she should be elevated.

SUE M., is 38 years old, a native of Poughkeepsie, twice divorced.

    A wedding fantasy? No. I must have, but I don't remember one.

MARTHA H. occupies a corner office in a big company. Highly effective in her work, very attractive, never married. Quite foggy about how she got from there to here.

    No. No wedding ceremony, anyway. Once I became aware that they existed, I had a fantasy of the announcement in the New York Times but never a fantasy of the wedding itself.

    I don't remember a fantasy of being a wife, though I did have one of being a mother. But mostly what I had were extremely strong romantic fantasies. Along the line of Green Mansions or something like that. How I was going to get to the Amazon jungle, I don't know.

    But when you think about it, of course, isn't the man the whole point of Green Mansions? Rima, the bird girl, or whatever she was, she gets the guy.

MARY ANN B., 45, is a journalist. One long marriage, one long affair. Alone for the last five years, save for the occasional fling.

    Oh, yeah, every time I went to a wedding. But the fantasy was about the clothes. If you just gave girls the clothes, it would prevent a lot of marital disasters. But the clothes indicate the role. They're the uniform. And they're the metaphor for romance. If you look at all the bride magazines, it's all about domesticity, but the male figure is virtually a shadow. I think if women could get married without men, the bride, that figure in a gown, would keep the same meaning.

    Well, yes, of course I saw myself as a bride. Who else would you see yourself in the role of? You never see yourself in the role of the mother-in-law.

CALLIE S. is a real estate agent in her late 50s, mother of a grown daughter from a former marriage and a young daughter out of wedlock.

    Holy cow! Did I ever see myself as a bride? Honest to God, I don't know. Fantasies of bridal gowns? Nah ... Not me. What I do remember is playing house. I used to play house with Benny Glinn--his father ran the gas station around the corner. We never played doctor, though. We never did any of that kind of stuff. I don't know why. I want to go back!

ANITA S., turning 40, is an academic who plans to adopt a child next year.

    My sister and I had Bess Meyerson bride dolls that my mother gave us. But even before that, there was one year when my mother sewed bride dresses for us for Christmas They were sort of loose--they didn't have a waist--and looked more like communion dresses than wedding gowns. They were very long, of course, and they were kind of gathered at the wrist, and then there was a wraparound apron embellished by white ribbon and that material that's like tulle. We tied it around our waist, which gave it a kind of gauzy thing. And then we had plastic high-heel slippers that had glitter in them, silver glitter, and they were held on by two criss-crossed silver elastic bands.

    How old? Oh, I must have been six or seven. And my sister was four. She looked totally confused, like, "What am I doing?" Whereas I was smug. Like Winnicott would say, my mother had met my gesture. No, it wasn't like Halloween at all. Halloween was cowgirls and gypsies, and we worked on the costumes together. But these, my mother made them for us in secret and gave them to us at Christmas.

    And it's around then that I got my Bess Myerson bride doll. I had seen it on TV and really wanted it. I couldn't believe my mother sent for it. It came in the mail.

ELLEN P. is textiles curator of a museum, unmarried, much loved. Quite clear about how she got from there to here.

    My bride doll was my most precious object when I was little, and I had a most pervasive, profound fantasy about marriage and children. Even now, I religiously read the section of the Times about weddings. I'm completely haunted by the idea of this configuration. And I keep imagining that I'm secure and clear enough about what I want for myself that I could share a life with somebody else. That does not go away

REWRITING LITTLE WOMEN

Sentimentality isn't what it used to be.

SUSANNAH W., a film critic, is the one who just had the painful breakup. Black T-shirt, black jeans, black high-heeled sandals. She still smokes.

    I do remember, when I was ten, rewriting Little Women. I rewrote the whole book and illustrated it. What I did was, I eliminated the guy--do you remember?--he was the sort of wuss. I axed him from my version. And how about Jo who had to sell her hair because her father was fighting in the Civil War? In my version, she didn't have to cut it after all; she kept all her hair. And she sold a story. It was so inappropriate that Jo, who I thought was so terrific, should have to pay the price and end up with that much older man who was just unexciting, so I eliminated him, also. And she had some dashing thing happen to her.

    Yes, it's true, Jo would have been the single woman. And she was the one who was talented, she was the voice of the book, I think. And where was Meg? Now it fades. Meg, Amy, Beth. Beth who died ... Good riddance. I wanted her to get a life.

    But that's when I was really little. Seven--or eight, maybe. I think I stopped having ambition when I was ten. My desk was taken away from me at that point because I spent too much time in fantasyland, as my father called it. I grew up in a house where I knew I couldn't let anybody know what my ambitions might be. I had an extremely fraught life with my father, trying to establish how to get around him all the time. My blocking move was to be extremely private and not tell anyone what I wanted. But he had the power. My little stuffed animals were taken away. My books were taken away. He thought I read too much, and this isn't what he had in mind for me. He wanted me to be his secretary and my mother's nurse. He thought he was being practical, but it was really because he was a pessimist. He was really ignorant.

MONICA V., 48, divorced, midwestern entrepreneur. She was the first interview I did for this book. Smart, warm, and bemused by the course her life had taken.

    I was a gawky kid, I was too tall, I was not very pretty. Intelligence was not particularly given any social weight where I went to school. I come from a small town in the Midwest, farm country. I had this very sort of American, low-class American, upbringing, even though we did very well--my father was the mayor. But it was so important for me to really fit in, and I didn't. I never, ever fit in. I was too smart or not smart enough or didn't look right or, you know, didn't have the sense of humor, wasn't Miss Personality. And I would worry about never being able to get married. I would really think about that. I never had a date in junior high school. I didn't have a date in high school. Not only did I graduate high school a virgin, I don't think I had even kissed, I never had a boyfriend. And this was a place where everyone got married out of high school. And when I've gone back to high school reunions since then, I mean, these people now have grandchildren! And that was how it was going to be. I think the reason I went to college was because I would meet a better type of husband. I went to a big school--Kent State--and there I started to date.

    Everything was a lot of fun. It was the '60s. And then at that point, I started to think, Well, yeah, I will get married, but maybe not right away.... And then ... then I had boyfriends, and then I stopped thinking about what the future was going to be, and then I had a boyfriend for five years, right out of college, and then I had another boyfriend for five years, and then I had another boyfriend ... you know. And then I did get married, but when my marriage broke up six years ago or whenever, all of a sudden I found myself alone, without any prospects of going into another relationship.

JENNIFER B., born in New Jersey, 32 years old, a portfolio manager, is in a relationship that she characterizes as "OK." She is similarly concise about her marital status.

    Why am I single? Because I'm not afraid to be by myself. And I intimidate men.

MARY ANN B., the journalist.

    I think my parents are still waiting for my sister and me to settle down and get normal. Even though I'm on the cusp of fifty.

    But they really do belong to a purely couple generation. And I think that's the last couple generation we're going to see. I really do. Even though the right wing is trying as hard as they can to restigmatize divorce, as long as women have economic independence, divorce will always be with us.

    And I think divorce is good for marriages. If you have a society in which there can be no divorce, men who have all the power right now could keep behaving as badly as they want to because women would have no choice, they couldn't leave.

ANTONIA O. lives in a rural environment. She is a secretary in her late 30s, soft-spoken, delicately courteous, and unselfconsciously unconventional.

    I don't think I ever thought of myself as being married. I had crushes on boys, but I don't think I ever imagined myself being married and being a housewife. I rode horses and imagined myself being a high jumper. I imagined myself going to school and learning a lot. I don't think I clearly imagined any kind of work, except when I was very young: riding in the westerns, riding back and forth over the hills and prairies, in the background of the westerns. I thought that would be a great job.

Copyright © 1998 Marcelle Clements. All rights reserved.