At some point in most women’s lives, a familiar line of thinking creeps in—whether on its own or planted by well-meaning parents: What if I don’t get married? What if I never find my person and end up alone?
For Joan, the panic hit in her 30s—strong enough to land her in a psychologist’s office. Back then, she says, “a woman who didn’t want a husband was assumed to have something wrong with her.” But her therapist—married with children, yet more open-minded than most—didn’t try to correct her with cheesy motivational mantras or fear tactics about a “ticking clock.” Instead, she asked a different question: What kind of husband would you want, if you had one?
Joan listed a few traits. Someone busy, she recalls saying. Someone deeply absorbed in his own life—his job, his hobbies, his community.
“So you’d want someone intellectually stimulating?” her therapist asked.
“No,” Joan replied. “I’d want someone who’s never home.”
It landed as a joke, though deep down, it wasn’t. What came from that session was an almost accidental realization that sounded radical at the time (it was around 1980): “Some people genuinely live their best lives independently,” Joan tells me. Now 79, single, and uninterested in changing her relationship status, she has spent decades proving her theory true.
How the single life became aspirational
For much of modern history, women like Joan were cast as anomalies, freaks, or worse, cautionary tales. There’s “the childless cat lady.” The “old maid.” The “lonely spinster.” Singlehood was framed as a transitional phase, a temporary stop on the way to finding The One. Not an end goal, and certainly not a fulfilling one.
