#1 Marriage is the Key to Happiness. So untrue! We know there are a lot of unhappy married folks. Many divorced or widowed people do with their singleness what they should have done before they married for the first time: live alone, find their own rhythms, date a variety of people, go into therapy, develop new friends and interests, learn how to live with and care for themselves.

#2 I’m ____ years old and still single — Something Must Be Wrong With Me! Singlehood is no longer a state to be overcome as soon as possible. It has its own rewards. Marriage is not the gateway to adulthood anymore. For most people it’s the dessert – desirable, but no longer the main course.

#3 Single means Incomplete. Completeness does not come from another person. I don’t have a boyfriend. And No, I don’t need a boyfriend. I am enough. And I am complete just the way I am. I choose to be single, just like I choose to not listen to people who make marriage seem like the only possible pinnacle a life can have.

#4 Single means Alone. Some would argue that it is better to be quirky alone than unhappy together. Being single isn’t the cause of loneliness, and marriage is not necessarily the cure. Everyone is lonely sometimes, even married people. But regardless of your being quirky or not, we all crave companionship and the closeness of a friend. As singles we must reach out to others and make friends. There are several ways to do this by: joining a Meet-up group, enroll in a class, try new things, begin to build a new life, etc.

After all, singleness is experienced by everyone.

Photo Credit

Strolling © by joiseyshowaa on Flickr

As the village has grown and brought an influx of new people, it has become more commercially minded, and our new hairdresser, Maude, is full of new ideas. Apart from putting blue/green streaks in hair, razor cutting designs into the backs of the boys’ heads, and highlighting my hair with vermilion, she single-handedly invented the Bachelors’ Ball.

The new permissive streak in the village conscience was evidenced a few years back when the firemen came around with their annual calendar. Most of the young men in the area are at sometime volunteer firefighters and we know most of them because they have helped out with our cider making. So when Florian (the French name for Prince Charming) presented himself with his calendar at our front door a few years back, we were not surprised. However, he then took a sly gander around, and shiftily slid fhis jacket not the old standard calender but THE calendar we have all been waiting for.

THE calender is somewhere between Women’s Institute calendar — as in Calendar Girls (the film where the women all posed nude to raise money for cancer) — and The Full Monty (the film about unemployed steel workers who form a Chippendales-type group). It shows 12 great photos of the young and muscled men of the village Blangy in their posing pouches, sporting their firemen’s helmets and naughtily hosing each other down with water jets. Imagine rippling muscles, great pecs, and wet male bodies and you’ve got the picture. Daniel Craig, eat your heart out.

Not many people in Blangy did, in fact, get the picture. It was reserved for the more broadminded few. The other calendar is a bog standard one with stiffly uniformed firefighters all in a row in front of the fire engine, posed like the CRS (French SAS) ready for a riot.

The most important date in our village is 14^th February – St Valentine’s Day — and now that we have a flower shop and a card shop (the heights of sophistication) we celebrate St. Valentine with the usual wine and roses but also with Maude’s Bachelors’ Ball.  After the War, there was always a village dance on a Saturday night. The villages took turns hosting  the dance because of the lack of young people in small villages. So the young farm hands with tractors went off in search of young girls with farms. These unsophisticated affairs soon got invaded by townies, who just went along for the fisticuffs, so the ‘Bals’ seemed to have faded out some time in the 70s.

In recent years, Blangy replaced the weekly hop with the Meet and Mate dance called La Fete des Celibataires (The Bachelor’s Ball), organised by Maude, our new hairdresser. Her shop was known jokingly as Radio Blangy because it was where all the local events were discussed and dissected and gossip spread so she had a ready-made and eager clientele.

The Bachelors’ Ball is a huge success for singles, and some couples go too, for the fun.  The bar, the restaurant and all the local shopkeepers have a hand in it and decorate the Salle des Fetes (village hall) with red roses and hearts, streamers and garlands and cover every table with a red cloth.  The menu is printed on a romantically decorated place mats; everyone gets a ticket for the prize draw, heart-shaped key holders, a condom and a tube of KY jelly, and a discount card for buying sexy undies in a store in Lisieux.

Most of the prizes were cuddley teddies or satin bags to keep your nighties in. I won a baby’s bottle which Maud, amidst gales of laughter, said, at my age, would have to do for the lambs.  The merchants of Blangy haven’t discovered Anne Summers yet, which is probably just as well because there are two fashion parades while we are waiting for each course, a sort of inter-course entertainment, you could say. Village maidens troop onto the stage in big white bathrobes and drop them unceremoniously to the floor, revealing matching sets of bras, basques, strings, garter-belts and stockings, then they flounce around the dance floor posing for us to take photos.

Next, the young bucks sidle in from the wings in their fetching pouches, boxer shorts, strings, tiny underpants and cowboy hats.  They obviously all think they are irresistible — and in their own eyes they are. We are not supposed to notice they are unsophisticated and gauche. It is all quite sweet.

By the time we reach dessert, the Chippendales or some other strippers arrive to much noisy cheering and oohing and aahing.  The strippers nearly always arrive late because they have to come up from Paris and end up lost in the bush, so to speak. There are no local strippers for hire or pole/lap dancing clubs in Lisieux because it is a place of pilgrimages (St. Theresa of Lisieux) so the church pays a hefty sum to the local council to keep all such unseemly activity out of bounds – the bounds being about 30 kilometres around. (One of our friends ran a DVD hire shop and offered a selection of erotic films, as no one else was doing that, but a rival company must have reported him to the local authorities and he had to remove all the erotica.)

The Bachelors’ Ball seems to be harmless fun but there is always someone who goes too far, and maybe those celibate priests know this.  One of our local heroes in the fire brigade gets all aflame and does a “full monty” at about 4am – but lovers have paired off long before that and old fogies like us have gone home to bed.  Some fisticuffs, fuelled by drink, occur between husband and wife, apparently, when the man shows too much interest in being massaged by a nubile young lady. Not quite the Hunt Ball but incredibly popular and many a country lad has found his true love.

Jean-Louis from down the lane (the bottom in love’s school of his class and whose minute maelstrom of a mother would never approve his choice of bride) found true love last year.  His mother had tried, years ago, to explain the facts of life to him and his brother. In her attempt to help the boys distinguish human coupling from what went on with the cows and the borrowed bull, she tried to explain that once a month women had a period but, not knowing how to put it delicately, she merely explained that once a month women were unwell.  Jean Louis is supposed to have retorted, “Well, thass it then, innit. Oim not having nuthin to do with women what are ill.  I got too much to do around yer without having to look after any sick woman.”  When he went to the first Fete des Celibataires, there was a transvestite Can-Can Chorus Line which was very popular.  Jean-Louis spent quite a bit of time dancing with one of the girls and nobody liked to tell him they were all chaps in drag.

Anyway, last year Jean-Louis found the love of his life, a large lady, well past middle age with suspiciously raven locks, glasses like the bottom of lemonade bottles, and obviously a heart of gold since Jean-Louis is no heart throb. He has huge sticky-out ears and is locally known as Prince Charles. He spent the first few days of his new relationship parading his love proudly around the village and holding her hand in very proprietorial fashion.

He keeps a happy smile on his face, like a permanent emoticon, but his brother, Michel, is now worried that Jean-Louis will leave the farm and he will be left to cope on his own. They are having such trouble with their cider making now that Jean-Louis has discovered his very own “Rosie”* and is not paying attention to the production details. Their bottles have exploded in shops and the shop-keepers no longer want their product.  They have called Ted around several times to taste and give advice but to no avail. Jean-Louis’ mind is no longer on plunging his densimetre into his beloved cider anymore.

The bad news is that this year, there will be no Bachelors’ Ball. It is not the fault of the Pope, who has called a halt to the “sinful” displays, but rather the local businesses quarrelling amongst themselves about who does the most work on it and how unfair it is that? Forget “fighting on the beaches”, these Norman villagers can fight perfectly well amongst themselves but how the village guys are going to meet their dolls this year, I don’t know. Perhaps someone could invent a computer with tractor controls – that might work

* This is a reference to Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee,  which is Lee’s memoir of growing up in rural England between wars. There is a fabulous DVD available of the 1971 BBC TV series of Cider with Rosie but you must specify that it is the one with Rosemary Leach as there was another version. The DVD is hard to get and you may only be able to get a VHS version.

Photo Credits

All photos © J Mclean

Interviewing the Sweet Spinsters

Bachelors Ball

Dirty Dancing

“I hope I’ll get an ice cream cone today. I hope grandma doesn’t make me eat turnips. I hope I get a pony ride. I hope daddy will come back someday.”

Hope is a six year old in an woman’s body.

“I hope that if I’m very good, if I smile pretty and wear nice clothes, but I’m naughty in bed, he’ll leave her and be with me.”

The flip side of hope is despair.

Despair is Sylvia Plath readings at a coffee house. Despair is three quarters of a bottle of wine sitting in the bath when he leaves. Again.

Daddy never came back. Men never stay.

Faith is twelve years old.

“If I pray very hard every night to Jesus, he will bring me a new bike.”

Faith is a twelve year old in a woman’s body.

Faith is dating; another evening seated across from a man who has nothing to say, imagining a dress, a ring, another walk down the aisle. Faith is the rituals of coupling and couplehood well before harvest time, invoking an intimacy that could never take root in such shallow soil.

“Maybe if I pretend I like Enya and vacationing in a 36-foot-long gas guzzling motorhome, I can make this work. After all, he would never leave, he’s devoted to me.”

The flip side of faith is suspicion.

Suspicion is poison emails and text messages and a hot rage that burns bridges and destroys relationships. Distrust is finding a stray message and kicking him out at 11 pm, throwing his shoes out the window while your chest caves in.

“Fuck you then. You will never have another chance to hurt me, ever.”

Charity is eighteen years old.

“I’m staying in the school gym for 24 hours without eating anything … to raise money for the food bank.”

Charity is an eighteen year old in a woman’s body.

“Oh no, look what I’ve done. I can’t just leave him with blue balls can I? He’d be so upset if I said no right now.”

Charity changes nothing. Charity is stealing someone’s dignity with a handout. Charity is an endless feedback loop that teaches nothing and prolongs the misery.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t really love you; I didn’t mean for it to get this far.”

What is the flip side of charity, hope, faith: selfishness? No, charity IS self-serving. In reality, the flip side of charity is compassion. Wisdom. Letting go with love. It’s a timeless acceptance and serenity in this 45-year-old woman’s psyche.

I’m still working on it.

Today is our anniversary. I’ll forgive you for forgetting it, if only because you have no idea who I am. Just so we don’t have this awkward exchange on our next anniversary, let me jog your memory: I’m the frizzy-haired brunette who gets on the bus a few stops after you in the morning. The one who so carefully makes sure you avoid her longing gaze. Ringing any bells?

The fact of the matter is, Bus Boyfriend, like it or not, we’ve been seeing each other for five months now. And it’s been friggin’ magical.

A quick compendium of everything I know about you: Your hair is too long, even when it’s just been cut. The books you read are pedestrian at best, but it warms my heart how lost you get in those tacky Sexy Vampire Murder Mysteries. You wear nice clothes, but sloppily. You have the kind of face that tells me you wouldn’t kick a puppy – not even if the puppy kind of had it coming.

Over the months I’ve thought about trying to get to know more about you. Maybe even by talking to you, face to face. But what more could I possibly want to know?

Nonetheless, I almost crossed the line the other day. The only available seat that morning was next to you, so I sat there, quivering with nerves. Two stops before you left for work, I turned to ask you about the book you were reading. But I’d woken late that day, with no time to wash my hair, and a girl likes to look her best for the imaginary men in her life.

Besides, what could I possibly say to you? “You don’t know me, but I’ve been watching you?” Ha. Maybe if I were one of those Sexy Vampire Damsels. But I’m just me. And just-me prefers to leave you cast as Adorable Bus Boyfriend, instead of letting you relegate yourself to the role of Kind Rejecter of Advances or, worse, Pitying On-Looker.

Occasionally, to torment myself, I cobble together clues to figure out whether there is some non-imaginary girl in your life. One day you get off the bus at precisely the right stop to pick up a frothy little something for dessert; two days later, you stop in front of the big liquor store in the seedy neighborhood where I live. What can it mean, Bus Boyfriend? Champagne dinners a deux? Binge-pastries over lonely six-packs?

The other twenty-three and a half hours of your day are a mystery to me. But for now, the daily half-hour we share – away from home, then back; together, but not – is enough.

So happy anniversary, Bus Boyfriend, even if you don’t have the day marked. I only hope you are as wonderful in your real life as you are, imaginary, in mine.

Fondly,

TKOG

Photo Credit

“Love Letter” Artist Unknown

Our “dates” started after the whole Twilight-mania ignited a few years ago. We were trash talking everything about it (the movie, the books, the actors, the fans), and after our clever banter petered out, I said quietly, I kind of want to see it. To which Melissa sighed and said, Yeah, totally.

I drew the short straw and had to rent Twilight (yes, we were both embarrassed to be seen with it in our hands, to be JUDGED by the film snob elite of rental employees). Sadly, the movie turned out to be terrible. Not guilty-pleasure-secretly-loved-it terrible. Just plain terrible.

But our love of indulging in bad flicks stuck. Our latest was a trip waaaay down memory lane, to a movie of our shared childhood. I’ll give you a hint: Kim Cattrall is a sassy Egyptian who doesn’t want to be married off to some slouch.

So she prays reallllly hard and the gods flash her to late 80s, where she can meet her true soul mate, Andrew McCarthy. The only down side to this match made in heaven (literally) is that poor Kim is a…

…wait for it…

…a store mannequin.

This story gets made into a movie. Meanwhile, I can’t even get an agent to look at my screenplay. I’m not bitter.

Anyway, hilarity ensues as Andrew and his dummy get all hot and heavy, fall in love, and save the day. In case this description has you just itching to run out to your video store and rent this movie, it is oh-so-cunningly named Mannequin.

I got a little off topic there. My story isn’t about this bad movie. It’s about what happened on the way to watch this bad movie. We were walking down the hall of Melissa’s apartment building, when all of a sudden she grabbed my arm and said wait until you see something!

We were stopped in front of a small window. It looked out over the roof of the next building. On the other side of that roof was another apartment complex. Our little hall window lined up with the window of a kitchen in that complex.

What are we looking at? Oh. Oh my…

In that kitchen, standing in front of a stove, was a man. A man stood at a stove. He appeared to be cooking.

Cooking. Stove. Man.

It was the best porn I’ve ever seen.

We stood in the hallway, weak in the knees and sighing, while this MAN puttered around the kitchen. He was backlit so we couldn’t really see his face. But we could see his body. Oh, yes. We could see that. Stirring, adding spices, opening a cupboard, closing a cupboard, stirring some more. Then serving this food (food that he cooked) onto dishes, and carrying them, one by one, out of our line of sight.

Finally, when it was clear that the show was over, we dragged ourselves onward to our beer and our movie.

This weekend I found myself cat sitting for Melissa (previous tales of these cat-antics include My Sister’s Pussy) while she was off enjoying some kind of shenanigans. And I could not walk down that stupid hallway without stealing a peak out the window. Was Mr. Tall and Wonderful (I mean, seriously tall. Did I mention that? At one point I swear he was resting his elbows on top of his fridge.) doing a day-time performance? Perhaps getting a snack or a glass of water? No?

I’m aware that this is wrong. Wrong and bad. And probably kind of creepy. But I also think that curtains were invented for a good reason, and if you don’t want to use them, you risk being seen, and possibly appreciated. By strange girls.

With questionable motives.

Photo Credits

Mannequin © Wikicommoms. Creative Commons. Some rights reserved.

Man At Fridge © Flickr. Creative Commons. Some rights reserved.

Two of my students, middle-aged women from Ethiopia, asked me today why I don’t have a car. I went into the various reasons — to be more environmentally-friendly, to save money, to get more exercise. They weren’t convinced. One asked the other, “Was he born in Minnesota? Is he from here?” After that was confirmed, the other went on to say, “You have a family, you need a car. It’s important.” I then said “I’m single.” They couldn’t believe that one either. This opened the door to all kinds of questioning about when I would get married, and if, among other things, a rich woman with “a house and car” asked me to marry, would I do it. The whole conversation was pretty jovial, not heavy at all, but you can see some of the assumptions there.

But assumptions about relationships come not only from my immigrant and refugee students. They seem to arrive from all over the place, even from other 30-plus single people. Here are some of the assumptions I have run into as a result of being single for at least part of the past three years — post 30 years old.

1. There must be something wrong with you if you’re not coupled by now.

Somehow it still surprises a fair amount of people that you can be well-adjusted and yet not ever married, or even close to getting married, at my age. Even some 30-plus singles have made comments to me like this, which makes you wonder what they thought of themselves, given that we were in the same boat so to speak.

2. What about children? Certainly you want or have children, right?

This one seems to be especially true for female friends of mine who are 30 plus and single. And there still seems to be a cultural stigma around either not wanting children, or questioning whether you want children or not. Never mind that there six billion plus people on the planet, and hundreds of thousands of unwanted children languishing away in orphanages, group homes, and other places.

It’s one thing to wonder about someone like me if you’re from a war-torn country where children sadly die fairly often, and where childbirth itself is still a fairly difficult, sometimes dangerous process. Or from a country where family and relationship structures are highly controlled and norms adhered to because of what is considered culturally acceptable. I question these, too, and sometimes have “interesting” discussions with my students.

But to have such an attitude in the U.S. or some other post-industrial nation is, in my opinion, a failure to step outside of the reproduction box to see that not everyone needs to get married and have children to be well-adjusted and happy.

I say this more firmly because there has been much more talk about accepting alternative or complimentary approaches to living and being in countries like the U.S. We like to tell other nations we are democratic, open, free, etc. And yet we still seem to really like our white picket fence, two children, car in the big garage fantasy. So much so that many of us go around questioning and subtly or not so subtly go around shaming those who either don’t fit that norm now, or who never wanted to fit that norm in the first place.

3. Are you gay? Maybe even just a little bit?

Lines like this reveal so much. The heterosexual norm is so easy to threaten that simply being an older single raises alarms. And notice how there’s a not so subtle bias playing out in lines like this, which link “not normal” with being gay. The same may be said when the word gay is replaced with lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, or any other sexual minority. I have a friend who went on a date with someone who questioned him repeatedly about his sexuality solely because he works as a hairdresser. She couldn’t believe — because she failed to step out of cultural stereotypes — that he could be both a male hairdresser and interested in women.

And what if someone is part of the GLBT community? Somehow, getting a confirmation on such a question teaches you nothing about why someone is single. I have another friend who has spent much of her adult life single, and really quite content being single, and has only in the past few years started dating a bit. Although she has been attracted to both men and women in the past, she often chose to focus on the work and studying she was doing, and really didn’t feel she was missing out on something by not dating.

4. Aren’t you terribly lonely? How do you do it?

This line of thinking is understandable in some ways. Most of us want a close companion to share our lives with. And yes, sometimes I feel lonely, but not nearly as much as some people seem to think I would given my situation. However, there is still strong assumptions behind thoughts like this. First, that people want to be coupled at all times, and can barely handle it when they are not. Second, those who say they are just fine without a partner are somehow lying or maladjusted. Or, as a few have suggested to me, maybe “you should become a monk.”

In other words, being along like this as 30 plus adult somehow is linked with a spiritual calling in some people’s minds. This is not to say that such a link is never true, but it suggests the deep split we often have when it comes to sexuality and relational intimacy on the one hand, and spirituality on the other hand.

I find all of this very curious, and yet clearly it’s reflective of not only cultural issues with people who don’t “fit in”, but also an example of how strongly our minds want to pin things down, have solid answers about what reality is and how it works. A

A single man in his 30s raises a few eyebrows. A single woman in her 30s seems to raise a few more eyebrows. A single person whose gender you can’t quite define raises many eyebrows. And this seems more so when these people have no children. Single mothers and fathers get a lot of grief, too, but the children are markers of normalcy for them. I don’t have that kind of marker, and I’m not even sure I want to. And saying this, some might wonder what I think of children, as if the two issues have to be linked.

Photo Credit

“Happy Heart” fauxto_digit @ flickr. Creative Commons. Some rights reserved.

Previously published by Dangerous Harvests on July 28, 2009. Published with permission.