Stefanie Preissner

The stigma of being single

Is it just me or does it seem like our society demonises being single? Love Island is a TV show that is based on, and propagates, the underlying assumption that being in a couple is inherently better. We are continually fed the narrative that one becomes ‘whole’ or ‘complete’ when they meet ‘the one’.

Frankly, I think it’s a lethal load of nonsense that is actually damaging our society.

I saw a play once called The Ideal

Homes Show, where a character argued that swans are ‘more human’ than ducks because they mate for life. It got me thinking. Swans are not ‘more human’ because they couple up, because this would mean that humans who do not couple up are less human.

To say that you are ‘complete’ when you meet someone, implies that single people are somehow incomplete — which is actually quite offensive.

I learned from being raised by a single mother that singlehood does not equate to loneliness, and that independence is valuable and should be cherished. I think this is why I find those Hollywood narratives so problematic.

We all know the friend who melts into a new relationship. Their defining features disappear into their partner like an egg mixed with flour. You end up with a scone, whose composite parts are indecipherable. You send the friendly text, the invite, the request to meet up. After a sequence of messages that get left on ‘read’, you lose touch in a flurry of missed calls. Losing oneself in a relationship is an age-old trope.

Being single is not the same as being lonely, but I feel more and more as though the two are being conflated. We are born and immediately get tossed on to this conveyor belt of conformity.

Learn to walk. Learn to talk. Go to school. Go to college. Get a partner and a degree. Graduate. Get a job. Get married. Get a house. Get a child. Put the child through college. Complain about debt. Retire and die.

There’s some wriggle room for free will in there, but you catch my drift. This is the general expectation, so anyone who doesn’t fit the mould, anyone who choses an alternative, is seen as deviant. We put a spotlight on the minority and we demonise them. We focus on who isn’t playing along. Who isn’t dating, who isn’t getting married, and who isn’t procreating. These people are defective somehow. They must be, surely. And like a defective product or a mutant potato, we cast them off the conveyor belt.

Cultivating a world where people feel like outliers for being single is dangerous. When societies treat people like they are defective for being single, it leads to an array of consequences from loneliness to harassment and even abuse.

I just saw the film Joker, and was horrified at how easy it was to remove the comic-book backdrop to the story and take it at face value, as a story about a socially awkward and therefore isolated white man who cannot contain his rage for being bullied, teased and rejected any longer, so he becomes a mass murderer (with a side hustle as a sexual predator along the way).

I don’t agree with the narrative of the film and I don’t want to spend any time with the angry men who relate to the film’s eponymous hero, but I do think there is a kernel of truth in what it says about how society views people who diverge from social norms — particularly when that means they are not coupled. The film has lead to discussions around incels. This is an internet shorthand for men who are ‘involuntarily celibate’. They feel victimised by the women who won’t have sex with them; they rage at the society that makes them feel weird for being single, and sometimes these emotions metastasise, leaving a trail of (most often female) victims. The pressure to justify their singledom is so profound that they have to create a portmanteau that makes them the sexless victims of cruel women.

I remember attending a theatre after-party when I was single, and chatting to a very close male friend of mine. His girlfriend was sweating over at me, not knowing whether to see me as dangerous or pathetic. People are afraid of single people. Even single people are afraid of other single people. I love watching First Dates Ireland and am fascinated at how skeptical and suspicious the daters are of their ‘match’ just because they are single, when the whole point of the show is that you are both in that same lone canoe paddling in the apparent frosty waters of solitude.

The constant pursuit of a partner makes people terrified of themselves, their solitude and their own company. I know people who would rather go hungry than be seen eating alone. The scarier thing, I think, is that a fear of being alone, or being seen as ‘other’ for not being in a couple, lowers people’s standards for relationships.

People shift their boundaries, dismiss their desires and put up with being treated badly because they’ve been socialised to believe that being in a toxic relationship is better than being in no relationship at all.

Is that not a scary and depressing fact for a Sunday? Let me know @stefaniepreissner.

Cultivating a world where people feel like outliers for being single is dangerous