A Cougar, A MILF, and a Single Mother Walk into a Bar…

What happens next isn’t a surprise to women

A cougar, a MILF, and a single mother walk into a bar … She’s the same woman. Society just keeps slapping more labels on her.

I’ve been thinking, and writing, about these labels a lot lately. Maybe it’s because I just hit that aging milestone of 40, or maybe it’s because I continue to find myself subject to the judgment that comes from still being single. While men at this age can get the tidy label of bachelor, women get the designation of spinster or cat lady. Since I am divorced and have children but no cats, society either assigns my irrelevance or designates me as a MILF. I don’t often get termed a cougar since I’m not a mature woman who regularly dates younger men, but MILF (or Mothers I’d Like to Fuck) is an acronym I’ve heard one time too many.

If you’re curious, one time was too many.

I often wonder what it is about single women that makes the world so uncomfortable when single men cause no such concern. As I’ve been divorced several years now, I’ve had time to think about it. I think there are several factors in play here.

Happy Single Women are Envied by the Unhappily Coupled

I’ve decided that being happy as a single person is sometimes envied by people who are unhappily coupled. As a person who was once unhappily married and became happily single, it’s understandable. It’s hard to watch someone living their best life when we’re not yet living our own. As lonely as it can be sometimes being uncoupled, there’s little lonelier than being with someone and feeling alone.

Contented solitude becomes preferable to the ache of discontented companionship.

Happy Couples Want that Happiness for Their Single Friends

There’s a flipside to this coin. Couples who are genuinely happy in their relationships wish that same happiness for their single friends. It’s why they’re constantly recommending online dating, suggesting new dating apps, or telling us about their eligible single friends. They want us to find what they did because they understand how the right relationship can enhance our lives. It’s less about being bothered that we’re single and more about being eager for us to experience the same bliss they’ve managed to find.

Happily partnered couples managed to embody relationship goals and want us to experience it, too.

Labels Help Us Make Sense of the World

As much as many of us claim to hate labels, we label ourselves all the time. We define ourselves by what we do or who we are to other people. We choose handy descriptors to summarize our lives. But those are the labels we select for ourselves. It’s quite another thing to have other people slap a label on us.

The labels applied to single women are proof of a misogynistic double standard. Men get bachelor, a term with very little negative connotation. Women, on the other hand, hear MILF and cougar now that spinster has largely fallen out of fashion. Of course, that applies to older women. Younger women usually get painted with other labels like slut or prude, depending on their sexual activity. We’re just as shamed for having sex as for not. Older men may be termed a silver fox, another complimentary designation. Believe me when I say there is no such flattering term for a woman going gray.

Labels may be the world’s way of neatly categorizing us, but these aren’t labels we’re choosing. We’re being defined by our relationship status rather than by who we are and what we contribute to the world. Single women aren’t third wheels to twosomes or fifth wheels to a double date. We might make parties come out in odd numbers rather than even, but it seems like we shouldn’t be so hung up on symmetry that we forget we’re counting actual human beings. Just because we can’t be sorted two-by-two doesn’t mean we don’t count.

Single women make society uncomfortable. Perhaps it’s an ancestral discomfort leftover from Victorian times when an unmarried daughter equated to a financial burden and dowries were necessary to offload the financial stress of an extra mouth to feed. We’re so far beyond dance cards and calling cards that perhaps we should readjust how we view people who happen to be uncoupled.

Maybe we don’t need to slap them with a demeaning and uncomplimentary label just because they aren’t living the way we think they should. It’s past time to stop dismissing people for their age or ability, their race or relationship status, or the ways they are different and stand out from the crowd.

A cougar, a MILF, and a single mother walk into a bar … she’s the same woman, and she just wants to have a drink in peace.