Does Being Single and Childless Mean I Haven’t Grown as a Person?

The myths that we tell about women who lead non-traditional lives.

I was 40 and after a devastating breakup, I’d finally met someone I liked. He was handsome, tall, smart, and had the sexiest voice I’ve ever heard. We made plans to go on a date in the near future, but a few days later, he criticized me and questioned my professional competence — and in a way that was incredibly disrespectful.

I canceled the date. I was old enough to know that if he was already willing to treat me poorly before we’d even gone out, it would only go downhill from there.

I was proud of myself for honoring my needs and refusing to accept a situation that wasn’t empowering for me, but I was also deeply disappointed. I couldn’t believe it was so hard to find a partner who could see me as an equal.

“Oh honey, I’m so sorry. I know exactly how you feel,” one friend said. “Being single can be so hard.”

Her comment annoyed me just a little, I must confess. She hadn’t been single in twenty years. She had married the first serious boyfriend she had. She didn’t know “exactly” how I felt.

Then another friend said, “I know how hard this is — believe me, I’ve been there. But you’ll find someone any day now.”

This time, I could hardly hide my frustration. She had “been there” fifteen years ago, when she was 22. Finding someone “any day now” when you’re 22 is very different than waiting for that “any day now” when you’re 40 and have endured constant disappointment and frustration in romantic relationships.

My experience as a single woman in my forties was not at all comparable to their experience of being single in their twenties. And I didn’t appreciate the insistence that it was. There was something almost patronizing about that — something I couldn’t quite put my finger on…

“Everybody starts out in the same place. And then we grow. We change. We get married. We have kids. But we all started from that same place so even when some people move forward, we still remember what it’s like.”

I’d decided to do some research on why I kept getting these well-intentioned, but annoying assurances of solidarity from friends who insisted they knew exactly what I was going through. We were having a staff day at work and during lunch break, I shared my story and asked my female coworkers what they thought of my friends’ responses.

“What do you mean move forward?” I asked.

“You know,” Cindy said. “We all start out single and childless. Some of us choose to move forward and some of us choose to stay there.”

I immediately regretted this fact-finding mission, suddenly feeling like I was being shamed for the fact that I was single and didn’t have children.

I wasn’t surprised by her assessment of the situation, though. It finally put to words something I’d been seeing play out among women but hadn’t been able to really articulate.

When it came to relationships, my married friends were always so insistent that they knew what I was going through. Never mind the fact that they got married at 21 or 22 or 23 and had never lived alone as an adult or had to make it on their own.

Meanwhile, I stumbled through relationships only to find myself single — again — at 38. Being single as you approach 40 after a string of heartbreaks and disappointments is very different than being single at 21. Not worse. Not better. Just different.

I also noticed that after I turned 30 (still childless), my sister and sister-in-law seemed to hover a lot more (via constant texts) when I was babysitting their kids. My sister often says things like, “Don’t let them swim in the spa without watching them,” or “Don’t let them play in the street.”

“Are you joking?” I always fire back. “Do you really think I’d be that careless?”

“I’m just covering all the bases,” she’ll typically say. “You’re not a mother. I don’t expect you to think of that stuff.”

She doesn’t expect me to think about the preservation of their beautiful little bodies just because I’m not a mom? It almost feels as if some women see me as less competent the older I get without having a child.

It makes me think of my former coworker and her assessment of the situation. Do other women assume I didn’t “move forward?”

I hate to disappoint anyone, but this whole theory is ridiculous.

While yes, we all start out single and without children, that doesn’t mean we start out “in the same spot.” Our experiences and circumstances vastly influence who we are and who we become.

Further, getting married and having children are not accomplishments to be checked off a to-do list. These things are also not within our control, no matter how much some women would argue with that. You can want to get married and want to have children and still find yourself single and childless in middle age. That happens. Trust me, I know.

If these things don’t happen to occur or if someone deliberately chooses not to walk these paths, it’s not a failure to move forward in life.

I must admit, I hate the way we often entrap each other, as women, with these attitudes and beliefs. We judge each other for everything. But the judgments around marriage and motherhood are the ones that irk me the most. When we treat marriage and motherhood as markers of growth, as things to do to be a valuable and mature woman, we are high-fiving the patriarchy.

Marriage and motherhood do not make us who we are. Those are pieces of ourselves, pieces of our lives. We don’t grow, change, and develop because of marriage and motherhood. We grow, change, and develop because we are human. Every day of our lives is an opportunity for this growth. Yes, marriage and motherhood affect us profoundly, but so does life, itself.

This, I realize, is the core of the frustration I have felt when my married friends tell me they know exactly what it’s like to be in my shoes. That they remember being single and can relate so perfectly to my situation.

That is an insult to the growth I have experienced over the past twenty years. I am not the same as I was as a single girl in my twenties. And my situation now is not comparable to my friends’ experience of being single in their twenties.

I have grown. I have changed. My life has, yes, moved forward.

The struggles that I have today are not the same ones I had back then just because I was single then and am single now. The absurdity of that overwhelms me. Would we say someone’s relationship was the same in Year 1 as it is in Year 17 just because they were together then and are together now? Would we say a woman seeing her child off to college is the same woman she was when she was breastfeeding that child?

Of course not. We recognize and celebrate the changes that a woman goes through as a wife and as a mother.

So why on earth do we not recognize the evolution of a single, childless (or childfree) woman?

I have said it before and I will say it again: We don’t know what to do with women like me in our culture. Women who reach middle age without ever having been married. Women who haven’t had children, either due to choice or circumstance.

Sometimes, I fear we place women like me into glass bowls, like odd little fish, so we can examine these strange creatures. There’s this virgin fantasy around us — the women who remained in “perpetual maidenhood.” The women who “decided not to move forward” in life. The women who are frozen in time, in that place where we all supposedly “started out together.”

The problem is, we are not the ones who have frozen ourselves in time. It’s our culture that has done that, refusing to acknowledge that we are human beings who can’t not grow and change. It’s the people who keep us in those glass bowls, staring at us as if puzzled as to why we didn’t keep up with the illusory and meaningless “curriculum deadlines,” or “trail markers.”

We aren’t stunted if we haven’t gotten married or had children by a certain age. We haven’t stopped growing and changing.

We’re just on a different path — parallel and no less valuable.

© Yael Wolfe 2020

On “otherhood”: