I come from a long line of single women. My mother wasn’t single. She was married to my dad for twenty-seven years and would have been married to him for much longer had he not died at way too young an age. She was widowed at age forty-nine and never remarried. She was ninety-two when she passed, so she was single longer than she had been married. My great aunts, who raised my father and his sister, were what was referred to back in the day as “Old Maids.” My maternal grandmother was widowed before I was born and never remarried. My father’s sister was widowed once and divorced once and decided twice was enough – or perhaps too much. I’ve been married once but that was so long ago it feels more like some guy I went steady with in high school. Except that we had a daughter together. My daughter is – what else? Single.
A lot of the women I know are single as well. Some have been married a time or two and there are a few who never took the plunge. The reasons are varied and I think the women who were never married sometimes feel they’ve missed something. I and my divorced counterparts could tell them they didn’t miss much, unless one wants to miss waiting for an errant husband to come home in the wee hours of the morning. That’s an experience I would gladly have missed.
It’s harder financially when you’re a single woman and there are some who would marry just to shore up their bank accounts. I’ve had the opportunity to be a kept woman. That was a long time ago, when I was young and still fairly nubile. I passed. He was an old guy and had bleeding gums. There wasn’t enough money in the world… Now? The offers aren’t exactly pouring in. You get to be my age and you tend to become invisible, at least in the dating world.
I suppose I could go looking online. Actually I have. There are plenty of age appropriate men looking for a woman like me. Except not really. I think I’m a little too much for most men. I piss them off because I have a lot to say and I say it, whether they like it or not. But mostly, I just don’t have the time. I never have. There have always been things I wanted to do that got in the way of finding someone who would then want me to do what they wanted me to do instead of what I wanted to do. And I don’t want to do that.
I am reminded of my Great Aunt Annie – my namesake. She lived to be 103 years old and was never married. On her hundredth birthday, the local paper interviewed her and asked the secret of her longevity. She answered that having never been married was the reason she’d reached the century mark. The reporter then asked if she liked men. I suppose that would raise quite an outcry in today’s world. But she just smiled and said, yes, of course she liked men. In their place.
I like men too. I just don’t need one. Maybe, if I met the right man, I would want him but he’s never presented himself to me and the truth is, after being single for nearly all of my life, having to share a space with a man would be very difficult. Of course, if we lived in a mansion…
