What is shaping culture: The single life

Photo by Suhyeon Choi on Unsplash.

Do you take you to be your lawfully wedded … you? Linda Doktar did. She’s our introduction to The Single Life, a woman who married herself on a beach and in the process made visible something that many among us have become: dedicated and committed to ourselves.

“...how we are showing up for ourselves is how the world is going to reflect back at us, including our friendships, our environment and our relationships. I really wanted to enter into a conscious relationship with myself and I wanted to really tap into the unconditional love of honouring myself because quite often we get caught up in treating others nice but how are we actually treating ourselves?”

So, what we understood from Linda is this is not so much about committing to being single so much as committing to looking after yourself, in order to be the best you that you can be. Committing to caring for your mental and physical health, for what you want to do, for how you want to live your life, and by doing so creating the strongest best version of yourself that you can be. If you do find a romantic partner, they will find in you a person powerful in their own skin, hopefully resulting in a much healthier relationship than if they hadn’t first cared for themselves.

Not everyone does this intentionally, having found themselves single for some time they’ve adapted to a new way of thinking which gives them a sense of independence that they didn’t know they had.

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The Single Life, despite all the dating apps and the amorous suitors sliding into your dm’s, is something that is becoming more and more attractive to some people. We are taught from a young age that, in order to have a healthy relationship, we’ll need to adapt to our partner, to make concessions, to compromise. And, while this is true, we cannot ignore the fact that we are stand-alone people who have wants and needs that are uniquely our own.

Mental health is a major problem in modern life and many are finding ways to address their mental health in more conscious ways. One of those ways is to release oneself from the societal pressures that say that you have to either be in a relationship or chasing one.

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People like Olwethu have a growing awareness which many generations before simply didn’t have, or didn’t have the luxury to have. Historically, gender roles dictated a certain level of need to be in a relationship (especially women as they were prevented from earning a decent salary and becoming independent). This norm has changed, meaning that women neither need to, nor have to be in a relationship in order to have an enjoyable life. Equally, with men, the norm that without a partner they were somehow less ‘of a man’ no longer exists, freeing all genders from that societal pressures, somewhat.

Author, academic and activist Dr Bella DePaulo made a serious statement regarding how those who are single are treated. Her assertion is that single people are being consciously and unconsciously discriminated against. The term she coined in relation to this discrimination is ‘singlism’, which she compares to racism and sexism.

Some singlism actions include those single people get used to and don’t seem to notice much – friends in relationships no longer invite singles along to events, or colleagues expecting more of you at work because you are not in a relationship. But DePaula also highlighted a few very real problems that single people have. For instance, the ‘single supplement’ when travelling or effectively paying more per person for rent.

There are more than 1000 laws in the USA that benefit and protect people who are legally married. Sometimes that involves financial protection offering opportunities to people who are married but not to those who aren’t. Moreover, single people are a massive part of the population and, generally speaking, are ignored as a growing culture.

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