There is a question I have been thinking about for many years and I
still don’t know the answer: If there were no pressure whatsoever to
marry, if people were completely free to choose whatever life path
suited them best, how common would it be for people to choose to live
single? How many would not just settle for single life as some sort of
default option, but fully embrace it? How many would do whatever it
takes to get to live single, even if there were daunting obstacles in
the way?
When well-meaning people want to reassure single people they assume
to be sad about their single lives
, they say things like, “Being single
is better than being in a bad relationship.” That’s not what I’m talking
about. That’s way too grudging. I’m talking about people who are “single at heart (link is external),”
who feel that living single is how they live their best life. They are
not settling for living single because some fantasized romantic partner
never made an appearance; long-term coupledom just isn’t one of their fantasies.
I can reframe my question in a way that a skeptic might: Is “single
at heart” really a thing? Are there really people who are single not
because that’s the life they are stuck with, but because it is the life
they joyfully chose? If the answer is yes, how many such people are
there, or how many would there be if there were no pressures to make a
different choice?
It is possible to approach this question in a number of ways. The one
I’ll focus on here is to look for other times and places where people
went out of their way to get to be single.
I found a great example in Roseann Lake’s new book, Leftover in China: The Women Shaping the World’s Next Superpower (link is external). The relevant section drew from Janice Stockard’s Daughters of the Canton Delta (link is external).
The singles who overcame formidable obstacles to stay single were
Chinese women who lived in the Canton Delta between 1890 and 1930. The
first obstacle was the social norm of the time: staying single was
something that just wasn’t done.
Even more daunting was the stigma of being single around the turn of
the 19th century in China. Here’s how Lake described the prevailing
assumptions about the unmarried woman:
“Her spirit was believed to cause crop failure, infertility, and a host of other misfortunes. It was said that grass would not grow on the site where an unmarried woman had died, so moribund maids were taken out to pass away in deserted areas where the damages incurred by their spouselessness could be minimized. Then of course there was the predicament of an unmarried woman’s soul, which, lonely and restless, could come back to haunt the living and the wed.”
So, who was ready to sign up for that?
Single women who got a taste of economic independence – that’s who.
The single Chinese women of the Canton River Delta worked in the silk
industry, “pulling silk threads from their cocoons,” which involved
“extreme dexterity.” They were paid well – nearly twice as much as men
who were working in the fields.
Although families profited from having a daughter who could
contribute to their finances, and the women enjoyed some praise “for
their economic fortitude,” the tremendous pressures to marry did not
subside.
Lake described three ways the women of the Canton Delta found to get to live the life they wanted – their single life.
#1
One approach was to go through the motions of planning to marry, but then disappear on the day of the wedding:
“…runaway brides…were known to escape from home on the morning of their marriages or bolt from their bridal sedan chairs and hide from their grooms in empty graves until everyone had given up looking for them.”
#2
A second approach was to find a dead guy to marry. Yes, that was
actually a thing. These “spirit marriages” were “arrangements between a
woman and the family of a prematurely deceased bachelor who feared he
would be lonely in the afterlife.”
Not only were these spirit marriages a thing, they were a coveted
thing. When women learned that a dead bachelor was available, “women
would often fight viciously among themselves to marry him.”
#3
The third way these women found to hold onto their single lives was
to pay off the family of a live bachelor. They had money from their work
reeling the silk, and they were willing to pay what they had to – the
equivalent of a year’s salary – in order to get to stay single.
Technically, they were married, but their husband’s family used the
money to purchase a “little maid” who would provide a “compensation marriage.”
The outsourced wife would “bear children, care for in-laws, manage the
desires of the man of the family, and do all of the other wifely things
that renegade reelers would rather not do themselves.”
A woman who paid for another woman to be the wife she did not want to
be was still considered officially married. She got to be buried in the
plot of her husband’s family, and no one worried about her roaming
around in the afterlife spooking the living.
That era of living singly drew to a close at the dawn of the Great Depression,
when the demand for silk dropped precipitously. People just couldn’t
afford it anymore. The awesome opportunity that women had to support
themselves was over.
The women of the Canton Delta provide the first answer to my
question. They wanted to live single so badly that they hid in graves,
married dead men, or paid other women to perform wifely duties for them –
even though they knew that when they died, their bodies would be dumped
in deserted lands.
I think that qualifies as “single at heart.”
[Readers, if you know of any other great examples, please email me or post a comment.]
BY
Bella DePaulo (Ph.D., Harvard), an expert on single people, is the author of Singled Out and other books. She is an Academic Affiliate in Psychological & Brain Sciences, UCSB.
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