Kate Bolick

...but now, driving past the billboard I realized that losing everything is death. A death that I crave and I don't want anyone to save me

At first I thought it was simply that the specter of the crazy bag lady has been branded so simply into the collective female consciousness that we__e stuck with her. Now I realized I was wrong. What is haunting about the bag lady is not only that she is left to wander the streets, cold and hungry, but that she__ living proof of what it means to not be loved. Her apparition will endure as long as women consider the love of a man the most supreme of all social validations.

Whom to marry, and when will it happen__hese two questions define every woman__ existence, regardless of where she was raised or what religion she does or doesn__ practice. She may grow up to love women instead of men, or to decide she simply doesn__ believe in marriage. No matter. These dual contingencies govern her until they__e answered, even if the answers are nobody and never.

Today we tell girls to grow up to be or do whatever they want. But the cultural pressure to become a mother remains very strong; rare is she who doesn__ at least occasionally succumb to the nagging fear that if she remains childless, she__l live to regret it.

The question I__ long posed to myself__hether to be married or to be single__s a false binary. The space in which I__e always wanted to live__ndeed, where I have spend my adulthood__sn__ between those two poles, but beyond it. The choice between being married versus being single doesn__ even belong here in the twenty-first century.

When you're single, you are often buried in time, your mouth and eyes and ears stuffed with it. You hate it, rail against it, do whatever you can to get rid of it--work too much, drink too much, sleep around, make unsuitable friends, create an imaginary future filched from the lives of dead forgotten female writers...

Isn't that how falling in love so often works? Some stranger appears out of nowhere and becomes a fixed star in your universe.

When the present feels as endless as an impossibly long hallway between airport terminals, white and sterile and numb, we're particularly receptive to signs.

Being single is like being an artist, not because creating a functional single life is an art form, but because it requires the same close attention to one's singular needs, as well as the will and focus to fulfill them. Just as the artist arranges her life around her creativity, sacrificing conventional comforts and even social acceptance, sleeping and eating according to her own rhythms, so that her talent thrives above all else, nurtured the way a child might be, so a single person has to think hard to decipher what makes her happiest and most fulfilled.

If you are lucky, home is not only a place that you leave, but also a place where you someday arrive.

...go live happily alone requires a serious amount of intentional thought. It's not as simple as signing the lease on your own apartment and leaving it at that. You must figure out what you need to feel comfortable at home and in the world, no matter your means (indeed, staying within your means), and arrange your life accordingly--a metaphorical architecture.