Which is why it’s noteworthy that sexual activity has been declining for years among seemingly everyone. The sexlessness panic provocateurs online endlessly debate whether this is the fault of “men” or “women.” More measured commentators and academics consider things like economic stress, domestic labor imbalances, and technological changes like smartphones with their attendant ubiquity of porn and distraction of social media.

But here’s something else to consider. Rather than the story of emotionally stunted and overwhelmed people turning away from an amazing experience that we hear so often, what if the experience itself is often nowhere near as great as what’s been sold to us? Indeed, what if a large number of human sexual encounters fall within a matrix of confusing, boring, pointless, alienating, frightening, awkward, rushed, ill-communicated, poorly planned, shame-inducing, and absurd?

When people are afforded increased levels of personal and bodily autonomy, they have an increased ability to say “no” to the activities that land them in the aforementioned matrix. And as those “no’s” ricochet across a culture as people increasingly think and act differently, the curtain begins to be pulled back on what’s really propping up the status quo. Pull back the curtain on the status quo holding up sex, as described in the first paragraph, and you begin to see the contours of an outright scam.

Even though I’m calling this the Sex Scam, I don’t believe sex is inherently a scam. It can be as enjoyable, fun, relaxed, and pleasurable as any other human activity, like eating fine Italian cuisine, going to the theater, or playing miniature golf. (A note...I’m defining “sex” here in the broadest sense, meaning any combination of emotional and physical intimacy; not strictly intercourse.) The Scam is something else entirely. It combines the abundant beliefs and behaviors around sex that produce unpleasant outcomes with the strong taboo against speaking about sex directly and honestly. It then drops that combination into a culture whose only acceptable narrative of sex is some version of “it’s wonderful and it transforms you.”

Living with this Scam has the effect of turning people into liars, sometimes directly but very often by omission. So, we high-five someone for their “first time” while they sit quietly with how awful it was. We let people believe that we’ve had whatever number of sexual partners are necessary to make us a “real man” or “proper woman.” And untold numbers every day suffer through sex they pretend to want, just because of the belief they’d better “take what they can get” or out of some twisted romantic or marital “obligation.”

And because the Scam leaves no room for the truth, it continually reinforces the prior-mentioned beliefs and behaviors that consistently make sex unpleasant. Here are just 20 of those beliefs and behaviors:

• God is watching and judging me.

• My parents aren’t watching but somehow are still judging me.

• I don’t have enough “experience.”

• I’m a healthy man whose penis doesn’t respond like a trained seal. I studied at the University of TikTok and determined I have “erectile dysfunction.”

• I’m a healthy woman who can’t orgasm from penetration alone. I must not love my boyfriend enough.

• I think porn is a how-to manual.

• I secretly hate my partner. Why am I never “in the mood?”

• My fantasies make me a broken freak.

• Sex should always be “spontaneous” and free from pesky bring-downs like clarity on birth control.

• I studied at Facebook State to learn what turns “men” on.

• Someone with my body type has no right to act or even think sexually.

• Someone with my “body count” has forfeited the right to healthy sexual encounters.

• I know nothing about the anatomy or cycles of the body I’m trying to have sex with (I’m looking at you, straight men.)

• My partner and I have a desire mismatch, and she’s convinced I’m a “sex addict.”

• I’m sure “everyone” has more sex than me, but I’ve subconsciously defined “everyone” as the cast of “Euphoria.”

• She has big breasts - she must always be horny.

• He speaks loudly in meetings - he must be a demon in the sack.

• I bury everything sexual in three layers of euphemism. Why does no one understand what I want?

• I was taught the only valid reason for sex is “love,” so I pretend to be in love to get sex, and it blows up in my face. What gives?

And finally...

• If you don’t have a sex partner, you don’t have a “sex life.”

The human erotic universe is vast and splendid, but this last point is what strands so many on Planet Sex Scam. I believe singlehood to be an excellent vessel to explore that universe. More on that in a later installment.

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Wisdom, truth, beauty, love – they dwell within us and move through us. They are not scarce, divisible quantities stored in one location, institution, or very specific form of human relationship. To treat them as such is to suggest that rather than birthrights, these things are rewards for being a palatable human being, for deftly navigating the system of carrots and sticks devised by the society in which one lives. After all, being “chosen” to be loved by a “viable” partner is seen as one of the rewards of “having done everything right.”

And the next step when so “chosen,” when love has been “found,” is to cheerily agree that life is best lived as a domestic-centered, government licensed, multi-decade three-legged race. Only now, the endless advice pivots from “how to find love” to “how to keep love alive.” Because the genuine love that brings two people together is like a wild animal - when institutionalized and caged, it often sickens and weakens substantially.

This highlights one of the core questions each of us faces daily. Will we keep the wisdom, truth, beauty, and love that dwells within us and moves through us wild and free, maximizing their ability to do the work in the world we were meant to do? Or will we be disabused of those birthrights by cultural and political machinery that dangles them in front of us like gateway drugs to access the “good life,” which turns out to be nothing more than taking your place as a cog in the wheel of a merciless status quo.

Single people, keep your love wild and free and remember you have nothing to “find.”

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I’m referring to my cat Perry (shown above on February 2, 2018.) And I’m referring to him as someone, a term usually reserved for a person, rather than something, because I’ve felt his loss in a way that is similar to losing a person. As he’s the first pet I’ve lost as an adult, I’ve frankly been shocked by the similarity.

It was while contemplating this recently that the 2021 take US Vice President JD Vance had on a subset of cat owners suddenly popped into my head. In a Fox News interview, Vance referred to “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives.” His was perhaps the most widely disseminated example of a genre of animus directed at anyone, particularly women, who divert from a “traditional” life course. For simplicity’s sake, I’ll distill the genre down to a three-word taunt: “Enjoy your cats.”

In this telling of things, cats are the last refuge of the damned. Damned because they perverted the course of nature by being unable to marry and procreate and are thus faced with a future devoid of love. The best that can be hoped for are scraps of affection offered up by “lesser” beings.

And really, the logic behind “enjoy your cats” makes sense if you are unaware or outright approve of the way that love is used as a tool of social control. That control starts with the dictate to “find” love in the same way you might find the best deal on a new car. But it’s when the “search” for love yields results that the real control begins.

Continue to play by society’s rules – marry, have kids, and never, ever rock the boat in any way – and a lifetime of love and security will be your reward. Step out of line and break those rules – by not being “man” or “woman” enough, by having the temerity to no longer call the slop you’ve been fed prime rib – then poof, love is gone. You have no one to blame but yourself. Enjoy your cats.

My dear Perry taught me a much more expansive and essential lesson about love. It started with the fact that it was never Perry’s “job” to love me. There were no vows taken, no romantic getaways to the Caribbean. He didn’t take care of me when I had Covid, never listened to my problems, never cleaned up around the house. He never gave me advice or helped pay the bills. And in true cat fashion, affection was always on his terms.

Yet my love grew incredibly strong. I think this happened for two reasons. First, daily acts of devotion have a way of compounding over years to create a deep, abiding love for the object of that devotion. Cleaning his litter, attending to his diet, and greeting him at the door on arriving home from work were some of those daily acts.

Second, interactions with the living world around us are nothing short of communion with the universe itself. My 13-year communion with the branch of the universe I called Perry gradually allowed me to receive a crystal-clear transmission of the eternal, unmovable, and ever-present love coded into life itself.

Of course, humans are also a part of the universe and that eternal love is transmitted through us, as well. The difference is that the signal has a much higher chance of getting distorted when transmitted from human to human, since that signal must travel through the interference of our agendas, our egos, our complex societies and relationships, and the plain old fact that we psychologically trigger each other constantly.

All this reveals the cardinal problem of the belief system of the “enjoy your cats” crowd. When a romantic partner and family are held up as the sole legitimate wellspring of love, you wind up living in the land of perpetual signal distortion. That distorted human-to-human signal tells us love is a scarce resource reserved for the worthy, and it must be contained behind an iron curtain of legal and financial commitments to truly “count.”

The distortion is also on full display any time take-what-you-can-get relationship advice makes an appearance. As in, stick with him, even if the rest of your life will be consumed by man-child management. Or stick with her, even though you get the sense that you’re nothing but a blank slate upon which she’s writing her hopes and dreams (and a prop for her Instagram to boot.)

Perry showed me that life is offering us so much more than the small-minded love and its attendant fear and hostility that “enjoy your cats” represents. I knew this in my head during his life; that knowledge has now been committed to my heart and soul after his death. For that gift he gave me, I dedicate to him this brief requiem to that ridiculous phrase:

“A lifetime of mediocre lovers will never match the wisdom of one dead cat.”

I love you, Perry. Until we meet again.

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I’m a 90’s kid, born at the leading edge of the Millennial generation. I remember vividly adult voices in the media and in the community lamenting the promiscuity of young people and the way “the MTV” encouraged such behavior. Young people are having sex, I was led to believe, because they are depressed, anxious, listless, and have low self-esteem driven by the media they’re consuming.

Enter the year 2022. There is now a raft of data showing how throughout the 21^st century, but especially over the last 15 years or so, sexual activity has declined among nearly everyone – men and women, singles and couples, young and old, in places all around the world. The biggest declines, at least in the United States, have been registered among young people.

Any researcher or journalist reporting on this research who is honest will tell you that we just don’t have the studies yet to illuminate all the reasons why this is happening and what it all means, good or bad. But that hasn’t stopped some talking heads from claiming that young people aren’t having sex because they are depressed, anxious, listless, and have low self-esteem driven by the media they’re consuming.

If you’ll allow me one pun: what the actual fuck?

The logic-bending nature of the same set of circumstances being blamed for polar opposite sexual behavior among young people living just 30 years apart is a sign to me that we’re in the midst of yet another good ole’ fashioned American Sex Panic. You know, the type of panic where you read an article online or see a commentator on cable news that leaves you with the sense that the sexual choices of a critical mass of the populace might lead to the collapse of civilization.

The pernicious thing about these panics is the way they give cover to bad behavior and the way that the crusading moralizers of the day run roughshod over the rights of anyone in their path in order to restore “normality.” A panic over a lack of sex is no different in the fact that it has real-world consequences:

People still lack critical information and support. There is an appalling lack of equal access to sexual education and reproductive healthcare resources in the U.S. Depending on where you live, sex education may be non-existent. If it’s mandated by law, it may not have to be medically accurate. If you live in a state that has banished as many reproductive care options as possible and you can’t afford to travel hundreds of miles, you’re stuck. Handwringing over clickbait agendas like “too much” or “too little” sex changes none of this.

You can stare a good thing right in the face and still not see it. One of the interesting things about the decline in sexual activity among young people is that there has been a concurrent decline in alcohol use. I’ve read some who speculate the two are connected, as basically, “back in my day,” most young people couldn’t have sex without first being drunk.

Yet, these comments seem to land not with a sense of triumph, but an air of resignation, often because not having sex or drinking alcohol are listed as two ways in which today’s young people are “delayed.” I don’t know, maybe they just don’t want to fuck up their lives for no apparent reason and they see some of the bizarre markers of adulthood held by their elders for what they are?

It keeps women in their place and gives cover to raging male malcontents. Women in the U.S. won the right to vote with the ratification of the 19^th Amendment to the Constitution in 1920 after decades of struggle. The Equal Credit Opportunity Act, allowing women to obtain credit cards independent of their husbands, passed in 1974. It only became illegal in all 50 states for a husband to rape his wife in 1993. Yes, that 1993, the one that was only 29 years ago.

We tend to think of our rights as eternal and unchanging, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. When looked at through a historical lens, many of the rights women have in the U.S. literally just happened. And as we’ve done with racism, so we’ve done with misogyny. After we outlaw the worst practices, we pretend that the underlying beliefs and attitudes that led to those practices will somehow resolve themselves of their own accord, point to women in positions of power today, and declare ourselves cleansed of the ugliness of the past.

What’s easy to see, though, is that those beliefs and attitudes don’t just go away – they mutate into different forms and put themselves on full display when political and social conditions allow it. And politically, conditions across the western world over the last several years have allowed it – the rallying cry of “traditional values” has echoed across right wing populist governments in Hungary, Poland, and the U.S., among other places.

Women enjoying the ability to live and prosper independently of men is not part of these traditional values, and even large parts of the political center seem reluctant to challenge this notion. Propose transformative legislation to put women on par with men, and many in the center, while expressing support in principle, will still fear going “too far” and likely vote for whoever wants to uphold the status quo.

Drop an incendiary like a sex panic into this smoldering fire, and the flames kick up again with the idea that the real reason sex isn’t what it’s supposed to be is because of all these self-determining, educated, money-making single women. Most people these days won’t say that directly, but the unspoken step-by-step logic is familiar to us all: sexual activity is in decline, because marriage and couples are in decline, because women no longer need men. There is not enough time in the day to list all the subtle signals we get from our culture that a laundry list of social ills can be attributed to “women no longer need men.”

Unfortunately, all this provides aid and comfort to the incels and other raging male malcontents out in the world. A protracted panic about a decline in sexual activity among the mainstream of society further reinforces for them the idea that their birthright, which from what I can tell entails controlling a woman’s life, has been stolen from them.

These panics have power. The power to distract us from investigating substantive issues around people’s rights. The power to goad us into keeping the status quo out of fear of change. The power to keep women in their place and contained by male rage. The next time you see the “alarm raised” about lower levels of sexual activity, ask yourself: what do people want me to believe about this data, and what agenda might they have? And consider saving your alarm for much more worthy issues.

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Last month, the United Nations issued a report projecting that Earth’s population will reach 8 billion on November 15, 2022. If you feel like the human odometer only recently rolled over, you’re right. The population hit 7 billion in 2011. 6 billion in 1999. 5 billion in 1987.

The fact that the population has grown by over 3 billion within my 38 years is one that seems custom-built to confound the human mind. We are notoriously bad at conceptualizing large numbers and long stretches of time. I know that I can’t picture 3 billion of anything. And to me, four decades feels like a long time. However, in this case what I feel and what I know are two separate matters.

What I know is that in a 13.7-billion-year-old universe sits a 4.5-billion-year-old Earth, and a few million years ago that Earth saw the emergence of the genus Homo. It took nearly that entire time for the sole surviving member of that genus, Homo sapiens, to reach a population of 1 billion, in 1804. I know this because of centuries of painstaking work by scientists around the world who dedicated their lives, at times at great personal risk, to establish the truth behind our existence.

What these mind-bending population numbers and timeframes tell us is that we are living at a truly extraordinary moment in the history of our species and our planet. In 4.5 billion years, the Earth has seen five mass extinction events. The population explosion of the past 200 years combined with the resource-use frenzy kicked off by the Industrial Revolution has placed us at the start of a sixth.

Every single bit of this often flies in the face of our ideologies, religions, and egos. In other words, some of the things that are the building blocks of making sense of life. Denial and diminishment are common results. Denial that the Earth is that old, that climate change is real, or if it is, that it’s down to natural variability and not human activity. Diminishing the idea that there’s even a problem at all, because not only are things fine now, Earth could actually support two to three times its current population with no issues.

The reality that 8 billion humans are facing due to too many people consuming too many resources will not be moved by calling it a lie, calling it irrelevant, and calling it day. And it will only get harder to deny if we persist in the belief that the road to fulfillment and happiness for all people lies in coupling up and having children.

This matter concerns one of the most significant mortal enemies of the American people: math. Our cultural “math is hard” mantra is well known around the world, and I will acknowledge that math is hard in a very specific way: it doesn’t negotiate, and it doesn’t give a shit about our happiness.

Exponential growth is the mathematical non-negotiable in this case. Wonderful things like advances in healthcare and reductions in poverty that have allowed a large part of the global population to reach reproductive age results in an exponential growth curve when most of those people, and most of their offspring, and most of their offspring, decide to procreate. This has already become wildly unsustainable over just a few generations, and continuing to send the population in this direction will cause immeasurable human suffering and environmental degradation over the next few centuries.

At this point, even a replacement birthrate that stabilizes the population at 8 to 10 billion isn’t sustainable at current rates of resource consumption. Luckily, the birthrate has fallen below replacement levels in many places around the world. At least, I say luckily. This is inducing a panic attack in others who now claim a population crash is imminent. If you insist on combining a zero-migration mindset with the belief that Western economies must maintain their current pyramid scheme, grow-at-all-cost structures, all while throwing in a twist of single-women-are-destroying-society, you worry all you want about how awful the world will be without 30 billion people.

The rest of us can work toward solutions that make life better for people alive now and for the millions of species that lay equal claim to this planet. This includes supporting people who truly do want children with polices that keep those children out of poverty and educated, proven ways to lower birthrates when those children become adults. It also includes the 800-pound gorilla of population management: robust, enforceable rights for women and the attendant cultural support that makes those rights possible.

And it includes people turning away from the traditional model of life centered on sex, marriage, and child-rearing, a phenomenon well underway in many parts of the world. While some condemn this as “the destruction of the family,” I see it as the mirror opposite: the next step in the moral evolution of humanity. We’re seeing the world being crushed under the weight of 8 billion people, and we’re adapting to that reality by looking at new ways of living fulfilling lives.

To help that process along, there is something all of us can do, right away. We can treat childfree people specifically, and single people in general not looking for a traditional life, with EXACTLY THE SAME AMOUNT of reverence we save for parents specifically and the coupled in general. No more patting us on the head, insisting that life will get better when we meet the right person. No more questioning if we know what we “really want,” even when we’ve walked this path every day for in some cases decades.

And most importantly, no more condescension masked as concern regarding “what will happen to you when you’re old.” In an effort to put this question to rest, I’ll answer just this once. When I get old, I will die. I might be older by 50 years or 50 days, but that’s the only certain thing on my horizon, as it is for us all. In between now and then, I plan to use every moment of my single, childfree life to make the mark on the world I was intended to make.

That includes talking about it without qualification or hesitation. So, while others are thankful for their partners and children, I fall to my knees before whatever Gods may exist to give thanks for the family I don’t have. What a remarkable blessing it has been.

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Love for Financial Autonomy, Continued

Love for financial autonomy grows when a man has the resources to create a home that is a shrine to his values. It grows when he makes purchases and allocates his resources in a way that makes sense to him and leaves him feeling entirely comfortable and relaxed in his own skin. And it grows continually stronger when he realizes he now has the power to not just replicate the stories of his past, but can build a future on his own terms.

Like all of the stories of our younger years, our stories around finances and money are dictated to us, and we absorb those stories as if they are God’s spoken word. Kids quickly discover that they are either “rich” or “poor,” with the consequences of these definitions stretching far beyond the amount of money in their parents’ bank accounts. Those same kids then grow older in a culture where talking about money is still taboo and formal financial education is almost non-existent.

The consequence of all this? Reaching adulthood with the feeling that money is something that just happens to you, that you have no real agency over it, and that the best you can do is replicate the patterns of those around you and those you observed in your past. As the deliberately single man grows past this conditioning, he starts to see one thing very clearly: running his financial life is just like running his own small business. As such, it pays to think and act like a principled, educated businessman.

A smart businessman always tries to be aware of existential threats to his business. Love, as it is practiced in this culture, is one of those threats. This goes beyond complaints about the cost of dating and the like. These are things that merely impact the bottom line; they aren’t a threat to the whole enterprise. The main issue is the ways that we are taught to treat our financial and business decisions when love is involved, which to me seem certifiably insane.

This is because culturally, we’re led to believe that when romantic love persists long enough, we’re to demonstrate our maturity by entering into a contract provided under law that comes with a host of rights and responsibilities and drastically alters the legal landscape around our finances. This is what’s known as marriage.

Let’s look at how the corporate world looks at mergers of these kinds. When one company proposes buying another, the lawyers and accountants fly into action. If the buyer doesn’t do its required due diligence and work to get a true picture of the seller’s balance sheet, or the seller works to hide negative information, there is the real possibility of criminal or civil charges. At the very least, the parties involved would be tied up for years in litigation from shareholders.

Considering all the legal implications that come with marriage, one would think that a similar process would take place. Instead, it seems like it’s undertaken as the business equivalent of one company buying another without having any idea what its books look like. And further, wanting to buy this particular company because you like its logo and you think their corporate spokeswoman has a nice personality.

An alternative to this madness is to normalize a more rigorous approach when two individuals wish to merge the “small businesses” of their lives. Public records searches? Of course. A full and open accounting of assets, debts, and income? Non-negotiable.

This just in…I’m being told that I just killed the mood. It seems that when love is involved, we get told constantly that it is both unnecessary and unattractive to be so demanding when it comes to financial transparency. It’s unnecessary because we’re trained that when we tell someone “I love you,” we’re also automatically and implicitly saying “I trust you.” This of course applies to all matters financial, even if you have very little hard evidence that the person you love is actually trustworthy in this regard. Does this give you pause in your relationship? Never fear! Somehow, love will do the heavy lifting and things will magically work out. Still not convinced and want to raise the issue with your partner? Be prepared to see that implicit link between love and trust on full display, albeit in reverse. In this situation, telling someone “Don’t you trust me?” is automatically and implicitly saying “Don’t you love me?”

An unscrupulous person can easily manipulate this implicit link. If you questioning my trustworthiness is equivalent to questioning our love, then I can threaten to withdraw love until the questioning stops. And, since we’ve been so relentlessly told that being outside of love’s good graces is one of the worst places for a human to be, we’ll quickly learn to keep our questions to ourselves and fall in line.

All of this is often regarded as unattractive, as well. This is not just about the general taboos of talking about money, especially in the early stages of romantic relationships. It’s also about the bizarre cultural shorthand that substitutes “accounting” for “unsexual.” Need to drive home the point that a male character on a TV show is dull? Make him an accountant. The band Bowling for Soup, in their 2004 song “1985,” describes the depressed, dull state of the song’s female subject by noting that her husband is a CPA. Apparently, FDA-approved contraceptives include condoms, birth control pills, IUDs, and IRS form W-2.

But at least there’s evidence that avoiding financial transparency like the plague for these different reasons works well for couples, or else we wouldn’t be constantly doing it, right? Unfortunately, strife around money is still a leading cause of marital tensions and divorce, and surveys show that “financial infidelity”- the hiding of debts, assets, spending, and income from a partner – is rampant among American couples.

What do we have to lose by changing this dynamic? We as individuals, of course, have nothing to lose, but the social order, and those who fight every day to make sure it changes as little as possible, have everything to lose. Financial autonomy, and especially the love of it, threatens to upend one of the remaining powerful tools this establishment has to keep us dependent. Conservatives say they don’t want people dependent on government, but they, along with a healthy share of liberals, want us all dependent on romantic love.

This of course is not a commentary on human interdependence or even on romantic love itself; as I’ve mentioned before, none of this is love’s fault. What they want us dependent on is the prevailing ideology of romantic love. This is the ideology that strips us of our financial autonomy even as it tells us that’s what’s best for us. This is the ideology that fears the deliberately single man who loves his financial autonomy, because he will not be cowed to give that autonomy up for the promises the ideology makes. And a man who can’t be cowed is a man who can’t be controlled.

One final note on this topic. Recently, Kay Jewelers ran a national ad campaign with the tagline “Love is Unstoppable,” with the idea that love can go on even in the face of a global pandemic. However, ads like these also play out in the larger context of the cultural messaging around love. Considering that, this ad’s tagline can easily be interpreted as: Love- it’s coming for you. No matter what you say or think or do now, when your time comes, you will get in line. Because it’s a force that can’t be denied, even if you try. And why would you try? It’s a universal good. And why, if you tried, do you think you would succeed? Who do you think you are?

The deliberately single man knows exactly who he is, and knows that his financial autonomy and the power that the love of it brings will not be relinquished at fire-sale prices in exchange for the fantastical promises of an ideology.

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Other Forms of Love - Introduction

Luckily for the deliberately single man, there are many other kinds of love that he can cultivate over time. These forms of love are just as strong as the love between a couple or a parent for a child, and require no less commitment. However, the fact that these forms of love are ours for the taking often gets heavily obscured by the time we reach adulthood.

From birth up until a person is a few years old, it is easy to see personality traits as clear as day, and the fearlessness with which children that young display those traits. Before too long, though, a child starts to learn which of those traits are encouraged, and which need to be hidden. Further, our socialization at every turn has us focus outward.

By the time we reach young adulthood, we are convinced that anything worthwhile that will ever come our way must be searched for “out there.” And because all those formative years often warp the expression of our true selves, by the time we hit our 20s, we undertake that search with our hands tied behind our back while blindfolded. Parker Palmer said it best when he described how we spend the first half of our lives being disabused of our gifts, and the second half trying to reclaim them.

It is in this process that these other forms of love become obscured from view. It takes work to reclaim them from the socially-imposed tyranny of the few love forms that we are convinced we can’t do without.

Love for Financial Autonomy

Let’s face it: nothing in our modern world happens without money. Having an income, as well as other means to access capital, such as through credit cards and bank loans, is a requirement for stability as well as the ability to build financial security over years. So important is equitable access to the financial system to a dignified life that it has featured prominently over the decades in fights for women’s and minorities’ rights.

For the vast majority of people, the primary way to access money will be through paid work. This is especially so for the deliberately single man who lives alone and must cover all the bills by himself. However, a man in this situation and on his way to financial autonomy must first confront and understand a very strong narrative that informs the culture: the reason that a man works is to provide for his family. Earning his salary is a sacrifice for this higher calling. This narrative is connected to the decades-long belief in the idea that a man becomes “civilized” once attached to the institution of marriage and the responsibilities of child-rearing. The narrative says that once “civilized,” the family man now has a reason to work and otherwise behave responsibly.

The existence of this narrative can be seen in the way Hollywood portrays the relationship between work and the single man. Three archetypes are seen again and again on both the big and small screen.

The first is the playboy. He works for the purpose of enriching himself. His thoughts go nowhere beyond winning, personal gain, and feeling good. The second is the hard-luck striver. He may be passionate about his work, but it takes a tremendous toll on every other aspect of his life. This is the man who returns from long days on the job to a depressing-looking apartment to eat pizza over the sink. This archetype is exemplified by at least one male character in every TV show and movie about law enforcement ever made.

The third is not even employed at all. This storyline is often used to drive home the point that the character in question hasn’t “grown up.” Enter Jason Sudeikis’ character David Clark in the 2013 film We’re the Millers. David spends his days selling marijuana, until he gets robbed and has to pay his supplier back by smuggling drugs in an RV from Mexico to the US. David’s plan to pull this off without raising suspicion? Recruiting his neighbor and two teenagers to go with him and pose as, you guessed it, his nuclear family.

It’s these archetypes, combined with the sacrifice narrative mentioned at the beginning of this section, that puts single men, especially those with no kids, in a bind. That’s because it’s assumed the family man is unselfish in his gathering of income and other financial resources, as they will be used on his kids. It’s assumed the single man with no kids is selfish in his gathering of these things, as all will go toward him alone.

I contend that even if a single, childfree man wants to spend most of his income on himself, that’s a choice that’s entirely ethically defensible. The argument starts with this fact: for many people, having children is a deliberate choice. In fact, whether or not to procreate is, in my opinion, the most ethically significant choice we will make in our lives.

Still, too many people in this world don’t have the choice, due to lack of education, lack of rights, or grinding poverty. I’m not talking about these people. I’m talking about those who have even a basic understanding of how sex works and how babies are made, are able to negotiate the power dynamics of their relationships, and have enough financial, familial, and community/cultural resources to access one of the million different types of contraception available. These are the people who have the latitude to make a deliberate choice, even if they don’t realize it.

To illustrate what I’m getting at, I’ll use an analogy. If I enter your kitchen and smash all the dinner plates and stemware, and then put on a show about the sacrifice I’m making in spending 3 hours cleaning up pulverized bits of glass and ceramic and write you a check for the items’ replacement, this “sacrifice” would hardly be commended. In fact, your likely response would be “It’s the least you can do.”

Similarly, for parents, making sacrifices for your children is indeed the least you can do. Like the dinnerware that wasn’t destined to be smashed, your child was not destined to be born. That child is a result of human choices to harness a biological process that creates something almost literally out of thin air – we all, after all, start as a single cell. Please note, this is NOT an endorsement of the position the US Government and our culture takes towards parents, which mostly consists of “you’re on your own,” an attitude that has been on full display during the coronavirus pandemic. There are many things that government and society can and should do to support people who have kids. But that does not change the fact that the full ethical weight of this choice falls upon the chooser.

Given the scope and scale of these ethical questions, it’s astonishing how comfortable society is with the flimsy justifications so many give for having children. Often a simple “I wanted them” suffices. There are also those justifications that indicate this future person is being viewed as a hedge against loneliness, a down payment on love, or an insurance policy for old age. And if someone wants to bypass all these heavy ethical questions by professing their faith that their kids “will grow up to be happy,” they can safely bet they won’t be challenged.

There are clearly strong ethical arguments that can be made for having children, as the human race cannot survive without new humans. But at perhaps no point in our species’ history, in an era where we are watching the Earth rapidly buckle under the sheer enormity of the human enterprise, has our survival also depended on people in their hundreds of millions not having them. We need to be encouraging everyone to consider if a childfree life is right for them, and to celebrate those who make that choice as contributing to the future of the planet and humanity at least as much as we celebrate new parents.

My hope is that this all illustrates how laughable it is to pontificate on the “selfishness” of the childfree single man who enjoys his disposable income. When we consider the ethical weight of this with the ethical weight of choices around reproduction, it becomes immediately clear that not only are these two things not in the same ballpark, they aren’t even in the same galaxy.

I wanted to address all this first as these currents still run so strong in our culture. It is, however, important to know that the single man enjoying his income is by no means in and of itself sufficient to cultivate a love of financial autonomy. That love, like all forms of enduring love, grows over time.

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I’m always very open about the fact that I’m a man in his late 30’s who has been single all his life. The part that gets left out in polite company is that at the age of 38, I’ve never had sexual relations of any kind. In an effort to help the reader avoid snap judgements about this story’s contents, I’d like to make four things abundantly clear from the jump.

1. I don’t believe there is any inherent value in abstaining from sex, or that doing so makes one more intelligent, interesting, or virtuous. I am not religious and don’t believe that masturbation or any type of sexual activity between consenting adults is “sinful.”

2. Related to point 1, I also don’t buy into the whole pseudoscientific premise that’s easy to find online that men who abstain from sex or masturbation are somehow “preserving their life force” or sharpening their body’s fitness. Self-improvement is a worthy goal. How a man achieves it by avoiding touching his penis is beyond my comprehension.

3. I am not asexual or aromantic. In fact, as I’ve aged, the types of women to which I’m sexually attracted has only increased. And even though I have huge issues with how our culture values romantic love, I am in no way against romance.

4. I AM NOT AN INCEL WHO HATES WOMEN. Sorry to yell at you. I just really don’t like those guys. If tomorrow all the women in my life were gone, I’d be lost.

Are you still with me? Excellent! Because here is the big reveal. I’ve never had sexual relations because…wait for it…I’ve never pursued sexual relations. Don’t believe me? Given the cultural attitudes that are so omnipresent around sex, I understand your skepticism. But indulge me, if you will, in a thought experiment that I hope will ease your skepticism.

You don’t know me, but given that you do know my age and the four bullet points above, how many sexual partners “should” a man like me have by this point in his life? What number seems “right?” For me, 6 feels good. 25? Good lord, “too many.” 0-2? You poor thing, “too few.” Why does 6 feel good? The fuck if I know. I can only chalk it up to years of conditioning in a culture whose pervasive dumb-fuckery around the topic of sex is staggering, even more so because of how sexually liberated we proclaim ourselves to be in these times.

Because sex is a pursuit, it takes time and energy just like any other meaningful pursuit in life. And just because it’s sex doesn’t mean it gets automatically bumped to the top of the pursuit queue. We live in a fascinating world with an endless array of things to do. All of us, however, only have 168 hours in a week. We need to pick and choose what we pursue; there’s no way around it.

Uh oh, here comes the skeptic again: “But Lucas, you’re 38, how can it be that it hasn’t ‘happened’ yet?!” Let’s go back to the above-mentioned cultural conditioning. As a millennial who grew up with almost non-existent sexual education or dialogue, that education instead came from whatever NBC decreed “Must-See TV” or the executives at Miramax and 20^th Century Fox declared would show at my local movie theatre. And we all are intimately familiar with how sex is portrayed on TV and in movies. One character looks at another across the room. There’s an instant attraction. They immediately find a private place to do the deed, and simultaneously orgasm after 27.3 seconds in which each is 75% clothed.

In other words, even more cultural dumb-fuckery. The vast majority of the time, it doesn’t just “happen.” “Nuh-uh,” says the skeptic, “you could just hook up with someone, you millennials are legendary for that.” Yeah, that still requires more pursuit than the term “hook-up” implies. And besides, for me at least, trying to do that is the psychological equivalent of nails on a chalkboard. No judgement whatsoever on people who can have mutually satisfying hookups. I just can’t genuinely interact with a woman in that way.

So there you have it. 38 years sans sexual congress easily explained. Only I wish dealing with it was that easy. When you’re like me, you have to contend with the implications of a word that has become so loaded with layers of nasty intent that it can be hard to even talk about. That word is VIRGIN.

This word harms men and women in equal measure but in some very different ways. One of those differences is that this is just one of many sexual epithets that can be sent a woman’s way. There are far fewer for men, but this one in my opinion is the 800-pound gorilla. The culture is almost certain that a man my age who’s never had sex isn’t a man. It’s even up for debate if he really is even a human adult.

I’ll give just one example. I’ve been watching Netflix’s animated show “Big Mouth” and just started the fifth season. It’s a fantastic show about a group of middle school students going through puberty, and is very progressive and inclusive in many ways. I’m glad I’ve stuck with it, but they almost lost me due to the portrayal of one character: Coach Steve.

Coach Steve, at least through the first many episodes, is a virgin. OK, fine. But here’s the thing: Coach Steve is illiterate. Coach Steve has such poor social skills that there are instances of scenes he’s in that are near unwatchable. Coach Steve’s living arrangement, though, is what really takes the cake. He lives in a shipping container on what’s called the Diaper Barge, literally a barge heaped with discarded diapers.

Is Coach Steve a virgin because he’s such an inept adult? Or did his virginity lead him to such a cruel fate? I can’t tell what the show’s intent was, but frankly, I don’t think it matters. I’m not beating around the bush here, so I’ll tell you exactly the lesson I gleaned from this: Fellas, find your way to a vagina before it’s “too late” or you’ll be living alone on a stinking pile of garbage.

That this portrayal of a character who had yet to have sex was shown on such an otherwise sexually progressive TV show was shocking, but I can’t say I was surprised, because it’s the same 18-wheeler-sized blind spot that many other sex-positive progressives seem to have. And this blind spot has serious implications. One is as it relates to consent. Consent in sexual relations has been talked about extensively since the dawn of the #MeToo movement, which has been wonderful and very much needed.

But in the context of such a pervasive virgin-shaming culture, consent has a huge asterisk placed next to it. This is because what we’re in essence telling people is that you have every right to say no to sex you don’t want, BUT THE CLOCK IS TICKING. Each day you go without sex is a day closer to being a late-in-life virgin exiled to the Diaper Barge. So, let’s be real, at some point, you’re going to have to consent to someone, or else be branded a freak for the rest of your life. Talk about a mind-fuck of mixed messages.

Another serious implication of all this is the real-world effect it has on people who have reached their 30’s and beyond without having any sexual contact with another person. It’s easy to find the written accounts online of men and women in this situation, and the desperation and brokenness of many of them is absolutely heartbreaking.

These people are not broken. They have been blitzed into submission by cultural narratives that don’t give a fuck about actual people, only about churning out as many “normal” human drones that political and economic forces can easily understand and therefore easily manipulate. They don’t need to be normal; hell, I’m guessing sex would not even make most of them actually feel any better. What they need is a more affirming worldview that doesn’t start with the proposition that they’re worthless because of what they have or have not done sexually.

Please don’t get me wrong. Going out on a limb and asking for sex and getting rejected hurts. Wanting sex and not being able to find it hurts. However, held within that more affirming worldview, the hurt is manageable, not an existential catastrophe.

Given this state of affairs, the first thing to remember is this: if someone hurls “virgin” your way, what they are really saying is STAY IN YOUR PLACE. Stay small. Stay unsure. Look away and sit quietly while the “real” grown-ups tell you your worth and what they think you should find important.

Just who are these “real” grown-ups I’m speaking of? They are the ones who are frantically in the process of filling their “I Am Normal” punch cards so they can be granted admission to the Promised Land of Respectable American/Western Life that is dangled before us in commercials for insurance and pickup trucks. They believe in this path, which includes monogamous romantic partner sex, so passionately that they can’t tolerate anyone who deviates from it, willing or not. Out of my way, virgin.

Let me tell you, we don’t have to take this lying down (every pun intended.) Your sexual history, or lack of it, in no way defines you. Those who think it should want to keep you as contained as possible so as not to disrupt their own fragile ego or the tenuous hold they have on their fantasy world.

We each have the ability in a million small ways to be walking, talking middle fingers to any person or system that wishes to diminish our humanity in this way. If you, like me, have reached your 30’s, 40’s, and beyond without having sex of any kind, I see you, and I see the power you have. We aren’t “virgins.” We’re diverse people with rich lives and interesting histories. And we’re not carrying your fucking shame anymore.

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Looking at Love Through a New Lens, Continued

Even in relatively free societies, the ruling political and economic class finds ways to guide the behavior of citizens in the direction they find beneficial. Economically, love is worth billions. Consider diamonds and the SUVs targeted at families as two of many examples of products and entire industries targeted at a few narrow forms of love.

But the economic power brokers want more than just our money. They also want to predict with precision how an entire society will behave. For this, they need legions of “normal,” or as economists would say, rational consumers. We’ve already seen that to avoid the terrible fate of being shut out of love’s good graces, we have to be normal. Again, this linking of love with normality is no coincidence. When enough of the citizenry is normal, the economic models and predictions work. Too much “irrationality” bodes poorly for markets of all kinds.

The political ruling class weaponizes love in a different way. Sometimes this has been done explicitly through legislation, such as the criminalization of homosexual behavior or interracial relationships. But the primary way this happens is simple: by using overwhelming cultural pressure to keep our definitions of love as narrow as possible.

If I had a vested interest in keeping the political order from changing, and couldn’t use the blunt tools of soldiers on the streets or jailing opponents, I could think of no better way than to convince a critical mass of the populace that the most meaningful things that will ever happen to them will occur within the four walls of their private residences. This is epitomized by the spring 2020 TV ad campaign for the University of Phoenix, whose tagline was “Family First. And Second. And Third.”

But more importantly than causing people to focus inward, what makes family and romantic love such powerful political cudgels is that they are exclusionary. Not everyone is guaranteed a spot: you have to earn it. “Earning it,” as we have seen, means being normal and hustling to be “chosen.” If you don’t want to be left out in the cold, you’d better toe the line. What a perfect tool through which to exert political control.

As I mentioned before, the deliberately single man will have to radically overhaul his understanding of love. And this is where it can begin: with the understanding that while the love he and everyone around him has been taught to value most is conditional and exclusionary, many other types of love are neither. They are available to him, regardless of his circumstances, right now. Further, it is within his power to cultivate these forms of love over time on nothing other than his own authority. Asking a question while on one knee and being told “Yes” is not required.

Before I get into these other forms of love, I want to discuss romantic love as the starting point. Because while it may not be a form of love that’s available to everyone this instant, it can and needs to be thought about in ways that no longer make it conditional and exclusionary.

There are two ways I believe this can be done. First, by ceasing all efforts to pursue it. Second, by completely re-framing what the presence of romantic love means for all the other aspects of one’s life.

In our culture, not pursuing romance seems like blasphemy against the very foundation of a fulfilling life; like the ultimate form of giving up. But move beyond these initial gut reactions and you see this course of action is rooted in something else entirely.

Think about the most meaningful, worthwhile things in your life, the things that have evolved over years. On closer inspection, it’s astonishing the degree to which we didn’t “make” any of these things happen. Sure, there are critical junctures where we make choices, and we work to maintain these good things over time. But there is a certain mystery involved, and we know down deep that if the stars had not aligned in this particular way, this person, this work, this experience could easily have not been in our life.

People might call this mystery God, the universe, or something else. I prefer the philosopher Parker Palmer’s statement: “Instead of telling your life what you plan to do with it, ask what it plans to do with you.” Life will continually throw at every one of us challenges and opportunities. Many will be small; a few will be huge. Our task is to make choices around these challenges and opportunities that best resonate with the core of who we are as individuals. I truly believe that we live our best, most authentic lives when we move through the world in this way.

Contrast this with the culturally mandated “search” for romantic love. A cardinal rule of this search is that nothing will happen unless you are continually “putting yourself out there.” “It’s not just going to happen on its own” is another line we’re fed in our younger years. This is a lie, pure and simple. It is going to happen on its own, subject to the same mysterious forces that cause our lives to come together in ways over which we have absolutely no control.

This, of course, is no guarantee of any specific outcome, and I think that’s why, culturally, this is such a difficult argument to make. Since we’ve been so primed to believe that romantic relationships are a necessity for fulfillment, it can’t be left up to these mysterious forces I’ve been describing. We’re instructed to do all we can to guarantee the outcome along a very specific timeline.

It is my belief that much of the time, when two people who are trying to “guarantee the outcome” come together, they start in earnest the construction of the proverbial house built on sand. You’ll know this shaky house when you see it, because an elaborate scaffolding prevents its collapse: “The Rules.” You, I, and everyone else has “The Rules” so thoroughly baked into our consciousness that it’s easy to forget that they are mere cultural dictates and not unbreakable cosmic laws.

“The Rules” are found on TV shows, in movies, in the multi-billion-dollar self-help industry, and in relationship therapists’ offices across the land. They say what men and women “want” and “need”. They prescribe ad nauseum what successful relationships require. Like the United States Code, many people in relationships can describe instances of being told by their partner which section and subsection of “The Rules” they’ve been convicted of violating. The length of their sentence is anyone’s guess…convictions are often re-visited, even years later.

“The Rules” are needed precisely because people pursue these relationships as a cultural mandate. Or because they “need love,” which in my opinion is no better reason. Either way, we’re not asking our lives what they intend to do with us. And when we don’t do that, and instead tell our lives what they are going to be, suddenly the requirement that all that’s needed is for “you to be you” is no longer enough. And when you bring two people together in this state, where parts of their identity have to be bent and others obscured all together, “The Rules” help ensure that they play nice with each other just enough so that house on the sand doesn’t implode.

Need more evidence this is true? Despite all the hype around romantic relationships as the pinnacle of love, it’s astonishing to consider how much of the language around them is couched in terms of failure. It starts in the dating stage, where it’s “common knowledge” that one will likely have to be rejected many times before striking gold. Getting “ghosted” online is just the latest iteration of this. Extensive post-mortems often follow, looking for any glimmer of “what I did wrong,” or its more appealing cousin, “what can I do better?”

In this era of the “all-or-nothing” marriage, commentators have noted that with how people look at these relationships, there is always at least one way their spouse is constantly “letting them down,” or at the very least annoying the bejesus out of them. The term “failed marriage” gets thrown around regardless of the context in which a marriage ends. It seems that everyone, by reports from their partners or their self-reports, is “doing love wrong,” or breaking “The Rules” in some way.

The deliberately single man looks at this landscape and says “no thanks.” His number one priority is listening to his life and taking actions in accordance with, as Parker Palmer says, “the life that wants to live inside him.” He spends no time seeking certain types of relationships based on advertisements of their supposed greatness.

He also believes that being deliberately single and having romance in his life is very well possible. This relates to the second aspect of making romantic love no longer conditional or exclusionary: re-framing what its presence means for all other aspects of life.

In the decades since romantic, companionate marriage became the norm, the act of “falling in love” has served as the cue for two individuals to re-arrange vast parts of their financial, social, and domestic lives. This is, yet again, one of those cultural dictates so baked into our consciousness that it’s easy to forget that it doesn’t have to be this way.

The deliberately single man understands that he can leave his financial, social, and domestic lives intact as they are and still experience romance, and he continues to understand this despite the chorus of voices shouting “Impossible!” Yet again, we all know the script that drives that chorus. It’s the script that would demean such relationships for not being “committed” or being “just a fling.” We all know that pivotal moment in the TV show or movie when a member of the couple says three dreaded words: “Where’s this going?”

The implications of these three words are that unless things get more “serious,” the relationship will be in grave danger as the party asking the question is likely to bail if the wrong answer is given. There seem to be two culturally acceptable responses for the party receiving this question. The first involves breaking things off, and then analyzing why they are riddled with “commitment issues.” The second involves the realization that the withdrawal of love is imminent; therefore, it’s time to dust off “The Rules,” hold your nose, and jump in the deep end.

The deliberately single man looks at these thought processes and choices and finds them absurd. Why should the presence of romance require such severe alterations to the rest of his life? He may encounter another argument to this line of thinking: “You’ll never meet someone who wants that/thinks that way.” The factual basis for this claim is irrelevant, because to him the claim itself is irrelevant. The odds don’t matter; it’s all the same to him if they are 10:1 or 10,000,000:1.

To summarize, if romantic love is not pursued, and, if it is present, re-framing what that presence means for one’s life, it can be made much less conditional and exclusionary. If, through listening to your life and leaning in to the mystery of its unfolding, you stop pursing certain types of relationships because of their supposed “importance,” then the message from society - that you are only worthy of those relationships if a specific set of conditions is met - becomes meaningless to you.

Further, using this approach no longer makes romantic love exclusionary, for the simple fact that you can’t be excluded from an arrangement you are not actively seeking to enter. But much larger than this, when romance is re-framed as described above, it is an additive to life, not the foundation upon which it is built. Being excluded from an additive can be annoying. Being excluded from a foundation can be devastating.

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Originally published at Substack on December 18, 2022.

Frank Yates is 38 and married with two children, which is the kind of life he’s dreamed about since he was a teenager growing up in York, Pennsylvania. But the high school science teacher worries about how much his world has narrowed since he tied the knot nearly 11 years ago.

Becky Nash, a 32-year-old accountant in Santa Fe, New Mexico, is mostly grateful to be married, she said, because her mother and aunts never took her life seriously until her husband Greg popped the question in 2016.

Diane Hunter and Louis Shriver are raising a 3-year-old in Madison, Wisconsin. Married in 2020, the young family radiates with positivity about the future. But the real estate market has posed challenges, and the modest bungalow that was within their price range has required repairs that have drained their savings.

These stories represent one of the country’s fastest-shrinking demographic groups: people 45 and younger who form nuclear families. This trend has been decades in the making and has been driven by deep structural changes in the social fabric, among them the economic and political empowerment of women. While 13 percent of US households had a single occupant in 1960, single men and women comprised nearly 30 percent of all home buyers in 2019.

In interviews, many married younger adults with or without children said they feel positively about their lives.

But while many thrive while married, research never has – and indeed never will – prove that marriage itself boosts people’s health, happiness, or longevity. This is because it is impossible, both practically and ethically, to randomly assign study participants to singlehood or marriage.

This concerns Stanley Robertson, a sociologist at Syracuse University. “Even with declining rates of family formation, there is so much pressure in our culture to marry and have children. I fear that sloppy studies and sloppy journalism that proports to show the unequivocal goodness of marriage and parenthood will only serve to lead some young people down the wrong path for them.”

Compounding the issue, many children grow up to become adults who, for a broad spectrum of reasons, are unable or unwilling to carry on any kind of relationship with their parents, raising questions about how elder care will be managed in these families.

“What will happen to these people?” Dr. Robertson asked. “Will they be able to find other supports to compensate for believing that marriage and children are a glide path to well-being?”

Looking to the Future

For many married couples and parents, the pandemic highlighted the challenge of living with others. Ms. Nash, the 32-year-old accountant, discovered that spending nearly every waking hour in her husband Greg’s presence as they both worked full-time jobs from home took a terrible toll on their relationship. “I needed another social and emotional outlet, so I started looking for interesting service and recreational opportunities in town,” she said. She joined a hiking club and helped with fundraising for the local library, and says she is happier than before the pandemic began.

Ms. Nash regularly drives to San Diego to visit her parents, trips which reinforce her desire to have strong relationships with people beyond her husband. “My mom felt like my life began when Greg proposed, which reflected her belief that your spouse is everything. After 36 years of marriage, I fear neither of my parents would be able to function if the other died. That’s not cute or endearing, it’s terrifying,” she said.

Observing their parents’ marriages seems to have had a profound effect on many members of the Gen Z and Millennial generations, who say they doubt they’ll want to replicate the same patterns of behavior.

Mr. Yates, the high school teacher, watched helplessly as his parents went through an acrimonious “grey” divorce in 2018. “It was a long time coming. I think the last time they spoke to each other was during the Clinton administration,” he said. He believes the couple stayed together for so long despite their unhappiness due to every aspect of their lives being profoundly intertwined. “When you come to detest the very person you’ve built your entire life around, every day becomes Sophie’s choice on steroids,” he said.

All this has made Mr. Yates think about his own future. “I’ve been married for over a decade. I have two young children. It’s the life I’ve always dreamed about, and I love my family more than anything.” But he feels his world narrowing more every year, and said that the options for maintaining his independence are “almost non-existent. I’m totally freaked out by it.”

Home Sweet Home

Mr. Shriver and Ms. Hunter, the Wisconsin couple, began dating in 2014, and both were determined to take things slowly. “We really wanted to carefully explore life’s big questions together before jumping into anything,” said Ms. Hunter, 32, a sales rep for a media company.

They decided to move in together in 2017, renting a one-bedroom apartment. Their daughter was born in 2019, and they married in February 2020. “Our space needs grew beyond our apartment, and instead of an expensive honeymoon, we decided to buy a house,” said Mr. Shriver, a 29-year-old truck driver.

Then the pandemic struck and real estate prices across the country skyrocketed. After a monthslong search, the couple found a modest two-bedroom home within their price range and closed the deal in April 2021. While they love their home, it has come with a few very expensive surprises, such as the sudden need for a new furnace in the middle of last winter and the replacement of a collapsed sewer line. “Our savings took a big hit,” said Mr. Shriver.

Then, last month, family life became harder.

On his way home from the store, a driver alleged to be texting ran a red light and smashed into Mr. Shriver, breaking his left leg and totaling the family car.

“It’s been a tough time for us,” he said. “My wife works full-time and has to do almost everything with our daughter as I’m still having a hard time getting around. It’s going to be awhile before I can work again and we’re still waiting on disability payments.”

He sometimes wonders if his recovery would be easier if he were single. “I’d be able to focus on getting better and not see every day the toll this is taking on the people around me. And people wouldn’t assume that because I have a spouse, I automatically have a full-time caregiver.”

That last point rankles Ms. Hunter. “They saw ‘married’ on his paperwork at the hospital and assumed ‘she’s got this.’ Our beliefs about coupled life are ridiculous. No family can exist as an island.”

Despite what they’ve been through, the couple remains optimistic. That’s fueled, in part, by their proactive approach to their situation. Mr. Shriver, calling the couch his “command center,” is coordinating household tasks with all the people in their lives willing to help. “Just this weekend, a friend is getting our groceries and our neighbor is mowing the lawn,” he said.

“We’ll be stronger as a result of all this,” said Ms. Hunter. “But only if we understand we’re never going to be each other’s ‘everything.’”

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Looking at Love Through a New Lens

The deliberately single man recognizes quickly that he has to take a deep look at the concept of love. This is because, for reasons I will discuss later, society has relentlessly instilled in each of us a few, very narrow definitions of love. The single man will find his path blocked at almost every turn if he can’t begin to get a handle on what this cultural conditioning has done to him and everyone around him.

Let’s start with these few, narrow definitions. Looking across the culture, there are two types of love relationships that get the vast majority of airtime and occupy pride of place: love between romantic partners, especially when married; and love between parents and children. In the cultural imagination, this places the nuclear family as the primary vehicle for giving and receiving love.

Much of the remaining small portion of airtime is dedicated to love in other human relationships, such as for extended family or friends. Representations of any other form of love, for instance for a hobby, place, work, creative process, other life forms, or an idea, is virtually non-existent in the cultural marketplace.

How do we know this to be true? There are many simple mental exercises that show us. Tell someone “I’m falling in love” or “I’m in love,” and it’s taken to mean in a romantic sense with another person. Consider how often politicians reference “families,” and compare that with the fact that only 25% of households in the US are composed of mom, dad, and the kids. In the aftermath of a disaster, consider how many stories are written by, or about, people with spouses and children, and you’ll quickly see the proportion is higher than the 25% they actually represent.

Conversely, look at how the culture often derides and caricatures other forms of love. The man who spends too much time on a hobby “won’t grow up.” A single woman doesn’t love cats, she’s a “cat lady.” And let’s not forget the biggest caricature of all: the “career gal” who “can’t settle down,” but who, about 45 minutes into the movie, finally realizes that her work will never love her back.

What we have are two forces pushing for the same goal: the belief in romantic attachment grounded in the nuclear family as the source of the vast majority of love. The first force pushes for this goal by constantly talking about and celebrating these things. The second force does so by pathologizing any other form of love that is perceived to be an impediment to these things.

How does the deliberately single man begin moving past this? He must understand how we got to this point, and then use that understanding to begin the task of radically altering his definition of love.

So how did we get here? Largely due to the fact that in modern times, love has been used by political and economic forces as a form of social control. All societies have mechanisms in place to shape the behaviors of their members. Many societies around the world use the blunt force of government repression and attacks on civil rights to carry this out. But what of societies that have relatively high levels of political and social freedom? As Laura Kipnis writes in her book “Against Love,” these societies have to turn their members into self-policing subjects to attain their goals.

And what phenomenon has been hijacked to turn us freedom-loving moderns into self-policing subjects? Love. This did not just happen on its own. After all, love itself is personal and harmless, but many forces have and continue to work relentlessly to weaponize it.

One need look no further than Economics 101 to see how this has been accomplished. The public needs only to be convinced of two things to cause a run on a product. First, the consumer is unable to live without the product. Second, there isn’t enough of the product for everyone (read: toilet paper during the coronavirus pandemic.)

And so it has happened with the romantic, familial definitions of love that are most celebrated. We’ve been thoroughly convinced that we can’t live without it. And forces are continually at work inflaming our anxieties that there isn’t enough to go around. A byproduct of this anxiety is constant worry that we will not personally qualify for the limited quantities that exist.

One easy cultural reference that shows us the belief that we can’t live without romantic love is the assumption that all single people are looking for it, constantly. The single-by-choice movement has undoubtedly begun to loosen the iron grip of this assumption, but it still looms large, as seen in the near impossibility of finding a TV show where a single character has declared themselves deliberately so, and not due to any underlying pathology.

And despite the vanishing number of American adults that are choosing to have children, you can’t swing a cat in the zeitgeist without hitting no-love-compares-to-the-love-of-a-parent-for-a-child ideology. The implications for those without children, then, is that any love they experience can never measure up, and they are therefore stuck living a life that lacks the kind of love that makes us fully human.

Once the belief in the indispensability of these forms of love has permeated a society, a fear of lack or scarcity is easy to engineer. And looking at the cultural marketplace, the language of scarcity that exists around romantic relationships is abundant.

What TV series featuring adolescents doesn’t include an episode where someone waits too long to ask a date to the school dance, only to find a few undesirable or no choices left. Think pieces fill the internet with commentators parsing demographic data, wringing their hands about the proportion of the population that is “marriageable.” “All the good ones are taken,” we continually hear.

And one overwhelming type of scarcity haunts us in our quest for these most valued of love relationships: time scarcity. We fear, almost universally, almost constantly, that “time is running out.” This is the fear that tells us, unless we act swiftly and decisively to secure some of this scarce love, we run the risk of reaching a point where the doors close permanently, and we are left with no options.

Given these difficult circumstances, what does the culture suggest we do to make sure that we are among the lucky who are able to enjoy this scarce resource? Follow one overarching, powerful edict: BE NORMAL.

By the age of 12, most of us start our crash course in the vital importance of being normal as a prerequisite to these most valued love relationships. Kids quickly learn that everything from the quality of their clothes, their appearance, or falling within that catch-all term of “weird” will greatly limit their options. Added to these lessons by the teens and 20s is the near paralyzing fear of “saying the wrong thing,” and therefore appearing abnormal, to a prospective partner.

In fact, the need to be in the “Goldilocks zone” is so pressing that it permeates the entire experience of the partner search. You can’t be too disinterested or too needy. You can’t talk too much or too little. You have to invest in your appearance, but can’t appear to be overly concerned about your looks. You have to be confident but, you know, in the “right” way, and on, and on.

If the search stage has been successful and a relationship declared, particularly through living together or a marriage, your continued compliance with normality is enforced through what Kipnis in “Against Love” describes as a 24-hour surveillance state. Comings and goings are closely tracked. Tallies of time doing all forms of activity, as well as real and perceived slights, are mentally recorded, and this neatly-kept ledger of surpluses and debts is ready to be used at any time to bolster the case for the ledger holder’s “rationality” or “normality.”

Indeed, even the most trivial matter can be litigated endlessly in an effort to determine which party is the more rational or normal. This surveillance-state, constant-litigation dynamic is the fodder for countless TV sitcom jokes about relationships and marriage being some form of prison. The popularity of certain types of humor comes down to two factors: the proportion of the population that identifies with the joke, and the degree to which it’s difficult to talk about the topic in other settings. In other words, these jokes have found so much traction across so many shows over so many years because many viewers easily identify with the feeling of “doing time” in a relationship.

If there is even a grain of truth to the “partnership-as-prison” trope, how is it that so many people have been convinced to put themselves in prison by making choices to pursue these types of relationships, sometimes multiple times over the lifespan? We need look no further than the above-mentioned TV sitcoms to get an idea why.

At the conclusion of each episode of many of these shows, there is a lesson to be learned, a “moral of the story.” And very frequently, the lesson, when it comes to romantic relationships, family, and kids, is “it’s all worth it.” No matter how much figurative blood and treasure is sacrificed in determining who does more around the house, or how much emotional bandwidth is used to conduct the 200^th argument over the same issue, this is love, we’re told. This is family. This is the way it works. In their time of doubt, our TV protagonists are reassured: “You have everything.”

This entire arc – of normality as the price of admission, of surveillance and litigation as the enforcer of normality once admitted, and the constant reinforcement of the message that this arrangement is as good as it gets – is how political and economic forces have weaponized love as a form of social control.

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For years now, we’ve been hearing about a “loneliness epidemic” sweeping the United States. Two years of pandemic disruptions have only increased coverage of the topic in the popular press. Loneliness is not trivial – it can be a very difficult part of the human condition to experience. My goal here is not to dispute any rigorous evidence showing increasing self-reports of loneliness in the population, nor is it to lecture the lonely to “snap out of it.” What interests me are the counterproductive and at times flat-out wrong ways that we talk and think about loneliness and how those ways keep us stuck.

This starts with the apparently unending confusion around what loneliness is. Often, when an article states that loneliness is on the rise, the sentences that follow point out trends such as increasing rates of living alone, decreasing rates of marriage, and smaller family sizes. Discussions about loneliness that follow this common path miss a crucial distinction. Loneliness is a subjective state, which may not at all be correlated with objective measures like the amount of time in a week spent with others.

Nonetheless, one of the most common cures offered for loneliness involves increasing time spent with others. Despite the seeming “common sense” of this approach, I believe it is often a misguided effort to put a band-aid on a two-pronged reality that we often don’t care to acknowledge. First, that loneliness is inseparable from the human experience, and second, that modern life and social norms turn this inseparability against us in absurd and at times cruel fashions.

Through the ages, the philosophers, artists, and poets have spoken to the intrinsic nature of loneliness in life. We see in countless works how the angst and sorrow driven by a feeling of separateness can fuel creativity and profound insight about what it means to be human. We see how loneliness, when worked with and unabashedly experienced, can be a component of building a meaningful life.

Modern Americans, by and large, are not encouraged to consult with the wisdom that has been accumulated over the centuries when faced with their own loneliness. Instead, we’re fed the thin gruel of “Try making new friends.” We’re not led to believe that the rawness of our loneliness can lead to our own beautiful works of creativity that can serve as a beacon for ourselves and others through the dark passages of our lives. Instead, we’re asked, “Have you tried online dating?”

The paltry nature of this common advice on loneliness reflects a much bigger reality for 21^st century Americans: we are socialized to live paltry lives. This is reflected most in our national obsession with happiness. As a middle class, white American, I can tell you one thing with certainty: every ounce of my socialization in this culture led me to believe that the purpose of life is to be happy. In other words, you grow up, you run around doing shit that makes you happy, and you die. The end.

Everything I was told to do was for the purpose of increasing my likelihood of happiness at some future date. Whenever I was around others, I was to always be happy lest the reality of my humanity scare them off, thus rendering friend-making and lady-fucking impossible and putting life’s only meaningful pursuits out of reach.

If there really is an epidemic of loneliness in our society today, I propose that one of the primary drivers is this steamroller of American Happiness. When our lives are flattened to the point where everything rests on whether or not we’re experiencing one emotion, how could anything but loneliness follow? When, in addition, we are told that there are only one or two life paths that will access that one emotion, how could anything but desperation and fear follow?

In this context, telling people to spend more time with others to absolve their loneliness is absurd, as the root cause of this loneliness – the flattening of life in a paltry culture – goes unaddressed. In this condition, the best that others can do is not fulfill us, but distract us. And we often fail to recognize the devil’s bargain we’ve made with this culture before we even reach the age of 20. In exchange for the privilege of running towards our deaths while being perpetually distracted so as to feel as few “negative” emotions as possible, we increase the likelihood of the very loneliness we fear while dramatically decreasing our ability to cope with it.

How we behave with respect to romantic love illustrates this perfectly. Want evidence that romantic love is as much about distraction as devotion to another? Look at all the cutesy articles that get published about how everything from hugs to sex release the brain’s “feel good” chemicals like dopamine and oxytocin. The tenor of these articles is often “you absolutely want this, here’s how to get it,” and the message they convey about the brain is clear – it is nothing more than a neurological slot machine. It exists to make us feel bliss, and your sole purpose in life is to pull that god damn lever as many times as you can to flood your brain with feel-good. What an insult to billions of years of evolution.

Further, we see how people who exist outside the culturally defined boundaries of romantic love often get heartbreakingly locked into an almost helpless sense of loneliness. This is a logical result of the flattened lives we’re expected to lead. To be happy, do the one thing. If you can’t do the one thing, you’re fucked. What an insult to the raw power of life itself.

As if that’s not enough, we then cruelly taunt people in this situation with throwaway phrases like “maybe you’re sending the wrong signals,” “just put yourself out there,” or “maybe you’re too closed off for love.” Or, if they are expressing themselves along, gasp, more than one dimension, maybe they are driving people away because they are “too intense.”

I can’t for a single second tolerate the idea that we were put on this Earth to suffer in this way. Experiencing loneliness as a function of being alive is unavoidable. Turning it into an unbreakable psychological prison because we somehow “did life wrong” is a senseless tragedy.

If we truly are facing a loneliness epidemic, the only way forward is through each of our inner lives. Only as we slowly turn “flat and paltry” into “three dimensional and decadent” can we at the same time have a much healthier view of our relationships with others and a more realistic outlook of the roles they can play in our lives.

And if loneliness is indeed the struggle of our time, we need to be curious about why that might be, and just what it is these times are asking of us. What if this loneliness is not a scourge to be cursed or an inconvenience that needs the quick fix of a friend or a partner, but a call for renewal in our politics, relationships, and society as a whole? What if this renewal involves not turning loneliness into happiness, but instead inspiration and meaning?

21^st century Earth is crying out for this renewal. Each passing day sees a more destabilized global climate system, and each passing year the steady march of authoritarianism and erosion of human rights and democratic governance on every continent. More time spent watching football with the guys or on #baecation is not the answer to any of this.

However, meaningful and deep interactions with our own loneliness, no matter what that loneliness looks like, might just be one part of the 1000-piece puzzle that is figuring out how humans will continue to exist on this planet. That doesn’t sound like an “epidemic” to me…it sounds like an opportunity ripe for the taking.

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“But what about loneliness?” As a solo-dwelling single, this is in the top five of the most irritating questions someone could ask me. In a philosophical sense, it’s irritating because it ascribes a universal aspect of the human condition to a specific subset of people – the romantically unpartnered. In a practical sense, it’s irritating because it’s an intrusive way singles are expected to produce complex explanations of their inner lives, often in the inane context of small talk with family, friends, or co-workers.

The final leg of this tripod of annoying? There are no comparable inappropriate questions for partnered people, as they get to hide behind the vaunted “privacy of the couple.” So if you’ll indulge me, here are 10 examples of what it might look like if couples were asked similarly presumptive, intrusive questions with no self-awareness or shame. Each primary question in bold has follow-ups if the coupled person chooses to engage.

“But what about lost time?” Embarking on the second half of my life is beginning to seriously alter my concept of time, and my awareness of how little of it we have in this life. Each second that ticks away is one closer to stepping off this Earthly platform and into the Great Beyond. You just spent 15 of those seconds reminding your partner, a grown adult, when their mother’s birthday is. Does spending your precious seconds in this way alarm you?

“But what about people you can’t stand?” Your partner’s relatives, friends, or kids of any age they brought with them into your relationship: how do you deal if they drive you insane? How often does your mind wander to spending that time with people you enjoy or with no one at all?

“But what about compromised ideals?” Do you find that putting someone else at the apex of your life has slightly to severely compromised all the ideals you held before that relationship started?

“But what about interrupted flow?” Flow is the state whereby you are so engrossed in an undertaking that hours can pass with barely a notice. Being in flow can have great benefits for creativity and mental health. How is flow compatible with the constant demands of a partner? Is interrupted flow particularly annoying when your partner needs you to “adult” in their place?

“But what about interrupted sleep?” Sleep science has come a long way in the last few decades and has reinforced just how much proper sleep is important to health in ways that were inconceivable 50 or 100 years ago. Does that concern you if your partner snores or kicks you in bed? Do you find that conflict in the relationship affects how you sleep?

“But what about monotony?” Sexual monotony. Dietary monotony. Recreational and the-kind-of-shows-we-watch-on-TV monotony. Isn’t it impossible to avoid this when you spend years in close quarters with another human?

“But what about infidelity?” I keep seeing stories about how many coupled, and even married, people are on dating apps. And that doesn’t even count all the people your partner encounters in real life that they might find attractive. Doesn’t that worry you?

“But what about financial infidelity?” I keep seeing stories about how financial infidelity – the hiding of debts, assets, spending, and income – is all too common among American couples. Are you ever worried that your debit card will be rejected at the grocery store, and you have no fucking idea why until you ask your partner and the look on their face immediately tells you all you need to know?

“But what about when your partner changes?” Are you sure you can handle the process of aging together? What if they start struggling with their mental or physical health? What if they fall down the internet conspiracy theory rabbit hole and emerge the next QAnon Shaman? What if they decide to take up gambling and it gets out of control?

“But what about when you change?” What if, through the alchemy of human growth and maturing that leaves us feeling like different people with each passing decade, you find that the life you enjoyed at 35 is intolerable to you at 45? What if you learn things about yourself over time that makes your relationship increasingly unworkable? What if that unworkability derives from the notion, now inescapable, that the person who you once felt held you up is now holding you back?

Think about how awkward you’d feel asking a coupled person any of these questions, and contrast that with the ease with which “but what about loneliness” rolls off the tongue. Those contrasting feelings get at a much larger truth that we still face in our culture: that for single people, many believe that the greatest height that can be reached isn’t “thriving,” it’s “managing.”

While it may take beyond my lifetime for this to really change, I think that change is already underway. There are so many single people in society now, and only more projected in the future, that our collective voice will be harder to ignore if we steel ourselves to use it. If I’m in earshot of “but what about loneliness” in the future, my first step in the proverbial thousand-mile journey will be thus:

“You’re a human being, you know what loneliness is. Tell me about your experience first.”

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Embracing the Feminine – Domestic Literacy

Domestic literacy is critical to all deliberately single men, whether they live with others or on their own. Much is made, rightfully so, in feminist circles about a patriarchal society that says that men “deserve” to be taken care of by women. What gets overshadowed is the corrosive effect this social order has on men: it instills in them the idea that they not only deserve, but need to be taken care of by women.

Not only do they need to be our emotional guides, but our domestic ones as well. Many men are socialized with a hands-off approach when it comes to cooking, cleaning, decorating, shopping, and appointment-making. The dependency fostered in men when it comes to these routine tasks of life is a travesty – both for the women on whom the burden is placed, but also on the men who are robbed of the growth and learning potential that comes with engaging in these activities.

The deliberately single man who lives alone has, in my opinion, the best chance of developing domestic literacy. This is not because living alone automatically makes you literate in this way. After all, a man can live alone in filth and with a poor diet. Rather, it’s because it offers the best chance to escape the woman-as-care-er and man-as-care-ee dynamic that is so hard-coded into our behaviors by the culture.

Domestic literacy means, among other things, being able to procure food and plan and make meals that are healthy and provide variety. It means being able to find an efficient way to clean and do laundry. It also means understanding that comfortable, well decorated homes don’t just fall under the purview of married couples. This requires developing tastes in furniture, artwork, and all the other necessities of a home.

Domestic literacy also involves skillfully interacting with all the people who provide services to your household, such as contractors, and those who work in sectors as different as banking, medicine, and auto repair. Conveying to all of these various service providers what you need and taking an active role in choosing from different solutions allows, over time, the deliberately single man to gain mastery over his domestic life.

Embracing the Feminine – Social Literacy

The comedian John Mulaney said in his February 2020 appearance on Saturday Night Live: “My dad has no friends, and your dad has no friends. If you think your dad has friends, you’re wrong. Your mom has friends, and they have husbands. Those are not your dad’s friends.”

Beyond the realm of comedy, researchers have also found how common it is for men of all ages to struggle socially. I suspect this is due to decades of socialization whereby women, as the “heart” of the home, not only direct emotional life, as described above, but also do the work of maintaining social and familial ties.

The deliberately single man must recognize that men, particularly those who live alone, are uniquely primed to fall into social isolation unless specific steps are taken. This is centered around working to maintain ties with those he is close to. Steps that can be taken include keeping track of and recognizing birthdays and other important milestones, and taking the initiative to make phone calls and arrange times to meet. Any activity – work, volunteering – where people come together for a common cause is also fertile ground for creating social ties – especially if these situations are looked at in as expansive a way as possible.

Expansiveness, or open-mindedness, is the key. Too often, people come to believe that their most meaningful relationships will occur with those that mirror their own characteristics. This causes an obsessive search for social ties among those of the same age, education level, and economic class.

Romantic norms serve to further restrict the pool of potential social ties, as close connections with any non-familial member of the opposite sex appears to be off limits in many heterosexual romantic relationships. Add to this, asinine notions such as “men and women can never be ‘just friends,’” and many adults find themselves walled off from meaningful connection with half of humanity.

When we subconsciously shut ourselves off to the possibility of having “unconventional” relationships, the opportunities for connection that are missed are staggering. Realizing we have at least some common ground with everyone around us helps keep those possibilities open, and can lead to unexpected, beautiful things that unfold over years.

Another major aspect of social literacy involves the single man pondering the question that the author Wendell Berry asked, which also serves as the title of one of his books – “What are People For?” More specifically, what roles can I realistically expect other people to play in my life? The process of finding answers to this question begins with the realization that life is in essence a single-player game, by virtue of the fact that no one has the option of letting someone else enter their mind to do the work of dealing with day-to-day experience.

That’s not to say that society at large accepts this. In doing the frantic work of denying this existential reality, we have made Gods of other people. Looking to popular culture provides ample evidence for this. The “advice” industry is worth billions, and counsel from “the experts” on even the most trivial matters is easy to find. TV shows often use a main character’s journey toward “the one” as a plot anchor that can span multiple seasons.

The deference to the advice expert, or finally reaching “the one,” is often taken at face value as the pursuit of wisdom or love. But the rarely discussed subtext is that it’s also about the pursuit of existential security. The all-encompassing aura around a TV couple finally marrying after several seasons of pursuit is not only that they have found love, but that they are also now “safe” – that they will somehow cancel out each other’s existential aloneness. That they will not just ease the burden that can come with day-to-day life, but will actually take the burden away.

The most immediate and obvious result of these beliefs and expectations, which are so counter to our existential reality, is constant disappointment. And what is disappointment but the mismatch between expectations and reality? How do we bring our expectations more in line with the reality of the people we are in relationship with? We work to keep the relationship on a sustainable trajectory.

When we first meet someone, we only have very surface-level expectations of them. We assume they will follow standard social conventions, like being courteous. We may have positive or negative expectations based on stereotypes surrounding age, appearance, race, or gender. But we often don’t make sweeping assumptions about the role that person may play in our lives in the future.

After a few months or a few years of this person being in our orbit, we may start attaching labels to the relationship: friend, mentor, partner, spouse. Social conventions and what people are socialized to believe mean that sustainable relationship trajectories are much easier to maintain with some labels than others.

Let’s start with the label of “friend.” It’s accepted that this label can be used to describe a person you only talk to a few times a year, as well as a person who you interact with frequently and is a central part of your life. This broad definition makes it socially acceptable and easy for individuals in a friendship to define the expectations of the relationship for themselves. When those expectations are established gradually over years of friendship, the result is what researchers find to be some of the longest lasting, most durable relationships humans can have.

Now, let’s go to the other end of the spectrum and look at the label of “spouse.” Unlike with a friend, the expectations that come as a spouse are 1) extensive 2) front-loaded and 3) strongly reinforced by social norms.

The expectations are extensive as they encompass vast swathes of a person’s life, from finances to living arrangements and all manner of social behaviors. They are front-loaded because an individual agrees to these extensive expectations before their partner, or for that matter even they themselves, know if they are willing or able to meet them. They are strongly reinforced by social norms as evidenced by the severe social penalties faced by those who venture into “off -limits” behavior, such as an affair.

All this results in the spousal form of relationship having a much less sustainable trajectory, which is borne out in research that shows that over the lifespan, people’s spousal relationships are often among their most unstable.

In summary, the deliberately single man must be socially literate. He recognizes the factors that can lead men to be more isolated, and counters them by taking the initiative to reach out to and maintain connections with the important people in his life. He understands that those important people can come from all walks of life, and has an open mind about developing relationships with all kinds of people. He works to keep his relationships on a sustainable trajectory, and tries to have a realistic view of what those in his life are able to do for him, and he for them.

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A Notable Absence of Men

Over the course of studying single life since 2014, I’ve found one indisputable fact: most of what is written on the topic is by, and for, women. This is especially true when it comes to accounts of the deliberate exploration of single life and its rewards. I’ve read countless articles by women on the wonders of traveling, friendships, solo living, personal growth, and just about every other positive aspect of single life one can imagine. All this begs the question…where are the single men?

A Little History

The nearly 20 year social and economic upheaval of the Great Depression and World War II eventually gave us what to this day is the reference point for the “traditional” roles of men and women. This was an era when the dominant cultural narrative was that men and women need each other, because each provides what the other doesn’t have. Men are strong willed, logical, and able to endure the impersonal world of work. Women are emotionally intelligent, nurturing, and have minds that are best suited for domestic affairs.

As Stephanie Coontz points out in “Marriage, a History,” this social order began crumbling almost immediately after it was formed as women began demanding more rights. Since that era, women with glee have taken up traditionally masculine roles: making money, focusing on careers, engaging in politics. At the same time, they have maintained the culture’s permission to be emotional beings that value connection with others.

Men, on the other hand, have not been expected to take on or develop traditionally feminine roles over these 50 years. The evidence for this is everywhere. Brene Brown’s research on men and shame found one unequivocal rule: don’t be weak. Other research has shown that for millennials, domestic work still falls to women to a large degree, this despite this generation aspiring to egalitarian relationships. The same goes for what’s regarded as “emotional labor.”

The end result is that to this day, many men are still brought up to be crippled socially and emotionally, and promised they will be made whole by outsourcing large swaths of their functioning to women upon adulthood. Now that women are more empowered than ever to say “no thanks” to this arrangement, the result is often men’s anger, despair, and cynicism about being single.

As a man who is deliberately cultivating single life, this cultural backdrop is inescapable. This has spurred me to create a new narrative. This narrative will explore two broad topics. The first applies to men specifically – the ability to embrace traditionally feminine qualities. The second applies to either gender – having a more expansive, re-defined view of love.

A quick note about what I mean by “deliberately single.” I don’t go on dates with women I barely know. I don’t spend any energy or time on “looking.” The life I live now is not the default state because I have bad luck, nor am I marking time until “something works out.” All engines are at full throttle as I’m building my life, and heart, mind, and intuition are what’s guiding the construction.

Embracing the Feminine - Emotional Literacy

The belief that women are uniquely gifted at understanding and processing emotions looms large to this day. The popular culture is saturated with storylines about how men are unable to deal with or uncomfortable discussing emotions. One need look no further than how often this belief is used to drive plot lines in movies and TV sitcoms. In fact, this belief has taken on such seismic proportions, that it’s often not considered belief or cultural narrative at all, but “human nature.”

Indeed, one of the consequences of the “separate spheres” view of men and women that held sway over post-war life, and that remains stubbornly persistent today, is that it’s on women to hold the “emotional center” of the household. This has allowed the emotional expressiveness of men to decay over the course of decades to two basic responses, as Brene Brown notes: “pissed off or shut down.”

If a single man seeks to have an emotional life beyond these two options, he has to be emotionally literate. He has to be curious, and non-judgmental, about the emotions he has through the course of a day and how thought patterns and events affect those emotions. This familiarity with the catalog of emotions and their triggers is a prerequisite to one of the crowning achievements of emotional literacy: the ability to self-soothe, or doing the work of putting inner guardrails in place to deal with the difficult emotions that are common in day-to-day experience.

The deliberately single man also has to be willing to talk about emotions. This can be a tall order, considering that men are socialized to believe that once adulthood is reached, the only appropriate expression of emotion is in the context of a romantic relationship. But he sees that family members, friends, and colleagues can also share in his emotional life, and that the larger his portfolio of emotional confidantes, the better off he will be.

A note on the confidantes that are friends and colleagues: they can be women. It is my belief that a man and woman can have a deep emotional connection in the context of a platonic relationship. However, potential issues can arise if that woman is romantically partnered or married. This comes in the form of concern on her or her partner’s part of an “emotional affair.” This, in my mind, is a searing indictment of the inherently selfish way we’re taught to look at love. This is not an indictment of individuals, but of the institutional arrangement in which they take part.

There will be much more on love later, but here’s a taste to get the reader warmed up. The deliberately single man sees the emotional prescription of institutionalized love: select one person around whom to build an emotional wall, so the light they’ve been given to shine on the world shines only on you instead, with a few rays to spare for the types of people you aren’t “threatened” by.

The deliberately single man understands that if he ever is in a relationship with another person that requires that person to dim their light or direct a large portion of it toward him, he is in wrong relationship. Note that specific turn of phrase. Not a wrong relationship, where the cast of characters might change now and then but the underlying structure remains the same, but wrong relationship. Wrong relationship occurs when you explicitly or subtly require a person to be less than their full potential to the world for your own emotional comfort and safety.

The deliberately single man seeks right relationship, whereby he doesn’t seek to turn another’s light onto himself, but instead wishes to step in the direction of the light they are already shining, and hold them up so that others may benefit even more.

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