The Deliberately Single Man - Part V

Love for Financial Autonomy

This is the fifth in a series that highlights my framework for well-rounded single manhood that I’ve called “The Deliberately Single Man.” Originally published at Medium on March 30, 2022.

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.