Flying Solo

Sunday, Aug. 20, 2000 By TAMALA M. EDWARDS
Article Tools
Print
Reprints
Sphere
RSS

danny turner for time
Jodie Hannaman, in red, and Houston pals get together to play Bunko, a dice game. Everyone thought she'd be first to wed, but at 32, she says, "I'm happier being single"

Related Articles

singles 20000828

Jodie Hannaman grew up in Houston, a city as fond of formal weddings as of barbecues and rodeos. So it was saying something at Duschene Academy, her Roman Catholic girls' school, that Hannaman was chosen as Most Likely to Be Married First. But her teenage fantasies of buttercream frosting and silky bridesmaids dresses first began to crack with her high school sweetheart. He dated her for more than a decade before she finally got tired of waiting for a marriage proposal that was never going to come. There were other men after that, but it was Hannaman who repeatedly decided against a life built for two. Marriage, it began to dawn on her, wasn't an end in itself but rather something she wanted only if she found the right guy.

Now Hannaman, 32, spends 60 hours a week in her job as project manager for Chase Bank of Texas in Houston, in an office decorated with art-museum magnets and Cathy cartoons. She extends her business trips into the weekends for solo mini-vacations, enjoys the social whirl of the Junior League volunteer circuit, and has started looking for a house. While she would love a great romance that would lead to marriage, she no longer feels she has to apologize for being single. "I've finally matured enough to acknowledge that there's more to life than being married," she says. "I'd like to get married and have kids, but something in the past few years has changed. I'm happier being single."

Hannaman might seem to have little in common with the four lead characters on TV's Sex and the City, single women who live the supafly life and discard men quicker than last season's bag and shoes--and look damn good doing it. Her sex life isn't nearly as colorful, for one thing. All of them, nevertheless, are part of a major societal shift: single women, once treated as virtual outcasts, have moved to the center of our social and cultural life. Unattached females--wisecracking, gutsy gals, not pathetic saps--are the heroine du jour in fiction, from Melissa Bank's collection of stories, The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing, to Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary, the publishing juggernaut that has spawned one sequel and will soon be a movie. The single woman is TV's It Girl as well, not just on Sex and the City, the smash HBO series in the midst of its third buzz-producing season, but also on a growing number of network shows focused on strong, career-minded single women, such as Judging Amy and Providence.

The single woman has come into her own. Not too long ago, she would live a temporary existence: a rented apartment shared with a girlfriend or two and a job she could easily ditch. Adult life--a house, a car, travel, children--only came with a husband. Well, gone are the days. Forty-three million women are currently single--more than 40% of all adult females, up from about 30% in 1960. (The ranks of single men have grown at roughly the same rate.) If you separate out women of the most marriageable age, the numbers are even more head snapping: in 1963, 83% of women 25 to 55 were married; by 1997 that figure had dropped to 65%. "Are you kidding? An 18% to 20% point change? This is huge," says Linda Waite, a sociologist at the University of Chicago.

To be sure, the rise in single women encompasses some other important trends. An estimated 4 million of these unmarried women are cohabiting with their lovers, and a growing number are being more open about gay relationships. Nevertheless, single women as a group are wielding more and more clout. A Young and Rubicam study released earlier this summer labeled single women the yuppies of this decade, the blockbuster consumer group whose tastes will matter most to retailers and dictate our trends. The report found that nearly 60% of single women own their own home, buying them faster than single men; that single women fuel the home-renovation market; and that unmarried women are giving a big boost to the travel industry, making up half the adventure travelers and 2 out of 5 business travelers.

Equally important is the attitudinal change. The dictionary once defined a spinster as an unmarried woman above a certain age: 30. If you passed that milestone without a partner, your best hope was to be seen as an eccentric Auntie Mame; your worst fear was to grow old like Miss Havisham, locked in her cavernous mansion, bitter after being ditched at the altar. Not anymore. "We've ended the spinster era," says Philadelphia psychotherapist Diana Adile Kirschner, who has made single women a focus of her practice. "Women used to tell me about isolation, living alone, low level of activity, feeling different. Now there's family, lots of friends, they're less isolated and more integrated into social lives."

More confident, more self-sufficient, and more choosy than ever, women no longer see marriage as a matter of survival and acceptance. They feel free to start and end relationships at will--more like, say, men. In a Yankelovich poll for TIME and CNN, nearly 80% of men and women said they thought they would eventually find the perfect mate. But when asked, if they didn't find Mr. Perfect, whether they would marry someone else, only 34% of women said yes, in contrast to 41% of men. "Let's face it. You don't just want a man in your life," says author Bank, 39. "You only want a great man in your life."