“I can’t believe you’re still single. You’re so attractive/fun/intelligent/such a great person/fill in the blank.” Sound familiar?
If you’re in your forties or older and have been single for any period of time, you’re bound to have heard that from friends or family at least a few times. Although nearly always kindly meant, there is the unspoken implication that if you’re single, you’re somehow not “normal,” as if being in a relationship is the norm. Perhaps it was the norm once upon a time, but as many of us Boomers hit the center of life on our own, that is quickly changing.
Dr. Mary Lou Serafine, PhD is helping that change along. She believes that being single is a fine place to be, that it’s pretty normal, and getting more normal all the time. She runs seminars that teach people how to be successfully single.
What does “successfully single” mean?
Mary Lou explains that being successfully single means “you aren’t waiting around for a relationship to make your life what you want it to be. You might want very much to be in one, and it might be a goal you are actively pursuing, but in the meantime, you aren’t forlorn or disappointed with life. A successfully single woman would be self-motivated to achieve whatever goals are important to her.”
What is the philosophy behind the idea?
“Until very recently, we believed people’s psychological development stopped once we reached adulthood, mostly because most research had been focused on child and adolescent development. But we have come to see that development can continue throughout our lives. We have the potential to be very different people in five years than we are today,” Mary Lou explains.
So, she asks, why not take periods of singleness and use them to foster our personal growth? After all, it’s a time when you don’t have a partner’s needs to worry about, fewer compromises to make. In fact, Mary Lou takes it a step further and talks about being strategically singl’. That means not only using periods of singleness that may occur naturally, but intentionally remaining single to work on one’s own development.
That might be a foreign concept to many of us. After all, look at the booming success of online dating sites like Match.com and eHarmony. But, consider that the biggest mistake Mary Lou believes people make is not being single when they should be.
“Getting stuck in a bad relationship is one of the worst mistakes women can make,” she says. “Society sends us messages that if you’re single, somehow you’re a loser, or nobody loves you, or you’re unlovable, you’re washed up, or you’ll never find anybody.” Those kinds of messages can drive us, both men and women, to latch onto someone and end up in a relationship we shouldn’t be in.
Just because we get those messages doesn’t mean they are true. Far from it. Mary Lou encourages people to ask themselves, “Would I rather be in today’s average relationship or marriage, or would I rather be successfully single?”
She walks the talk. Having gotten her PhD in education and done postdoctoral work in psychology at Yale, she decided at forty she wanted to go to law school. And did. She then moved to Los Angeles, not knowing a soul, to take a job. She was there for twelve years before making her way to Austin. What motivated her to take this path?
Similar to many mid-life women, “I think there is an awakening that comes with reaching forty and recognizing there’s likely another forty years left. Perhaps there’s been some big change that we’ve had to adapt to—a divorce, or the kids are grown and out of the nest—and we have another forty years left. The question becomes, what am I going to do with that?”
To help answer than question, she offers several suggestions for being successfully single:
1. Periods of singleness are an investment in yourself, much like a monetary investment. It’s a time to work intently on some aspect of your growth that makes your life richer.
2. Don’t go it alone. It’s much easier doing it with other people who are working toward the goal of being successfully single themselves.
3. Information, exploration, and knowledge are an important piece of self-development. There are endless books and tools available and many points of view to explore that can help you grow.
4. All personal growth requires pushing beyond your comfort zone. Don’t be discouraged if some negative emotions surface. The most helpful view is that all past relationships were learning grounds and a prelude to something new. Bad feelings are an opportunity to push the boundaries of your comfort zone.
5. Thinking of life domains can be helpful for seeking answers to the “What’s next?”. Some of those might be the spiritual, the intellectual, the emotional, the physical, or the social. Identifying one where things aren’t as satisfying as they could be could signal a growth opportunity.
6. Resist the negative messages. Don’t pay any attention to the sympathy around you for being single. The race isn’t over yet. Walk your path and see where you are five years or ten years from now.
Mary Lou also offers some interesting thoughts about how our expectations of relationships are changing. She points out that “societal and technologic advances mean we have become enormously successful at providing for our basic needs. That has led to the demise of the economic marriage. Our expectations for a marriage are completely changing from what they were just in the previous generation.”
“Our needs are now centered on the emotional rather than the economic, and we’re living longer. It could take a long time to find someone who meets those needs for the rest of our life. It’s not appropriate to feel bad about the periods of singleness since the cues from the earlier generation aren’t really valid for the circumstances we face.”
That means that if you have those high standards for a relationship, it may be necessary to undergo long periods of singleness before you find the right person.
Mary Lou also makes the point that we sometimes worry that we will never find someone and that we’ll always be alone. Better, though, to worry about the opposite: what if now is our last time to ever be single? What if the next few months or years are our last chance to be unattached and do what we need to do? That seems to her to be the greater risk to future happiness.
The good news too is that women are experts at socializing. Being successfully single includes playing that natural tendency for all its worth. Creating a rich and fulfilling social life is one important sign of a woman who is making the most of her single state.
Having a lively circle of good friends and the ability to achieve what’s important to you sounds like a pretty good definition of success, wouldn’t you say?