You Mean It’s Okay to Be Single?

It wasn’t the mere fact that we were talking about dating that disturbed me. Dating is inherently filled with great fodder and I do enjoy that. What struck me was the intensity and frequency with which the topic arose. This was during the height of Sex and the City’s popularity, and while that show was wonderful on many levels, it definitely asserted that the only thing single women really care about is dating.

In my case, I was living a full, vibrant life and lacked not for love. Dating was certainly one part of my single life, but that was it. It was just one part. In my conversations I enjoyed talking about my dates, but I also wanted to talk about reading, cooking, biking, praying, dancing, voting, learning, traveling…everything! I wanted to talk about love not just in terms of romance, but it terms of loving myself, my neighbors, my family, the world. The constant conversing about dating seemed limiting to me.

So I began writing, not because I wanted to preach about the value of singlehood, but because I wanted to address the question, “Why is the single life viewed in such narrow terms?” With Kiss Me, I’m Single I wanted to honor and examine the complexity of what it means to be a single woman today.

Is there a little bit of “you” in your book? Can you tell us a little about your background which led to your “singledom”?

There is a lot of me in this book. I think the single topic has been something I’ve wrestled with—whether consciously or subconsciously—from a young age. I grew up the only child of a single mother in a neighborhood where seemingly every other home had a mother, a father and two or three kids. I remember being very uncomfortable that our family was different. In Kindergarten my teacher hung a huge chart at the front of the room and asked us to write the number of people who lived in our family home. I was only kid who wrote two. I was mortified.