“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.
