Forget His Roses--You're Better Off Single

Forget His Roses—You’re Better Off Single
2/14/2023 by Amy Polacko
On Valentine’s Day, my mind always goes to the women in unhappy marriages and toxic relationships who don’t know how incredible it feels on the outside.



A Galentine’s Day event on Feb. 13, 2018, in Hollywood, Calif. (Vivien Killilea / Getty Images for PUMA)
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I didn’t blame her for thinking I was hitched. After all, in my Norman Rockwell-esque Connecticut town, it seemed like everyone was. Following my first divorce, I felt like Hester Prynne from The Scarlet Letter walking down quaint Main Street with a “D” on my chest. “There she is,” I imagined our tiny town’s residents saying while pointing, “the divorced one!” Was I upset about having no beau on the big day? Did I run straight to the tissue aisle? Or lose it when settled snugly in my car? Hell no. In fact, my mind went to the poor women in unhappy marriages and toxic relationships who don’t know how incredible it feels on the outside.

Don’t get me wrong, as a divorce coach with clients across the United States, my heart breaks for them. I coach these trapped women. Often fear—especially of ending up homeless—prevents them from asking for the Valentine’s Day gift they really want: a divorce. They can be scared of the online dating pool too, for good reason. With the Tinder Swindlers and West Elm Calebs out there, it’s a war zone. As a former investigative reporter, I tell my clients they have to be one too.

But what more and more of us have figured out is that—despite the challenges—singlehood is nothing short of nirvana. Gone is the obligation to cook nightly, pick up dirty socks laying around or make your plans around someone else’s schedule. Besides kid and work duties, you can do whatever you damn well please. We singletons throw ourselves into passions we had little time to focus on before—and it feels fabulous.
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Looking back, it’s not our fault. Women are conditioned to need a man. Some mothers teach daughters how to “land a husband.” Movies often portray marriage as the pivotal goal in a young woman’s life. Then, there are those feel-good stories spun by fairy tales. Yes, Cinderella, Snow White and even the seven dwarfs are complicit. No need to point out that Valentine’s Day pressure starts before Kris Kringle has even left town. “I do think that more women are deciding to stay single,” Dr. Bella DePaulo, author of Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After, told me. “I’m most interested in the people—not just women—who do so for entirely positive reasons. They are the people I call Single at Heart. For them, single life is their best life—their most authentic, meaningful, fulfilling and psychologically rich life. It’s not something they’re stuck with—it is something they love and embrace.” According to the market research firm Mintel, 61 percent of single women say they are content with being solo, while only 49 percent of single men said the same. Sixty-five percent of men said they were not looking for a partner, compared to 75 percent of women who said their singledom was a choice.

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https://msmagazine.com/2023/02/14/valentines-day-women-single/