Sex and the Single Girl: The Unmarried Woman's Guide to Men (30 page)

During that time she carefully wrapped a present for their major client and put it in a filing drawer for safekeeping—an expensive, ancient little book from Rosenbach & Company in Philadelphia, containing rare maps of oil territory in frontier America. Several weeks into January, when her boss still hadn’t received a thank-you note, he muttered disconsolately to Karen about the ingratitude of clients. By this time Karen was enough out of zombiehood to remember the little book she had filed away. She made a full confession and rushed the book to the client.

Her company lost the account anyway during the year. Karen wonders to this day if she and her company wouldn’t both have been better off if she had taken to her bed for a couple of weeks to mourn the end of her affair, and left the Christmas shopping to a live, functioning human being!

The mourning period, which can last several weeks, is obviously no time to accomplish major tasks, but you
can
get things done around the house—sewing, scrubbing, furniture polishing and curtain washing—the more exhausting, the better.

Then finally a day dawns when you can contemplate without rancor the blue jersey dress you bought to wear to the New Year’s Day game with
him.
Since it’s too late for football, and especially under
his
auspices, you decide just to wear the dress to the office. You do—and look kind of great.

From that day on your strength and interest in life begin to return. And the sap returns to your veins.

Even so, for a little while, every man you meet will be an oaf, an imbecile or have dandruff on his lapels. In the early recovery stages you’re in no condition to know what to do with a crown prince offering a kingdom anyhow.

But one day, somebody good
does
appear, and by now you have a strange new asset going for you … derring-do! Since it’s possible you are still partially numb and in love with your departed beau, you figure what’s there to lose—so you are a little bolder, a little more razzle-dazzle than you’d normally
dream
of being. It may be just what you—and the situation—need.

Karen sank into a wonderful man that way—a ruggedly handsome builder contractor with whom she had a blind date for cocktails. Karen suspects he wasn’t sure he’d like her well enough to take her to dinner. Figuring that he was probably hopelessly out of reach, and knowing that she was immune to new love
or
rebuff, Karen decided over a third daiquiri to play Scheherazade and weave him a wonderful tale. She said she had met him many years before at a party (which she knew he’d attended because her friends who arranged the date told her about it) and at that time had fallen head over heels in love with him.

He couldn’t remember Karen, naturally, because he’d never laid eyes on her before, but he was fascinated. He clung to every word as Karen revealed that he was everything she had ever wanted in a man—strong, responsible, brilliant, funny and lovable. She said, “Of course I think I’m over it now, and that’s why I can see you.” He said, “Of
course
you are,” and took her right on to dinner to see if he could demolish her again.

They are still dating. Karen said that if she hadn’t been sick in love with somebody else at the time she would have been her usual diffident self—and never have seen this exciting man again.

Two Detroit girls I know, both in the doldrums one Sunday afternoon, started calling up men and asking them to
tea
, never expecting any takers because they called improbables they barely knew. They had no refusals, as it happened, and turned several improbables into lasting friends.

You can fail in your brazenry. It’s no disgrace. But you can win. I was astonished again and again in my single years at how much flattery, reassurance and kindness men can absorb. You only get into trouble when you try to trade your interest in men for a quick marriage proposal. If you will use it to make new friends, you can rise like a phoenix from the ashes of an old affair to a brand-new one with a better destiny.

I
NEVER MET A
completely happy single woman … or a completely happy married one!

A single woman admittedly has a special set of problems, but I think her worst one is not the lack of someone to belong to officially but the pippy-poo, day-to-day annoyances that plague her. For example, she has purchased a secondhand TV set from a private owner, and the 400-pound bargain is waiting in the trunk of her car to be brought upstairs and hooked up. She hasn’t a date until next weekend—and anyway she outweighs him by ten pounds!

Or she has called a taxi to take her to the airport for a 6
A.M.
departure. The taxi is now thirty minutes late, and she must be on that plane to keep an important business appointment in another city. A married woman could simply wake up a husband. That’s what I did once in such a predicament. I woke up a husband next door (
and
his wife, unfortunately, or I might have had more luck) and asked if he would mind driving me to a central part of town where I could find a cab. He was anything but thrilled with the idea, considering his wife’s admonitions which I could hear from the bedroom, and I can’t say I really blamed her. Mercifully, my taxi arrived while he was probably wondering how to say no.

These are the frustrating little experiences that vex and humiliate a single woman from time to time; however, they are not so frequent as to make life unendurable. I’ve jotted down a few suggestions for coping with them.

And for a finale I can’t resist adding a few last thoughts on how I think a single woman can have a happier life.

Be Brazen When Helpless

If there’s anything you can’t lift, lug, tote, tug or tow alone, you’ll just have to get help; and it will mean imposing on your friends as well as total strangers. You’ll have to speak
up
, too. Nobody’s going to know you need a before-work ride to the doctor for a basal metabolism if you don’t say so.

You’ll find ways to repay. You’ll help move them to
their
new apartment when the time comes, or bake a cake or send a valentine. You can even offer money tactfully, though you’ll probably be refused.

Even wives have to be brazen sometimes. I know one married to a mechanical incompetent; for weeks she has been hunting for somebody able to get the hard-top off her convertible.

Get Adopted

Every smart single woman I know gets adopted by a good butcher, an expert mechanic and an influential and/or rich couple.

In the case of the couple they often appreciate your
needing
and belonging to them as much as you appreciate their sponsorship.

As for the butcher and mechanic, I think it’s best just to throw yourself at their mercy. If you are relentlessly wide-eyed and trusting, it would be like taking advantage of an orphan to give you under-aged beef or a faulty brake job.

Don’t Compare Yourself to Married Couples

Your apartment, though charming, is not meant to compete with leading architects’ houses photographed in
Better Homes and Gardens.
Your entertaining, often hostless, can’t be like a couple’s. Your guests, though highly amusing, could be considered a little off-beat in Married-landia. Your investment program can’t begin to compare with a top executive’s. But whose college education are
you
planning?

Married couples go places in neat little twos, fours, and sixes—which seems so orderly. Naturally they do! There are
two
of each, so they multiply for social outings in twos like themselves. But
you
are not one of Noah’s aardvarks, and it is all right to move in threes and fives occasionally. Hearing Dixieland with a good friend and her beau is not the worst kind of evening when all you’d planned was to go to bed early. Having dinner with
two
delightful men can be sensational. Unmarried people’s parties are often livelier because of the non-pairings.

The married usually go places on Saturday night, which seems so normal and American! Saturday is the
logical
night for parents to hire a baby sitter, do the whole bit and sleep late the next morning. What if your next big date is on a Tuesday? The food, the wine, the music and the chatter are just as sweet and the atmosphere is better for being less crowded.

Don’t Fold Up over What You Read—or Don’t Read

Many publications deal with the problems of single women in the same vein as their, articles on fall-out. I read a newspaper editorial last night which stated among other philosophies: “The bachelor is only half-man or half-woman. They are to be pitied.” Now really!

Still other publications—
most
others for, that matter—ignore the existence of single, women entirely! For example, an otherwise excellent book entitled
Emotional Problems of Living
, by Oliver S. English and G. H.J. Pearson (Norton), lists in the index under S:

Sheep, neurosis in

Shock therapy

Siblings

adolescent rivalry

traumatic effects of birth of

Sioux culture

Social worker

Where would a single woman look to find something about
her
, I wonder. (Don’t worry—I looked! There’s nothing under U for Unmarried or under B for Bachelor girl, either.)

You see enough picture stories in national publications about couples and families to make you feel like the sole occupant of a life raft. To further depress you, the couples and families are always blueberry-pie normal, as industrious as gophers, and as much at home in the world as an egg in custard.

We know the married state
is
the normal one in our culture, and anybody who deviates from “normal” has a price to pay in nonacceptance and nonglorification. There is no one universal “normal” time, however, for participating in the normal state of marriage. Furthermore, part of what you are, at the moment, missing in marriage may be well
worth
missing!

Ernest Havemann, writing on love and marriage in the September 29, 1961, issue of
Life
, says:

Married love is not a constant round of candy, flowers and birthday presents. It is more likely to be a long series of sacrifices in which the fishing trip gives way to a down payment on a washer and the new party dress gives way to an appendectomy, and where even the weekly night out at the movies may have to give way to new shoes for the kids. It is not a guarantee of living happily ever after, for every marriage involves struggle, boredom, illness, financial problems and worry over the children.

The bridal wreath withers, the wedding dress is folded away. The bride’s biscuits—as in the comic strips and the B movies, which are often a better mirror of life than the fairy tales, and the Lana Turner epics—turn out to be inedible. The groom, seen in a bathrobe, turns out to have legs like pipestems. The love nest in the suburbs has a leaky roof, crabgrass, a mortgage that burns up every second paycheck and mice which the bride has to catch and dispose of single-handed because the husband has an annoying way of being on a business trip during every crisis.

The groom, alas, is not quite so brilliant as promised. His job prospects fade. He never earns that million dollars. He loses his hair and his teeth. His wife loses her figure. The babies are not the dimpled darlings of the ads, but imperious tyrants who have to be bottled, burped, bathed and changed—and later agonized over when they start getting into fights in elementary school and staying out too late in high school. There are moments when the husband is fed up to the teeth and would like to run off to Australia. There are moments when the wife wishes she had entered a nunnery.

Are you
really
a great deal worse off than a wife?

Don’t Run with the Mouse Packs

A solitary walk will get you more male companionship—and not necessarily with mashers—than visiting any bar and grill in town with eight other girls. Who’d have the nerve to beard such a group? A man seeing you with that many other girls
could
conclude you prefer girls anyhow.

Stay home with them if you like—girl socials are more fun than people give them credit for being—but don’t broadcast to the world you’ve given up all hope of romance by swarming publicly with females.

While we’re at it, why be sucked into outings with
anybody
who drags you down just because she’s single too? You owe her nothing. You’re probably better company all by yourself.

Be Patient with the Pressure Groups

The fond aunts, cousins, parents, neighbors, friends and bosses who dig at you like chiggers because you aren’t married and aren’t
getting
must be handled with fortitude and cunning.

Your best answer to them (if you can swing it) is to act as though they must all be off their rockers …
you
give up your precious
independence
! Then get off the subject fast before you wind up confessing how concerned you
yourself
are. This kind of discussion with
this
kind of partisan can have you looking for the razor blades.

If they insist on a more probing analysis of your singleness, look them straight in the eye and say, “But I’m much too y
oung
to marry,” or, “I’ve never really been in love with anybody but King Farouk, and since he’s gone and got so fat …” This should back them off to the bar for another Scotch and water, and you can make your getaway.

You’re the Only One There Who Isn’t Married

Many married hostesses (who are not working women themselves) would be more comfortable with a Martian at the dinner table than a single female over twenty-five. They figure the only way to solve the whole embarrassing mess (a friend of their husband’s brought you) is to bring you into
their
world and confine the conversation entirely to the children’s summer camps, parties you haven’t been to and what to put in the rock garden.

About once a year I used to come down with an illness I could diagnose as patio fever—total malaise brought on by having admired one too many split-level houses, basements converted into rumpus rooms or freshly landscaped patios.