Mar

Singles in the News: Getting Branded, Online Dating (also) sucks for Men and the problem with Leaning In

“Maybe a woman has a child without being married; maybe a woman gets married, has children, and then divorces; maybe a woman marries and Mother Nature cheats her out of motherhood. But all of these women got on base: only the single, never married, childless woman is like the batter who just never hit the ball or got on base – no marriage, strike one; no relationship, strike two; no kids: strike three. She’s out – outcast from the community of ‘The Family.’” — Diane Torre, The Scarlet Letter S, at Psychology Today.

“Single women – with and without kids – have special challenges in their work lives that most married women do not. They have no spousal salary as a back-up plan. In some ways, they need greater opportunities and protections, but they get fewer. If, for example, a married woman becomes ill and her spouse has a job covered by the Family and Medical Leave Act, that spouse can take time off under the Act to care for her. No peer in the life of a single woman (such as a close friend or a sibling) can take time to care for her.” — Dr. Bella DePaulo, Is the Lean-In Conversation Going to Leave Out Single Women? at her Single at Heart blog

“I tell all my single guy friends to watch out for online dating. It is a sad, soul-crushing place where good guys go to die a slow death by way of ignored messages and empty inboxes. You will peruse profiles and find a few women who aren’t posing in a bathroom with their stomachs exposed. You will look for things in common in their profile (they like Scrabble too!). You will send them a note, carefully crafted to show interest and attention to detail. The first seven will not respond. The next one will, but she spells “you” as “u” and you will let the conversation stall.” — Why Online Dating Sucks for Men at AlterNet (reposted from Role Reboot)

93 days ago Short URL 2 Comments

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Nov

“It is not worth the grief” An essay at the Feminist Wire about work & self-care

I wrote a piece for the wonderful forum on black women’s health published at The Feminist Wire today:

There was something really satisfying about it, I think, because I was used to abuse. I had no idea what to do with my feelings when I wasn’t working. My work addiction provided immediate gratification so that I was always accessible to anyone – student, editor, supervisor or reader.

As Gloria Anzaldúa wrote in another context, “no vale la pena…it is not worth the grief.” Like my peers in academia who are full professors, I know what it means to be fully committed to the world in which we find ourselves. When I started teaching, I had the same porous boundaries with my students. I was answering emails and phone calls at all hours, regardless of what the syllabus said. For my 60+ hours per week, I was essentially paid the wage of an intern with no benefits, which is why it was useful to continue working at the paper.

My life was my work. Work was my life. I was always exhausted. I thought this was what it took to live the American dream, but I was not really living.

I hope you enjoy it. Ironically, I still work all the time. It feels different (and more anxiety-producing at times) because I’m working for myself now, but I know it will resonate with some of you.

231 days ago Short URL Comments

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Oct

Six things I love about Facebook, The Single Lady Edition

If you are a working writer in the 21st Century, you can try all you want, but you cannot escape the Facebook. (And, yes, this is my balance post after Six Reasons Facebook Sucks. Speaking of which, The Party of Ones now has its own Facebook page. Come hang out with me there if you’re around.)

On a day when I was working on two book projects and building a blog for a client, I got news that a website wanted an essay about how I coped with losing my parents within two years of each other.

Did I have original art, the editor wondered?

Well…I’ve written about my family dynamic in the past. There aren’t a ton of pictures of me with my family, or even my parents by themselves. When I moved around a lot with my mother as a kid, we lost a lot of things, including a picture of my brother Jose, who I am named for, during evictions.

I did have one photo of my Mom, though. During the span of a few weeks when I lived with my Dad while I was in college, I spent a lot of time by myself because he would just stop talking to me randomly. Out of spite and because I wanted it, I found this photo and stole it from him.

It ended up being photo of her that graced the cover of her memorial service this past January.

My Mom, some time in the 1970s. Working it.

I scanned it as it is, then noticed it was dusty. I tried to wipe it delicately with water and totally destroyed it.

I mention this is because the story of that photo is connected to a time in my life before I met the bulk of my Facebook friends or people in my life at the moment. I’m incredibly blessed to know folks from all over the world I met at boarding school, in the Bronx, at middle school, in college and all my jobs from New York to the West Coast to Texas, starting way back when I was 14.

That’s two plus decades of memories, experiences and friendship.

The thing about knowing people for that amount of time is that they get to see you grow and change. And you get to see them grow and change. It’s not true for all of your relationships, probably, but it is for the ones that matter.

Anyway, on the day I ruined the photo of my mom, I shared another family photo that I hadn’t ruined on Facebook. It allowed me to connect with my sister and my beloved friends in a way that was impossible before social media. Just sharing that little glimpse of the past and connecting with my closest friends and loved ones was enough salve for my wounds to keep me writing when I would have preferred to sulk and go back to bed.

Sometimes that’s all it takes.

So, here are my six reasons for loving Facebook. Pardon me if I get sappy.

Engagement with people, causes and ideas I care about: Mashable reported this summer that Facebook keeps inching closer to a billion active users. They had 955 million active users as of July, and more than half of those users log in everyday. When you’re interested in being connected to social causes, virtual communities, other bloggers, business and commerce, it is the go-to place.

Marketing and promotion of writing: Part of writer/journalist/content creator 101 should be, if it isn’t already, that if you write, your words get shared more and viewed by more potential readers, publishers, agents or anyone on Facebook than any other site. Some of this has to do with the sheer number of people that are on Facebook. I don’t know if anyone has any scientific proof that writers + Facebook equals fame and fortune, but what the savvy and smart writers on Facebook and social media know is that you can’t just get a robot to update your status. Community and reader engagement is the sign of our times. If you’re not doing it, you will likely not sell a lot of books, either. For some people, the privacy concerns, the time suck of social media and other things keep them away, which I totally understand.

Social connection when you work remotely or from home:
It’s nice to be able to see a lot of the people I love online on a daily basis. Writing and blogging can be lonely, harrowing work. Read this. That’s kind of what it’s like.

Tremendous resource for job leads and work connections: I find editors and writing buddies and story ideas and all kinds of good stuff on Facebook. The blend of work and personal is sometimes a grind, but it’s often worth it. It just requires me to be a grown up and learn when to log out.

Spiritual, religious and general inspiration and encouragement: I’m still a huge self-help fanatic. I’ve hidden a lot of random people who I don’t know personally from my news feed. I focus on updates from Tricycle, The Solo Traveler, Happy Black Woman, Marianne Williamson and Paulo Coelho. I like pictures with quotes. I sort of knew this before Facebook, but now it is abundantly clear.

International reach:
Some of my favorite people post pictures when they are traveling around the world or around the country. I stalk my friends pages when they visit libraries in other cities (Seattle Public Library, we haven’t met yet and this is CRAZY but, I think I love you) or travel to Istanbul or the Sudan or Brazil. I haven’t gone to any of these places yet, but it helps reinforce why I want to go and it’s great to hear what they’ve found along the way.
Why do you like it/love it? How do you manage your addiction? (What’s that? You say you’re not addicted? Help me, I need recovery. Maybe after the book is published. Did I mention the Single & Happy Facebook Page? )

Sep

NYT: The privileged Americans are marrying which helps them stay privileged

About 41 percent of births in the United States occur outside marriage, up sharply from 17 percent three decades ago.

But equally sharp are the educational divides, according to an analysis by Child Trends, a Washington research group. Less than 10 percent of the births to college-educated women occur outside marriage, while for women with high school degrees or less the figure is nearly 60 percent.

Long concentrated among minorities, motherhood outside marriage now varies by class about as much as it does by race. It is growing fastest in the lower reaches of the white middle class — among women like Ms. Schairer who have some postsecondary schooling but no four-year degree. – Two Classes in America, Divided By ‘I Do.’

I’ve been thinking about the concept that Stanford professor Ralph Richard Banks describes in his book Is Marriage for White People? as “white follows black.” He talks about the fact that what happens to black women who may not be following the marital patterns of their predecessors and who face all sorts of social barriers based on their single status, are actually also setting the stage for how life will start to be for white women.

The article above shows that theory might be correct, as flawed as it is. (Side note: I dislike the New York Times’ reductive take on single people, generally, and this piece is no exception). I have such an odd relationship to privilege, and yet, given my upbringing, it makes total sense. I want enough to do the work that I am passionate about in the world, but I hate privilege because it excludes people who have very little. In fact, I hate most things that exclude people, but that’s the rant of an outsider, and I’ll get to that later.

The article includes some not-great news about single parenthood. Never say never, but I am highly unlikely to be a parent, so I never write about the topic. Also, given the unpredictable nature of marriage and the fact that I have essentially spent my entire life trying to avoid becoming a single parent, it sounds like it might not the path for me. I do find it interesting that the Times notes that single parenthood has gone from being an anomaly to being pretty popular. That also falls in line with Ralph Richard Banks’ ‘white follows black’ theory. I love that single mothers had to be validated by the fact that the last three American presidents were raised by single mothers. Children of single mothers, you, too, can be great!

Bella DePaulo, an expert on singles and cultural bias against singles writes more about the piece at Psychology Today, which she calls deplorable:

Also missing from the Times story is any awareness that stigmatizing stories such as this one are contributing to the disparity in the experiences of single-parent families and married-parent families that DeParle believes he is merely documenting. Go ahead, keep telling the single-parent families how bad they have it because there is no “6-foot-8-inch man named Kevin” and how superior the married families are because they do have their Kev. That sort of mythologizing and moralizing probably nudged Jessica into finding “a new boyfriend, who she thought would help with the children and the bills,” but who had to be tossed out by the police six months later.

Really, “just get married” isn’t the answer to the economic challenges of single parenting any more than “just say no” is the answer to drug addiction.

330 days ago Short URL Comments

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Jul

Wait, so you want me to love on you AND clean all the things?

Whenever I think about love, I think about partnership and I envision what it would be like to be married.

Recently, I had a great conversation with a working writer and activist who is also a married mother. “I know how to be single and happy,” she said. “What I’m working on is learning how to be happy with another person.”

She still very much identifies with the struggles of singles who are considered infantile until they are partnered. And I had a lot of compassion for her and some of my other friends who are searching for models of partnered love that do not oppress women who also enjoy little luxuries like freedom and leisure. So, of course, reading things like this are pretty sobering:

Women are a growing part of the American workforce. In the last 25 years, the number of working women has grown by 44.2 percent, while 59.4 percent of working-age women are currently in the labor force. Sixty percent of women are the primary or co-bread winner for their household.

But despite those historic numbers, most women are still left doing the majority of the house work.

A new report out from the Bureau of Labor Statistics details how both men and women spend their days, and it comes as no surprise that women do a larger portion of the cooking, cleaning, laundry, and other chores:

On an average day, 19 percent of men did housework–such as cleaning or doing laundry–compared with 48 percent of women. Forty percent of men did food preparation or cleanup, compared with 66 percent of women.

The numbers can be in part explained by the women who don’t work or who have part-time jobs. But the disproportionate burden of housework on women shows that a “second shift” still exists for those who work. While women have earned more rights in the office place (though they still aren’t fairly paid for their work), there is still the burden for them to be the primary housekeepers and caretakers.

There are a dozen reasons why this is no bueno. The glorious benefit to being single, of course, is that I can leave the dishes dirty until it requires a power cleaner to get the hard spaghetti sauce off the plate from my intentional neglect. Underthings can hang from the ceiling fans if I want. No one will see it for days but me.

But the other thing that makes this a rough situation is that I want to take care of my partner, but I also don’t like to do free work. I don’t want the house to smell like the inside of a hamper, but that’s what Glade plug-ins are for. Relationships, I hear, are work. So is marriage. Maybe I’m too tired from the heat to see how this ends up being a good deal for women. Am I missing something?

349 days ago Short URL 8 Comments

marriage/second shift/single/women/work

Jun

I am a happy Single American: An excerpt from the book

I have been telling you a little about the book I’ve been writing, and wanted to offer you some excerpts of it while I slowly edit so you don’t have to wait forever for a finished product.

The year I turned 34, I had finished three full and seven half marathons and I’d been teaching journalism at the University of Texas as a lecturer for four semesters. I’d dreamed of being a writer for over twenty years, and persevered for long enough that I worked full-time as a newspaper reporter in some of America’s most scenic cities: San Francisco, Seattle and Houston (well, OK, now I live in Austin, which is much prettier than Houston.)

I owned a home – a huge feat for a girl who had once frequented New York City homeless shelters as a child — a beautiful dog the size of a mini-pony, a reliable car some jerk dented with one of those metal carts at Home Depot and a spectacular bill of health from doctors. After years of therapy for having financial issues, control issues, addiction issues and general issues, by the time I reached my mid-thirties, when my therapist said I was the most mentally healthy person she knew, I finally believed her. I had a rich network of friends around the world who respected my work and writing and emailed me dispatches from Mexico, Barcelona and Egypt.

I believe that we are each defined by the people in our lives. They are mirrors for us. I am probably unnaturally devoted to my friends because so many of them have acted as surrogates for family over the years.

I am also a single American.

“Why are you still single?”

This question has always grated on my nerves, but it’s only gotten worse as the years have gone by. It is what I like to call a back-handed compliment. A guy I met recently called it a slap kiss. It is meant to flatter you as in, “Why are you still single when crazy-as-a-fun house Becky got engaged six months ago?”

Before I did any research, before I realized that the problem was a cultural and social one and before I knew there were over 60 million other single Americans who probably shared my pain, I simply answered this question with the truth: “I don’t know.”

Sometimes the answer was different. “I don’t want to be in a relationship.”

The truth, more often, was a bit more nuanced, as any single person can attest. Dating, as I will write about here, is like everything else in the world that the Internet screwed up – incredibly rich with potential, totally, incredibly time-consuming and randomly ludicrous. I could not believe no one had written a first-person account of dating as a single woman in the 21^st Century and how to cope with all the shenanigans that come with the package – no matter how brilliant, sexy, big-boobed, erudite or compliant with societal norms a woman is or is not, it is really rough out there for single people.

Not just a little bit rough, honey. It is incredibly hard to find like-minded people with good credit, self-awareness or goals that are scheduled beyond a calendar date in the next couple of weeks. There are books on weight-loss, getting your money right, how to be more devoted to God, and of course, how to get a man. What I really needed for a good decade, though, was a book on how to be happily single.

358 days ago Short URL 6 Comments

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May

Wall Street Journal: Wait, you don’t have all this free time as a single person?

One thing that troubles me more than any other about the single life is the assumption that you just have all the free time in the world to do whatever you want. It’s supposed to be a kind way of saying, “I have to leave the office right this second because I have a family waiting on me, but since you don’t have a real life, I’ll just leave this work here for you to handle.”

I was happy to see this Wall Street Journal story about how much more time it seems to take being single than being in a committed partnership:

Much of the research on work-life conflict focuses on harried working mothers trying to juggle everything, desperate for more time, with lots of reasons to leave work early. But an even higher proportion of single women yearn for more free time; 68% of childless women say they would prefer having more time over more money, compared with 62% of women with children, according to a 2011 More magazine survey of 500 college-educated professional women over 34.
“People talk about, how do working mothers do it? But how do singles do it?” says Sherri Langburt, founder of SingleEditionMedia.com, a New York agency that advises brands on marketing to singles and runs a network for bloggers on singles topics.

Without a partner to help, singles must “get the laundry done, get to the gym, buy groceries and get to the job,” plus plan social activities or volunteer work and sometimes care for aging relatives, too.
“No one is focusing attention on those women or men, who are achieving such great levels in their careers, all alone,” Ms. Langburt says.

Many employers have added “work-life benefits,” such as flexible scheduling and personal time off, in an effort to keep all kinds of employees happy, with and without kids and spouses.
But the benefits only go so far. Heavy workloads keep many employees from using them. And for men and women alike, some managers still assume singles don’t have anything to do but work and pile on extra duties and projects, according to research by Wendy Casper, an associate professor of management at the University of Texas at Arlington.

It was a relief to read this. I have never worked as hard in my life as I did when I worked for someone else, in offices where other people had a better excuse to leave their desk at 5 p.m. than, “I need a nap because if I’m going to work on the myth of work-life balance, I won’t be able to go have my ‘Sex in the City’ networking happy hour speed-dating love fest after this AND make a healthy dinner for myself that isn’t from a box in the freezer.”

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May

I thought I was the only one who loved this song, but I found out when Donna Summer died last week at age 63 that it was the song of choice for so many. The Internet Movie Database called it “the abiding feminist anthem…(and) one of the most-played songs of all-time.”

Every now and then, when I’m tired and whiny and ready to complain about too much work, I hear the hook on this song.

What a life, Donna Summer. Rest in peace, darling.

391 days ago Short URL 2 Comments

African American/black women/music/popular culture/work

May

Life and Business Advice for the New Graduate

Another guest post at Bitch Magazine:

I haven’t donned a cap and gown of my own for a little while, but as a self-help and business book nerd, all the great career advice dispensed around this year keeps my Instapaper account busy.

There’s business advice hidden in funny books like Tina Fey’s Bossypants (paraphrase: If there’s someone you dislike at your office and they don’t have the power to change your fate, ignore them and move on) or even in general life advice books like Katie Couric’s The Best Advice I Ever Got. Here’s one of my favorite quotes from Couric: “I realized that whatever your path, whatever your calling, the most damaging thing you can do is let other voices define you and drown out your own. You’ve got to block them out and find that place deep inside you, shaken but still intact, and hold on to it.”

What’s the most useful career advice anyone ever gave you? Here’s my best shot at dispensing words of wisdom that I wish someone had told me when I entered the workforce but I didn’t know until later. Feel free to add some to the comments. I’m sure me and my imaginary boo, Ryan Gosling, are missing something.

I know. I had to add Ryan Gosling in there somewhere.

Here are some of my favorite tips:

6. Don’t date in the office. What? I know. Hot. Right there. Where you spend all your waking hours. Down GIRL! (And by date, I mean whatever it is you think I mean by date.) Certainly, there are all kinds of excuses you can make to say why this is wrongheaded. I know a lot of couples who met at the office. Don’t crap where you sleep. It rarely ends well.

7. Ask for what you want. Like my imaginary honey Ryan suggests above, asking for a raise or a promotion is something that you should totally do. Lois Frankel gives great advice about this, as does Austin-based career coach Ann Daly. It’s scary, but scared money don’t make none. In other words, the worst that could happen is that your boss will say no to whatever you’re asking for.

8. Try to forget ‘What I Thought I’d Be Doing’ and enjoy the ride. Aim to enjoy where you are. Everyone has to start somewhere.

9. Save Money. I used to have a really silly relationship with money, shaped by growing up without much. Interviewing wise people over the years has underscored for me the importance of having a stash saved in the event that I need to leave a toxic or untenable situation and regroup.

10. Win. I used to hate attention and I would unconsciously sabotage myself, thinking that if I won all the time, people would hate me for it. Specifically, “boys club” women and intimidated men. It turns out winning is sexy. It also makes you happy and confident, which gives your skin a healthy glow. Go for it.

If you have some, I’d love to hear it.

400 days ago Short URL Comments

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