Free Spinster by Kate Bolick Page B

choose to not do something so normal and expected would require a very good explanation, which I certainly didn’t have.
    Before, I’d looked at the adult women I knew—those older than me, in their forties and fifties and beyond—to see who I wanted to become. Now I consciously divided them into married versus unmarried, and it was revelatory.
    The first thing that struck me was how the single women of my acquaintance were exceptionally alert to the people around them, generous in their attention, ready to engage in conversation or share a joke. Having nobody to go home to at night had always seemed a sad and lonesome fate; now I saw that being forced to leave the house for human contact encourages a person to live more fully in the world. In the best instances, the result was an intricate lacework of friendships varying in intensity and closeness that could be, it seemed, just as sustaining as a nuclear family, and possibly more appealing.
    I began to listen more closely to the variations in these women’s advice. Married women, especially those with children, tended to assume a superior stance, as if their insights into people and relationships came preapproved, even though single women drew from a larger store of experiences and had often seen more of the world, from which the wisdom I wanted to discover is derived.
    Yet, for all their vitality and stores of empathy and insight, none of these single women had actively chosen her state, or even simply failed to meet “the one.” Each had come to it through some form of bad luck, whether death or divorce. Most were on the lookout for love, only one or two swore they were done with it, but all of them behaved as if their married selves had been their true selves, and this present-day version a peculiar aberration.
    None seemed to enjoy what I imagined to be Maeve’s quietly confident self-reliance. That this was sheer projection didn’t exactly strike me at the time.
    And if my faith in her, this woman I knew next to nothing about, sounds misdirected, a touch magical, that’s because it was. When the present feels as endless as an impossibly long hallway between airport terminals, white and sterile and numb, we’re particularly receptive to signs.

    In the winter of 1999 I did two things: apply to two graduate schools in New York City, and write an essay about Filene’s Basement, in the Maeve Brennan tradition—an urban flaneur’s wanderings through a bustling retail emporium. In the doing, it became a memory of shopping there with my mother. After waiting for the managing editor to leave his office, I left the essay on his desk chair.
    If he published the piece, I decided, I was a real writer. If he didn’t, I had to figure out a new plan.
    It was, of course, preposterous to put my entire fate in someone else’s hands.
    A week later, he left the essay on my desk chair, with the word
Yes
circled in red.
    Not long after, I heard back from the schools I’d applied to: I’d been accepted to both, and New York University had offered me a fellowship. The instant I received the acceptance e-mail, I knew I wanted to move to New York City alone, but once again, I didn’t know how to say it out loud. To even
think
of leaving my boyfriend on the cusp of thirty felt recklessly immature. I kept telling myself it was time to quit my spinster fantasies and grow up.
    In August R and I packed the contents of our Somerville apartment into a U-Haul and drove to Brooklyn.

    Recently I came across a study by the social psychologists Hazel Markus and Paula Nurius that illuminated my fascination with Maeve Brennan—and the necessity of increasing culture’s store of heroines in general.
    The thirty subjects had recently experienced a significant breakup or death of a loved one. After self-diagnosing where they ranked in the recovery process, the subjects were divided into two groups—“good recovery”