Single All the Way 🎄🎅
🌎 The Big Topic: Single All the Way 🎄🎅
For 15 years I’ve been sending custom Christmas cards to friends and family (if you’d like to receive one, send me your mailing address). Two years ago I switched from wintery landscapes to solo photos of me in festive attire.
A friend gently told me his boyfriend reacted to last year’s photo with, “He’s still single?” I get statements and questions to this effect about once or twice a year. At Thanksgiving, days after I started drafting this essay, I was asked when I was going to “settle down.” (Ever notice how the word settle is usually associated with sinking, immobility, paying up, or ending an arduous negotiation?)
I turned 40 last month and these remarks, thankfully rare, nag me a bit because I don’t have a definitive response. I’ve only been in two relationships: the first in 2008 and the second spanning 2016 to 2017. Otherwise I’ve been single.
A Pew study of census data found 38% of Americans age 25-54 live without a spouse or partner, up from 29% in 1990, so I’m in plentiful company.
A few months ago I asked myself what benefits people get out of being in relationships. I can think of practicalities like sharing living expenses and having extra help for various chores and responsibilities (though many marriages are lopsided in who completes household tasks).
Married and cohabiting partners have sex more frequently, according to Britain’s decennial National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles, but that gap has been narrowing. Similar disparities appear in the University of Chicago’s General Social Survey of Americans.
Romantic partners can provide emotional support, but so can friends, family, and an actual therapist. The existence of couples counseling proves that a partner’s support may be inadequate and even counterproductive at times.
I notice the downsides of people’s relationships. I sometimes see condescension, entitled demands, manipulations, control, dependence, dreams abandoned, and lives upended.
I fear losing independence and having someone tell me what to do or not do, and I fear feeling guilty that I’m transgressing in some way for having different beliefs and interests.
For instance, when I was 31, I quit my job and went backpacking through New Zealand, Australia, and Southeast Asia for half a year. That trip, which was one of the best experiences of my life, would’ve been very difficult to do were I not single.
I sometimes like doing some things on a whim like impulsively booking a movie ticket, touring a museum, accepting a dinner invitation, meeting friends at a bar, or just walking for several hours. I don’t have to ask anyone’s permission, convince anyone, or develop justifications. I just go do it and I don’t feel any guilt that I’ve returned home late at night “yet again.”
I’m lucky to have a rich social life, something I’ve worked very hard to cultivate and whose value I didn’t fully appreciate until pandemic closures destroyed it for much of 2020. Consequently I don’t feel lonely and don’t have a strong motivation to date someone to just fill a nonexistent void.
The question about when I’m going to “settle down” is hard to answer because I just don’t give it much thought. I sometimes want to respond, “When are you going to join an amateur hockey team?” knowing how ridiculous it is to ask that to someone who never talks about hockey.
📣 What do you think? Email me! 📬
📺 The Screen
Anora (in theaters)
On a whim last week I bought a ticket for Anora, which I mentioned in a previous issue. The movie follows the rags-to-riches tale of a sex worker who hastily marries the scion of a Russian oligarch. The movie is much funnier than I expected but it’s a deeply sad story.
I liked a few unconventional features of this film. It doesn’t exaggerate the stereotypical bleakness of poverty. Also, the director cast people with relatively short acting résumés and some of the strippers were indeed professional strippers, adding a degree of authenticity.
Having read reviews, I went into the movie primed to look for a theme of conflict between the moneyed and their view of the rightful position of the help. One reviewer suspects the director focused on sex workers because “their world crystallizes the transactional nature of so much of our lives.”
Say Nothing (Hulu)
This series follows several Irish Republican Army members and victims through the decades of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. The dramatized series partly relies on oral histories collected by Boston College in the years after the Good Friday Agreement of 1998.
The show highlights the conflict between righteous motivations and the persisting human devastation of political violence that haunts a community for decades. The mood of this grim and grisly series contrasts sharply with Derry Girls, set in 1990s Northern Ireland, in which the Troubles lurk quietly in the background of what’s ultimately a teen comedy.
- 📺 Watch the trailer 👀
- 📝 Read more: The Guardian review | Esquire interview
Vanderpump Villa (Hulu)
I finally gave in and watched one of the many reality series that sink to the level of “trash television.” And I liked it. The series follows the dramas of the mostly 20-something staff running a French chateau overseen by Lisa Vanderpump, one of the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. As with much of this genre, the kayfabe drama is sometimes too obvious, but entertaining anyway.
🔊 The Speaker
Brat and It's Completely Different but Also Still Brat (Spotify | Apple Music)
Last summer I mentioned Charli XCX’s new album, Brat. She released a remix album with a mile-long name that’s well worth a listen. Here are a few of my favorite tracks and some of the lyric that caught my ear:
- 🟢 360 with Robyn & Yung Lean. Robyn admits she started singing “so young, I didn’t even have email.” It turns out her career started in the early 1990s!
- 🔪 Sympathy is a knife with Ariana Grande. Charli says how much it hurts when people claim that fame has changed her and they want her to fail.
- 🗣️ Talk talk with Troye Sivan. Another incredible dance song features an uncredited Dua Lipa announcing in French, “J’ai pardu mon téléphone,” (I lost my phone) but that it was totally worth it.
- 🦊 Everything is romantic with Caroline Polachek, who laments the foxes keeping her awake
- 🏜️ So I with A.G. Cook. I had to stop and rewind when Charli mentioned performing in Arcosanti, a small experimental community I visited last year in the Arizona desert.
- 🤷♀️ Girl, so confusing with Lorde. I first interpreted this song as Charli struggling with conflicting visions of her ideal self. Others insist it’s a diss track.
🔗 Assorted Links
News articles and essays of note
- 📝 World’s ‘smallest film festival’ is one big party — if you can get there: Take a harrowing drive in the Pyrenees to get to the little film festival in Spain. (Washington Post)
- 📝 DC’s Metro Made a Comeback. Meet the Man Behind It. Under Randy Clarke, Metro has bounced back from a pandemic slump, winning him plaudits and fans. (Washingtonian)
- 📝 Jumbo Slice trash cans arrive in Adams Morgan. Deposit your late-night pizza boxes in these new receptacles. (Axios)
- 📝 How the Ivy League Broke America: The meritocracy isn’t working. We need something new. (The Atlantic)
- 📝 I Liked New York as a Tourist. I Fell In Love With It as a Tour Guide: How did pigeons came to dominate our streets? Where did Katharine Hepburn live? The answers might be more interesting than you think. (New York Times)
- 📝 Two Apartment Buildings Were Planned. Only One Went Up. A case study in why a city that desperately needs more housing struggles to approve new housing. (New York Times)
- 📝 Someday, We’ll Bike on a Path Across America. But First, Nebraska: A pedal-powered tour through the middle stretch of the proposed 3,700-mile Washington-to-other-Washington trail. (New York Times)
📊 The Numbers
Share of Washington region residents who rate Metro as “excellent” or “good”.
- 📊 Source: April 19-29, 2024, Washington Post-Schar School poll of D.C. area residents.
- Cited in 📝 DC’s Metro Made a Comeback. Meet the Man Behind It. (Washingtonian)
…of Latinos who have heard of the term Latinx say it should not be used to describe the Hispanic or Latino population, up from 65% saying the same in 2019.
- 📊 Source: Latinx Awareness Has Doubled Among U.S. Hispanics Since 2019, but Only 4% Use It. Pew Research Center.
📨 Letters to the Editor
A reader is skeptical of my newfound motivation to go to the gym:
Sir— Isn’t the real reason you gave into the gym was the copious 🍆 in the steamroom? —Stan W., Forest Hills
While it's true I had a brief encounter or two, that's not my motivation for going to the gym. And, for the record, I did not initiate these encounters, but nor did I object.
🎬 The Wrap
I read a profile of Daniel Craig, an actor best known for playing James Bond, but who, in the upcoming movie Queer, plays an American in 1950s Mexico City enchanted with a younger man. I have added emphasis to the director’s take on the relationship between an actor and the character:
Though his performance has been earning raves and Oscar chatter since “Queer” premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September, it may surprise fans to see this side of Craig after watching him play a stoic secret agent for the better part of 15 years. But when I asked the director Luca Guadagnino whether “Queer” is closer to his leading man’s actual sensibility than people might have guessed, he replied, “Every movie is a documentary about the actor playing the character.”
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Header image: People in the Sun. Edward Hopper, 1960.