Questions single women get asked
And it’s not OK
I wanted children.
I am good with children. My mum was too.
It’s not magic. Honestly kids and animals. If you love them, they sense it and love you right back.
My next door neighbours had two young boys. I know I let them be “naughty”, but they were four and six. I didn’t care if they jumped on the bed and bounced. How much harm could they do?
Or even if they screamed and ran around. It was the end of a cul-de-sac. My garden was secluded and surrounded by woodland. Boys are loud and boisterous and bounce and run. Nothing wrong with any of that.
I loved them and they loved me back.
But single women are a problem in society..
Questions that I have genuinely been asked:
“But you’re so nice, how come you’re not married?”
“Are you a lesbian?”
“Hi, how is ‘X’?” (My boyfriend – it didn’t work out).
To be clear, this from a married acquaintance while she was walking her dog and I was out for a run. We both lived in the same village and saw each other maybe twice a year. This was years ago. Before I met and married my husband.
How would she feel if I did the same. “Hi, Fiona (not her name). How is Malcolm?” (not his name).
“Are you still together? Oh, that’s brilliant.”
“Nice to see you too.”
Big smile.
Because what else can you do?
I never asked her about her husband or their relationship, because urmm. That would be so rude.
Get Trish Booth’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
But she asked about my boyfriend. It was as though having a boyfriend elevated me from non-person to potential person status. It felt strange.
Then there was the time my brother and his family came to stay. It was the summer. We had a barbecue. My chatty brother started talking to my neighbours and invited them over. They joined us and we had a nice day.
But as a single girl, I had lived next door to them for three years with nothing more than mutual “hello’s” and taking in each other’s Amazon deliveries.
Suddenly, I was no longer a scary, predatory, possibly lesbian single girl. I had a brother, with wife and children. He was O.K., maybe I was too?
Why are single girls so scary?
Actually it also applies to single guys. My husband’s first wife died from cancer at the age of thirty-five. They lived out in the country. It was a tight knit community. For at least two years my husband didn’t want to socialise. When the fog of grief eventually lifted a little bit, he noticed he was still welcome at the pub, at the football club, village events.
But his married friends no longer welcomed him into their homes.
No dinner parties. Birthday celebrations. Anniversaries. Barbecues.
Nothing where he, as a single man could potentially seduce one of the married ladies away from her husband. Which is something he would find abhorrent by the way. He was and 😊 still is, a big believer in fidelity.
I even had a friend spell it out to me. “We would have invited you, but it was all couples, so you would have messed up the numbers.” Smile. “I hope you understand”.
So. Questions single girls are asked.
“Don’t you want children?”
- Yes, desperately, thank you for pressing the most painful button I have!
“Did you always want to be a career girl?”
- No, never. It happened by accident. I don’t honestly know how I got here.
“Don’t you like guys?”
- Prrrrrrrreow. Licks lips
“I could never live alone. How do you manage?”
- To be fair this was someone way back in the early eighties. Times have moved on since then. But. Did you notice? No single ladies in Stepford.
“Honestly, I just couldn’t deal with all that. <insert as needed> ‘paperwork, tax returns, mortgage application, diy, gardening…’. How do you cope?”
- I agree. Most of it isn’t fun. But I do it. It’s not hard. And actually I found that I didn’t need a Y chromosome to get it done after all.
