How's Your Love Life? - Harper's BAZAAR

As marriage rates fall, divorce rates among over-fifties increase and more women choose to live alone, the stigma surrounding being single should be non-existent. Alexandra English speaks to Clementine Ford about why that’s not quite the case

 EMILY RATAJKOWSKI wants you to get divorced. “It seems that a lot of young ladies are getting divorced before they turn 30,” the model said in a recent TikTok video. The 32-year-old married the film producer Sebastian Bear-McClard in 2018, when she was 26, and divorced him last year. “I have to tell you, I don’t think there’s anything better. … For all of those people who are feeling stressed about being divorced, it’s good. Congratulations.” 

Clementine Ford agrees. The author’s new book, I Don’t: The Case Against Marriage (Allen & Unwin, $34.99), presents a new way of looking at the elements of weddings and marriage we consider to be tradition but she argues are antiquated and steeped in female oppression. She supports her points by quoting feminist scholarship, 1800s philosophers, poets, Sex and the City and the Kardashians, as well as the Bible and myriad laws.

“You’re not trying to convince people to get divorced with this book,” I suggest. “Yes, I am,” she quips, peering over the top of a freshly brewed cup of coffee. There’s a twinkle in her eye, I think. She’s joking — kind of. 

Ford and Ratajkowski are hardly the only proponents of divorce and being single post-30, both having been through the turmoil (each with a child in tow) and emerging more empowered than before. Or, in Em Rata’s words: “There is nothing better than being [divorced] in your thirties, still being hot, maybe having a little bit of your own money … and then you’ve got your whole life still ahead of you.”

Being a single woman of a certain age has been slowly — and thankfully — losing its taboo sheen in the past few years, in no small part due to the high-profile women singing its praises. Tracee Ellis Ross told Shape magazine: “In my wonderful and robust experience of being single, I have learnt to have … an intensely juicy relationship with my joyful solitude”; Whoopi Goldberg told The New York Times, “I don’t want somebody in my house”; Jennifer Aniston recently told The Wall Street Journal, “I didn’t like the idea of sacrificing who you were or what you needed. … So it was almost easier to just be kind of solo”; and Chelsea Handler wrote a sketch for The Daily Show called “A Day in the Life of a Child-free Woman”, in which the comedian sleeps in, then teleports between Paris and Mount Everest, and invents a time machine and kills Hitler. “It’s amazing what you can do when you have this much free time,” she says.

This year has also seen a seemingly unprecedented slew of celebrity divorce and breakup announcements. In September, Hugh Jackman and his wife, Deborra-Lee Furness, announced they were separating after 27 years of marriage. More celebrities have gone their separate ways: Joe Jonas and Sophie Turner, Joe Alwyn and Taylor Swift, Joe Manganiello and Sofía Vergara (prompting Twitter users to give new life to the “It’s Joever” meme), Reese Witherspoon and Jim Toth, Ariana Grande and Dalton Gomez, Tina Knowles and Richard Lawson, Justin and Sophie Trudeau, Natalie Portman and Benjamin Millepied, Jodie Turner-Smith and Joshua Jackson. The Cut called it The Summer of Celebrity Breakups, which, adjusting for hemispheric seasonal differences, feels correct.

Globally, marriage rates are decreasing. The United Kingdom’s Office for National Statistics found that as of 2021, there were 1.2 million more unmarried 25-35-year-olds in 2021 than there were in 2011, and the number of people getting married was at the lowest rate on record. In the United States in 1950, 80 per cent of households were composed of married couples; by 2020, it was 50 per cent. In Australia, the marriage rate has been falling for decades. In 2021, the marriage rate jumped up 12.9 per cent from 2020 due to the pandemic but was still 21.7 per cent lower than in 2019.

As marriage rates fall, so do divorce rates (after all, fewer marriages means fewer bad ones) in all age demographics, bar one: the over-fifties. ‘Grey divorces’ — those between couples who have usually been together for 20 years or more (think Jackman and Furness) — are on the rise. In March, the Australian Institute of Family Studies (AIFS) reported that more than 25 per cent of 2021’s divorces were grey divorces, up from about 20 per cent in the ’80s and ’90s. 

The number of people living alone is also increasing. In July, the AIFS reported that the number of single-person households is at the highest rate on record. Twenty-six per cent of households are single-person households, up from 24 per cent in 2016. Fifty-five per cent of people living alone are women, and half of those women are under 65.

So, with more people than ever choosing to remain single or leave their relationships, why is the stigma that a divorced or single woman is lonely, immature and selfish, simultaneously undesirable and uncontrollably promiscuous, still so pervasive? While not being coupled up no longer carries such extreme undertones of desperation as it did in, say, the ’40s when marriage rates peaked in Australia, the mainstream narrative maintains that the right life is a shared life: married women are normal women; single women have cats. How can there be so much distance between our lived experiences and our perceptions? 

“It is no longer legally or culturally obligatory for women or men to marry or to stay married — to be or to act heterosexual,” Professor Sasha Roseneil wrote in The Guardian. “Yet ... our lives remain profoundly shaped by the couple norm. This is the powerful and ubiquitous force — at once both social and psychological — which maintains that being in a couple is the natural and best way of living. … To be outside the couple is, in many ways, to be outside, or at least on the margins of, society.”

Roseneil’s 2020 study, titled The Tenacity of the Couple-Norm, looked at European men and women between the ages of 30 and 55, the period in mid-life “when you’re expected to be settled down in a couple and having kids”. “What our interviewees told us was that there remains at the heart of intimate life this powerful norm of the couple,” she wrote.

Marriage being the path to a happily ever after, Ford argues, has so deeply ingrained in us the idea of Being Chosen that, even when we take ourselves out of the running, we still feel like we’ve lost. In I Don’t, Ford lays bare how the concept of marriage went from utilitarian to fairytale, tying itself up with a woman’s worth every step of the way: first, it targeted their perceived economic, domestic and reproductive worth; now, it’s come for their self-worth. As Being Chosen became the apex of a woman’s life and the ultimate signifier that she was loved and important, those who remained single or got divorced ingested the message that without a Better Half, they were worthless. “Women are so afraid of what it means to be single, they stay in relationships that don’t work,” Ford says. 

Even those who are single by choice can be taunted by a sense of shame that they are living the wrong kind of life. “[Being in a couple] forms part of our ‘normative unconscious’, so that non-conformity all too often produces feelings of shame, guilt, disappointment and anxiety for uncoupled people,” Roseneil wrote. “Feelings of failure and distress at not living up to the ideals of the couple norm can torment us.” 

Single women are not supposed to admit that they might sometimes want a partner. To be human is to be conflicted, and so when the message is that you’re supposed to want desperately to be coupled up or unequivocally happy and steadfast in your singledom, a lot of women don’t feel able to speak about their fluctuating feelings. Then there’s silence — and shame feasts on silence.

“Those of us who don’t yearn for these things — for husbands and babies and houses … — aren’t evidence of a different kind of woman,” Ford writes. “Rather, we’re evidence of a woman gone wrong.”

That Woman Gone Wrong, more commonly and cruelly known as The Spinster, has been pop culture fodder for eons, fuelling paranoia among women who could relate to the most famous spinster, Bridget Jones, when she panicked at 32 that she would die alone. (Note: there is no term with the same venom for men — they get to be ‘bachelors’.)

Being dubbed a spinster wasn’t always a barbarous taunt: in the 1300s, it was a valid job title for unmarried women who spun wool. They had greater economic and legal freedoms than their married friends, whose husbands had been legally granted absolute power over their lives. In 17th-century Britain, the term ‘spinster’ became the legal definition of an unmarried woman and remained so until 2005. In Hong Kong, the word only went out of legal usage in 2019. 

There’s a new movement to reclaim the title. No longer a word that evokes pity for a woman who couldn’t possibly have chosen this life for herself but most certainly brought it upon herself, a spinster is now a woman living on her own terms, deserving of celebration and power. In South Korea, single women have changed their spinster equivalent, ‘old miss’, to ‘gold miss’; in Japan, unmarried women over 25 call themselves ‘Christmas cake’ because they are past their best-before date. In China, sheng nu (‘leftover women’) are causing such panic in society that the government has begun an aggressive campaign to pressure women to marry. Instead, they’re buying property. In August, The New York Times reported that the number of marriage registrations in China in 2022 dropped to a record low of 6.8 million. Meanwhile, the number of unmarried women who owned property increased from 6.9 per cent in 2010 to 10.3 per cent in 2020. 

“It’s important for women to see other empowered single women who are finding joy in life, the pleasure of living,” Ford says. “I’m not going to pretend that somehow incredibly powerful white women like Chelsea Handler resisting being [coupled] is changing the world for everyone, but it’s something to talk about. It’s evidence and proof that you can be happy without these things, that you have the freedom to make those choices.

“Women are so capable,” she continues, “but it’s really, really hard to let go of the fantasy that we’ve been conditioned into believing. I want all women to know that there is life out there for you. It’s never too late to change your life, to save yourself. You deserve to be happy. You deserve to be fulfilled. You deserve to be seen in your own life.”

This article originally appeared in the November 2023 issue of Harper’s BAZAAR.