18 I There’s Nothing Wrong With You! You’re Just Single

Almost half of American adults are single, yet we still treat being unpartnered as a problem to solve. But being single is not better or worse than being in a relationship, it’s just a different experience. In this episode, Julia interviews her single friends about what they love about being single and how they navigate a world built for couples. 

Then she chats with author Glynnis MacNicol about challenging the narrative that women need to be partnered to be happy.  

Check out Glynnis MacNicol’s books, No One Tells You This and I’m Mostly Here To Enjoy Myself. You can read her New York Times articles here.

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Episode transcript is below. Transcripts may not appear in their final form.
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Julia Winston: I’m Julia Winston and this is Refamulating, a podcast that explores all the ways to make a family.

How would you describe yourself? For me, the first place my mind goes is: I’m a 40-year old Jewish woman, I’m unmarried and child-free, I’m a Texan, I’m a daughter, a sister, a friend, and a podcast host. I’m a bunch of other things too, of course, but these are the labels society puts on me - and the labels I put on myself.

For most of my life, "single” has been one of the most prominent labels I would use to describe myself. “Single.” It’s a loaded word, and for me it has come with many joys and many challenges. One of the reasons I started this show is because I wanted to feel less alone as I wrestled with the question, “what does family mean for me as a single person?” I donated my eggs to help other people start their family and that felt great but who would my family be? 

To be honest, I always felt a lot of shame about being single. I’ve had a great career, I’m blessed with many friends, I even bought a house, but for most of my adult life I haven’t had a romantic partner and that missing puzzle piece has made me feel like a failure.

But why? Why have I felt that way? Well, because society told me to. Our larger culture told me I should be partnered. That message has been hammered into each of us from every possible direction since the moment we entered the world. We hear it from older generations, we see it in the movies and the media, and we feel it in our laws and policies, which all favor heteronormative couples. 

So when I learned that almost half of American adults are single - that is people who have never been married or have been divorced or widowed - I was stunned. How could our social narratives be so out of balance with reality? 

This statistic comforted me because I felt less alone. I realized this is not a "me" problem, and in fact maybe it's not a problem at all. Maybe being single these days is just normal. 

But I also found it disturbing, because it likely means that around half the adult population in the US feels the way I’ve felt, which is to say: inadequate. Inferior. Incomplete.  

As we discussed in episode 11, Reframing the American Dream: Part 1, there are many other ways humans have lived throughout history that do not reflect couples and nuclear families. We are hurting ourselves by perpetuating this story that we should all be coupled. We’re especially hurting women, and we have been for a long time.

The purpose of this episode is not to analyze why so many of us are single these days. The intention here is to simply honor the experience of being a single person in today’s world. And with Valentine’s Day coming up this week, what better time to celebrate single people, who never get any love on Valentine’s Day?

A personal note here: I’m someone who has been single for most Valentine’s Days throughout my life, but since we started working on this episode, I’ve actually started a relationship with someone who feels like a true fit - something I’ve never experienced until now. So going back to that question I posed about how you would describe yourself - well, my sense of self is changing. When it comes to being single, I am refamulating. But I will never forget how it feels to be single in a world that glorifies romantic partnership. 

And by the way, partnership is not a fixed state. Just because you’re partnered now, doesn’t mean you always were, or that you always will be. We all have or will live our lives as a single person at some point. And being single is not better or worse than being in a relationship, it’s just a different experience. So if we want to extend more love to the single versions of ourselves we’ve been or will be - and to almost half of today’s U.S. population - it’s up to all of us to flip the script. 

First, I’m going to introduce you to some of the amazing single people I know about their experiences…

Margie: I'm happy I'm single because the alternative isn't Prince Charming. It's one of the losers I've dated

Julia Winston: bGlynnis MacNicol: I'm enjoying the person that I am. I think the irony of sort of sliding off cultural narrative is it can be both punishing, but it can be both freeing too, because there's no path laid out here for me of how this is supposed to go. So I'm going to continue down the path of what makes me feel the best.

Julia Winston: This one goes out to all the single people out there. I see you. And guess what? There’s nothing wrong with you. And also…I love you.

 Julia Winston: Hosting a podcast is a great excuse to ask people probing questions about deep shit and I wanted to go deep about being single. So I reached out to a handful of single people I know. They all live in different places and have been single for different amounts of time. These are people I know who I’ve been in the trenches with for years when it comes to being single. Being single gets a bad rap but I know that there are so many awesome things about it. So the first thing I wanted to know is what do they love about being single?

Margie: Making big life decisions like by myself and doing whatever I want to do whenever I want to do it.

Julia Winston: This is my friend Margie. She’s in her early 40s, she’s one of the most brilliant women I know. And she’s been single for a long time.

Joanna: Generally speaking, just not having to navigate someone else's schedule or preferences feels very liberating and freeing.

Julia Winston: That's Joanna, one of my closest friends who lives in Oakland.

And this is Alex, we used to work together.

Alex: Mostly, I love the freedom and flexibility that I get to choose my own path and have my own life 

Rachel: to me, being single is a luxurious way to spend the day. Um, I can choose how to fill my time, how not to fill my time without having to explain it or justify it. 

Julia Winston: That's Rachel, she’s a writer and one of my besties in Austin.

Rey Joaquin: I think what I love about being single is that I can Walk around naked and not have to put myself together for anybody 

Julia Winston: Yes honey, me too Rey. I looooove walking around naked! 

Allie: it's just nice to sort of be free and in my own energy and able to move about the world, um, thinking about myself and what feels best for me as opposed to always having to compromise with another person.

Julia Winston: Allie is a soul sister music producer who lives in both Berlin and Mexico City. 

Tal Lee: I'm an empath, and so when I'm with someone else, it's almost compulsive that I'm constantly thinking about what they need, what they're feeling, what their schedule is, what their people are doing. 

Julia Winston: That’s my friend Tal Lee, who actually reminded me about a bunch of reasons I’ve loved being single. 

Tal Lee: there's something really freeing about not having that second center of gravity and being just truly centered in myself. I feel like I get to be a really good friend because my friends are my community and my relationships right now. I get to do a really kick ass job at work because I can work in the evenings if I need to or want to and can kind of organize my life around that to the degree that that feels right. And then I get to be really present and committed to my hobbies because I can spend Friday night tango dancing or spend all of Sunday gardening, um, and there's really nothing holding me back from that.

Julia Winston: I think we’re expected to beat ourselves up for being single but actually for many of us, but if you haven’t met someone who feels like a good fit, why would you give up all the awesome things about being single? 

Margie: Like I'm happy I'm single because the alternative isn't Prince Charming. It's one of the losers I've dated and I'm so happy I haven't married any of the losers I've dated. I want big partnership. I don't want just to feel validated. And I feel like a lot of my friends got married cause they wanted to feel chosen and not left out  of this club.

And honestly, I think it's a little bit of a pyramid scheme.  And people keep recruiting you into it.  Join us in our misery. Yeah, join us. We're not going to tell you how bad, like, the margins are for these Cutco knives.

Julia Winston: So yes, there’s a lot to appreciate about being single. And we shouldn’t overlook these things! But I don’t want to sugar coat it because like anything in life, there are times when being single sucks. I know this intimately well, but I wanted to hear about it from other people. I found it healing to hear from my friends about what they find challenging about being single.  

Rachel: I often worry what people think, not what they think about me being single, but whether they think that me being single means that someone doesn't want to be with me or some type of narrative that there's something wrong with me.

Julia Winston: Girl, me too. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve felt that way. Hearing this from another person made me feel less alone, but it also bummed me out because I think a lot of people feel that way. When I asked what their biggest insecurities are about being single, that feeling was at the core.

Tal Lee: I think the biggest one is that there must be something wrong with me

Joanna: how people perceive me and I think primarily if they think that there's something wrong with me.

Alex: I think the biggest thing is that our society isn't built for single people, and sometimes I feel insecure that I don't fit into the mold.

Rey Joaquin: I often think about How I'm not Good enough And perhaps maybe that's why I'm still single. 

Tal Lee: If everyone else has found their person and I haven't, that must mean I'm not enough in some way, that there's something wrong with me.

Rey Joaquin: So that bleeds into, like, I don't look a certain way, I'm too brown, I'm too gay, or not gay enough. I think all of that brings out a lot of, um, My insecurities about my worth.

Alex: I think a lot of people, especially in older generations, have some pity for single people or see it as a deficit and sometimes I take that on and feel like it is a deficit or something is broken within me.

Julia Winston: That's so true. I have a physical response in my body when I listen to all of these thoughts because I have felt this so deeply. It’s sometimes hard to tell the difference between how you feel and how other people think you should feel. Here’s Margie again:

Margie: I always feel like I'm okay with being single when I'm by myself. It's when I'm like with other people and they project things. And I'm like, wait, should I feel that way? Should I be nervous about that? it's subtle in the zeitgeist, but you can hear, like, I was just watching, like, a Real Housewives, uh, reunion, and a dig women give to other digs of, like, well, you, you're not even married.

So, like, as much as we've progressed, you still know there's a hierarchy, um, communicated subtly, directly, indirectly to you. people try to fix your singleness status a lot. Um, Where I'm like, you want me to fix your marital status? Because I know shit about your marriage that I'm not saying anything about. 

Julia Winston: Beyond negative perceptions about being single, there are some real practical challenges. 

Margie: I think there's like with singleness, there's a little bit of an existential dread, like no one's assigned to like, take care of you if something happens. If you lose your job, there's not a second salary you can, or like health insurance, you can draft off of for a couple of months. It's like, you've got to figure it out and quick.

Here's Joanna: 

Joanna: in a lot of ways that our society is shaped to support people who are in partnerships or traditional families, even as something as mundane as taxes, um, or going on a vacation. Typically the cost per person for a single person to go on a trip is 15 to 30 percent higher than that if you were to get like a double occupant. Occupancy, occupancy room, and it just makes me feel like I'm constantly being financially penalized for not having found the person that I want to spend my life with. Even in terms of sharing rent or buying a home, these things feel much more burdensome, um, not just financially, but in terms of major decision making because I'm making these decisions pretty much alone by myself.

I can't help but feel as if I'm just not meeting the same adult milestones as my peers. And as much as I've tried to think about the things I enjoy about my life and hold those present for myself, it does, your brain naturally compares yourself to the people that you spend your time with.

Julia Winston: Yup, check check check. I’ve definitely felt socially and financially punished for not having a partner. And it can be a really lonely experience because couples don’t have to worry about things like that. 

I know another thing that can be really stressful as a single person is wrestling with the question of what to do if you think you want to have kids. Not everyone I talked to wants to be a parent, but Tal Lee does. 

Tal Lee: when I think about fertility, the stress is around finding the partner to build a family with. I, I do have my eggs frozen, so I have the option, but I would really love to do it in partnership with someone.

So does Rachel: 

Rachel: I really want to be A mother and not because my biological clock is ticking or that I have maternal proclivities or that society expects it of me, but because there is this inner knowing and longing. 

Julia Winston: It is very vulnerable to talk so openly honestly about being single. I know first hand how private it is to think about the joys and the challenges, so I want to thank all of my friends for sharing their truths with us. 

I want to sit with this feeling of longing that Rachel just mentioned. This feeling of longing is like an old friend for me. We do ourselves a disservice by saying being single is either good or bad. Like everything in life, it’s all true. The complexity of accepting and loving your single life, while also longing for companionship is one of the most natural things in the world.

Rachel: I celebrate my independence. I just feel so fortunate to live this way, and I also recognize that that same feeling coexists with the part of me that aches for love and partnership. And the part of me who still does want to have this idealized family life in some way, shape or form, even though not only does it not look like the version that I imagined as a child, but I don't actually want it to look that way anymore. And still I am here struggling how to hold space for understanding that these two things Are in both conflict and in conversation with one another. 

Julia Winston: So for anyone listening who is single at this moment in time, everything you feel about being single is valid. We can hold it all. 

When we come back, we go deep about what it’s like to fully embrace being single with author Glynnis MacNicol.

Julia Winston: Anyone who has been single amidst a sea of married friends has probably, at some point, felt like a failure. And that’s because, especially for us women, we spend the first part of our lives being bombarded with stories and narratives about a woman FINALLY finding happiness when she falls in love. Or becomes a mother. So when you don’t achieve those things it’s easy to feel like you failed. But as I’ve gotten older and spent more time being single, I’ve realized that the feeling of failure has come from comparing myself to these stories. But what if there had been different stories to compare myself to? What if there were a slew of Disney movies about young girls pursuing a creative passion. Or a rom com about beautiful friendships and building community?  

Glynnis MacNicol: It's hard for me to think in a grounded way about partnership or even thinking of myself as being single in those terms because I just sort of have don't, Frame my life in those terms anymore.

Julia Winston: This is Glynnis Macnicol. She’s a writer who lives in New York City, and has written a lot about her life as a single, child-free woman in her 40s and now 50s.

Glynnis MacNicol: there's no happy stories about women that don't end with wedding or a baby, and like just purely enjoyment for enjoyment's sake. it's the absence of narratives to me. It's that so many women are leading lives,outside of, you know, motherhood outside of partnership, and we don't have any narratives attached to that, that we still default onto, you know, you're either frivolous or sad or bitter or lonely. And, and certainly we all experience, all people experience all of those emotions because we're, you know, human, but to attach those primarily to single women, I think far more than men .

Julia Winston: Glynnis has a lot to say about the stories we tell about single women. 

Glynnis MacNicol: I moved through the world with so many women who've made similar choices, and, uh, Few of us experience this is the primary way that we operate, and we're not seeing any versions of our life culturally that would even suggest that this is enjoyable, or there's pleasure to be had, or these choices are rewarding in and of themselves, or that we're fully fleshed out people all on our own without, you know, being parents or parenting.And so I we still don't know how to tell stories about women outside of these tropes, even as a majority of women are living outside of these tropes.

And so not seeing yourself reflected is punishing for anyone, right? It leads to unfair laws. And just personally, it can be excruciating to just not think that you exist in the world. You have to develop such a strong belief in your own experience you don't see it reflected because when there's no ritual or celebration around any element of your life, you just have to believe yourself that you're enjoying yourself.

Julia Winston: Glynnis writes about enjoying herself as a single, aging woman without kids. Her latest book, "I'm Just Here to Enjoy Myself," is a memoir about a summer of seeking pleasure in Paris the year she turned 50. Her first memoir, "No One Tells You This" is about when Glynnis turned 40 and chose to let go of the narrative that she was a failure because she was single. I read it when I turned 40, and I was single at the time so it was a very empowering perspective for me. 

Glynnis MacNicol: When I was turning 40 that came out of no one tells you this is that I was really having to ask myself Did I believe that I was enjoying the life I like my life wasn't an accident. It was intentional. Understanding it was intentional and then really asking myself, was I enjoying this life I had chosen for myself? I was having to make up my own mind about it with no reassurances in sort of the larger cultural narrative, and that's difficult and can feel very gaslighting. when you can't participate in cultural rituals You really have to say to yourself, like, I really am having a good time. 

Julia Winston:  Yeah the reality is, single people have to reassure themselves because cultural narratives tell us we shouldn’t be content until we find our person or get married. That’s when we’ve ARRIVED! 

But that’s ridiculous. Because not everyone in a relationship is happy or fulfilled, just like not everyone who’s single is happy or fulfilled. But sometimes people are! So if someone is having a great time being single, why would we discredit that? We don’t go around asking our married friends “are you SURE you’re happy”???? 

Glynnis mentioned cultural rituals and I want to dig into that. Things like weddings, baby showers, and housewarming parties are all popular celebrations - But all of these milestones are focused on the nuclear family. If you're like Glynnis, single and child-free, it’s like there’s no reason to celebrate. 

Glynnis MacNicol: The absence of a rite of passage, a tradition, is a narrative. There's a reason why we still struggle to have any films, again, that are not, She's a success. She either dies in the end or we know she's a success because, you know, she found love or Children like we thought they these rites of passage are narratives. And that's how we know that you have progressed. And when When you don't have a right of passage, you have no sense of momentum or that you or recognition that you have Progressed or your life is progressing. And subsequently, you are always the witness to other people's progress, but there's no witness to you.

This sense that you were the audience and not such a tick tock phrase, but like not main character energy. and I want the progress, the fact that I continue to develop and evolve and face challenges and become a different person is just as true, sometimes more so, when you're outside of partnership or parenthood than not, and it's How do you measure it when there's no measuring stick? I think is the thing that we are both coming back to and that sense of being left behind is simply because there is no way to measure how much you're progressing. 

Julia Winston: So if you're in your 30s or 40s and you're single. You've definitely gone through this experience that I'm about to describe. So your best friend gets married, or they get pregnant, they start building a family. Your life starts diverging. There's a chasm between you and the people that you've been closest to and something is getting lost.

Even if you're still really close and you feel fully seen by them, this chasm creates this experience where you're like, Oh, now I'm alone having to reinforce that I'm having a good time and that I'm okay. And you feel a little bit left behind. And then it happens over and over again. And with every wedding or birth or life event, You, you are having this experience of grief because you're losing something, but it's invisible. And you can't ask anyone to acknowledge it because they're having a rite of passage. So this, you've referred to as the disappearing act of friends. And it's something that I was excruciating for me in my 30s. And I've eased up on that.

Glynnis MacNicol:It is really hard in those first five years because small kids are consuming. And that's just the reality of the situation.after that five year period, though, I have found so many of my friends have come back because their friendship circles diminished enormously because they only have time. They don't have time that they are desperate for your friendship that Your friendships can evolve if you hang on Friendships go through ups and downs, long term friendships the same way marriages do, even though we still don't fully recognize the prime primacy of friendships in our lives. 

And so, like, I do sort of say to people like if this is a friendship you want at some it's not always going to be fair, like it might be the next few years you're going to be the person. It's Who's got to do the holding on and then that switches again but that those friendships come back around in really extraordinary ways that if you can allow yourself to be open to it, which is not easy, um, The balance shifts and in it's, in it's wonderful and, and rewarding and enriching, but you have to sort of try and see over that hump, which is really tough.

This is something I've been thinking about a lot recently, feeling left behind. I definitely felt as I wrote about no one told you this in my late thirties that I was like a decade behind everyone else. And all I can tell you turning 50 is I'm a decade ahead of everyone else. because once you have kids, you are like in it for a long and I'm just, I have like leapfrogged over it where I feel like I've reached the point at 50 that most people traditionally have not gotten to until 65 or 68 from like life decisions and financial restrictions and all this other stuff.

And I, that I'm able to get here at an age where like physically I still have the energy and um, Outlook and excitement has made me feel like it's a weird shift that happened in the last few years where I'm like, oh man I'm so far ahead of everyone else. It's fantastic.

Julia Winston: I think there's probably a lot of single people who are like, Oh no, I've been left behind. And then they're in their, you know, they're in their struggle with that. And then, okay, so five years later, people start coming back. But like, they didn't have a sense of community maybe. So how have your friends played a role in your life? And how do you create a community of people who provide the same care and support that, you know, many people find with a partner and kids.

Glynnis MacNicol: In my late thirties, when, excuse me, that core group of friends I have, some of whom I'd lived with for a decade, um, Really moved on and it was so destabilizing and, and it should be destabilizing. And I think again, that's where we, you know, the punishment of not having ritual or like the grief you experienced, like it should be destabilizing your entire infrastructure, your financial infrastructure, your emotional infrastructure leaves, and there's no obligation to say, like, how is this impacting you? And then it's a cause for celebration. And you are sort of cast in this role of like, Oh, you're bitter about this. Cause it's not happening to you. And you're like, actually, this is really tough because my entire life has been upended without anyone checking in to see how this is impacting me. I think at some point I was using a table analogy, like you have a table with four legs and. Three of them are removed and it's like everything gets wobbly and crazy. And it's like, well, how do you achieve sort of like stability is I started making more friends, Which I recognize it's not does not come as naturally to people.

But I really recognized that I needed a wider, um, support system or I wasn't going to survive this in any real way. And travel was part of that, But, whenever I travel somewhere, go somewhere new, I ask everyone I know if they know someone there and I meet everyone and sometimes it turns out to just be a coffee.  But sometimes like my close I have a very close friendship circle in Paris at this point, which started out with like a random blind friend date. 

And so I just made more and more friends. And as you age, the people time to be friends with you are often people who have made similar life decisions that you've made. And I'm, I don't discriminate with age either. I mean, I have friends in their twenties and I have friends in their sixties. And I have a lot of friends my age. So I try and just remain extraordinarily open to it. And the result is I'm 50 with like a really deep bench. 

Julia Winston: I’ve also found that focusing on friendship and community is a really enriching source of connection as a single person. But it’s still hard to watch coupled people move on and shift their attention to marriage and children. There have been many times over the years when I’ve asked myself, “Am I doing something wrong?” 

Glynnis MacNicol: when I feel like that, it's usually my, me responding to Instagram, which is reinforcing certain narratives. So whenever I feel, or I'm like, Oh. I'm not ever going to have that. I actually go to a home where everyone has the thing I don't have. And I'm like, Oh God, I don't want any of this. Like I'm very, it's oftentimes when I feel like that it's not based in reality. I'm not ever in someone else's marriage thinking, wow, I wish I had all of this. I'm mostly in someone else's marriage thinking, I'm so glad I have access to this and also my own apartment I can go home to, um, which is like having my version of, you know, it's the narrative versus the reality. And the thing is, there's, you know, those narratives are shiny and appealing. 

But like the reality of marriage, even for people in the strongest marriages is so disconnected from the narratives were presented about marriage that navigating Through that is the challenge of, you know, I would say the first decade of marriage and, and the loneliness of being in a relationship that's not fulfilling, particularly a relationship that culture reinforces as the most fulfilling choice you can make is complicated in very similar ways to what I talk about in terms of being happy and never seeing a good version of it out there.

When it's the flip, it's being, you know, unfulfilled when there's You know, so many versions of how it should be fulfilling out there. It's, you know, it's the disservice we're done by the stories we are told about how life should be lived. So I do think that in this is not just in this instance, but just in general, like real life is a very good antidote to this, uh, anxiety and depression.

Julia Winston: One thing I’ve noticed is that where you choose to live can really contribute to your experience as a single person. For me, living in proximity to others has been an important factor because being single can sometimes be lonely. 

Glynnis MacNicol: I live in New York City, which traditionally and anyone who's read Rebecca Traister’s all the single ladies book. She writes about this New York. Is a hub for single women traditionally, like long before sort of we had the financial or bodily agency to make these decisions primarily because the city itself functions a lot of times as a partner like you, there's the setup of apartment buildings, the fact the isolation that I would experience living on my own. Say in a suburb somewhere is deeply mitigated here by the fact I see like three people on the way to the elevator and like 100 more before I've crossed the street. So there's like a social interaction that alleviates isolation significantly. And I think when we talk about these life choices, um, I'm always careful to point that out.

Because when I am on book tour, I hear from people and they say, you know, I live, you know, just for example, You know, in a suburb of Minneapolis and I have my own house and it gets very lonely because my friends are married and I have to make dates with people. Like, what do you suggest? And I just think, I don't, I recognize why that is so difficult and why it can be so isolating and lonely because my life allows for me to have my own apartment and for me to live on my own without feeling isolated whatsoever. And that is one of the reasons I think we see, you know, more single women attracted to urban hubs is for, for that exact reason. 

Julia Winston: What's like the short version of the question to how you came to the choice of not wanting to have kids?

Glynnis MacNicol: I think right around 40, I recognize that I wasn't in partnership and that if I wanted to have Children, I'd be having them on my own. And I really had to look that in the face and. Think hard about did I want Children badly enough to have them on my own and take on all of the risks and financial precarity and and all the rest of it, um, to achieve that. And the answer was I didn't. And what I recognized was I was going to be okay without Children. 

That I can have a fulfilling, meaningful, satisfying life that I'm built for. Um, like I recognize that I'm built for the life I'm leading in ways that are pretty extraordinary. Uh, and I will be okay if Children are not a part of that. And I think that was really the conclusion I came to more than like, I don't want to have kids. It's that I don't want them enough to pursue them.

Julia Winston: But you do tend to play roles in other people's families as I've heard you mention and as I've read from some of your writing What roles do you play in other people's family units and what roles do they play in yours?

Glynnis MacNicol: I think early on in the case of some friends, it was, you know, literal, you know, support of showing up or just being involved or, you know, being present. I don't have any godchildren. I have, but it's a lot, but I'm Auntie Glynnis to a lot of people.

I really was intentional of wanting to establish myself as a person they could trust. And I think that that is really, and so, and I think that's true in the case of the kids that are older than me, is I have a trusting relationship with them where they feel able to come to me and talk to me.

I love having children in my life. Um I think that was one of the major issues I actually took with the JD Vance thing, was not like Childless Cat Ladies, which feels like so boring and like stale of criticism. It was more this idea of not being invested in the future if you don't have kids. And I thought, what a, what a limited, mean spirited way to think of how children benefit from being loved by many people. And also how I benefit from having many children to love and how much I enjoy it and how grateful I am for it. 

In the past summer, I've sort of like been in the worlds of two year olds and in the worlds of seven year olds and the worlds of 15 year olds and like getting to like, like live in all of those different worlds, which are so different from my own and so different from each other just feels like such a gift. It's like, and those are people are all of my family. 

Julia Winston: I know what you mean. I recently went to my friend's, uh, kid's fourth birthday party and it was chaotic. And there was, you know, a lot happening and she lost her keys and needed to get back in the house. And so I was like, Ooh, I'll go get your extra set of keys. And it felt so good to be able to offer that, you know, like I don't have that chaos in my life. So I was like, let me like, throw me in coach. I want to help. And like, that felt great. And I think…

Glynnis MacNicol: I think there's this also this idea that caretaking is only limited to being a parent as anybody who's been a full time caretaker, which I have for aging parents can tell you, like there's many forms of caretaking and caretaking is an act of love and sometimes it's awful. But you know, even those smaller things of like Let me care for you, and I don't want this to be my 24 hour role, but like there's joy in that It's lovely to care for people. That's just being a human being. 

Julia Winston: Glynnis has let go of any shame or disappointment that our culture wants her to feel about being single. And if you read her books you’ll see how much fun she has in her life and how much she loves the life she's built. 

Glynnis MacNicol: I take joy in my ability to move freely, it would be to understate it to a degree. I've said that, you know, sex is great and I enjoy it. And I hope that's the case for everyone having sex, but like. I wouldn't give up my bike for sex. If I had to choose between my bike and sex, I'd choose my bike every time. But my ability to move freely is so at the top of my list of absolute Fundamental core to who I am that every time I get on my bike, I feel like it's a ritual celebration.

Julia Winston: This sense of freedom is a big part of being single that we don’t talk about enough. I think it’s a really empowering part of the experience to have freedom in all areas of your life. I know the feeling of cruising down a hill on your bike, and that’s how i’ve felt at different points of being single. Even in moments of longing, that sense of freedom is so beautiful. But in order to feel truly free, you have to reach a level of comfort with being your own companion. 

Julia Winston: You know, one thing you do that you have experienced is this idea of being comfortable with yourself. How have you gotten there? What's been your journey to become more comfortable just being with you?

Glynnis MacNicol: I really think the number one, you know, challenge in life for everyone is coming to terms with who you are and accepting that it's like expanding so you fill your whole skin essentially. And for me, I think really turning around and confronting those things I was scared about or anxious about or angry about right around when I turned 40 and then having two parents die really was like, looking in the face, the choices I've made and and recognizing that they weren't an accident.

And then when you make them on purpose is, you know, you have a feeling of agency, but it's also responsibility. Like I'm choosing this life. I have to take what comes with it.  And I think it's just, it might, maybe it's just an age thing and sort of a continual, the fact I am a writer and I tend to write about personal issues means that I'm constantly having to sort of interrogate myself and why I'm doing certain things and, and come to terms with it. But I, you know, I know it feels good.

I'm enjoying the person that I am. And, um, Once I think the irony of sort of sliding off cultural narrative is it can be both punishing, but it can be both freeing too, because you're like, there's no, there's no path laid out here for me of how this is supposed to go. So I'm going to continue down the path of what makes me feel the best.

Julia Winston: One of the truest things we never hear is that every relationship we’ll have in our lives begins and ends with ourselves. 

The biggest gift I’ve received as someone who’s spent most of my life being single is the opportunity to cultivate an incredible relationship with myself. 

So this Valentine’s Day, I’m here to say: I love you, Julia. And for everyone listening, whether you’re single or partnered, I hope you love you, too.