It no longer makes sense to see singlehood and marriage as two distinct and stable social categories that should be accorded different legal rights and social esteem.
I didn't get married until I was 38.
I think it's unfortunate that there exists only one path in America to complete social legitimacy, and that is marriage. I think, for instance, that it would be far easier for Americans to elect a black president or a female president than an unmarried president.
Our society teaches a woman at a certain age who is unmarried to see it as a deep personal failure. While a man at a certain age who is unmarried has not quite come around to making his pick.
I have a lot of nieces and nephews. I was always around kids. I was like the family babysitter because I was the only one that wasn't married.
Even though I was 27 when I left, I still was largely treated like a child, because I wasn't married. My parents, my mother specifically, knew where I was and what I was doing at all times.
I had thought a lot about unmarried life during my years as an unmarried woman - which was all during my 20s and into my 30s. I was someone who didn't have a ton of relationships as a single person - and so I had a sharp identification with singlehood.
People always assume that bachelors are single by choice and spinsters because nobody asked them. It never enters their heads that poor bachelors might have worn the knees of their trousers out proposing to girls who rejected them or that a girl might deliberately stay unmarried.
It is helpful for a woman artist not to have a husband.
She would have been a very remarkable woman, if she had not been an old maid.
An unmarried man, in my opinion, enjoys only half a life.
I consider myself very fortunate to grow up in a time when my family, my friends don't look at me funny because I'm a 29-year-old single woman.
The fact that I haven't been married might qualify me as belonging in the nutty category to a lot of women.
I always thought, as I was growing up, that I'd be married with children. That hasn't happened.
