In Defense Of The Defensive Single Girl Essay

Incline your ear to the sounds of the holiday season: the tinkling of bells, rustling of firs, and weeping of single women. Time to obsess, if you’re unattached, over having no one’s hand to hold on the ice rink and no reply when your relatives ask you whether you’ve met anyone nice. The singular snowflake, so lovely in its un-duplicability, seems instead so inexpressibly lonely—or something. The point is, if you’re a single woman around Christmastime, you’re supposed to be sad.

On the Web, single girls are fighting back, sort of. By now you’ve no doubt seen this picture (“Single Girl Reacts Perfectly to Friends’ Engagements”), which shows a group of girlfriends squealing over three newly be-ringed members. One girl, off to the side, mimes shooting herself in the head. The photo has so far gotten more than 17,000 Facebook shares. Then Huffington Post ran a piece called “Is Being Single Really That Bad?” (No, it is not that bad, the story argues, except when “it sounds like a tragic Taylor Swift R. Kelly collaboration titled ‘Make Love to No One.’ ” Comforting.) A law student who blogs at Sister of the Yam wrote a fiery ode to “women who are difficult to love” and thus single. On Thought Catalog, unmarried Chloe Angyal explains that while she and her boyfriend will be spending December in Paris, the city of romance, a proposal will not be happening. “He knows full well that I have no interest in getting married,” Angyal says. “More than that, I would rather—and I’m only being mildly hyperbolic here—gouge my own eyes out with a rusty fork than be proposed at.”

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