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Anxious Preamble:

Last week, I wrote a piece about a phenomenon known exclusively to single people—couple exclusion.

I didn’t send it out.

I worried it might offend, I’d lose subscribers, and everyone would hate me, so I sent out a solution to those suffering the same reflexive, irrational thought cycle I’d succumbed to—Cognitive Distortion.

But then many people asked me to send it, so here I go.

On Loneliness and Exclusion: The Hidden Architecture of the Single Life

I am a never-married, cat-and-child-free, currently un-coupled, woman of “advanced maternal age” who lives with her dog.

In that first year of COVID-19, I was single (coincidentally, so was my dog), and we rode it out together in our small Brooklyn apartment.

While others found safety in numbers, I learned what true isolation meant.

Lockdown policies found families, couples, and single mothers (thank God) cocooned together, sharing space and company, essentially forgetting about the world outside, including their friends who were alone.

Every family I know disappeared to bunker up out of town with other families. They created pods, ran home schools, had big family-style dinners at long farm tables, and created micro-cultures in mini communes of their own making. I scrolled enviously through their posts on social media.

The silence of that first year was stark and telling. I have never felt so dead and invisible in my life. As it dragged on, my body responded to the lack of physical contact —no handshakes, hugs, or even a pat on my shoulder for nearly half a year. There were moments I questioned whether I was still alive.

I always imagined that in the event of an apocalypse, someone would make room for me in their bunker, but I was wrong.

Being excluded from pandemic pods was painful but understandable—no one could risk introducing illness into their protective bubbles. Still, for many single people, it amplified a pattern we’ve long experienced: being left out of couple-centric events because we’re unpartnered. The same invisible barrier that keeps single people out of couple-centric dinner parties was now keeping us out of survival pods.

What exactly is behind this non-life-threatening exclusion, where instead of protecting against a singular, potentially deadly disease, the safeguard is against the single guest? Is it a fear of odd numbers? (Imparnumerophobia, if you’re curious). This fear of one seems to affect more single women than men (years of asking), and its pervasiveness chips away at our souls.

Am I being overly sensitive? For many things, yes. In this case, no.

I’ve had my share of serious relationships (seven, if you’re counting), and have been included in plenty of dinner and cocktail parties, summer barbecues, weekends away upstate with our shared friends. Still, when we break up, the invitations stop.

Throughout my adult life, I’ve watched almost everyone in my orbit couple up, get married, become parents, and disappear into family life, weaving themselves into the fabric of a societal norm they don’t often realize they’re in. I’ve set up many people who’ve gone on to marry and have children. The irony isn’t lost on me that I haven’t seen any of them in decades.

I've named nineteen babies, and never had one.

People who don’t have families, by choice or circumstance, or who lost them through death or divorce, live on the outside of that societal norm, existing in an unlocatable sphere that has no home. This feeling of displacement is exquisitely painful and alienating.

As you age, it gets lonelier.

I’ve been there at every beginning: during the early anxiety of falling in love, through the fear that a proposal will never come, but then it does. I've spent money I don’t have on weddings, baby showers, and all the sundry events society considers worthy of ritual. I never have one myself because the milestones of single life aren't codified as worthy of celebrating. After the wedding, friends fade away. Evidence of their existence abounds online in photos of events that include only couples.

When it happens that I run into the friends I haven’t seen in decades, I’m often subject to the complaints of parenthood, all with a misguided conspiratorial whisper meant to indicate how lucky I am not to have done what they did (knowing I wanted children):

"Kill me now, why did I have children again?"

Or:

"Can you believe I did this to myself? Do you want them? Take them!"

This projected guilt assumes a resentment toward them that I don’t carry. I don’t begrudge anyone their family—I just want an occasional hit of shared joy. But this telegraphed guilt illuminates one potential unspoken discomfort of couples—they don’t want to go back. Perhaps single life represents a place of such disquietude, precisely because our society finds a family of one so unacceptable—they’d prefer not to be reminded.

Yet, they often turn to their single friends when things break down and they’re in crisis. Once resolved, they disappear again, back into their family fold.

But it’s the middle part, the meat of community-making, the family-ness: summer barbecues teeming with children, kids’ birthday picnics in the park with their school friends, weekend playground hangouts, that I (and so many other single people) get cut from.

This exclusion has affected me in numerous ways: from feeling isolated during holidays to missing essential milestones in my friends' and their children's lives.

But why is it like this? How did it happen, and how can I feel better about this dynamic?

After the jump, I reveal the origin of single-exclusion and share a revelatory insight I had at a friend’s birthday party. Upgrade to read the entire piece.

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