Other People's Stories

"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers."

— CARL SAGAN

Searching to Find the One

Glenise

There are 63 million single, never-married people in the United States, half of whom are women. Why are there so many single women in the most industrialized country in the world, in the twenty-first century? Is this an unintended by-product of the civil rights and women's movements of the 1960s and 1970s? Is it because women today don't face the same economic pressures to marry as did the young women of our mothers' generation? Is it because, as some have said, a woman's career has replaced marriage as her number one goal? Is it because reproductive rights enable a woman to control when she gives birth and by extension enable her to delay marriage? Or is it because, even in a culture that places an emphasis on family, being a single woman no longer carries the social stigma it once did?

I'll leave it to the social psychologists to provide us with insight as to why the number of single, never-married women has doubled since 1977, when the number was approximately 16.5 million, or better yet, why the U.S. Department of Labor and Bureau of Labor Statistics include teenage boys and girls as young as sixteen years of age in the count. Nevertheless, the numbers can't hide the upward trend, a trajectory I find quite interesting when you take into account that more people are single today, either by choice or by default, even though the opportunities to date across races, cultures, and socioeconomic classes is greater and more socially acceptable.

Not only are there more single women today than in our mothers' generation, but also many are staying single well into their thirties and forties. This presents several challenges on the financial front. How do single women with fully developed financial identities and styles navigate the equally familiar and unfamiliar terrain called dating, especially if their ultimate aim is to merge their lives and finances (in some form) with partners?

Inspired by an article she recently read, Glenise has been steadily working on her list of one hundred things that she wants in a mate. You may have created such a list yourself, especially if you have ever read a self-help book espousing the benefits of writing down your goals, dreams, and desires. Such lists, in my opinion, are a great way of gathering information, first about yourself (what is important to you) and then about the other person (what attributes you are hoping the person you're dating or hoping to date will embody). Glenise is hoping — like many single women, including myself, who've put such lists together — that it will help her do a better job of separating the chaff from the wheat.

A month into this exercise, she is almost halfway done, and at the top of her list of what she's looking for in a partner, at numbers one and two, respectively, are self-aware and self-made. "Believe it or not," she says, "self-made for me does not mean financial although it does tie into that. [What] it really means is [someone who has had] some sense of struggle and not a life where everything was handed to [them] because I don't understand that." Given her life story, this isn't surprising.

Glenise's parents met in the early 1960s when her father was a student at Howard University. When she was six, the family relocated to Nigeria, his home country. Her father accepted a position with the Nigerian government, and they lived on Victoria Island in a tony housing complex built specifically for civil servants. By African standards Glenise's family was middle class; they lived in an affluent neighborhood, had servants, and took family vacations. Additionally, Glenise was sent to boarding school for five years. Yet she is quick to point out that, even with all these comforts of wealth, "money didn't feel abundant." As examples, she tells me about never having extra money while at boarding school and having to wear her uniforms until they almost fell apart.

She graduated from boarding school at fifteen, in June of 1986, and was scheduled to attend college in the coming fall. But this plan was thwarted when her parents (unexpectedly to her) separated. Soon after, Glenise, her younger sister, and her mother moved back to the United States. That move shifted their financial situation to the opposite end of the economic spectrum: poverty. They went from living a middle-class lifestyle to being on welfare and calling Section 8 public housing home. The welfare was temporary, but her mother still lives in the projects.

It is common knowledge that when a woman, especially one with children, separates or divorces, her standard of living is likely to drop significantly. Does it decrease by 73 percent as Dr. Lenore J. Weitzman claimed in her research? Her study influenced the law and the thinking of presidents, judges, commentators, and other sociologists. Or is it a much lower number? According to Dr. Richard R. Peterson, a sociologist who reevaluated Dr. Weitzman's findings, the number is closer to 27 percent. For some, these are merely statistics; but for others, like Glenise, plummeting down the economic ladder was a reality she, her sister, and their mother lived.

Instead of going to college in September of 1986, Glenise started twelfth grade at a public high school in Baltimore, and in March of the following year, she started her first job. The plan was to get an American high school diploma, work to save money for college, and apply to American colleges. Little did she know this was the beginning of an eleven-year journey during which she'd work a bit, go to school a bit, and sometimes do both simultaneously. In that time, she was accepted into four colleges — her father's alma mater, Howard University; Florida A&M University (FAMU); Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT); and Smith College — deferred admission to two (Howard and FIT), attended two (FAMU and Smith), and graduated from one (Smith). By the time she entered Smith as a full-time, nontraditional student, she was twenty-four. By the time she finished, she was twenty-seven with a degree in African American studies, a lot of credit card and student loan debt, a more developed personal philosophy, and a naive understanding of the relationship between money and matters of the heart.

Back then, she was a self-described feminist. To her that translated into being a modern, independent woman who didn't subscribe to any traditional scripts about dating (she dates men and women) or any set rules about money in relationships. Today, Glenise is thirty-seven, single, almost debt-free, savvy about investing, and owns her apartment in New York City. And she has shifted her views slightly about how she wants the intersection of love and money to play out in her life. Gone are the days of no set rules, thanks in large part to age, wisdom, and a profound fear of being "old and broke."

Perhaps...