By Joanna Mathers
The princess, released from her enchantment by a kiss, marries her prince with pomp and splendour. Hinemoa and Tutanekai, kept apart by custom and status, are joined by love that spans a dark and perilous lake. Love as myth is potent and ubiquitous: the healer of wounds, the shatterer of spells.
In our apparently enlightened age, the mirage of love, a delectable thing in the distance, has retained its power. There's a tacit societal agreement that coupling will occur; that two destinies will intertwine. And coupling is indeed still the status quo: more than half of us are hitched or partnered.
But, for many New Zealanders, life exists outside of coupledom. These single people don't have an "other" with whom to share the trials, burdens and joys of life. They may be perpetually single, they may have had relationships break down, they may be parenting alone. But they are powerful in their solitude.
Ghazaleh Golbakhsh, writer, academic, and film-maker, is one of them. She is 39, and her new book, The Girl from the Revolution Road, is engaging, perceptive, and addresses identity, place and New Zealand's dark and deleterious relationship with racism.
It also deals with singleness. In the essay Love in a time of Corona, she explores the minefield of online dating; singles parties where women flit and flirt with desirable men, (who remain essentially motionless); and the one that got away.
She's been single much of her adult life: at 39 she's seen friends pair off, buy houses, have kids. Coupling was something she took for granted. "I guess I thought I would be in a long-term relationship, but I was ambitious, and I wanted to be an actor, so my career came first." She admits that she was a late starter when it came to dating: "I was very depressed and anxious in my 20s, so I only really started dating in my 30s." She wants children and wants a relationship but she's not a partner-hopper.
"[But] I'd love to find someone. Being single isn't my default. I would have a partner if I could find the right person."
Golbakhsh, in a sense, encapsulates the experience of many of our city's singles. Talented, driven, creative, but as yet, unable to find the right match.
The experiences of single people don't get much of an airing in our relationship-mad society. We're raised from a very early age to expect the societal norm of marriage, home, ownership, children — for all our lip service to lifestyle acceptance (particularly in the big cities) there's a deep thread of conservatism that runs through our veins.
You might expect this lack of visibility to correlate directly to a death of singletons but you'd be wrong. According to the 2018 Census data from Statistics New Zealand, close to 40 per cent of Kiwis are single. In Auckland, 36 per cent of Census respondents had never been married or in a civil union.
Given the numbers, it seems rather odd that single people don't take up a larger space in our social and cultural representations. There's certainly a place for it — Golbakhsh was surprised at how many people commented on how much they enjoyed her essay on singleness.
"I didn't realise that people would be so interested. I thought it was just pretty normal, a subject that people read about all the time. The reaction to it has been really interesting."
There is a "persistent myth of the 'other half' outside yourself", New Zealand-born author Stephanie Dowrick wrote in her 1991 bestseller, Intimacy and Solitude. This myth warns of individual insufficiency, she wrote: 30 years on, this thinking still prevails.
In 2015, Auckland PhD student Chelsea Pickens published a thesis around the experiences of the New Zealand single woman. She interviewed more than 20 women aged between 25 and 35. They came in for a chat and she documented their thoughts and feelings around singledom. Every one of the interviewees viewed their singleness as problematic and expressed a desire to be a relationship.
"There was a real sense that, once women got to a certain age, that there was 'something wrong with them' if they were still single." Pickens says that there were four [troubling] trends that emerged from the research around the experience of singleness; these trends were more or less repeated by each of the women taking part in the study.
The first trend was around beauty — and was no surprise given our Insta beauty-soaked cyberverse. "They share an expectation that women that they should look beautiful all the time," says Pickens. Not just beautiful: they also needed to like they hadn't spent any time looking beautiful, their perfection must be effortless: they needed to "act like a boy, but look like a girl".
Says Pickens, "Being a girly girl wasn't seen as desirable."
Control was the second key theme: traditional stuff repackaged and represented for a 21st century audience. In dating, the guy needs to take the lead, or so this group contended. Don't act too interested, men need to make the dates, don't be too bossy. Women need to wait, patiently, for the man to make his move. Don't "jump into bed" on the first date, or you'll be in danger of breaking the third rule.
"The third rule was, if you are too keen, you are a slut. But if you don't have sex within the appropriate time, you are frigid." That old virgin/whore dichotomy ... In Tinder-land, it looks like this.
"There was an idea that if you had sex on the first date, you were a slut; but if you hadn't had sex by the third date, you were frigid," says Pickens. "Some of the women who I interviewed didn't buy into this but it was definitely a theme running through many of the interviews." The last rule is around age and desirability. Namely, if you weren't partnered by a "certain age" there was something wrong with you: this overriding theme posited that a woman needed to be in a relationship to be desirable.
The women that Pickens interviewed were open, honest and happy to talk freely about their experiences. The logical follow-up was a PhD on the experiences of single men in New Zealand. It was a very different experience.
Pickens' research on single women had been picked up by the media: she'd been flooded with responses from those keen to take part. The call-out for respondents to research about single men was met with a deafening silence. The media, it seemed, weren't interested. And neither were men.
"There really wasn't any enthusiasm around the topic," she shares. Eventually, she scraped together 31 participants, men between the ages of 23 and 67, to interview. But the interview process, she quickly found, was to be problematic.
"The interviews were meant to be about being single, and a couple of the guys were great, there was no problematic stuff," she says.
But the rest of the interviewees, the great majority of them in fact, were shadowed by misogyny.
"Most of the men said that they were happy to be single; men in our society are socialised to be individuals, to be emotionally strong. A few admitted to vulnerability but the majority stated that they were fine being by themselves." The motivation for many of the men in the survey, it transpired, was the desire to "get the male voice out there". And this made for a strange power play.
"A lot of the men were there to tell their story, and they tried to take control of the context. It was like I was there to be their mouthpiece."
There was silly banter and more sinister moments: a man telling Pickens that it was okay to hit a woman if she hit first.
Pickens went into the research process wanting to find out about men's experience of singledom; she came out with quotes that wouldn't look out of place in a men's rights manifesto.
Not all men and not Nick Holmes. Holmes was a solo dad for five years, caring for a son with autism. The marriage break-up and attendant Family Court case was traumatic, but he managed on his own with a 2½-year-old and it's given him a unique perspective on being a) single and b) a single parent.
He says that he was always the stay-at-home parent and used to get teased by some people about it but didn't feel any judgment, overt at least, around being a dad alone.
"Although, when my wife and I broke up, I was still in the antenatal class and a New Zealand/Chinese play class but these petered out, so maybe I did feel a little uncomfortable."
He was lucky as he didn't have financial worries and he could stay in the family home. But being alone with a child who ended up being diagnosed with autism wasn't easy. He did, however, make some significant breakthroughs.
"I remember having discipline issues with my son and one day he was screaming and I thought, 'How can I diffuse this?' I looked into his eyes and I didn't see defiance, I saw fear. So I then realised he needed a soft touch, and we sat down and I said, 'Can we still be friends?' And he started crying."
On the DPB, Holmes needed to learn to manage money. The IT consultant shared these ideas on online forums and was recently hired by finance info website Moneyhub to write a guide for parents who have found themselves single. His recommendations on the site include unpartnering your bank accounts, saving even a little on a regular basis and cutting out the dross in your spending.
"The other thing I would say to recently separated parents is to avoid the Family Court if you can. I found this more traumatic than the breakup itself."
Songwriter, chanteuse and singing coach Caitlin Smith isn't a parent but she is happily single. She's been in and out of relationships, many of them toxic and, at 49, has decided to take time out from the pressures of finding "the one" to concentrate on herself.
Singledom is offering her the chance to heal. She's in therapy and is relishing the space to recover, after years of relationships that were often abusive.
"I've realised that you are in no fit state to be with someone if you haven't sorted out your own s***," she says.
As a blind woman, Smith's experience of relationships has been uniquely challenging. She's unable to read the visual cues that could be warning signs for others, so she's relied on her other senses to make dating decisions. Intellectual connections are made but there have been falls.
She's feeling nourished by aloneness at the moment — but does testify to feeling a weight of societal pressure.
"There seems to be a sense that single equals faulty; that you are a failure in some way. This is compounded by not having children; and I am blind as well, so it's a triple threat."
She does have a new baby, however. Her 2020 album, You Have Reached Your Destination, has just been released, she is planning a national tour next year.
She views her current singleness as a sacred space. "At the moment, I feel singleness is a blessing. There is this misguided belief that being single is faulty, that somehow people who aren't in relationships are at fault in some way." She's committed to this solitude, and the healing space she's inhabiting.
"There's a great Spanish saying (echoed in Buddhism), which is "mejor sola que mal acompanada". This translates as 'better to be alone than in bad company'. Just saying."
Intimacy and Solitude contains elegant insights into the experience of such solitude, and the joys it can contain. Dowrick clearly articulates the concept of solitude as separate from loneliness: viewing it a place of rest, healing and deep self-knowledge.
"The difference in experience [between loneliness and solitude] is immense," she explains long-distance from her current home in Australia.
"Think about times when you are missing a particular someone or longing for a quality of connection you don't have. Or you're feeling unnoticed or even unloved. That's loneliness. And it can be agonising. Now think about times when you are physically alone but feeling content in your own company, not self-conscious, and not "missing out". That's solitude — when you are comfortably alone with your own self." She believes (as was reflected in Pickens' research) that single men and women are still perceived very differently by society — particularly heterosexual men and women.
"We don't go on about gay women being 'spinsters' if they're not in a committed relationship," she says.
The idea that single people (in particular heterosexual women) as being lacking without a man is, in her words: "so 19th century. Let's not take it on and let's certainly not let others make you feel that way.
"The most successful friendships, as well as the most satisfying intimate relationships, are between people who feel 'complete' enough within themselves to be with someone else not as a 'life saver' — filling up an emptiness — but as someone who is himself or herself, separate and connected."
Although she acknowledges that it is wonderful to have a loving, committed relationship, to be someone's special person and to give that devotion in return, it's not the full story.
"Does that ever come without complications? I don't think so. It's a profoundly false binary to imagine that single people lack something that those in committed relationships inevitably have.
"If my own life has taught me anything, it's to value all of my relationships, to give as much time as I can to friendships, community, colleagues; to find richness through connections across the spectrum."
