Friends by chance, Sisters by choice

So I've decided that the best way to be a good Spinster is to have a spinster sister to live with and share your inheritance with. That used to be quite popular over a hundred years ago, I can think of one set of spinster sisters in my own genealogy-this is a shout out to Martha and Chancenie Dungy, who never married and lived together all their life in Alabama and Tennessee. We also see a good deal of spinster sisters in literature. My roommates and I recently watched the Masterpiece Theater miniseries-Cranford, which revolves around two spinster sisters and their large group of spinster and widow friends. Actually, as far as we could tell almost no one in the town was actually married.
But, as I only have one sister and she has been married for nigh on eight years now, the next best thing for me is roommates of my same age and situation. I have three roommates all between the ages of 27 and 31 and they are great fun. We have interesting conversations which include a lot of laughter, we eat together fairly often and throw parties together as well. We also go on the occasional road trip and outing together too. It's been loads of fun actually, so I think I will adopt them and make them my spinster sisters, and as I've said for a spinster there is nothing better.

Writer's Block Be Gone

So I don't know if I've been suffering severe writer's block or what. But after a long delay, here is another post. More to come soon!

I don't know if this is a good thing, but it always makes me happy when I happen upon someone my age that is also living the single life, especially if it is a person I went to high school with. Just this summer I've discovered that four people I went to high school with are unmarried (3 girls and one guy). Before that I discovered two other girls from school that weren't married, so that makes seven of us unattached alumni. It's not a large number, but it is nice to know I'm not the only one who is nuptially challenged, because sometimes it feels like I'm pretty much the only single gal left from high school. I also now have a roommate that is my same age that I knew several years ago in college. It's nice to feel like we're in this together.

The Young and the Restless

I have 29 single female Mormon Facebook friends that are 27 years old or older. I could add at least five more single friends of that age to this list as well that refuse to sign up for Facebook. That’s a lot of single girlfriends! Most of them have expressed to me a desire to be married and most of them expected to have been married by now. So why have they not tied the knot? Many of them are very pretty and stylish. I would describe all of them with at least two or more of the following characteristics: outgoing, fun, smart, ambitious, and active in the church. They are all really just nice, normal and socially adept people. They just all happen to be single.
So is this marriagelessness due to a shortage of nice, normal, socially adept Mormon guys? Is it that the national trend to marry later has rubbed off on the young adults of the church? Have they just not found the right one yet? Do they intimidate guys because they are “too smart” or “too ambitious”? Are they just not putting themselves out there to meet people? Are they in the wrong places at the wrong times? Are they just looking for a specific kind of person and not willing to settle for less? Or is life just really not fair sometimes?
Not that it is bad to marry later in life or that these girls are fated to be spinsters for the rest of their lives (in fact I scratched one girl off the list yesterday because her Facebook status had changed to engaged!), but I think a lot of my friends find themselves wondering what happened, how did their lives become different from their other Mormon peers, especially when they may not have planned it that way? As a spinster of 27+ you really start feeling like a minority in your family and ward. So this group I have amassed of former roommates, ward members, acquaintances and friends is still a minority of the many Mormon girls I have know over the years.
Ah, but maybe we are asking the wrong questions? I have had the same conversation over and over again through the years with my single gal friends. The topic is How do people find each other, fall in love and get married in the first place? Sometimes it seems like it would be a miracle if after all the dates we’ve been on and failed romances we’ve had to find someone who likes us as much as we like him- at the same time. And on top of that that we could both express our feelings to each other, without scaring the other person away or pressuring them into anything, seems unfathomable. But it happens all the time!
I will admit that I have no talent when it comes to interacting with guys. The same girl who was confident five minutes ago can be reduced to a babbling fool in front of a handsome man (it seems weird to call single guys men, guy seems to fit much better). So maybe that is my thing— awkwardness around that opposite gender, but some girls I know have a true talent for making guys like them.
I had a good friend and roommate in college who truly had a gift for attracting guys (of course not all of them were guys you’d want to attract but some of them were). She wasn’t particularly fetching or anything, but she was outgoing and fun and guys flocked to her. She got home from her mission and flew out to Utah a few days before school started at BYU. We had just become roommates and we looking forward to a lot of fun single college activities. I went with her to the BYU bookstore to help her get her books for school the day she arrived and who does she run into-her future husband!-a guy she had known during her freshman year. 3 months later they were engaged, so much for hanging out with my roommate. But the thing was she had only been off her mission like three weeks and she already had a boyfriend, crazy! I could never put my finger on how she did it, it was just innate or something.
Maybe some of my single friends are like me and just not good around guys. I think it would actually be really cool to hire a relationship coach or whatever you would call it, someone who would look at how you act around guys, how you flirted, how you acted on dates and tell you what you needed to work and how to do better. You know maybe something like a makeover, but only for you love life. I did find a really neat TV show kind of like that about a matchmaker in Buffalo, NY-Confessions of a Matchmaker http://www.aetv.com/confessions-of-a-matchmaker/ It was actually a really cute show and the matchmaker was brutally honest but in a way to get people to change not to put them down.
Ok, so I seem to be rambling, but I’m working this out in my head as I go. Anyway, I think probably one or all of the reasons I have mentioned for staying single apply to each of my friends. Obviously this isn’t a cut and dried issue or I couldn’t write a whole blog about it. It’s a super complicated and issues that I haven’t even dreamt of I’m sure are involved. But here is what we know for sure--Life doesn’t always go as planned and here is what we really hope for--Good things come to those who wait!

P.S. I'm going on vacation so I won't be blogging for a few weeks. Please no one be too devasted. :) Oh course if anyone wants to guest blog let me know and I'll add it in the interim.

Spinsters near and far

So my research on Spinsters around the globe has not turned up as much information as I had hoped, but I have found a few interesting tidbits. My first question was what are spinsters called in other countries. Here are a few of the results I got from Babel Fish:

German- Unverheiratet Frau (Unmarried woman)
or Alte Jungfer (Old maiden)

Italian- Zitella
or Donna Celibe (celibate woman?)

Russian- Ctaraya Deva (Old girl)

Spanish- Solterona (single one?)

Dutch- Oude Vrijster

French-Celibataire

But I asked my friend from France the word for spinster and she told me it was Vieille fille (Old girl). Here are some snippets from our conversation:

Me: So at what age are you a vieille fille in france and what kind of stereotype do they get?

My friend: Considering that the average age for a woman in France to have her first baby is 29 you're not a vieille fille for us yet. You're just starting your life girl! To be a vieille fille is not so much a matter of age but a matter of behavior to us since getting married does not mean much. We have actually more chirldren born out of wedlock than in. So when you meet a woman of 50 years old who has never been "married" she could very well be a happy mother of three (one just starting her career, one at university and one still a teen).

Me: so vielle fille is not really used much anymore? Is it a derrogatory term? so people don't feel any pressure to marry or start of family from society or their parents? what about in the church?

My Friend: LOOOOOOOOL this is such an American question. Oh nooooo. People really don't feel any pressure to get married. Actually what happens very often is that people get married after having raised their children (if they have not split up before). Vieille fille can still be used but since it is such a seldom thing we don't use it that much and it is therefore even MORE derrogatory. It takes a lot to be a vieille fille. It takes not only to never have had sex but also to be narrow minded and stuck in the time of your youth.
As far as the church is concerned there is not so much social pressure but people feel a lot more pressure from the church. Then you want to ask me why it is this way and then we will start on another subject that will take a lot more time to answer.

So I guess France is the place to go if you don't want to feel any pressure to get married! But not everyone has the French attitude. Here is an excerpt from a very interesting blog from a girl in Jordan, I suggest reading the whole thing at Memoirs of a Jordanian Spinster!!

She starts her post like this:

"Don’t be surprised! Jordan is one of these countries that if you are a woman and did not marry before the age of 25; panic attacks start hitting your family and specifically your mother, and they start doing their best to change this status to married so that they can finally rest and breathe that they did what they were supposed to do.

Suddenly; your mother wants to take you with her to any social call she is making, even if you don’t know the people or you don’t have anything in common with them; your mom will do her best to show you around to her friends and relatives and will go on and on about how successful you are, smart, obedient and how you would make a great wife and mother.

When you go to wedding parties, women will salute you and say in a low tone: By God's will; next time it will be your turn!! When will they learn that this is not a nice wish? It is as if saying we hope that one day you will get married as if this is the ultimate achievement in life!"

It sounds like Jordanian mothers aren't really that different than Mormon mothers. They still say the same things at weddings that they say here, "Next time it will be your turn!" Could that be a the most dreaded comment a spinster could receive anywhere?

Well I will keep searching and try to find more about spinsters from all over the planet, but until then I hope this suffices. Over and out.

Would a Spinster by any other name...

Is it bad to call yourself a Spinster? My roommates don't want to read my blog because they don't like the idea of calling oneself a spinster. If you call yourself such does that mean you've totally given up on the idea of ever getting married? If you call yourself a spinster does that mean you want to hole up in your apartment and become a bitter "old maid". (Just a sidenote, I find it interesting that we call those kernels of popcorn that never pop "old maids". What's the significance of that? Do people think that single women that never marry are useless, wasted things? Interesting...)

Why do I call myself a spinster? I thought about this for awhile the other day and I came to the realization that I call myself spinster because I want to be part of a group, I want to have a niche. I could just call myself single, but then that lumps me in with all people, male and female, ages 18-99, that have never been married or are divorced or widowed, etc. There's too many singles to really feel like your part of a group. (Another sidenote, why is it that people are called singles or married people? Why not marrieds or single people? Do we not get person status until we are married?). Ok so it's a much smaller group that are women ages 25/30 and up that have never been married. There is more solidarity with such a group, we can sympathize with and support one another in a society largely prejudiced towards us.

Also I want to take back the word spinster and make it my own, free it from the connotations it holds. I found an interesting article on the internet with this quote from Grumble Magazine (I can't vouch for this magazine because I don't know anything about it, but I liked this quote),

"Ladies, in the great tradition of under-served, marginalized and downtrodden people, we need to reclaim a certain word that defines and labels us as "less than". The word I am referring to is "Spinster". We have been called many things throughout the years: "Old Maids", "Career Girls", "Maiden Aunts", and most recently, and appallingly, "Sex & The City Girls". None of these terms encompass what we are, what we can be if we mobilize. If the gay population took back "faggot" and "queer", and the black population took back "nigga'", then why can't we take back "Spinster" and make it our own, define it our way? I say we can."

Anyway, it's just a thought. I think I have embraced my spinsterhood in a way some others haven't. I may marry one day or I may never marry, but I don't want to spend my life in a limbolike state being neither here nor there. For now I am a spinster and that is no bad thing. For now I will enjoy my life and live it on my terms, without feeling like I am less than I should be. Thank you.