Canadian writer Isabelle Tessier struck a nerve with her recent Huffington Post essay “I Want To Be Single -- But With You,” which has garnered over 65,000 likes and 11,000 shares on Facebook. In it, she discusses the ways she wants the comfort of a relationship combined with the freedom of not feeling tied down. Of the suitor she is seeking, she concludes:
I want to make plans not knowing whether or not they will be realized. To be in a relationship that is anything but clear. I want to be your good friend, the one with whom you love hanging out. I want you to keep your desire to flirt with other girls, but for you to come back to me to finish your evening. Because I will want to go home with you. I want to be the one with whom you love to make love and fall asleep. The one who stays away when you work and loves it when you get lost in your world of music. I want to live a single life with you. For our couple life, would be the equivalent of our single lives today, but together.
This desire is not new. Back in the early 2000s, Sasha Cagen coined the term “quirkyalone” to describe people very much like Tessier, going on to rebrand February 14th as “Quirkyalone Day” and write a book-length manifesto about this subset of people who don’t want to lose themselves the moment they form a relationship. As defined on Cagen’s website: “Quirkyalone stands for confidence, true love, self-love, authenticity, and connection. It’s not so much about being happily single (although we stand for that too) as it is about being happy within yourself, where you are single or in a relationship. Quirkyalone is about being true to yourself and forging relationships based on your authenticity.” Then, as now, it resonated, a sharp counter to the idea of “the one,” which, especially for women, often comes with a subtext of “the one who you want to do everything with, who you agree with everything about, who you tell everything to.” These are people who don’t want a partner to “complete” them, but who want to feel both complete and partnered at the same time.
Plenty of couples are already crafting some version of being alone together, carving out their separate interests as a way of keeping their relationship intact. For instance, Mona Gable wrote about taking separate vacations than her husband, because they prefer different types of travel:
I craved adventure and foreign travel, while my husband preferred outdoor activities closer to home. I loved the bustle of cities, their eclectic neighborhoods and cultural offerings. He found cities loud and overwhelming… Eventually, the two of us arrived at a solution. Now we often take separate trips, and we are far the sunnier for it, as a couple and as individuals. I get to venture on a National Geographic expedition to the Arctic, while my husband gets to sail to Catalina Island with his college friends.
Last week, the Wall Street Journal profiled Rhode Island couple Allison Paschke and John Danskin who have fashioned their home precisely so each of their needs can be met in a way they credit to saving their marriage. While they do sleep in the same bed, but “[t]hey each often cook their own separate meals in their own kitchens and are responsible for cleaning and decorating their own areas. There are two front doors.” This may not be the norm, but who cares? I give anyone credit who can optimize being true to themselves with the sacrifices inevitable in any relationship.
But there’s a lot of kneejerk reaction against the kind of relationship Tessier describes. One comment on Huffington Post’s Facebook page that has received close to 1,000 comments said, “Or...you know...if we were actually being honest here, ‘Hey, I want all the benefits and comforts of a relationship, without the actual commitment, dedication, loyalty, and effort that goes into a real relationship. I want to use you to satisfy my own selfish and immature yearnings.’" Another on HuffPost Women’s Facebook page similarly claimed: “This is the modern-day version of commitment phobia and inability to truly have an emotionally intimate relationship. We can't be in ‘half’ a relationship. We are either single or we're not!”
Those seem like deliberate misreadings to me, because if Tessier truly did want to be single, surely she could say that too. But she didn’t. She said she wants adventure and excitement and a little bit of chaos. She doesn’t want to control her partner or be controlled, but she doesn’t want to start over in the dating world on a weekly or monthly basis. She wants continuity mixed with spontaneity. Yet that is somehow immediately labeled “selfish,” when perhaps it’s actually simply practical. Rather than agreeing to relationship rules made by someone else, or simply because “that’s how it’s done,” Tessier is setting out the parameters of what she wants ahead of time, so she doesn’t lose her sense of identity when she does fall for someone.
Especially as millennials marry later—or perhaps not at all—but also have less sex than previous generations, I think we are going to see more and more people who, like Tessier, don’t necessarily see their partner as their best friend or Person To Hang Out With 24/7 but also don’t want to be on Tinder every night (unless they are casually browsing hotties). It’s about being discerning, but still leaving room to get swept off your feet, and not feeling the cultural pressure to settle down just for the sake of setting down.
What’s fascinating about this to me is that the separateness those like Tessier are seeking isn’t about sex, or monogamy vs. polyamory, but in many ways is just as important. She’s not saying she wants to play the field, but that she wants to have a field—or perhaps a bar, and a life—of her own. She doesn’t want to feel tethered to an identity or set of values or activities that leave her feeling like someone’s other half, while her unique desires (and her partners’) get subsumed. She wants the best of both the single and coupled worlds, and why shouldn’t she go after that?
Having the autonomy to pursue whatever makes you you while still having the comfort, support and affection provided by a relationship is just as vital as one’s sexual satisfaction. This is especially relevant to me, at 39, as it is to younger generations. In my life, this need to be what Tessier calls “single together” manifests in separate bedrooms, which are a must for my boyfriend and I. Like Gable, I often travel on my own, and find my Skype calls home poignant and affectionate in a way I simply wouldn’t achieve if I spent 365 days of the year with my partner. This version of privacy or freedom will look different for different people. I can’t imagine, for instance, any millennial wanting to share an email address with a partner, as a 27 percent of married partners do, according to a 2014 Pew study.
Tessier’s use of “single” in her essay is highly subjective. What she is suggesting sounds to me less like being single than in being in a relationship where nothing is taken for granted, where you don’t make plans for the other person without checking, don’t assume you know what they want, and don’t feel the need to control their every move, or vice versa. One HuffPost Women commenter wrote, “To this you might add, I want the comforts of a relationship but none of the awkward parts, like interacting with the often irrational and juvenile parts of another human being.” I don’t think Tessier is saying she wants to quit when things get hard, or wants to eschew commitment, but that she wants to make a commitment on her own terms, not with vows or promises or an online relationship status update.
What I see is a woman being practical, both about what she wants, and what’s realistic. She’s not talking about the agony of being in limbo while single, unsure whether someone has ghosted on you. She’s talking about trusting someone enough to not need to monitor them or your relationship status. When she writes, “I want you to have your life, for you decide on a whim to travel for a few weeks. For you to leave me here alone bored and wishing for the small Facebook pop-up with your face that tells me ‘hi,’” I presume she’s not saying she wants to be “single together” with someone who doesn’t tell her they’re disappearing until after they’ve returned from a jaunt around the globe. Instead, she wants to know that her partner can handle themselves while they’re away, and that she can too, and that maybe in their separateness, they will learn things about themselves they couldn’t, or wouldn’t, in the same room. Whatever name you want to give that, it’s something a lot more relationships, or couplings, or even casual flings, could probably benefit from.
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