Peter McGraw talks with Meghan Keane, the founder and managing producer of NPR’s Life Kit and author of the new book Party of One. They discuss the empowering message of being your own soulmate and navigating a world full of societal expectations. Meghan shares insights from her journey and advice for the mental and emotional side of single living in a world built for two.
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Listen to Episode #230 here
A Party Of One
Welcome back. One of the exciting things that I’m seeing since the launch of the Solo project is the number of voices creating a chorus that celebrates the opportunities of single living, books and podcasts especially, and I’m eager to showcase them. We’re joined by the Founder and Managing Producer for NPR’s Life Kit, a podcast and radio show that brings listeners advice and actionable information about personal finance, health, parenting, relationships, and more. Prior to founding Life Kit, my guest was a producer for NPR’s award-winning podcast, Invisibilia.
Invisibilia, it’s a fake word, Invisibilia.
A founding producer of NPR’s TED Radio Hour. We’re here to discuss her new book and first book, Party of One: Be Your Own Best Life Partner. Welcome, Meghan Keane.
Peter, thanks so much for having me.
You’ve got a good NPR voice despite being in the background.
It’s contagious over here.
I’m sure. I’m sure people are judging voices all the time in NPR corridors.
Exactly.
Meghan Keane
Let’s start with your story and how it led you to move from what I like to say is the first level of advocacy, which is living a life of a remarkable single, show life rather than a tell life, into the next level, which is a tell life, where you are broadcasting your remarkable singleness to the world. How’d this happen?
This book, no surprise, comes from personal experience. Over a decade of singleness, most of my adult life being single, I was in a place where I knew it was awesome and wonderful and valid to live a single life, but I was still having trouble bridging my head and my heart together. Sometimes, I would hear people like yourself, or other influencers out in the world, or researchers, or read books and tout the total merits and beauty of singleness. I would agree with them intellectually, but in my body and my soul, I still would feel really bummed at times, which of course, I was being maybe a little hard on myself. Everyone feels lonely or sad sometimes.
I kept coming back to this question: I know it feels good to be single, and it’s a great, honorable life. My mom’s been single for years. An aunt of mine has been single. I have plenty of examples of single people in my life, and I have great friends, a good job, a cool house, a cool dog, and all these things. I still was feeling bummed, and I was feeling shame, a lot of unnecessary shame about singleness. I thought, “I need to help bridge my head and my heart together.”
I wanted to find tools and mindsets that would help tweak that. Maybe it wasn’t just for me personally, thinking being single is awesome was not going to be quite enough. It was part of the puzzle, but I really needed these day-to-day skills, things like managing emotions, thinking about anxiety, building a community, and even destigmatizing the shame I felt around singleness within myself to help feel better and more at peace with my life.
It is a little bit trite to just be like, “It’s great.”
When have you ever felt bad, and someone’s like, just cheer up? You felt instantly 100% better.
You have a great life. Just enjoy it.
I was like, “Thanks, but yeah, I need a little more help, I thought.”
Ugly Confidence
You used this term romantic partners would come in and out of your life at various times. You talk about this ugly confidence you would experience when one of these partners arrived. I thought that was an interesting phrase.
It was ugly because it transformed me into someone I didn’t like. I realized that when I was with certain partners or boyfriends, I felt really attached to us as a couple, our status. I think it’s because, one, I was much younger, and I had a really different sense of what it means. Also, I feel like I had “waited” for so long for a romantic relationship. I talk about how when I was 26, I got into this relationship, and I was like, “Don’t screw it up. If you show your real self, if you push back too much, this is a very fragile thing that could just go away.”
That is not a good place to start a relationship in fear, but that was masked by, I think, how I had, like you said, this ugly confidence of, “Well, isn’t it so great? We’re out in public, we’re holding hands, like we’re performing coupledom.” I was so focused on that part of the relationship that I wasn’t thinking about, “Are we even compatible?”
I was so focused on performing coupledom that I wasn’t asking really important, hard questions about if I did want to partner with someone. Do we have the same values? Do we both want kids? I was too scared to ask a lot of value-based questions that would ultimately define if we were actually compatible. I think that ugly confidence really masked a lot of things that I was a little too scared to ask of my relationships. Luckily, hindsight’s 20/20, but I look back and I’m like, “I’m glad those are over.”
A-Ha Moment
Maybe you can help me come up with the right analogy or metaphor for this. There is this thing of “I’m happy when I’m single.” This even performative element that I see in the world, which I welcome, is a nice counter to the prevailing cultural winds. You only really know if you truly believe what you’re saying when you leave it, and how you feel and how you perform. I think that I see these things as different paths, one not better than the other.
Totally.
I think it’s a different path with different opportunities and challenges. That is not what culture says. So much of it is, “My shoulders can drop. I fit in. I get the invites. I even see how this person has the potential to solve lots of my problems.” Maybe not even, as you were identifying, questioning that it may not exactly be a perfect fit, or that there might be a lot of negotiating that happens to make sure that this relationship works and is healthy, because most people follow a very clear script. I’m wondering, I can’t come up with it.
What is the parallel thing in the world where someone says, “I love being X,” and then they do not become X? It trades their original perspective.
It sounds so cheesy, but it’s like an a-ha moment. For me, I was just seeing more layers to how I wanted to be in the world and what I actually wanted. I think I was really stripping away some social conditioning. It’s not a sexy, fun, quick phrase. I was so feeling, I felt so accepted. I felt like people were happy for me, and you get this reinforcement. People are so happy for you.
Congratulations. Tell me all about it.
Exactly. It gets in your head like, “I have to like this.” I also feel like a lot of relationships and how we talk about them in our culture are so focused on the beginning and only about the chemistry part of it or just the getting together. Not the stuff about, “How are you going to do taxes together? How are you going to negotiate child care,” or anything like that or, “How are you going to figure out if one’s an introvert and one’s an extrovert?” How do you think about just being your own person but also having social time? We miss all of the hard work of relationships. We, as a culture, love to be like, “Yes.”
It’s so fun, all the scintillating, titillating parts of the early side. I think that’s why I was so obsessed with having that relationship in my twenties because I hadn’t really had that before. You feel like you’re on the outside sometimes, of a cool party that’s happening. You’re like, “Why am I not in that party? I’m going to go hang out at that party.”
I got to the party, and I was like, “Wrong one.” I think, like you said, when I left, not to belabor this metaphor too much, but left that room, left that party, I had to do a lot of healing. I know it’s a trite word, but I really did have to do a lot of thinking about, “I have a real problem with rumination. I’m creating a lot of stories about what it means to be single or partnered.” I had to really get in touch with what do I actually want. What’s actually healthy for me? I also started to think about two realities in my brain of how my life could go.
I was like, “I could be single for a really long time, and that’s fine,” or, “I could meet a partner, and that’s also fine.” I had to start treating both of those realities as equally true. I had to be okay with both of those working out because the other thing I’ve been noticing, this is just a slight tangent, but I also think in my early twenties, I was thinking a lot about how when you get into a relationship, you’re in it forever. I weirdly thought that way about work, too. I was like, “Well, you get a job, and that’s the job you have forever.” I had a lot to learn about the world. It’s been really interesting to see, as I get into my mid-thirties, how, of course, big surprise, people get divorced. People leave relationships.
People have partners die. My mom’s been widowed for almost twenty years. I have my aunt, who’s essentially like a second mom to me, and she has never been married. People will be single at some point in their lives. It doesn’t make sense to me to put so much pressure or unnecessary shame on just the fact that you don’t have a partner at the moment because everyone will experience singleness at some point in their lives.
Amen. To your point about how we don’t focus on the blocking and tackling of a relationship, my joke has always been they never made the sequel to When Harry Met Sally, which would have been titled When Sally Divorces Harry.
I will be totally transparent. I watch the movie every Christmas with my family. I completely agree. It’s all about the beginning. What I love more about that movie is that at least it shows you that some relationships take friendship rather than crazy romantic ups and downs. I love that at the base of a lot of Nora Ephron movies, there is friendship at the center, which I think is really special. I think that’s why a lot of women, in particular, are particularly enamored with Nora Ephron movies, like myself, but yes, who’s to say? Maybe Meg Ryan would definitely file for divorce after twenty years of shenanigans with Billy Crystal in that movie.
Perhaps. Of course, what I would say is that doesn’t mean the relationship was a failure.
No, exactly. Yes, it’s just that it ran its course. I’ve heard people describe divorce as the best thing that happened to them. It makes sense.
Married People
I want to get to some of your actionable items, so to speak, which feels like the meat of the book and which I welcomed because I’ve heard lots of stories of people who have tussled with their singlehood and this less-than status. As a fellow ruminator, I found those perspectives useful. I want to touch on a couple of things before we get to that. You mention in the book that you’re not anti-relationship. You’re not anti-marriage. This is a line that I use often, and I do it begrudgingly.
Say more.
I wonder if you do, too. The people who are writing books about how wonderful marriage is and how to go about finding your life partner don’t feel the need to say, “I just want to go on the record and say I’m not anti-single.”
That’s so true. I haven’t thought about that. You’re so right, though.
I get why we need to do it. In part because I like to say the Solo movement has a big tent. We’re taking married people, too. You don’t have to be single, divorced, separated, or widowed. We also want our married allies as part of the tent. I’m not in a situation where I want to shi* on married people. I tease them. I like to make fun of them a little bit.
Naturally.
I like to punch up, as the comedians would say, a touch. I also recognize that they have a hard path. It’s not sunshine and rainbows on the other side. I don’t want to alienate anyone. I do admit that I say this begrudgingly. I wanted to ask you about this. It’s early in your book.
It is. It’s such a good point. I never thought of it until now. I’m a little embarrassed I didn’t think about it until now. You’re absolutely right. It just falls into the expectation that marriage is the default and that those people need to be happy, comfortable, taken care of, and thought of. No, you’re so special. Everything’s great. You never see anyone on their wedding day say, “I still love all my single friends.” Although maybe they should. That’d be awesome.
I’m leaving you, for now, at least.
I know, exactly. No, it’s a really good point. My background, as you said in the intro, is I run LifeKit, which is NPR’s service journalism podcast. I’m just really big on table-setting and being like, “Here’s where I’m coming from. Here’s how I’m thinking of this,” because I also wanted to be honest in that. I think it’s also an interesting lane to be in when you’re single, someone who also wants partnership but is also trying to enjoy your single life. I think it’s wonderful when people are like, “I’m committed to being a single person.” It makes the decision on how to feel maybe a little bit easier, how to live your life, how to show up for other people, and how to interact with others and fight against stigma. That’s a whole other can of worms.
I almost liken it to when someone isn’t sure if they’re going to have kids, if they’re leaning either way. It’s really easy if you’re like, “I’ve always wanted to be a mom or a parent, amazing.” You just have the decision locked. Maybe you’re like, “I never want kids.” When you’re in the middle, you’re like, “I don’t really belong on either side yet, but I feel like I have to make a choice, and I’m trying to be open.” It’s a funny gray area because, for me, I even say I felt ashamed for wanting a partnership.
It’s silly because our society tells us to be partnered, but then when we want to be partnered and aren’t, it’s like, “You’re so pathetic. It’s so sad.” It’s like, “You told me to want this. You don’t have to feel bad about it.” It just feels very backward. I think I just put it at the top to be like, “This is where I’m coming from.” The more I was writing this book, the more I was secretly hoping that married people would read this book, too, because I was seeing how all these skills are just good emotional health skills. Understanding your own personhood is so important.
You’re always going to be with yourself no matter what. In terms of writing and researching this book, the more I got into it, the more I was like, “I just think everyone needs these skills to understand how to enjoy their own company, how to regulate emotions, how to seek out community.” They just feel so important because everyone needs to understand how to be with their own selves. I think it’s just so important.
Chutes and Ladders
I agree. Obviously, we can also point to a one-in-three divorce rate. If you’re a woman in particular and you’re married, you’re probably going to end up alone at the end of your life because of differences in life expectancy if you’re heterosexual. Plus, I think one of the things you talk about that I like is your use of this game analogy in the book. I used one, too, in mine. I talked about the Game of Life and how the Game of Life has evolved over time to become more marriage-focused and then to become less marriage-focused as it reflects what’s happening culturally. You talked about Chutes and Ladders, or as my sister and I called it when we were kids, Chutz and Ladders because we did not know how to speak English.
I’ve also held Snakes and Ladders, too, but yes, Chutz and Ladders, I like.
I’ll add that to the Chutz and Ladders. Let’s play some chutz and ladders. But Chutes and Ladders is, I thought, a really apt game to mention. If you could, for the reader who’s never played, can you describe the game? I think it also really reflects what you’re saying about whether you’re single or non-single. Life is like playing chutz and ladders.
If you’ve never played Chutz and Ladders, it’s a very simple children’s game. You just have a big board. There are just numbers. Number one is all the way at the bottom left-hand corner. Your goal is to get all the way up to the top corner of 100. One hundred is when you win. The problem is that there are certain ladders that you can hit when you hit certain numbers, where you can just shoot up amongst.
Skip the line, so to speak.
You skip the line. You can get to 100 much quicker, or you’ll hit a number sometimes, which is a chute or a slide. You go right back down to number one. That’s how I felt for sure in my early twenties when I was very concerned about what it meant to be in a relationship. Where I would just see friends be like, “I just met this person at a bar.” I just, “This is just someone I work with,” or someone who they just always seem to have someone. It felt like they were climbing ladders and going to number 100 so much quicker than I was. I was over here being like, “Okay, I’m climbing this ladder.”
I got to number fifteen. I don’t get to fifteen that often. I would just immediately be like, “Go down that chute.” I was like, “God damn it.” What I write about in the book is that you see people “rising” above you to have these relationships or anything that you want. Maybe it’s like a different job or an accomplishment that you’re trying to work towards. You just see them as you’re sliding all the way down.
It feels so demoralizing. It’s just how our culture sets up how to think about romantic partnership, that it is the ultimate goal. It’s not even just a goal. It’s the goal. I also didn’t really understand, like, once you got to 100, I was like, “Okay, so what happens?” People wouldn’t really tell you. They would lie to you about how amazing everything was, how perfect.
What I’ve been really finding hopeful and interesting is when I have married friends who are open about maybe not even just struggles, but what does it take to be in partnership with someone? This is, of course, with friends with whom I’m very close or have vulnerabilities. It’s earned trust there. It is nice to remember that. I read about this in the book, too. It never also made sense to me within American media how we love weddings. Weddings are this big thing. Getting together is a big thing, but then we have all these awful sitcoms about how marriage is a drag.
I’m like, wasn’t this the thing that we were supposed to really want? It’s like these ball-and-chain jokes that are so sexist and demoralizing. What happened here? Yeah, the Chutes And Ladders metaphor, it’s honestly how I felt. I just felt like every time there was a false start with dating someone. It felt like I was going to the bottom. I think, in hindsight, it was really just me living life. I was also putting a lot more, maybe too much emphasis on needing to get to that “100.”
I think a lot of this book was me learning how to really quiet the noise and the pressure to then climb some metaphorical ladder and instead be like, “Okay, instead of seeing life as this upward trajectory, maybe I could deepen and go wider and think about all these other things that are around me and how special they are.” The less emphasis I put on dating or the less pressure I put on dating to make me happy, the happier I was overall.
Well said. It is interesting how comedy, rom-coms aside, can shine a light on the truth. I’ll add one to the ball and chain, which is the hapless, childlike husband who can’t survive without his wife. This conversation is really stimulating to me because what I haven’t done is I haven’t figured out what the game that better describes what we’re living is. It’s not the Game Of Life, where there’s a limited number of options that you feel like when you’re putting those pink or blue pins in your car, you’re winning. It’s obviously not chutes and ladders, where there’s only one way to climb the status ladder, in a sense.
Choosing Your Own Path
What I don’t know off the top is what is the better game where there are different paths. It’s more of a choose-your-own-adventure. I remember those books as a kid, like you pick one path or another path, and you never know what would have happened, per se, if you had chosen some other one, but I wonder what is like that, where’s the game that’s training our children about how there are these equally valid paths in the world? They’re difficult to walk. They have different rewards and different risks that we could draw on to say, “This is what modernity is more like.”
That’s a really good point. For me, I think of, I have less of a specific game in mind, but more of an idea of, like, a rule book almost, where, like, Chutes and Ladders, like, some authority figure gives that to you and you’re like, “This is how you win life. This is what you do.” I know it sounds maybe a little cheesy, but maybe the real path is to rip up the guy, the rule book, and then make your own. I feel like that’s what a lot of your work is about. Something that I really enjoyed learning about while writing this book was the importance of values work. I talked with this psychologist, Kelly Crace, at the College of William, and his whole thing is it’s not about focusing on the outcome of your values.
It’s not about, like, “I want to get married. I want to get this job. I want to win a prestigious award.” It’s about, “What are my values? Does my behavior actually follow those values?” and asking yourself every day, “Did I step into my values?” That could mean something like, if you really value the environment, did you want a day where you had a lot of time on a weekend, or maybe you went to go to a community cleanup? Or that’s expressing your values. You won that day. Maybe on a really busy day, you just looked out your window and you’re like, “That’s a cool bird. I haven’t seen that bird in a while.” That’s an appreciation of the environment.
You also stepped into your values that day. I think that takes down the pressure so much more than being like, “I have to focus on the outcome. I have to get a ‘goal’.” It’s more about being like, “What’s actually important to me? Do I actually have behaviors that follow those values?” I feel like that really turned it on its head for me because I was thinking, too, about how goals are often just random. We just were like, “Okay, well, yeah, I want to get married.” It’s like, “Why do you want to get married?”
Have you ever thought about why that’s important to you? I think understanding why and what values are attached to that can help you kick the tires on a goal and then think, “Okay, well, maybe actually I do want this or I don’t want this,” or you see, you become more flexible about how to attain that elusive goal. It just opens it up. Thinking about the example of, like, do I want kids or not? That’s a very big question. Maybe you realize your value is that you just love community. Maybe you actually don’t need your own kids, but you can mentor; you can volunteer at a center that helps kids improve their reading skills.
Maybe that’s actually what’s going to feed your sense of community and parenting and caregiving rather than investing in having your own kids. Ripping up the rule book, creating your own rule book, is just so much. It’s a gentler way to live. It was so much more.
As someone who has achieved a lot in life by using goals, I’ve become surprisingly anti-goal in part for the reason you just cited, which is a goal is a forecast. It’s a hazy one sometimes for certainly the further out you get from the present.
It’s also pass or fail. It’s like you either do it or you don’t.
Especially relevant to the issue of having a goal around a relationship is that to choose a goal is to make an agreement with yourself that you are less than until you achieve that goal. I’m just not going to do that anymore. I’m not going to put myself in deficit for some promise that may happen years or decades later.
I think that it is an important thing for people to recognize that there are certain circumstances where goals are going to be very useful for you, but there is a trade-off that when you employ a goal, it does something to your psyche that perhaps the satisfaction with it is short-lived. The data on marriage bears that out. There is a happiness benefit to marriage around your wedding, and then it goes away. What you’re talking about actually has me thinking a little bit about these different forms of ethics that philosophers and scholars talk about. There’s consequentialism.
You judge the goodness of your behavior by the goodness or badness of the consequences. There’s deontology, which is the rule book, the Ten Commandments. You follow these rules and you will live a good life. The last one, which I think is most related to what you’re talking about, is virtue ethics, which is to be a good person. If you’re a good person, you will do good things. I think what you’re talking about a lot is what life you want to live from an overarching perspective, and then life will flow from that and serve you.
I love how you mentioned how sometimes certain types of goals, especially around being in a relationship, can put you in a deficit and being able to decide this is what works for me and feels good to me. If I’m not causing harm to other people, then you can ease into life. There’s so much of what I realized about my own stigma or shame I had about singleness was like this resistance of, “God, I don’t want to feel this way. I hate feeling this way,” but I feel like I have to feel this. It was like, “I really don’t like this. I just want to be partnered, and everything will go away.”
As I write about in the book, when I did get these early relationships, it just turned into something else. The ugly confidence I was mentioning, the anxiety, the rumination, they were still there. They just took a different form. I was putting so much of my self-worth on the line for that goal. It was again like the theme of what we’re talking about. Other people were deciding for me what was important.
When I was able to take a step back, it was, “I need to get a handle on some rumination stuff and anxiety.” Who doesn’t? It’s very human. I just knew I needed some tools, but once I could, yes, it’s like you’re saying, focus. A goal of a relationship is hard because it involves another person, and if you’ve ever done a group project, you know that not everyone pulls their weight. I can’t really rely on that as an outcome that is going to make me feel happy. I really got to love this wonderful life that I already have in front of me.
Rules Of Relationship
I’ll add something to this, but you need the cooperation of someone else for this particular form of relationship. I think it goes even further in that the world gives you the rules of the relationship. I always used to think that there was something wrong with me because I could not make this relationship work. I must be broken in some way.
What I realized was that I’m actually quite good at managing relationships. I managed to manage the most difficult relationship of my life, which was with my mother, who was physically and mentally ill. To say that, “Peter, you’re not good at relationships because I wouldn’t get married,” is a complete mischaracterization of who I am in that I have very healthy, thriving relationships in every other way.
The problem was that this type of relationship wasn’t well-suited for me. I think some of those “failed” relationships could have persisted longer if we had both been on the same page about following the same rules. For example, I had a number of relationships, and because my girlfriend wanted to move in, I was like, “I love you, but I don’t want that to happen.”
Is there something wrong with me because I don’t want someone to live with me? If someone wants to judge me that way, that’s fine, but you can’t say that I’m not good at relationships. I think there are these two things, you need the cooperation of another person, and you need to have some fit there, but you also need to be on the same page about the rules.
The more you default into the rules without considering them yourself and agreeing upon them explicitly, the more it’s going to make some people feel out of place and feel like they’re compromising in a way that makes that relationship difficult, even though that other person is this really wonderful human being and is trying really hard to.
I think you’re completely right. One, that the narrow scope of what it means to be good at relationships is when we talk about that, we mean romance. We mean romantic partnerships. We don’t ever look at people and think, “God, he’s so good with his mom,” or we don’t celebrate those types of familial relationships when people do it well, or with a sibling, or when a relationship that’s not romantic is difficult. That takes a lot of skill, patience and time. What you’re saying about the rules, I totally feel that. I feel like I was the person that was the opposite. I was almost taking the rules too seriously without questioning them. It hurts people on both ends. It comes back to like, “Do I actually want this?” I’ve heard this concept of the relationship slide.
The relationship escalator.
The relationship escalator, but there’s also something about when people move in together. The relationship escalator, we just get on it and we think, “This is how it’s supposed to be. We’re on autopilot.”
Carries you along.
Exactly. If that type of escalation works for you, if you think, “This is what I want and why I want it,” and you can map out and talk with your partner about it and be really intentional, then that’s great. That’s wonderful. I just think there’s this missing part of intentionality that a lot of people totally overlook, and we just go into autopilot. For me, like I said, I was the opposite. I was too attached to the roles. I was thinking, “Unfortunately, some gender roles, too.” I was like, “I can’t be loud. I can’t be bossy. I can’t push back.”
This partner has some tough family stuff, and I have to tiptoe around him about it. I didn’t want to rock the boat in any way. That was ultimately very taxing. I didn’t realize how taxing it was. The “rules” of romantic relationships that a lot of people tend to, maybe we should read them a little first. I know it’s tempting. When I get a new appliance, I’m the type of person who throws the instructions out the door practically immediately, but just taking the time to think, “What am I signing up for? Is this actually what I want?” Having agency to do something different.
Communication
This, of course, relies on the thing that everybody talks about, which is essential for a relationship, which is communication. The thing that they don’t really talk enough about is that communication leads to vulnerability. The moment you start talking about what you want, what you don’t want, what you like, what you don’t like, or that you feel like something’s not working, it becomes so threatening to this thing that we’re often grasping so tightly.
I think that my own personal experience was I was often afraid to ask for what I wanted because this really wonderful person, who I was incredibly attracted to and wanted to make this thing work, I was afraid that it would just poof and disappear. We end up compromising who we are, what we want, because we’re afraid to ask for what we want.
What you’re suggesting with regard to considering the rules and discussing them is incredibly threatening because, with someone, you might get a no or, even worse, the kids call it the ick. You might get an ick. You might get an ew, gross, that changes the course of a relationship. Recognizing that it’s really the only way to actually create that strong foundation.
Absolutely. I also think that when you are so obsessed, like I have been in the past, with, “This might go away. This might disappear,” I think at the bottom of it, underneath it was, “God, I don’t want to be single again, I don’t want to be alone.” I think what I, when working on this book, I was like, “If everyone partnered, singled, everyone has turned down the shame factor of what it means to be single, people would be, I just feel like the word is ease.” I keep coming back to this word, but it feels like things would be easier when you have those vulnerable conversations and someone is like, “Actually, that’s not going to work for me.” It’s like, man, it hurts.
I love you, but that’s the way it is. That’s okay. It has no impact on my self-worth, who I am as a person. I’m not broken. We’re just two people who were vulnerable and made an adult decision to part ways. I think that’s what I really struggled with, was this wrap-up of self-worth, again, the chutes and ladders. When I was heading down to square one after being dumped for the millionth time, even if it was after just three dates, I would take it really hard.
That’s why I was like, “I’ve got to get a handle on this because this is no way to live.” It is great when you can be vulnerable and ask for what you want. It’s good outside of romantic relationships. We’re just so afraid to talk to each other about what we actually want. I feel really grateful that I’m in a place where I can be like, “This is what I want.” It’s not even, and I love this idea from Marissa Franco, who wrote this great book, Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make—and Keep—Friends, about friendship. It’s not always just brownies that are important, but also thinking about what she calls communal boundaries. How can I get to yes? What feels good? What can I offer?
Maybe not in a romantic relationship, but like in the context of, say, friendship, where they’re like, “I need your help with something.” You’re like, “I’m really busy that day, but I can help you tomorrow.” It’s like, instead of just being, “I have, I’m at capacity,” thinking, “How can I continue this relationship or friendship and offer something?” That’s where I feel like I’ve transformed. There are hard no’s, and they’re hard no’s for a reason, to keep your safety and your sanity.
I think some real vulnerability can come through if you are at that impasse where, like you said, this person wanted to move in with you, and you knew in your heart that was probably not going to be the thing you wanted or was going to make you happy. To say that, to be vulnerable, shows how you can reflect your real values and then be like, “Okay, great, but I can’t say yes to this,” then you can decide to part, or not part. I don’t know, people need to talk to each other. I talk with friends about how sometimes we’ll watch TV shows, and we’re like, “This show would be solved in two minutes if everyone just picked up the phone and had an honest conversation.”
The one thing that I have learned as part of my evolution is I have that conversation early. It’s like, “I don’t anticipate living with a partner. If you need that, I’m not the right man for you.”
I think that’s kind because otherwise, you get people who think, “This is how it goes,” and then reveal. That’s why I get encouraged when people talk really early in dating about, do they want kids? Also, even if you do want kids, at what length would you go to have kids? I’ve seen friends of mine who have gone through really tough times, and some stay together and some don’t because they realized we had a mismatch in how we would get to this point in a relationship. Asking really tough questions or just signaling, “Hey, this is where I’m at,” checking in even, I think, is really important.
Hosting Parties
As we pivot to these kinds of mental health strategies that you talk about in the book, I want to put a bow on the title of your book. Earlier, you talked about how you’re joining a party. That’s the feeling that you had when you would couple up. I think it should be self-explanatory, but tell me your rationale for this metaphor.
I am a person who loves to host parties. I love hosting on the small level to the big level. I love my birthday. I love Halloween. I love game nights. I just love a party in general. What’s fun about creating your own party and hosting is that you get to decide everything, and it’s an opportunity to think, “This is the type, exactly the type of food I want. This is the exact guest list.”
This is, and then once those people and those circumstances are there, down to the lighting that you want, all that stuff, you get to feel that glow right back at you. The vibe is good if you don’t have the right people around. It feeds your soul. I feel like it goes back. I know I call it Party of One. Obviously, the idea being that you can be your own best life partner. You get to decide. But being on your own is wonderful. I also want to give the sense that it does not mean that you’re alone forever. You do have community. You get to bring people in. Also, disco balls are just pretty, and I thought they were cool.
I share your love of hosting. I host a lot of events. As a single person, I think it’s quite important to do that as a way to connect and then connect your connections. One of my favorite things about throwing a party is I tell people when it’s going to end.
Have you seen those banners that say, “Please leave at nine,” that people put up at their parties?
They know it walking in the door. It’s part of a text message invitation because I go to bed early. I’m like, “I need to be enthusiastic about every element of this party in order to do it,” including what time you need to leave.
That’s wonderful. I love it.
Rumination
What you’re highlighting in the book is that we obviously have multiple coping mechanisms to deal with our challenges in life. Our tendency, I think, when it comes to singlehood for the average person is that the solution is problem-focused, and it’s behavior-focused. How do I find that other person? That’s why your book and all these other podcasts and books that are coming out are so refreshing. They’re not that; they’re providing an alternative narrative.
There are, I think, behavioral things that you can do in terms of leaning into community, building friendships, living a thriving life, and living a life where you don’t need someone to solve your problems, and so on. What your book does, I think, very nicely, is talk about psychologists call it more emotion-focused coping. Where do you want to start?
Let’s start with rumination. I know you mentioned it earlier.
Rumination, anxiety that comes from it, I joke, is the successful person’s disease. It serves us in a lot of ways in life. It gets us to work through problems. It keeps us vigilant for the challenges that may be coming. However, it’s often maladaptive.
That double-edged sword.
Not useful, especially at four in the morning, and so on. For the person who suffers from rumination, where do they begin if they want to start to break the cycle? It’s a well-learned habit oftentimes.
Totally. Rumination, at its core, is asking yourself questions about, like, why is something? It’s usually we trick ourselves, you’re right, into thinking it’s problem-solving. Most of the time, they’re like, I have to get to the bottom of this. Why am I single? Why is this happening? Our brains often like a complete sentence, and they like good information and an endpoint.
How am I going to get from point A to point B after work? I’ll look on Google Maps. I know I’m not ruminating about that. I’m ruminating about these existential things that don’t have a clear answer. That keeps the wheel spinning because, probably don’t tell you this, but your brain loves to spin up scenarios to give you all, “Is this the answer you’re looking for? Is this the answer?”
That spins those wheels more and more. One simple thing people can do, it comes from cognitive behavioral therapy, is simply tracking your rumination. It’s very illuminating. I’ve done it. All that means is when you have the thought, like, first, it’s the darn thing of self-awareness. Oh my gosh, I’m doing it. Just that is huge. Be like, “I’m ruminating.”
I’m in this rabbit hole, stopping. I like to keep it on my phone. I had a running note for a long time. I would write down the time and the date of rumination, the quality of the thought, and how I felt. What happened pretty quickly is I saw a long list. It wasn’t to be like, “Oh, God, I’m so awful,” and then cause more rumination, it was just more like, “Here it is plain and clear. I’m spending a lot of time thinking about this.”
It’s like looking at your screen time on your phone.
Yeah, it has its own shame associated with it. It’s just data. It’s like, okay, this is a starting point. A few things. One is that I started to think to myself, “Is this how I want to be spending my mental energy?” There are so many other things I could be thinking about. You get the one precious life we hear about so often, is this really what I want to be thinking about? I was also able to see where it was actually happening. I can help break those cycles.
Another thing in cognitive behavioral therapy is to disrupt the environment. For instance, I would take this similar path to work every day, see the same, usually the same people, DC is ultimately not that big of a town, see the same trees, see the same landmarks and my brain would go on autopilot, and then it would be like, I don’t have to worry about where I’m going. I’m going to go to this story and this rumination. What was really helpful was to break that up, take a different path to work, or call my mom on the way to work, just do something to make that typical rumination groove. Just breaking it up and giving yourself a different stimulus.
This is something that I’ve been doing. Actually, I did it one night. For me, my bugaboo is 4:30 AM. I’ve got some sleep. I need more. I could survive, but my body could, and my mind gets active and starts working through these scenarios. Sometimes, I have to get up out of bed, wash my face, brush my teeth, and go back down to bed. No, we’re not doing this anymore. That’s my version of that.
That’s what doctors will say about dealing with insomnia in general, CBT is one of the best effective treatments for insomnia that’s not involved, where it’s to break up the environment, because then you start to associate your bed with not falling asleep. I did this. I was sitting in bed too long, and I was like, “I’m going to go to sleep,” but then, as soon as the hour went by, another half hour went by, and I got angry.
You’re just like, “Damn it.” The best piece of advice is to do what you did to get out of bed, disrupt the environment. I would do this for when I was feeling really anxious or sad about being single and feeling shame about it, and unnecessarily so. I would be like, okay, I’m doing that thing. I’m noticing. I’m going to write it down. What can I do differently? How can I disrupt this cycle? There’s a bunch of different techniques for that.
Something that I learned about, and I write about in the book, is noticing when you have a why question and turning it into a what. Because rumination, a quality of rumination, is often self-blame. It’s like, why am I like this? Why am I broken? Why is this happening? Why am I unlovable? All these awful, intrusive thoughts that you could think about forever and spin out about. If you could turn that into like, “What can I do?”
What can I do to feel better? What can I do to self-soothe? What needs more attention? That gives you a choice. It takes you on a thinking off-ramp, is one way to think about it. You can do something that is a healthy distraction, maybe something that just feels nourishing. Another technique I love from mindfulness, in general, is this nourishing-depleting binary. You can even think to yourself, “Is this nourishing?” If the answer is no, make a nourishing choice. Is being on TikTok in bed depleting? Yeah, it is. It’s actually depleting. I feel like that is a really gentle, non-judgmental way to be like, “Am I helping myself, or am I hurting myself?” and then making a different choice.
I think that’s really wonderful. I want to point out what is probably self-evident, but I needed someone to point it out to me to become self-evident. It is that oftentimes, when you’re single, you have a lot of time to think. I do this men’s call. It’s with two friends, we do it every 2, 3, or 4 weeks. It’s an hour and a half. Everybody gets a half hour of time to work on their stuff. These are incredible friends, but they’re in a very different place in life. They’re married with kids.
As a result, we end up having different puzzles and problems. Sometimes, we have the same puzzles and problems. They like to point out to me that I have a lot of time to think and thus overthink. Where they are going from person to person, from thing to thing, they have the opposite problem. They don’t have enough time to sit and reflect because of the nature of their lives. I do think that the single person can suffer more so from this because they have more solitude, they have more control. As a result, there are times when you do need to think hard about stuff in life.
I’m not against problem-solving, but yeah, you do need to take time sometimes.
When it becomes maladaptive.
When it becomes self-blaming, I feel like is the thing that I, again, it wasn’t self-evident until it was pointed out to me. It’s like putting a lot of blame, ascribing a story to myself about how I was operating in singleness. That was negative. That’s when it’s maladaptive and not helpful.
ABCs
You talk about the ABCs.
Yes, I love the ABCs. Another school of psychology, dialectical behavior therapy, has this tool called, the long acronym is ABC, please. I focus on the ABC part. Essentially, I write about this because it’s a way to basically bring more positive emotion into your daily life. For me, a big part of feeling that ease and positive emotion with singleness meant accepting, like, some radical acceptance of where I was, so I could start enjoying things more. ABCs are accumulating positives, building mastery, and coping ahead.
Accumulating positives, I feel like you’re really good at this. Probably a lot of your listeners are really good at this too, it’s like seeking out positive things in your life every day. I had insomnia last night. I was like, “I’m going to go get a nice little coffee before I do this interview. I leave my house. I have a beautiful espresso machine, but I’m going to get a nice coffee. I’m going to pay attention to my dog, and when I have a break from work, I will give them kisses.” It’s about noticing all the little positive moments, not the huge big yeses, being excited about things like, “I went to a fabulous big party or I’ve been to a concert,” like those are really good.
Those are positive, for sure. I think it’s also good to think about, “I thought I couldn’t give this presentation at work because I was going to be too nervous,” but I did it, and noticing the positive moment of that, that’s one, that’s a. Building mastery that builds upon that. It’s doing something, and you feel accomplished. It could be simply just going through your to-do list and making sure you do the top most important briefings that day. It could be working on a creative project. I got really into embroidery in the pandemic and practiced a lot of different knots and stitches that took a lot of time, but it felt really good, even if no one was around to watch me do them well.
Building mastery is just doing something that makes you feel accomplished, even if it’s something smaller in scale, and then coping ahead is this really cool trick where you basically imagine yourself doing something that might be challenging for you or difficult or something you have anxiety about. The example I give in the book is going home for the holidays, and you have a family member who just loves razzing you because you’re not in a relationship or you’re not dating.
Aunt Sally.
There we go. Aunt Sally is like, “Why aren’t you dating?” or “We’ll find you someone,” and you’re really nervous about how you’re going to respond to her. Coping ahead is doing a mental rehearsal. You’re not planning out exactly what you’re going to say. It’s more about visualizing yourself doing really well in that situation and having confidence. You’re just thinking, “Look at me go. I’m doing this so well.” It’s almost like watching a silent movie, is the way I think of it, of yourself succeeding and doing well. What it’s doing is helping you build up that confidence, and I got this attitude. The human positives, such as building mastery and coping ahead, sound really small. They sound really simple. Together, they build up to enforce this well of positivity and confidence that can make you feel good about yourself.
I think that’s wonderful. This stuff is research-backed.
Exactly. This is not just some self-help guru.
I may be throwing this stuff together to fill out the chapter.
No. I was deep in the dialectical therapy manual for psychologists.
Wise Mind
Let’s finish with a third that you would suggest to folks. I have listeners who are all over the map. I have folks who are in no way singles. They love their life. They’re unapologetic about it. I have folks who are just stumbling on the show, at their wit’s end. There’s got to be a better way. Folks in between. What might be another strategy that you’d suggest?
I love the concept of the wise mind, also from dialectical behavior therapy. The wise mind is a blend of what we often think of as the two sides of our minds, the emotional side and the rational side. What I often think about myself is I, for a long time, was like, “I’m too emotional. I’m so focused on emotions. I wish I was super-rational.” What wise mind is telling you is you don’t need to pick one or the other. In fact, you do need both.
If you’re too rational, you’re leaving out a lot of important information. You’re leaving out compassion. But if you’re too emotional, you are missing some parts of reality. What the wise mind does is integrate those two things. It’s a great mindfulness tool if you’re up against maybe some anxious thinking, you’re feeling bad, or you don’t know what to do about something. It feels like this kind of magic trick where you can stop, a note would be like, “I need to pause and think, what does the wise mind think of this? What does my wise mind think?” You just let the answer arise in you. I know it sounds so out there.
It is like this magic trick where, if you just call upon it, the first thought, I guarantee, will be something that is a kinder, rational, compassionate step forward, which is so helpful because if you’re dealing with a hard work issue, and you’re thinking, “I’m so mad at this person. This isn’t going well. My boss is being a jerk or whatever. I want to quit,” it’s like, what would my wise mind say? Take a break, schedule a meeting, talk to this person. It’s just a beautiful way to see clearly but with compassion, which is why I like it.
I like that, too. It certainly has that element, almost what you talked about earlier, about breaking the process that you’re in, stepping outside of it.
It’s all about disruption. It’s the self-awareness. We joke on Life Kit that we have a few cliché first steps. One is, “Always take a breath.” It’s not your fault. It’s like, “Be self-aware.” Those are just evergreen, I feel like, for most things in life.
Episode Wrap-up
Meghan, I appreciate you writing this book. It’s a vulnerable book.
Thank you.
It’s an authentic book. It’s one that I have to imagine has changed you.
It has. I jokingly call it my capstone on singleness, but capstone makes it sound like I’m done with these skills. I never have to think about them again. It is a culmination of years of thinking about this, living this, and just approaching life with a wider lens. I appreciate that, because it did feel like being solely focused on romantic relationships and the pursuit of that. I felt like I had blinders on, I’m realizing, and had kept my vision so narrow. How I treated myself was a very particular way that was not all that helpful.
I wish I could go back to my old self and be like, “Here’s this book,” reparent my younger self, and be like, “You really are going to be okay.” You’re okay. You just don’t know it. This book has widened my lens to think about all the beautiful ways life can unfold and how, if we’re just good to ourselves, we can ultimately be good to everyone else.
Really wonderful. It’s also a very pretty book. You have it. It’s illustrated, which is nice.
I have to give a shout-out to my colleague, LA Johnson. She also works at NPR. She did all the beautiful illustrations, and they’re all hand-painted and scanned in. She’s just so talented. She brought these concepts to life.
It’s a colorful book. Colorful book. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for adding your voice to this course.
It’s truly an honor. Thank you so much for having me. Thoughtful questions. I appreciate it.
Cheers.
Important Links
- Life Kit
- Party of One: Be Your Own Best Life Partner
- Meghan Keane
- Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make—and Keep—Friends
About Meghan Keane
Meghan Keane is the founder and managing producer for NPR’s Life Kit, a podcast and radio show that brings listeners advice and actionable information about personal finances, health, parenting, relationships, and more.
Prior to founding Life Kit, Keane was a producer for NPR’s award-winning podcast Invisibilia and a founding producer of NPR’s TED Radio Hour, one of NPR’s top podcasts since its debut.
Party of One is her first book.