What does it mean to wait—especially as a single person? In this re-release, Peter McGraw is joined by guest co-host Iris Schneider, a fellow Solo and behavioral scientist, to talk with sociologist Kinneret Lahad about the overlooked power of time in singlehood.
They explore how the relationship escalator shapes our perceptions of time and adulthood—particularly for women, who are often left waiting hopefully… or hopelessly. They also discuss how waiting can strip people of power, and why having a family is so often equated with moral virtue. Plus, they ask a big question: If becoming an adult means giving up childish things—like Peter Pan—why are we so quick to abandon joy? Iris’s answer might just blow your mind.
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Listen to Episode #249 here
Waiting (Again)
Welcome back. I’ve been re-releasing popular episodes that are especially useful for all the new readers as a result of the TED Talk. This episode has been especially important to me. It gave me chills not once, but twice. I’m joined by guest co-host Iris Schneider, a fellow solo and Behavioral Scientist, to talk to Kinneret Lahad, a Sociologist who researches the intersection of time and singlehood.
There’s so much to say about this episode. We talk about what the sociology of time is, and how our perceptions of time are influenced by the prominence of the relationship escalator. We also talk about how this affects women in particular, who are too often either left waiting hopefully or hopelessly to ride it. Related to waiting, we talk about how people who are waiting often lack power.
Another interesting topic was the purported moral superiority of people who have a family. They are said to be morally good people because they are doing hard work. In turn, if having a family doesn’t mean that you’re an adult, we ask the question, what makes a person an adult? Iris’s answer to the question is brilliant. If indeed this transformation of becoming an adult means that you have to give up childish things, lest you be accused of being frozen in time a la Peter Pan, it begs the question, if childhood is so great, why are we giving up so much of it? Finally, there’s this notion of where to find freedom. I’ll give you a hint at the answer, and that hint is that the answer may be in your mind. I hope you enjoy the re-release of this episode. I certainly did. Let’s get started.
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Our guest is Kinneret Lahad. Kinneret is a Senior Lecturer at the NCJW Women & Gender Studies Program at Tel Aviv University. Her research interests are interdisciplinary, spanning the fields of gender studies, sociology, and cultural studies. She’s the author of the open-access book called A Table for One: A Critical Reading of Singlehood, Gender and Time, which is the focus of this episode. Welcome, Kinneret.
Thank you. I’m glad to be here.
I’m thrilled you’re here. We are joined by a new guest co-host, Iris Schneider. Iris is a Behavioral Scientist from the Netherlands. After obtaining her PhD in Psychology, she lived and worked in the US before starting her academic position at the Social and Economic Cognition Research Group at the University of Cologne in Germany. She studies mixed feelings and conflict in judgment and choice, which I suspect will be relevant to the topic of this episode. Welcome, Iris.
Thank you for having me.
The Liminal Space of Waiting: An Academic’s Journey into Singlehood
I want to tackle this topic of what I call waiting, this idea that a lot of singles are living in what we might call a liminal space, waiting for a better life of sorts. Kinneret has done cutting-edge work on this topic, and that’s why she’s joining us. Before we do that, I want to talk to both of you about how you got here. Why do you find yourself on the show? Kinneret, how did you come to study this topic? What’s the origin story of this research project?
One departure point is that I was fascinated by the study of family life. At some point in my academic career, I realized that I wanted to study families. In particular, what intrigued my curiosity is how, despite many stories of family crises, family problems, and disappointments of family life, it’s still the ideal of family life. Coupledom is strong. What makes it strong despite many everyday realities, at which point otherwise? Why do we still cling to that ideal and not to other ideals?
I began my PhD researching compassion as an emotion. I thought I would pursue research that would be more involved in humanitarian aid, compassion, and a cultural study approach to representations of international aid. At some point, I realized that I had answered most of the questions I was interested in when I wrote my graduate thesis, and I wasn’t curious anymore.
As a single woman at that time, as I am now, I felt that there was no literature that represented the complexity of single life. It’s either pathetic or celebratory. It is either glamorous or catastrophic. I said, “I want to theorize singlehood. I want to understand singlehood.” First of all, I realized that the studies I’ve read about singlehood were descriptive and not theoretically engaged.
The second problem was that they were quite binary. That’s my criticism of some scholarship on that topic. At that point, it was usually like, “Did you choose to be a single person? Didn’t you choose to be a single person?” I said, “Our life is much more complex than that.” When I proposed that topic, I got some quite harsh reactions from my surroundings.
It means you’re on to something. In academia, you’re either wrong or on the cutting edge of understanding something new.
In my study with Michal Kravel-Tovi on self-marriage, people thought we were mad and insane studying this. It was published in a quite good sociological journal. I love pursuing these kinds of topics. One story I can choose is an intellectual passion to think about singlehood in a serious way. I hope I did that.
You did, indeed. I want to make a couple of quick comments. The first one might only be relevant to what the three of us care about as academics. There’s a saying in academia that is attributed to Max Planck, which is, “Scientific progress happens one funeral at a time.” We all agree on this stuff. The fact that you agree on all of it constrains the field, whatever field you’re in.
It often takes someone who has either a new perspective, a new approach, and who’s old enough to know but young enough to be dangerous to find these new areas that are being overlooked. You’re often looked at as crazy and weird. Thank you for doing that work. I’ve also done a little of it with my humor research. I’ve had that same experience.
The second thing I want to say is that this idea of relationships in general and family life specifically is difficult for many people. People say, “Relationships are hard.” We know about divorce rates and the devastation that goes with this. We know about the abuse that can happen within relationships, and yet everybody is like, “I’m going to do it. I need to do it.” In some parts of the world, almost everybody does it. For example, in India, everybody does it. In the United States, nearly everyone does it. In Europe, it’s much less. It’s difficult to find anything that everybody does to the same degree as they do marriage. There’s nothing else they do that has the same level of pitfalls.
The Paradox of Partnership: Why We Cling to Difficult Relationships
It’s interesting that you mentioned this because this commitment with which people do something that they are aware of can be quite difficult and sometimes not end well. It might be the reason that people respond strongly if you suggest alternative narratives of relationships in life. I remember once, I was telling a colleague about a couple that I know who decided to buy a house and build two apartments in the house. They wanted to be close, but they wanted their own space.
My colleague got very upset. She said, “That’s immoral. How can you take up a whole house and make two apartments? There are not enough houses to begin with.” I was struck by this visceral reaction that she had. She didn’t even know what was happening. At first, she had an emotional response, and then she tried to make a story around it to justify it. The alternative to maybe her world, where she was living in a small house with three children and a husband she might not have liked, was like, “I could have done that. I should have done that. Why did I go?”
This is how bad it is. I was having a conversation with a happily married woman. They live in the same house, sleep in the same bed, and use different blankets. One of them has a heavy blanket, and the other has a light blanket because they prefer different temperatures. One of their family members thought that was wrong. They found it peculiar and weirdly threatening. Doing anything unconventional goes against the common narrative.
We both studied the mixed feelings, especially how you resolve them. It’s a classic dissonance paradigm. I feel some dissonance because there are alternatives to what I chose. I must resolve this by doubling down on my opinion and also changing you because you must be wrong, and I must preserve the balance in a higher interpersonal triangle. In Germany, everybody has two duvets on their bed.
As they should. It’s nearly impossible to have the same temperature preferences while you sleep.
The “Moral Accomplishment” of Family Life: Deconstructing Anti-Single Stereotypes
I want to respond to what you said, which was fascinating. The common therapeutic discourses conveyed the message that marriage, coupledom, and parenthood are hard work. Therefore, you get moral acknowledgment for being ready to dedicate yourself and get involved in that hard work. In many ways, it’s a moral accomplishment. Therefore, you’re morally superior because you’re willing to engage in this hard work as opposed to these selective single people who are not willing to be engaged in any hard work. They’re emotionally lazy. They’re not putting any effort, not going to therapy, and not involving themselves. This moral therapeutic ethos is prevalent in the stereotypes and stigmas towards single men and single women.
Thank you for saying that. First of all, the idea that single people haven’t grown up is obscene to me for people to say that. We know they’re more involved in their communities, they donate more of their time, and they donate more of their money. They’re more likely to be a caregiver of a parent or other sick family member because the people in the family go, “I can’t do it. I’m already overwhelmed.” They’re pursuing scientific benefits. They’re making art. Single people make the world better, also, and they may do it in different ways. They don’t affect climate change as much.
The fact that you have all these reasons ready, Peter, also the background of your show, which in itself is striking that we have to justify that we also contribute. This illustrates how strong these ideas are. This link with morality is important. For instance, in the work setting, especially in family-friendly work settings, single people are expected to contribute more and be more flexible.
Also, they assume that they have no responsibilities, they have no preferences, and that they can move aside to accommodate people with families, which they can. The fact that it’s assumed and expected is reflective of this idea that a single person’s life is incomplete, or they have time, they’re lazy, and they should do more to have this value.
They’re doing less important things. That’s what this says. You have less important endeavors, so you can move them around. The idea that you’re not being compensated for your flexibility and for the additional value that you bring is wrong.
I’ve been asked what are the social implications of my work. It led me to think a little bit about my work from a distance. I’m trying now to develop the idea that singlehood and aloneness studies can be radical literature and a form of thinking. For example, why do we need to be adults? Why do we need to be significant? Why do we need to work overtime? Why do we need to be flexible with our time? Let’s use the single vantage point to change your value systems, to rethink the value system through which single people are stereotyped and stigmatized.
Let’s rethink the value system that evaluates us and change it from that perspective, and not just say, “We are not childish.” What’s wrong with being childish? That’s fantastic, being childish. What could be better than being a child in so many ways? We’re thinking, “Let’s use this vantage point that single people offer to rethink the system as queer theory has done.” Allowing us to reformulate some of the normative and taken-for-granted ideas of what is valued and what is devalued in these hierarchies of values. This is an idea I would love to share with you.
Iris, I want to get to why you’re here. We’ve jumped right in, which is great. Your perspective on what you shared is perspective-changing for me, especially. As someone who gets referred to as Peter Pan sometimes, I’ve never been married, have no kids, and have no interest in that. The idea that I haven’t grown up is seen as a negative thing. What you’re suggesting is that it’s potentially a positive thing. We lament the loss of play.
The other thing is we live in a world that is built for families. The time course, the development, the nature of work, and everything is built around that thing. When you strip away having a family, it suddenly gives you a lot more options about how to live your life both personally and professionally. One of the things that I say time and time again is that solos never consider those options because no one ever presents them to them, and they never give them to them. I’m sorry to editorialize like this, but I don’t want this idea to be lost. We should think a little bit about what we want our adult lives to look like. Maybe we can get into that a little bit.
Unconventional Living: Challenging Society’s Traditional Paths
I want to follow up on this. One question that follows from this is if we have all these strong values for what it means to be an adult, and maybe we want to change them, or at least strip the judgment away, it’s one thing to say being single has positive values. Maybe the first step is to stop putting a value on different lives and different paths. The question is, who imposes this idea of adulthood? One thing that sprang to mind is that I think of these norms about who people are supposed to be as being communicated by marketing.
Families are also a big target of consumption. They drive the economy. You always see this in policies. Families need to be supported. That’s because capitalist economies are aimed at growth. You don’t want people who are not adults because they might not buy two cars. They might not get a mortgage, and might not follow this consumer pattern. That’s why you see all these narratives, although it’s a little bit less now that the buying power of singles is being acknowledged. A lot of these narratives come from commercial interests. I don’t know how you feel about that, Kinneret.
I’ve been thinking a lot about that aspect of consumerism. For example, in the LGBTQ communities, I’ve been thinking about how it is possible that the single community, to a certain extent, in other places in the world, is still not perceived to be a consumer niche. At least in Israel, that’s strikingly so. It’s not as much as the LGBTQ community. Having that thought, I said to myself, being an anti-capitalist person as I am, that is not the path I would like singlehood life to follow and get its recognition and respectability by being a consumer niche. That follows from the criticism from LGBTQ scholars that say, “Queer life is not about consuming. Queer life is radical. Queer life is about questioning the norms.”
These developments point to “Singlehood is now worthy consumers.” It’s a tricky and quite dangerous path to take. I hope single life will not gain its recognition by buying, as it happens in so many places. Our consumerist society is where you get your identity and recognition by being recognized as a consumer. We should pursue this liberty of not being a consumer nation, and not look for that recognition and respectability per se. Don’t look for that recognition and respectability from a value system that you do not necessarily agree with.
First of all, we may not want it to happen, but my suspicion is that it likely will. These are powerful forces. These are smart people who are a little bit asleep at the wheel at this moment. I teach marketing. Good marketing is about recognizing needs. It’s not about creating wants. Recognize that singles have a different set of needs and that their value systems may be different. For example, less materialistic, more minimalistic, more experiential, and more flexibility and mobility. What you can do is create products and services that make those lifestyle choices easier. That’s my hope.
The other place that we might end up seeing is also within the world of business, but on the hiring and retention side of things, to Iris’s point. Organizations are also working in a marketplace. They’re trying to acquire the best talent and keep that talent to recognize how valuable single talent is because they have fewer constraints.
However, they may have different values. They might want different things. They may not want to be on a Monday through Friday 9:00 to 5:00 because they don’t have kids in school. They value remote work more. They might not need to work a 50-hour workweek. Smart businesses will start to find that they don’t need family leave to the same degree. Maybe you could give them a sabbatical. These are ideas that I’ve been working on that will also help with deliberation.
The “Time Being” Trap: Women’s Achievements and Societal Expectations
The employer perspective is interesting. As I was reading your work, there was a woman who said or you said that everything that a woman achieves or does is considered for the time being. We’re talking about women because your work is specifically about women, and women also carry a stronger tag of singlehood. They go around the world, they get a degree, they master languages, they run a marathon, and they have friends in different countries, but they’re asked, “When are you going to get married?”
I was wondering about the implications for that in the workplace. You come there as a single woman and you have this huge CV with both community work and everything, and all the employers are thinking, “She’s going to want to have babies real soon. Clearly, she’s waiting for that next step in life.” That’s harmful in the workplace, even though you might be an easier worker because you require less of the structure that is now in place to support a family.
The Uncontrollable Single: Societal Perceptions and Biases
It taps into the issue of morality once again. Often, when you are single, you’re perceived to be dubious. You’re undeciphered. What are you doing in your private life? You’re uncontrollable. The boundaries around you are unclear. You’re not bound by the couple unit. You’re not accountable to your significant other. Who are you? If you’re married, it is clear who you are, or if you are a parent. There are other people who are accountable, so that you are not as dangerous or as wild.
As a single person, we have no social indicators of who we are. It also plays in many arenas, like the housing market and being an employer or an employee. This idea is not something that I’ve developed a lot in my work. It is something I’ve been thinking a lot about in the years I’ve been studying singlehood. For example, I have this exercise in one of my classes in which I tell them that we are a committee for a gated community, a kibbutz, or a private community. We are sitting on this committee on who we can accept into our community. I then say, “There is a single man who is 51.”
He’s tall, charming, super social, and living a remarkable life.
A great podcast host.
He’s a professor. We have a gay couple with two kids, a family with three children and a dog, a man who is a widower, and then a divorced woman with two kids. Who do we want in our community, according to which criteria? We play this game. I then say, “What do we know about these people besides their status? We don’t know anything about them. We have no idea who they are.” Allegedly, we have a lot of information about them, which is derived solely from their status.
However, we don’t know anything about their character, their ability to contribute to the community or harm the community, or if they fit the community, but we have these external markers, which indicate that they are safe, and this will be a safer choice. I think this mechanism is prevalent in everyday life in the way we organize our society and in the way we create these divisions of who is worthy of being near us and who is unworthy, who is dangerous, and who is safe.
By the way, how do I do in that ranking system? Am I at the bottom?
Pretty bad. You are the last person that the community would want. You’re a walking catastrophe because there is a high chance that all the women in that community will fall in love with you. You are posing a huge danger to the fabric of the familial atmosphere in that community. You are the least likable person to enter the gate. There’s no chance of you entering the gate. The widower will be a huge success.
I can see that. The term uncontrollable is fascinating. You use it with regard to women, but I think it’s especially apt when it comes to men. I’ve done a deep dive into the history of the bachelor. One of the terms bachelors get referred to throughout history is rogue elephants. The idea is that they’re useful if you need to fight a war or conquer a frontier. Once the frontier is conquered, once we’re settling in, we need to couple these guys up because they’re going to cause lots of problems. In some cases, they do.
There is a domestication analogy that happens a lot with singles. There are a lot of animal references to single men. In China, they’re referred to as single dogs or oxen. We need to put a harness on them and get them to till the fields. That’s where we need them to be. Iris, tell the folks how you got here. You’re an academic, but you’re not researching single living per se. Why have I invited you to be our guest co-host?
Together with a friend, we’re talking about being both alone and living alone for a long time. We share a lot of similar interests. We also share this frustration about how it’s viewed when you’re not desperately pursuing some coupling with another person. I recommend this book called Going Solo by Eric Klinenberg. He described something that has been going on in many countries on the rise of people living alone. That’s also one of his focuses.
The Power Dynamics of “Waiting”: Who Holds the Cards?
I thought this was interesting. I then came across Peter’s show. I knew Peter from his work on the same topic as I work on, which is mixed feelings and ambivalence. I emailed him. We were talking about the discomfort that comes from feeling the pressure that you don’t identify with. From time to time, I felt this pressure to finally do something, start my life, or achieve something.
I’m quite achieved already. I’ve achieved something in my life that is at least worthwhile. Peter sent me your article, and it had this metaphorical disconnection between time and waiting. I thought, “These are not my thoughts. These are not my wants. They’re externally imposed through this strong linear life metaphor that’s imposed on people through media, mostly, but also through other people who pick up on this media.”
It’s everywhere.
It was such a relief. Peter said, “Do you think it’s worth inviting?” I said, “I do think it’s worth it.” Especially the connection, it also relates a little bit to what Peter said, the connection with power. Single women are women who are waiting. People who wait don’t have power. I thought this was an interesting connection. You’re always waiting on somebody who has more powers. Especially with what Peter was saying, there’s a way to control the uncontrollable by telling them, “You don’t have power, you’re waiting,” and keeping them in that space.
People who are waiting don’t have power, or you’re waiting on some external thing to happen that’s often out of your control.
More than that, the people who are not waiting are superior to you by the mere fact that they’re not waiting. It enables people to say, for example, “Why are you not married?” You’re asking that question from a position of privilege. The person who is throwing her bouquet, as I’ve demonstrated in the article, is clearly in a position of superior power. This idea of the imaginary queue of where you are located in the queue. Can you enter the queue at all? Can you participate?
In the US, it’s a line, not a queue. Can you stand in line? Are you eligible at all to wait? At some point, how far are you in relation to the bouquet? At some point, you’re not even allowed to participate in this line anymore because you’ve become older, you’re not reproductive anymore, or you’ve left your youth and good looks.
This idea of standing in line was instructive for me in terms of my thinking of how the single life course is organized according to this pattern. It made me angry when I realized that. I said to myself, “How dare they put me in a line?” I refuse to be in this line. I refuse for people to tell me, “Soon, you’ll be married. Don’t worry.” It’s like a Hebrew saying, “Don’t worry. You’ll get married. The next wedding will be yours.”
It’s a patronizing wish in which the person who wishes you to get married soon says, “I’ve been married already. I can be generous and wish you the same heaven that you should enter.” These ideas seem normative and natural. The person who wishes you to get married only wants what’s best for you, but they don’t know anything about you and what you want.
Iris, you’re shaking your head like you understand this experience.
It’s up there with benevolent sexism. It’s like, “I want the best for you. Maybe you shouldn’t take on the strenuous job.” I’m talking specifically about women. Why are women not in top-tier functions? Why don’t they go into science? At the University of Cologne, there’s always this gender bias discussion going on. Why are women not being professors?
Seeing that in relation to this narrative of disempowering a person who is not yet married, and also in relation to this idea of the third shift is keeping women busy with the idea that they have to go down this path and spend time, money, and resources to comply with what this apparently superior person thinks that you should do. That takes away energy from all these endeavors.
It’s so easily internalized because it’s so connected to self-worth. Apparently, you’re not attractive. It’s either that you’re not attractive or that you are too critical. Either nobody wants you, or you want nobody, and both are horrible situations to be in, and it has to be remedied. The idea that I should be spending time on that, not in money, even. I have to get married or maybe have to stay looking young so that I attract potential mates, or whatever is so frustrating. It’s not just for women. This linear life course is oppressive for anybody.
Especially so for women.
This crossover between this third shift kind of thing.
I’m used to hearing second shift. What is the third shift?
I think I’m messing up two things. What I’m talking about is that women are not supposed to only live a life, but also live a life where they are attractive and thin. All the time, they have to spend on being good women in that sense, like looking good. The third shift is work, children, so it should be the second shift, probably.
There used to be a Chanel advertisement back in the day. She said, “I can bring home the bacon and I can fry it up in the pan,” this super hot blonde woman who is good at everything. To your point about the third shift, it was the image of her looking super attractive.
That’s what I mean. I was also not sure about the reference because I know that they also talked about this in The Beauty Myth, about how much time it takes for women to be presentable. Their economic power is set in that way. Are you familiar with this, Peter?
It’s only because I live in LA. There are two references. I have an ex-girlfriend who was a journalist, a reporter on air. She introduced me to the saying that I often use, which is backed up as, “Beauty is pain.” If you see a beautiful woman, she’s either in pain or she was in pain or both in order to achieve that. The second one is I remember being at a party with a friend’s girlfriend and one of her girlfriends. These are early 30s, beautiful women. We got talking about what they do to be this beautiful.
The list of things was enormous. What we started doing was putting price tags on all of these things. Immediately, we’re in the hundreds of dollars, and then eventually, we’re in the thousands of dollars. I am familiar with that sense as an observer and as someone who pays attention and talks to women about these topics.
This combination of the expectation that you’re not allowed to be ugly or old, and then the fact that you are being told that you are waiting, is extremely disempowering. It’s so easily internalized that women start holding themselves back, or they start spending time on things that are not important to them and shouldn’t be important by definition. It can be, and that’s fine, but they don’t have to be.
There’s a little bit of what we call inside baseball going on because we’ve read the papers and the books, and Kinneret’s written them. In your book, you juxtaposed two fields that aren’t typically linked, and that is the sociological study of time and the study of female singlehood. What I’d like to move forward with is to dive a little bit more deeply.
If people think we’re nerds right now, we are about to become nerdy. What is the overarching takeaway of the work? Can you describe a little bit about the methodology used? Iris and I come from a psychological background. The average person understands experiments in psychology, but doesn’t understand sociology and how these fields are complementary, although they have different techniques and approaches.
First of all, let me confess that I’m a proud nerd. When I talk in class, sometimes I’m so excited when I talk about an article and how I’m so much in love with this paper or with this scholar, and then I say to myself, “I’m a geek.” We should reclaim our nerdiness. It’s an interesting beginning because I wasn’t planning to engage in the sociology of time. I didn’t even know it was a field that existed at that point. My first intention was to write a thesis and to be followed by a book about singlehood, shame, humiliation, things that bothered me, and things that I saw around me.
Following what you said, Iris, about the amount of time that women and men invest in thinking, “Why am I single? Why am I not married?” When I began conducting this research and collecting texts, as I’m also referring to my methodology, I started paying attention that most of the sayings and many of the understandings and interpretations of single life are imbued with notions of time. For example, “Why are you still waiting? You’re going to miss that train. The train has already left. Someday he’ll come along. It’s a pity, you used to be so pretty.”
There are so many sentences that are imbued with understandings of time. I said, “I have to understand the force of these expressions, clichés, stories, and fairytales of happily ever after. I have to understand what gives these stereotypes about singlehood, the conventional thinking about singlehood, so much force.” I’ve understood that the normative and the natural perceptions of timetables, calendars, and life course trajectories, in addition to temporal perceptions such as wasting time, empty time, losing time, or frozen time, and aging. They play a significant role in the way singlehood is constructed and imagined.
Therefore, if I deconstruct these temporal conventions, I can deconstruct the way singlehood is perceived. I wanted to go as deeply as I could and create this revolution, in which I demonstrate how socially constructed these conventions are and how they are connected. Each chapter in my book takes a different route, in which I take one concept, such as waiting, wasting time, or empty time. An attempt to understand its origins, how it is demonstrated, and why it is articulated as a truth, as something that we cannot argue with time.
We should argue with time because, as social beings, we have invented time. If we have invented time, we can deconstruct and put other ideas into our life course. We can stop waiting, and we can stop thinking that we are wasting our time. I thought that would be effective also in terms of theoretical engagement with singlehood. Also, I saw this project, and I still see it as political because in my work, I want to change conventions. I don’t want single people to think that something is wrong with them. Something is wrong with the value system, which tells you that something is wrong with you and that should be changed.
You’re on the right show for that.
This reminds me of this saying, “The only thing that’s wrong with you is that you think there’s something wrong with you.” What is so powerful about your work is that merely by demonstrating and laying out how these things are connected and communicating, you’re already destabilizing their power because they’re so familiar. They’re like the air around us.
In your work, you say, “Why do we think about these things in terms of these things? Why do these metaphors exist? What do these metaphors or these ways of talking about this? What do they tell us about how we think about this construct?” That in itself was already eye-opening and opens up the question, “What other kinds of ways can we talk about this? What other narratives are there?” The self-marriage thing, reclaiming your temporal power, is a strong alternative marriage and alternative narrative. It connects with your ideas also about reframing singlehood, Peter, this temporal agency that people can take back.
As psychologists, we often study time as well, and we do so in two different ways in general. One is this idea of the perception of time. Whether it’s moving fast or slow, whether something feels close or feels far away, and then the implications for things like investing in your future, and so on. Those are the kinds of things that happen.
The Sociology of Time: Deconstructing Social Constructs of Life
I’ve done some of this work with humor, for example, the passage of time changes people’s emotional experiences. What you’re describing, I’d like to spend a few more moments on that because it feels academic. It’s about perceptions of a life course, about what time means to us, and about milestones. Can you talk a little bit more about this idea of the sociology of time in general, and then specifically for singles?
My study on singlehood was greatly inspired by scholars such as Haim Hazan, Eviatar Zerubavel, Norbert Elias, and Barbara Adam. What was interesting to realize at the point when I began my study in social time, was that it was a marginal subfield in sociology, as opposed to the fascination. There are so many studies written on space, for example, which is a recognized subfield in sociology. Several years ago, it wasn’t as popular. Now, it is much more well-known. There are many more studies on social time than there used to be, and interesting things are being written.
To sum it up, the idea is that the taken-for-granted understanding of time is to be natural, self-evident, something that happens, and we should adhere to it. The sociology of time is understood in a historical investigation or by looking at a social phenomenon, as I did on singlehood, and also with my wonderful colleague on late motherhood. We look at these sociological phenomena in which temporal notions such as age and moving across the life course are considered to be normative, natural, binding, and authoritative. You can’t do anything about time. You have to adapt yourself to the life course, or you have to act your age, or you are running out of time, or you should be on time.
For example, the notion of timing is significant, but these are not natural. These are socially imposed constructions that tap into the ideological system, such as capitalism or family life. It bestows a lot of values and a lot of truth claims, as Foucault termed it, about how we should live our lives and what makes our lives worthy.
For example, to be on time or to be married at the right time, or to buy your place at the right time. We are going back into these ideas of childhood versus adulthood. Are you moral or immoral if you’re on time or not on time? I can give you a brief example of how interesting it is. For example, think of the age at which you’re supposed to stop living with roommates. I assume that in Germany, it would be 25 or 30?
I was never 25 or 30 in Germany.
In the Netherlands or the US?
In the Netherlands, it’s not so common to live with roommates beyond your 30s, so that would be 25 or 26.
I’ll add it to this. Occasionally, on the dating apps, a woman will specifically say something about not having roommates. She doesn’t want a man who needs or has roommates, in a sense.
For example, the age at which you are not supposed to live with roommates, that we are supposed to live on our own, or to move on. What does it mean? To find a partner and to move in together, and preferably have your own place. That is considered to be the most normative channel or trajectory, which signifies being responsible and being happy. What if you want to stay and live with your best friend? What if you get on so well with the person you live with, and you want to extend this idea beyond the age of 25 or beyond the age of 30? Why not? Who says that at a certain point in our lives, we should live on our own or live with a partner? These kinds of ideas of who we should live with and how we should live are embedded in timetables, which are socially constructed.
Beyond the Biological Clock: Redefining Women’s Temporalities
I have a follow-up here before I turn it over to Iris. This idea of the timing of marriage. I’m thinking to myself, this notion of homeownership has to be part of this conversation. I often urge singles not to buy homes because it limits mobility and optionality, as I like to talk about from an economic standpoint, but we know that marriage and homeownership are connected. We know that the roots of marriage come from land ownership and agriculture.
To your point, these things are normative. The world is telling you how to behave, and that is super connected. The thing that we have to tackle with regard to women and singlehood, in particular, is the notion of having children. There are time constraints when it comes to that. It seems like the whole system is built around that. Is that fair to say?
I oppose that logic because when we think about singlehood and time, we automatically turn to the reproduction deadline and time limits. Women’s lives and temporalities are much richer than their imaginary or non-imaginary biological clock. We are seen as moving clocks. It’s not only my idea. It’s been written about extensively.
In many ways, my book is a bit cheeky because I don’t talk about it. I refuse to bend to that logic and enter that conversation of when a woman’s reproductive time clock is going to begin or going to end. I think we should broaden the conversation on singlehood and time, and not only reference the biological temporality. People’s lives do not begin and end with their biological clock. We have so many kinds of temporal movements and temporal trajectories that are possible. We cannot boil it down to the children, non-children question.
I appreciate you clarifying that. I agree with it, but I think it is something that shows up time and time again.
We should oppose that conversation because it channels the discussion on singlehood on a very narrow path. Single life is much richer than justifying, calculating, and binding into the logic of fertility, non-fertility, and biological deadlines. For some people, it could be important, but not necessarily for everyone. That part of my project on singlehood is to broaden and open the conversation into more directions than looking into women’s ovaries. I’m sorry for being a bit blunt. Enough is enough. We are not walking ovaries. Leave us alone. It’s none of your business.
I’ll tell you something funny that happened to me in my 30s. A doctor told me that I should hurry up because it’s time to be pregnant, and soon my time will be up. I said to him, “Is the person guarding the building single?” He was totally shocked because we were having this serious conversation about my fertility, although I didn’t engage in any conversation about my fertility.
I said to him in a blunt Israeli way, “Is the person guarding the building free?” He said to me, “Why are you asking? I have no idea.” He was stressed about it. I said, “I’ll go quickly, have a kid with him, and come back so we can continue our conversation. What do you know about me? You don’t know anything about me. You only know my name and age. You have no idea what I want in life, but you are so rude in presuming that I should be pregnant and that my time is up. That is not your job. Your job is to examine me. I came here to get medical treatment, but not to be patronized.” This was a pivotal moment for me, also in my scholarship. I said to myself, “I’m not engaging in this kind of conversation,” which is dictated to me by doctors and by the good intentions of my surroundings.
It’s family members, friends, coworkers, and strangers on the plane. It’s amazing how people feel comfortable doing this. I’ll give you a flip of this. Early on in the show, I had a urologist on, and we were talking about vasectomies. As part of his practice in Connecticut, a man who wanted a vasectomy had to get his wife to sign a form approving it. It’s within that.
We are built in a world where we want babies, as you were talking about growth, the family unit, government-supported, businesses-supported, everything is urging. To hear you be unapologetic and not be defensive about that is uplifting to hear. In many of these conversations, the single person is on the defensive, making excuses for where they are and what they want, whether they are single by choice or single by chance, to use my terminology.
You always have to fight two battles. The first battle that you have to fight is the assumption that you would even want kids, “When will you have kids,” and then you have to defend why you don’t want them. First, there’s the assumption. You have to say, “It’s not a valid question,” and then you have to defend the answer to that same question. It’s a lot of work.
Here’s the other one. Suppose you want to have kids, but you don’t want the husband. You also have to have that fight. It’s not even that kids are enough. It’s the whole package that is expected.
In the ’70s or ’80s in the Netherlands, there were these BOM mothers. It was the Dutch acronym for consciously unmarried moms. The women’s movement was a bit stronger there. Feminism was a bit stronger and more independent there, where women went out to have babies, either by a one-night stand or a donor. It was much more of a thing. You don’t hear this so much anymore that women go out and have babies by themselves, even though it could totally support the idea that women should reproduce, but not in that way, please. Only reproduce with the husband or a partner.
I was thinking, just listening to you, how about instead of people asking one another if they’re married or they should have children or not have children, we can ask people, “What are your favorite podcasts? What is the book that has inspired you?” How about changing these kinds of small talk conversations instead of the automatic path of, “What do you do for a living? Are you married? Do you have children?” How about refreshing the kind of conversations we have with acquaintances and with each other? That could tell us a lot more about ourselves if we say what our favorite podcast is than if we are married or not.
Maybe the thing is that people don’t want to know what kind of person you are. They just want to know whether you adhere to these rules. When you talk about morality, if they use this as a proxy of whether you’re a good person, they don’t want to know your podcast because that won’t tell them whether you are a stable, controlled member of society. No.
“Are you married? Do you want to have kids? Do you participate in the consumer society that we live in a decent way?” That’s why we don’t have these conversations. It’s the same with jobs like, “What do you do?” “What do you mean, what do I do? I’m talking with you right now.” The question is, “What do you do for a living? Is that valuable in my book?”
From Hopeful to Hopeless: Media’s Portrayal of Single Waiting
It helps with categorization to Kinneret’s point about whether we want someone in the kibbutz or not. Are they valuable, productive, and important members of society? It’s about status. Much of this is about status. What you do is an inclination of status. Families and couples have special status within society. We know that they get government benefits from it. They have more rights. They benefit economically. They have more say over each other’s lives when it comes to health and medical kinds of decision-making. This is a high-status thing.
Kinneret, speaking of cheeky, in your book, you do talk about the media, entertainment, and so on. You juxtapose two different forms of waiting, and you do this by looking at two different songs. I’m not going to sing these, but I’m going to read some of the verses. The first one is an Ella Fitzgerald song called The Man I Love. It starts out and says, “Someday he’ll come along, the man I love, and he’ll be big and strong, the man I love. When he comes my way, I’ll do my best to make him stay.” That’s the first one.
The second one is one that people probably know more so by The Beatles, the song Eleanor Rigby, which is a sad song. It says, “Look at all the lonely people, look at all the lonely people. Eleanor Rigby picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been, lives in a dream, waits at the window, wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door. Who is it for?” I’m hoping you could talk about those two different forms of waiting and how you use them in connection to these songs.
I find a lot of inspiration from popular culture and songs. You’ve asked before about my methodology. I can work with one cliché for years. For example, “You will die alone,” which is embedded in the Eleanor Rigby song. It epitomizes, on the one hand, a hopeful waiting, which is romantic waiting, which is depicted in the Ella Fitzgerald and other performers who have sung that song.
It’s a romantic kind of waiting that we are socialized to hope, long, and wait from a very early age, which is the most romantic thing. Waiting for him to come along, and this coincidence, magical, romantic love. We will see one another and fall madly in love. I don’t remember now exactly, but her responsibility is to make him stay. A woman has that responsibility.
Tame the beast, but also be the most domestic, feminine woman that he won’t run away to find a younger and better version of you. On the other hand, the Eleanor Rigby waiting is pathetic and unrealistic. There is no point in her waiting anymore by the door or looking out at the window because no one will wait. It’s done. Her waiting is hopeless. These are very binary depictions of waiting, which I find very problematic in terms of how single subjects are described, people who have hope and people who are hopeless. The happy, glamorous, single woman who is eligible and waiting in a romantic way for someone to come in and sweep her off her feet.
On the other hand, the old maid’s waiting is grotesque. It’s inappropriate. No one will come along. To think about COVID in that context of waiting by the window, I thought about writing that article. It was published in 2012. I thought about this metaphor of waiting by the window, of how so many of us were looking out the window a while ago and still looking out the window in this situation. This binary of single and non-single does not reflect this waiting by the window and feeling alone. One of the interesting things that I observed over the years is that many people who have families or are in a couple relationship felt lonely and very much alone, and longed to be back in society.
This binary depiction of the lonely single, as opposed to the happy couple, was destabilized. One of the interesting things that COVID taught us is that our wishes to be sociable and longing to be in society do not merely divide the lonely as opposed to the couple. Many people said how difficult it was for them to be with their family or partner for so many days. I heard other stories that single people were relieved by that. There are all kinds of configurations of loneliness and togetherness, which do not fall and organize so neatly into the Eleanor Rigby versus he’ll come along in The Man I Love.
I’ll add one element to this that might be useful. I did a whole series on solitude and the benefits of solitude. There’s a term called aloneliness, which is a lack of solitude, in which it’s not sad but stressful. A lot of people with families had this issue because they suddenly had no time for themselves. Some people like to commute because it’s the only quiet time they have all day, in that sense.
I come across this a lot on dating apps. It’s often women who are around that breaking point between hopeful and hopeless, eligible and old maid. This phrase comes up a lot. It’s, “Don’t waste my time.” There’s a lot of, “I am on the lookout for behaviors that are going to waste my time.” I have to think that some of that has to do, not just with the fact that people value their time, they live busy lives, but there’s this, “I’m on the cusp. I’m at this breaking point. These years, months, days, hours, and minutes before are precious. I can’t waste them on a man who’s not serious and not looking for something real.” These are terms that I’m quoting from my experience.
In my fifth chapter, I try to challenge this language because of the notion that you shouldn’t waste your time on short-term flings, short-term engagements, or relationships. In many instances, even relationships that are not long or do not necessarily lead to marriage could be very meaningful in different ways, which do not boil down to or do not lead to this linear reproductive trajectory.
This language of “Don’t waste my time,” or “Where is this relationship heading? I will not date you because this is not serious or non-serious,” limits the richness of our social life. You could be with someone for three weeks, and it could be so meaningful in your life. You could be with someone for ten years, and it wouldn’t be that meaningful. I’m exaggerating a bit. The way we evaluate relationships has to change. In the temporal quantification and measure, time is used as something that says the truth, and it doesn’t. It’s only a form.
It’s almost like a relationship has to lead to something, and that something has to be tangible and has to be acknowledged by me and other people as well. That could be, for instance, marriage or whatever. It’s always striking that people are seeing that because the relationship ends, it was not a good relationship or experience. I’m curious because many experiences end. This show will end at some point, maybe. A relationship as an experience in a person’s life is almost tied to, “If this doesn’t monetize in some way, either in money or in another commodity that I can use or trade or give myself a pat on the back.
Let’s be honest, it’s about putting things on Instagram.
I wanted to ask you about Instagram because it’s like there’s a big marriage promotion situation going on there.
Before we do that, Iris, you’re very kind. You say it’s a curiosity. I say it’s obscene. It is obscene that we judge the goodness of a relationship based upon the amount of time you’re in it, because a short relationship can be incredibly meaningful and uplifting. A long relationship can be debilitating, abusive, and belittling. The idea that we use this concept of time is perverse and wrong, and it inhibits healthy relationships. Now we can turn to Instagram, and what a marriage machine it is.
I was thinking about it because you’re interested in media and popular culture. I was thinking about how social media so strongly reinforces this linear life course, children and marriage, graduation is one as well, and your education. I think it’s very much tied to social media. We call it social media, but it’s just large-scale advertising.
In that sense, it’s again tied to the commercial interests of this linear life course, especially with engagement rings and the perfect marriages. You read these stories, and these are lovely because they give me so much schadenfreude, one of the best German words. You read about Instagrammers who had their whole honeymoon ruined because they were so concerned with getting their correct pictures. I was wondering if this is also something that you are interested in looking at, and how that plays out in this narrative.
Emotional Autonomy: A New Frontier for Singlehood
I feel that my book is so old, but it’s not. I think it’s still very relevant, but in certain respects, when I wrote that book, Instagram was not as popular as it is now, which has become the medium. In that respect, the virtual world is constantly changing and developing. It would be fascinating to rewrite parts of the book in relation to Tinder and Instagram and how these affect our visibility. The crucial element is how you look and how you feel. It has to be coherent in how you look and feel.
In that respect, I admit that I’m a low profile on my Instagram. I mainly use it to keep in contact with a few friends and follow art galleries. I’m such a geek. That’s my Instagram world, more or less. I prevent myself. I admit that it’s very intentional because this happy, perfect life depresses me. It’s not my idea. It’s Sara Ahmed’s idea, one of my favorite feminist scholars, who critiques this promise of happiness as a regulatory idea of how we are supposed to be happy. Happiness entails specific cultural scripts. It becomes a regulatory idea in which you’re constantly asking yourself, “Why am I not happy? I should be happier. Therefore, I should do this and this.”
This is another idea. I’m curious if I can ask you, if it’s okay, to reverse the question. One of the urgent tasks of dismantling popular perceptions of singlehood is rethinking the notion of emotional autonomy. We are very much preoccupied with notions of choice and economic autonomy. One of the challenges is to rethink singlehood in terms of ways in which we can strive towards emotional autonomy, which is not so much dependent on these ideas of happiness, self-fulfillment, and adulthood. As two psychologists, I’m interested in your view on that. I hope it’s okay that I’m asking you a question.
Everything I’ll say is just my opinion and the meanderings of my thoughts over time. The idea of emotional autonomy is an interesting idea. Also, in relation to what we said about roommates, it’s not okay to live with roommates because that signals some sort of emotional immaturity, but it’s okay to always want to have a partner. Whereas we all know that having a partner is also some form of externalizing your emotion regulation or your self-regulation.
The idea of emotional autonomy is helpful in relationships in general. There’s this great Dutch singer. He had a song called I Love Me. It’s about a love letter to himself. It also says in this song that “I love you” usually means, “Here are my problems. Please solve them.” Many relationships and people would be helped if they worked on emotional autonomy and some adult emotional life before they engage in relationships. It’s also not a lot of pressure from the outside because you have your own inner world.
Also, you don’t need a relationship so much. It’s fine to want a relationship, but if you need a relationship, it can be a little bit more problematic. We said before, “Why should we become adults? Why can’t we stay as children?” One reason is that the difference between an adult and a child is that an adult is a good parent to themselves. Becoming an adult means that you don’t need your parents anymore because you can parent yourself, or you can stay a child and find a new parent and marry them. These kinds of confounds, where we can mistake things for what they are not, if we clear that up and work more on keeping them separate, that would go a long way and put less pressure from outside.
Becoming Your Own Parent: Redefining Adulthood
That’s a powerful idea. I want to repeat it and reflect on it before I answer the question. This idea bothers me that to become an adult, you need to be married and become a parent. It is problematic because it pushes people off a track that might be right for them. That’s one of the things that I lament the most about how anti-single the world can be. People try to fit themselves into this normative structure, and it’s not a good fit for them. They make a major compromise as to who their partner is because of a biological clock or because of some other set of pressures.
The idea that turns you into an adult, this moral imperative, and this is where gender is relevant, where, in some ways, when a man marries, it allows him to remain child-like in a sense because his wife takes care of everything. He’s just exchanging one parent for another parent. I believe that the relationship is ultimately at risk in part because you don’t want to have sex with your child.
You don’t want to make a life partner with a child because they’re not engaging. They’re not respectable in the way that an adult-to-adult relationship is. To say that the process of transforming yourself into an adult is to be able to parent yourself is a powerful idea. It can distinguish someone who’s doing adulthood well from someone who’s not doing adulthood well.
It’s true for men. Anecdotally, you see that when men lose their wives, they often fall into this vacuum where they don’t have social relations, they don’t know how to take care of themselves, and they don’t know how to make their own bed. The reverse is also true in a different sense. Women marry a parent in the sense that they are not economically independent. The numbers are there, even in the Netherlands, which is quite a progressive liberal country. Maybe 50% of women are financially independent. I find that problematic, especially in light of divorce rates. I think that’s very destructive.
Even when a woman is highly successful economically, she’s looking now for a man who’s even more so, which statistically makes finding that person quite difficult. You’re setting yourself up for a mismatch, disappointment, and so on. Your question, Kinneret, is powerful. I’m going to put this episode on the tail of a two-part series on freedom.
In the first episode, I talked about the value of financial freedom. That is how it allows you to have what I call optionality. You can avoid misery. You can avoid toxic situations. You have a greater chance at justice and so on if you can find the magic formula of not spending as much money as you’re making, which the average person struggles to do.
The second one is freedom through a lack of power. This sounds counterintuitive, but if I may briefly, this is with Tim Kreider. Tim says that he has always avoided acquiring power because having power inhibits your freedom. It limits what you can say and do. It creates a set of constraints and responsibilities that may crowd out other things that you want to do. That’s a powerful idea to forego power in the search for freedom. He does it so he can pursue artistic endeavors, but we may do it for scientific endeavors. We may do it because we want to travel, whatever it is that gets you excited.
The third idea that I have been writing in my journal about, and I’m glad you brought up, is what you call emotional autonomy. I would call that freedom in your mind and heart. That is to be unaffected by what the world tells you that you should be doing. I don’t normally curse on this show, but I’m going to curse in this thing. This idea of not giving a f*ck. There’s a book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck.
The idea of this is you decide what you’re going to care about and what you’re not going to care about so that you can do the things you care about, and you can be affected by the things that you care about. I think the average person is not going to get as much financial freedom as they want, and maybe is stuck with their power because of what they like to do or what they need to do. The idea that you can move through the world with grace unbuffeted by these forces is a powerful idea. The first step is to learn what the forces are and to understand the systems that are trying to guide us.
The Freedom of Disappointment: Reclaiming Happiness Beyond Societal Norms
It’s again Sara Ahmed’s idea. If we don’t get attached to these ideas that only this can make us happy, or only if we will do this or we will follow this path, we can be happy. We should rethink the notion of happiness itself. We should ask questions about this idea of why we are striving for that idea in the first place.
There is another book you might be familiar with, which I read many years ago, and I loved it. It blew my mind. It’s by a sociologist and psychologist called Ian Craib, The Importance of Disappointment. He wrote it before Sara Ahmed’s book. I loved that book because he said it’s important to be disappointed. We can’t be in the world expecting everything to be perfect, expecting our partners, our children, and our friends to always live up to our expectations.
Disappointment is a very important factor. He is not alive anymore, unfortunately. In a short manner, I’m describing his idea that instead of clinging to happiness, fulfillment, and self-realization, we should also let disappointment into our lives. I found that idea powerful in terms of departing from these grand ideas of being happy and fulfilled. There are many points in our lives in which we are unhappy, disappointed, and bored. If we live constantly measuring our lives as opposed to Instagram photos, love songs, or the models we see in magazines, we are bound to be even more miserable and unhappy.
We should realize that part of everyday life is also these everyday moments of not being satisfied. These ideas of total self-realization, happiness, and choosing everything we want, we should be critical about them as well. Also, when we think about single life, that’s why I’m a bit critical about the single by choice, because many people feel that their singlehood is chosen. We have a richer vocabulary than choice. We have all kinds of feelings and stances, which describe us and our life, which is not only choice and non-choice.
This single by choice, though, is so radical already that I find it helpful. You’re like a black belt, and we’re talking to yellow belts here. I understand what you’re saying, but I also think that for someone to be able to say, “I’m single by choice,” is already such a powerful step in the right direction. That’s why I’ve embraced it a bit.
I totally agree. It’s radical and political, but there is a danger in this politics. How are we responsible for people who do not identify with that position who are single, but feel they haven’t chosen that path? Are they less worthy? Is their life less precious or less meaningful? If we want to rethink the way we think about singlehood, we should open the possibilities for all kinds of singlehood and not create a hierarchy between the chosen and the non-chosen. Many people cannot choose to be single because they don’t have that option at all in their lives, economically, culturally, and religiously. Single by choice is a radical and strong political statement, but we should go beyond that.
I use the term single by chance as the counter to that. I do these Clubhouse rooms where we talk about being single by choice and single by chance. A number of people say, “I can’t make the distinction. I’m a little bit of both.” It does have that sense. I never thought of it as a status situation where you’re putting yourself in a higher space. I want to make all of these things equal paths so that people can walk them comfortably.
Beyond Labels: The Radical Idea of Contentment
What is powerful about a single by choice is that it takes back the power. It’s more autonomous than the default of thinking about singlehood. In that sense, it’s a little bit on the noes and a little bit counter because the default way of thinking about singlehood is that it’s sad or whatever. I can also see Kinneret’s point that people differ in many ways. You’re single and you’re a person. Why does it matter if you’re a happy single? You don’t need these labels per se, but what I wanted to respond to is I agree with this idea, or going beyond that, we need disappointment, is that the idea that we should be happy all the time in itself is oppressive and very childish. It’s naive and boringly immature.
That connects well to what Peter was saying about values. When you orient yourself in line with your values in life, then it’s not so much about hedonic tone, whether I feel good or bad, I just live along what I think is important. For instance, autonomy and learning. You get a strong why, then you can go to a place where you’re maybe not happy all the time, but you find meaning and well-being in your life.
Talk about radical. You enter a radical area of being, namely some contentment, and now you’re a real threat because society is based on discontent. Discontent is what we need to solve. This is also tied a lot to the consumer, capitalist, industrial complex, whatever you want to call it. I got this from a book, a great thriller. There was a very thoughtful person in there. This person in the book said, “What is saddening is the people who are content and don’t want to solve constantly, get more, go higher and further, and exploit themselves.”
That’s because you can’t exploit them.
You can’t because you have nothing to scare them with. You have no leverage. That’s an interesting idea.
Can you give us the name of the thriller? It sounds amazing.
It’s called The Likeness by Tana French, an Irish writer. It’s a thriller, but there is a person in there who’s playing cards and suddenly has this super powerful idea because it used to be threatening when people were discontent. Discontent people could cause revolutions, overthrow states, and rebel, but now it’s content people who might be a threat.
I’m going to add one. It’s a Medium article that I read that has had a profound effect on me. It goes something like this. Are your goals holding you back? The idea essentially is that while goals can be a useful way to achieve, and all three of us have had big, hairy, audacious goals in life, the idea of becoming an academic and getting a position in academia, if you knew the statistics, it’s not rational to do it. The sacrifices that you make to achieve those goals, for many of us, are worth it. The endeavor overall is imperfect as the system is, but it can be worth it.
What this author argues is that the goals and our predictions about the future, and we’re bad about predicting the future, are a hunch that we have about what’s going to happen on the other side of something. For me, personally, I have found that being very goal-driven is not something that serves me anymore. I’m now much more process-driven.
Now I’m much more focused on what I want to do and how I feel about doing it. I still managed to achieve things, but they’re not done for a prediction of a better future, but rather for a more engaging present. To Iris’s point, many of the things that I do are not pleasant. They don’t bring happiness in terms of the joy of an orgasm or a delicious dessert or something like that.
They’re challenging, but they are still good for me and at least a small group of other people. I want to get back to this issue of time and to be able to put some final thoughts on it. You had mentioned empty time and being stuck in time. We’ve covered waiting a lot. We’ve alluded to being stuck in time about this childish play, but could you talk a little more about those two ideas?
There is so much to say. Maybe I’ll think together with you about the notion of timeout. For example, being in this zone of in-between us, being in between relationships. There is a time in our lives when I’m taking a break from dating or I’m taking a break to heal from my last relationship. It’s interesting these kinds of timetables in which one can take a time out, but at a certain point, grieving or being with yourself, you have to get back to the game. The metaphor of the game and the timeout is very interesting in that respect.
In my book, when I thought about time out, I was inspired by a fascinating article about timeout versus dropout written by a Norwegian scholar who researched unemployment among Norwegian youth. His idea was fascinating because what he discovered among the working-class Norwegians, not being able to find work, was putting themselves in danger of being a dropout, as opposed to the middle-upper-class Norwegian who was experimenting in life during this timeout. It was clear that being a middle-class person, you can get back into the game and continue with your life.
I thought about the ways in which we evaluate people as timeouts or dropouts, as people who can continue, as opposed to people who are going. I’ve written a book about academia. Think of how academia is imbued with these ideas of temporality and age, and what kind of accomplishments do you have to have by a certain age? At a certain point, you can become a dropout. Taking one year off can keep you in the game, as opposed to taking one year off at a particular time would signify that you are a dropout.
It’s this very capitalist forum of quantifying people’s lives, making them objects and rats in the race. In the same way, I tried to challenge the objectifying commodified language to which people are subjected. People are not commodities that should live their lives according to whether they are fit for the game or unfit for the game. I found his analysis of timeout and dropout in relation to unemployment in class very relevant to the ways, in my book at least, women are objectified according to their age and their value in the market.
This notion of empty time, that’s non-productive time? Is that a way to think about it?
It’s a nonproductive time and also a time which is unclear, going back to my previous idea of empty time, because it is not filled with the right things. This time should be filled with values, family time, and timetables. If you are living your life as a single, I’m talking about the conventions, what do you do with your time out of work, for example?
According to this formula, that family time versus work time, what do you do in your time if you’re not engaged in family, having these simplistic divisions of our lives of what we should fill our lives with? Often, single people are perceived as people who are living empty lives or not leading to anything but also leading an empty presence. That’s one of the reasons that they can work overtime.
What else can you do in your life besides waiting for something to be filled with? You probably know this work. There is an amazing psychologist who’s written about the empty self, Cushman. He’s written a fascinating book about the empty self of how we should fill our lives with commodities. The empty self is someone who’s constantly hungry and looking for external things to be filled with. That was another source of inspiration for thinking about it. It’s an amazing book. It’s been years since I’ve read it.
I do want to wrap up with this idea that this is a problem for both genders, but I see time and time again in these conversations how challenging this is for women specifically. You talk about these different terms. This is cross-culturally so late singlehood and Israel, these leftover women in China, the parasite women of Japan, and the singletons in Australia.
At best, the terms are neutral. At worst, they are pejorative. I find that the issue of language, as we talked about with men, also. It’s hard to find positive terms associated with being single. It is easy to find negative terms, and the opposite is the case for marriage. Iris, do you have any final thoughts that you want to share? You’ve been such a wonderful new guest co-host. I appreciate that you’ve done this.
It’s a fascinating way of looking at what it means to be single. As I said, just deconstructing it or just saying this is there. This is imposed socially. Time is not a fixed thing. Timetables are made up. It’s such a liberating idea. It’s like that fish in the water. One fish to the other says, “How is the water?” and the other fish is like, “What is water?” It’s the same with these narratives. They are so everywhere. You don’t even realize that they’re just narratives. They’re not truth or prescription.
Iris, thank you for joining us. This was great. Iris is going to be returning as we take another academic look at what is popular now in the popular press and the regular everyday conversation. We’re going to take a hard look at attachment theory, which will be fun. I’m going to talk to an academic who’s doing work related to that. Kinneret, thank you for writing such a wonderful book, diving deeply into this, joining us, and speaking so powerfully. This was a double chill episode for me. I don’t normally get the chills during the show. I got them twice now. I want to thank you for that.
Thank you. It was a real pleasure to meet you and talk to you both.
Cheers.
Important Links
- Iris Schneider
- Kinneret Lahad
- A Table for One: A Critical Reading of Singlehood, Gender and Time
- Going Solo
- The Beauty Myth
- The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck
- The Importance of Disappointment
- The Likeness
- Waiting Part 1
About Kinneret Lahad
Kinneret Lahad is a Senior Lecturer of NCJW Women and Gender Studies Program at Tel-Aviv University.
Her research interests are interdisciplinary, spanning the fields of gender studies, sociology, and cultural studies.
She is the author of the open-access book: A Table for One: A Critical Reading of Singlehood, Gender and Time.
About Iris Schneider
Iris Schneider is a Professor of Social Psychology at the Technical University Dresden. She studies ambivalence and difficulty in decision-making and judgment.