The Last Single Girl

I admit, I am a big fan of chick-lit. I have been for quite some time now, and I know exactly when it started. Mama first introduced me to Alice and when I looked through the looking glass, I found a world of wonder within myself. I have ventured into so many worlds since meeting Alice through girls like Nancy Drew and Amelia Jane, to Jane Austen’s Emma and sisters Dashwood and Bennet. As a grown woman, I have taken great pleasure diving into the world of Bridget Jones and finding as much in similar as I did different. The female experience is made of the same parts, now matter which part of the world you are going through it. On many occasions, stressful business trips were countered with the light touch of Jane Green and her animated women like Jemima J. I think my copy of that book is still at the Grand Hyatt Taipei, where I was a frequent visitor from 2003-2006!



I adored all these characters and the colorful, insightful experiences I vicariously lived through their stories, but there is one thing I do not share with them – I LOVE being a ‘single girl!’ To this day, six years into this relationship my beau and I still feel very much ‘single’ as we do together. There are parts of my single living that I would never give up, there is nothing I want to do now that I feel I cannot do because I am a dynamic, loving, monogamous relationship. In the last few months of my thirties, the thought occurs to me – perhaps I am The Last Single Girl. I am reminded of ‘Sex and the City’ and Carrie Bradshaw’s love affair with the gorgeous Aidan. Perhaps it wasn’t commitment she feared at all, but the death of her single girl.


This provokes the ultimate question, doesn’t it? Can a woman in a committed, monogamous relationship still lay claim to being a single girl? What about a married woman? Does sharing your life with someone mean the death of your single girl. We all recognize her, our single girl. She’s that girl who loves her independence and freedom as much as she loves the teamwork and sharing of her relationship. Over the past fifteen years I have happily witnessed my dearest friends finding love and marriage, building families and homes. I have cried happy tears for new loves, and bitter ones for the break ups. I have loved men, lost men, lusted men. I fell in love and continue falling a little bit everyday for the man in my life. And this heart that loves, it’s the heart of a single girl.

Is this a new brand of spinsterhood? The new twist to the proverbial old maid? Is the unmarried almost-forty of 2010 the re-branding and celebration of The Single Girl? Why can’t each one of us be that strong woman who loves herself as much as her beloved? Why does one’s personal ambition have to be at odds with shared dreams and a tandem adventure of discovery?

This year, I enter my forties still a single girl at heart. I suspect I might be the last single girl in my circle of women, and you know what…this makes me ever so slightly smug. But just a bit, until I realize that there are many sisters of my kind out there, strutting their stilettos. And thank the gods for that!