Romance, Love And Sex When You're Single
How can I replace romance in my life as a single person?
I think of romance more broadly in terms of passion. If you're single, you could become passionately involved, either with other people or with great interests or great pursuits or things that you really care about so there is passion in this broad sense. I don't think you need to give that up. You could have a broader idea of what counts as romantic. For me, I live in this wonderful town of Summerland. I get up every day-in ten minutes. I can be at the beach looking at the Pacific Ocean. I can hike through these wonderful trails. I have friends that I care about. I have work that I absolutely love. I don't feel that my life is lacking in passion.
What are some common misconceptions about sex and the single person?
When people think about single people, often they think either they are wildly promiscuous and are having random sex with lots of people, or they're thinking, "oh, they don't get any." Either way, they are thinking, "oh, sex, that's a problem for single people." In their mind, they're thinking, "oh, if you're coupled, that's taken care of." In fact, what is one of the most common problems among married and coupled people? Two things: sex and money. Those are what people fight over. Lots of other things, too, but those are two of the main things. So, just being coupled, or even being married, doesn't mean that you get exactly the amount of sex that you want, the kind of sex that you want, when you want it. Two people are rarely totally compatible, and even if they are compatible at the outset of marriage, they might grow in different ways. Then, when they are incompatible, they can have major battles over that, whereas if you are single and you get involved with someone and the sex isn't right and the rest of it isn't right, you can move on, and it's not a big yoke thing, that "I promised my life to this person and now I'm stuck with someone who either doesn't ever want to have sex or wants to have sex all the time or wants to have sex that creeps me out." I think married and single people have their own pluses and minuses about sex. It's not like it's a problem with one and not the other.
What are the different ways a single person can experience love?
Oh, there's so many ways to experience love. The traditional ways with other people is a more sexual way. It can be the love of close friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, mentors, and people who are important to you in your life. And when you're single, you don't have this obligation to say there is one person, and that one person always comes first, and I can never tend to someone who might need me more or who I might need more at this particular point. So I think, this is one of the reasons that single people, especially single women, are so unlikely to be lonely is that they do have love, they have love in a much broader sense, that's not just about the way we stereotypically think about love. Really, it's many splendid ways.
How has society's view on sex helped the single person?
In the 50's if you were having sex and you weren't married that was considered scandalous. Lots of people were anyway, but they pretended that they weren't. It's like the norms have flipped, and if you are not having sex then people think there's something wrong with you. Sex is something that you now can have without stigma.