There’s a thing that married people do, when they discover that they’re talking to A Divorcee. They sort of tip their head to the side and then either explain to you that they lived alone for six months in 2008 and they “actually really loved it”. Or they do the same slightly patronising expression then tell you that they’re “actually quite jealous” because while they’re obviously blissfully happy with their partner, it must be so exciting to be “on the apps”.
They don’t mean it, of course. As a society we are a little bit repulsed by singledom, so we pretend to be Really Excited! for anyone who finds themself experiencing it.
There is something about being married which just draws out an inexplicable desire to offer single people your approval for their lifestyle. I know this because during my tenure as a married person, I did it to other people. And now it happens to me. At every single one of the 400 weddings I went to this summer, someone asked me if I was married (the fact that I have a baby seems to confuse people a bit) and every time I said that I wasn’t, the response was kind, but steeped in pity. Which is perhaps why I was so delighted to read Joan Bakewell’s take on being unmarried.
In an interview with The Guardian, technically to promote a new series of the lovely Portrait Artist of the Year, but equally because she’s fascinating, Joan Bakewell says: “I was 17 years married to Michael, most of which was happy, and then it went wrong. And the same with Jack [whom she married in 1975 and divorced in 2001]. By which I mean, they flaked off and started behaving in ways which were intolerable to me… …I’ve been married twice, and I’ve been pleased not to be married for the last 20 years.”
You’re not supposed to admit to liking being divorced, I don’t think. I’m always shocked by how quick people are to ask me about the gory details of what happened, to assess my reasoning and determine whether or not I was right to pick the horrors of single life over marriage.
Occasionally, when I lay out the pure joy of dating having had a baby – detailing the excitement of getting to put on lipstick and a short skirt and brush someone else’s thigh under the table, when you’ve previously been washing babygros – I sense annoyance.
Married people seem willing to sympathise when they feel that I’ve been expelled from the club, but not when they learn that I willingly quit. I always find myself wondering about the truth of the marriages of those who are most perturbed to hear me say that I currently take joy in being unmarried.
Like Bakewell – I have taken pleasure in not cohabiting, in not being part of a one-surname unit. One day I very much hope to share a home with another person, maybe have more children, the kind of chaotic family situation that I’d always dreamt of. Mornings full of cereal and school runs and snatched kisses as you run out of the door. But wanting that doesn’t mean not enjoying this. I refuse for this period of my life, where I’m in a blissful new relationship, but still finding my feet as an unmarried person, to be some kind of holding pen pre marriage.
There’s a beauty in so much of being divorced. I like that I can leave things in mad places around the house and return to find them still there. I like eating a bag of broccoli and two Tunnocks tea cakes for supper while I watch the Kardashians on my laptop. I like the mornings when the house is silent and it’s just me and my daughter lying in my bed.
I was terrified to be alone, to go to weddings by myself, take my daughter on a family holiday without a co-parent, to pick childcare arrangements or make medical decisions without someone to consult.
But it’s actually so straightforward and easy that I find myself wondering if perhaps it might actually be the ideal. So, if one day I do find myself remarried, talking to a single person at a party, and I trot out that old line, “God I’m quite jealous, I loved being single”, it won’t be patronising or disingenuous. It’ll be entirely genuine.
Rebecca Reid is a journalist, author and commentator