Identity Twists and Turns

Jesse: “I can make things happen if I want to.”

For four of the never-married men in this study, the identity of being married was so central to their understandings of self and future that they did not engage in any talk which could be construed as transitioning into a future single self. Rather they reported the ways in which they were on the path to marriage, explaining away past relationship endings and noting the steps they were taking in order to become married men.

Jesse is forty-seven, has multiple advanced degrees, and lives in a major city on the East Coast. Jesse has a close relationship with his mother; his father died a few years prior to the initial interview. He is only loosely in touch with his one sibling. Jesse believes that he could be married by now if he wanted to be. This belief is common in my respondents; nine of the fourteen never-married men I interviewed stated the same. Thus, not being married is a choice. However, in Jesse’s case, the older he gets, it is an increasingly troubling one. Jesse clearly understood the centrality of marriage as an organizing principle of adult life. Virtually all my respondents, never-married and divorced, told stories of being left out of social engagements as single men. Jesse noted specifically that not having a “traditional family unit is difficult” over the holidays, adding, “You have to try to make holidays good and meaningful for yourself.” He says the “access to people and events within most middle-class, Western dynamics become less and less as a single person . . . as you get older as opposed to more and more.”

Jesse has many hobbies and pursuits in addition to his work life. He engages in solitary leisure activities that provide much time for self-reflection. Jesse says of himself that he has a lot of time to ponder his mental health and because of that he can speak at length about how most people would see him and how he sees himself. He notes he is “trending toward positive,” despite his sense that for most single people “the trend towards negative grows as one gets older. There is a point in life where the positives become less positive and the negatives become more negative.” Incorporating the language of self-help, he says,

I’m a person whose contentment lies in the realization that I have the tools to make things better. Meaning that I don’t feel that I have any elements of discontent that I don’t have the tools to change them into contentment. So, I think most people who are discontented don’t think they have any way to trend one way or the other. I am confident I have the tools that I [need]. I’ll be very disappointed if I don’t. . . . [The] things that worry me are that I’ll be lazy, sloppy or not as emotionally facile to take positive steps in my life.

Through Jesse’s remarks, we hear the hallmarks of the self-help discourse. He believes that he can modify his behavior as he strives toward self-improvement. He knows himself well enough to worry that he might not rise to the occasion; that he will take negative rather than “positive steps.” Ultimately he will choose the path his life takes.

Jesse notes elsewhere in the interview that in the past he has been superficial in his relationships with women. He thinks many men are, in that they rely too much on a woman’s appearance in making dating decisions. Jesse articulates a clear link between singleness and immaturity. Being able to recognize this about himself enables him to “take positive steps” in his life. We are invited to see his progress on the path to self-improvement when he tells me about his current relationship. Jesse tells me he is dating a woman 20 years younger than he. They met standing in the checkout line of a grocery store and he says she is “dramatically beautiful.” But he is ending the relationship because he is “starting to realize that as wonderful as people can be, shared experiences are so important to emotional-level experiences.” He continues,

So if someone hasn’t had the 10 or 15 years of experience that you’ve had it’s hard for them to meet you on common ground. That’s a kind of compatibility I’m starting to see as more and more important.

Here we can see Jesse drawing on the tension between what Swidler (2001) calls “mythic love”—he is dating a “dramatically beautiful woman” that he met serendipitously—and “prosaic realism”—one needs “to meet on common ground.” That common ground includes “shared experiences” because they are “so important to emotional-level experiences.” The culture of love discourse is intertwined with that of therapeutic self-growth. He is working on himself, and part of the process is understanding what marriage requires and what he needs to do in order to be ready to be married. The practical considerations of what makes a marriage successful are weighed against the romantic ones. Thus, though Jesse’s primary way of understanding himself is through the language of self-knowledge and growth, he uses that language to speak to and manage the language and culture of love.

In the following exchange, Jesse speaks to the salience of marital and fatherhood roles, choice, and the work on the self he is doing in mapping out his future. I ask him about the role of children in his future. He says:

I like children. But see I’m convinced that at some point I will have a family and children, it will just be later than most people did and hopefully more successful because I did. But I think family is a good thing. . . . I would prefer a relationship with children than without it.

Explicit in this exchange is Jesse’s belief that he will get married. He is in control of when this happens; in the past three years, there are five different women he could have married. Because he has waited and is “evolving,” becoming “more mature,” getting “more ready,” he will be “more successful” when it comes to the work of marriage. Furthermore, he states, “family is a good thing.” He sees nothing but “positive results” when marriage and children go together. The married identity is one that he intends to attach himself to; he cannot imagine it “wouldn’t go that way.” Throughout his narrative, his quest for ultimate contentment appears intertwined with taking steps to finding a more “compatible” partner and the positive value he places on marriage and family. Elsewhere in his interview, he notes that there are upsides and downsides to both marriage and singleness, but for him, marriage is better. This belief is connected to his view that marriage is better for society “in terms of stability, emotional, spiritual, sexual, public health, land use, passing on of property,” and the like. Thus, one strategy for moving toward the married identity is to align oneself, as Jesse does, with the history and benefits of the formal institution and his affirmation of a value system that centrally locates the institution of marriage and childrearing. Jesse is enormously successful, in good health, wealthy, and highly educated. His narrative and projected identity in the current culture is convincing and resonant. Jesse did not respond to a request for a follow-up interview; thus, I cannot examine how and if the intervening years have changed his conception of self in relation to marriage.

In an effort to place Jesse as the representative voice of this identity turn, consider Rudy, who at fifty tells me that he “could have married three or four” of the women he has dated. A married identity is very important to him. He wishes he could put down “wife” for his “contact in case of emergency” person. Working through some residual issues with a mother whom he describes as one who “would throw bombs,” Rudy says that he realizes it is important for him to be with women who are “a little gentler and a little nurturing. In that environment, I feel safe and can give fully.” He says, “I really want to be married. I envy people who wear wedding rings.” Rudy is looking for “someone who will knock my socks off,” but he notes at the end of the interview, “relationships are hard work and to me it’s the work that is the fun. I think through the exploration both people grow. I think marriage is a lot of compromise.” Rudy “really want[s] to be married.” Using a therapeutic discourse of self-help, he enlists the labor of love to share how the “exploration” of the “hard work” is what is “fun,” and he hopes, echoing mythic love, that the woman he does this with will “knock his socks off.” Like many of the men in this study, Rudy too could be married if he wanted. When I contacted him for a follow-up interview, he was.

The men attaching to a married identity were alike in a number of ways. All of these men had at least a college education. All had grown up comfortably middle to upper middle class. Notably, all of these men had been in a series of long-term relationships with women that had not led to marriage; only one had cohabited. All of the men expressed the ways in which they had or were working on themselves; thus the language of “self-help” was on display. All used the “culture of love” discourse to highlight the work of marriage. All indicated the ways in which they were “stepping up,” in the words of one, to the responsibility it would entail. And, significantly, none of these men ever mentioned the possibility that they would remain single, implying that Jesse is not the only one who can “make it happen” if he wants. The turn they are making is focused on one destination.

Richard: “There might be a reason for it.”

Richard lives in the country outside a college community and has many close friends. He reported close contact with his many siblings, parents, and a remaining grandparent. All of his siblings are married with children. When I first met him in 2004, he told me as he gets older he is “really beginning to question whether marriage makes sense anymore, or whether having a family makes any sense.” When I asked him what accounted for his change in thinking he said that he questions whether he would be able to find someone who is a “good fit” and stated, “I have a certain level of companionship from friends and meeting people and so forth so maybe the marital relationship isn’t necessary or necessarily desirable. And, at forty-two, unless I marry exactly the right person, taking on children is a bit much.” Richard relies on his friendship circle for companionship and getting out to meet people; thus he has learned to organize his adult life outside marriage. We also hear how, for Richard, marriage and fatherhood are linked. While he can be a father in the future, he acknowledges that the time for that may have passed. He tells me that he had thought of himself married with children “until recently.” Our exchange continued,

Here Richard explicitly states “there might be a reason” for him to have remained unmarried up to this point. Thinking about his age and his career, a married life with children may not fit the person he has become. The energy, time, and work marriage and fatherhood would require may not be attractive at this time in his life. If “it” were going to happen, his twenties may have made more sense. Therefore, he finds now that “marriage may not be necessary or necessarily desirable,” even though he also acknowledges “it is a little painful to think that may not happen.”

Remaining unmarried has its drawbacks. He tells me that a downside to being single is “loneliness, lack of companionship.” He continues,

You get to a certain age, when you are in your twenties you’re in a pack, in your thirties you might still be in a pack but you date more. When you get to your 40s there really isn’t much of a pack so you’re either dating or you’re alone because all the married people are hanging out with the married people and they don’t know any single people unless their children’s friend’s parents happen to be divorced. Loneliness is a huge downside.

In this part of Richard’s story, he echoes Jesse by explicitly referencing his understanding of the life cycle of adulthood (a narrative strategy of the single women Reynolds and Taylor [2004] interviewed as well). The passage of time is encased within a cultural marital context (Davies 2003)—“all the married people are hanging out with the married people.” Both men are articulating their conscious awareness of being unpartnered as they get older and situating their own lives against the dominant cultural model. In fact, toward the end of the interview, Richard reiterates this point by saying that the freedom one has as a single person “is really only good and interesting till a certain age” and that he has noticed that “since the age of thirty-six, the lack of having someone around, having companionship starts to outweigh the positives.” But Richard’s ambivalence is part of a larger adjustment he is making to a single identity. For example, when I ask Richard how he envisions his life going forward he says,

I don’t know right now. You know, as I mentioned, I’ve started to see that I might not marry. I may not have children that kind of thing. Starting to think that that might be better, maybe not. Going back and forth.

Unlike Jesse, who takes for granted his eventual marriage and fatherhood, Richard is working through a process, a transition into a potential and unexpected identity. Part of that process is the emotional work he is doing to understand and manage his feelings about the trade-off in identities. One thing that helps Richard justify his single state is that he has only recently been psychologically prepared for marriage.

I can tell you after some self-exploration in the past few years that I truly believe had I married prior to two or three years ago, I would have married the wrong person. The wrong person for me certainly. And at this point, emotionally, psychologically, I can bring more to a relationship than I could have before.

This is a nod to the hard work of marriage as well as the therapeutic conditioning that requires one to work on the self before entering a relationship. “After some self-exploration . . . emotionally, psychologically,” Richard can “bring more to a relationship” than in the past. Using these discourses he attempts to square his past with his current reality—to make the parts of his story cohere. Even though earlier on in the interview Richard suggested “there’s a reason” people raise children in their twenties, later in the interview he claims that if he had married in his twenties or thirties he “would have married the wrong person.” The decision to marry is his to make and because he has taken the time to improve himself, he can choose more wisely.

When I interview Richard four years later, he remains ambivalent about his relationship to the institution of marriage. He is now “used to” occasional loneliness but no longer views it as a “huge downside” of being single. He talks affectionately about his pet; caring for her has made him “less selfish,” something he connects to making himself better for marriage if he decides to go that way. Richard also shares stories about relationships he has had with women since the last time we spoke. This talk highlights the ways he is still working on himself, noting that in a current relationship he has “reached vastly beyond anything [he’s] had with anybody else.” Richard notes that his friends who married right out of college are all divorced now, save one, and that he has witnessed new relationships among friends that have begun after age thirty-five. These markers highlight the implicit understanding that marriage is hard work as well as Richard’s normalcy—he is not that unusual; marriage could still be in the cards for him. When I ask him if he hopes to get married someday he says, “I don’t know that I’m hoping. I think it’s likely. I think it’s not something I’m steering clear of or avoiding, I think there is some benefit to it. Right time, right place, right person.” When I ask him again if at this point in his life he is single by choice or circumstance he responds: “Largely by choice. And that being I want to do it once. I want to do it right.”

Unlike Jesse who never waivers in his future identity as a married person, Richard says that even though he is not “hoping” to get married, he is not “steering clear” of it either. Whatever happens, he implies, will be fine. Putting a coda on his experiences up to this point in his life he told me at the end of the interview, “it [marriage] may not be what I want.” One gets the distinct impression that if Richard marries, it will be what he wants; if he does not, the opposite will have been true. He can make the episodes of his life fit into whatever denouement results. Thus, he experiments with an identity turn to single.

He is not alone. Forty-seven at the initial interview, Greg notes he “enjoys the gratitude” of being single, the independence of it, the freedom. But, he says, “I’m kind of a romantic at heart and I miss, I miss being able to share my life with someone and being able to share theirs with them.” He pauses for a while before continuing,

Now, again, some of that when I think about this, I think some of that is imposed from the outside. Because when we go to the movies or when we read books, of course, it’s by choice, but what’s presented to us in great preponderance has these wonderful romance scenes between two very attractive, mentally healthy people going off into the sunset together. I guess I still have that sort of image in my mind and I’m not sure what to make of that. I have to own it. It’s there. It’s not just something on the outside. I feel it.

Greg tells me that he “carries this envy toward people who are in relationships, but when they talk to me, if you followed these people home and found out what was really going on, it is really hard. . . . Men and women who are just having hellacious times in their relationships.” Through just these small excerpts from Greg’s interview, one can hear how difficult it is for him to turn away from a future married self. He is a “romantic at heart,” one who recognizes the heteronormative push toward marriage seen in movies and books (Geller 2001; Ingraham 2008), but he recognizes his own desire as well. Using the language of self-help, he has to “own it”; he does not believe it is “just something on the outside.” As he looks toward his future, Greg tells me that if he stays single he would “turn a lemon into lemonade kind of thing. Being alone is not what I prefer. . . . But I see myself being able to deal with it in a positive way if it doesn’t work out.” When I ask him, he clarifies for me that ideally he would be married, not just coupled. Significantly, however, unlike Jesse above, he can envision a future single self. He is adjusting the wheel, preparing himself for not being married. When I interviewed him four years later he was still adjusting to thinking of his future self as unmarried.

Another on this side of the continuum is Charles. He volunteers that he has always been introspective and is even more so now. At forty-two, he tells me that “it’s probably easier to say that I want to want it [marriage and children], than to say I want it.” He notes that “If I wanted to be married, I could be” and that “it’s been a long time since I didn’t think I was ready to be married.” Not being married is a choice; he believes he is “ready” though he also tells me he worries that he may be “emotionally immature” because he has not. Like Greg, Charles seems aware of the “deficiency narrative” (DePaulo and Morris 2005) of the middle-aged single male, and, to some extent, internalizes it. Charles tells me he is “not clinging” to his singlehood, but that remaining single is “not an unattractive alternative” as he looks to the future. However, he also tells me that while the “upsides of being single” are good,

Presumably, you would find someone you would rather be doing things with rather than doing them alone and be able to depend on them and so on. . . . Is going to the theater better by myself than going with someone? Probably not. I’m happy to go by myself, but all things equal, I’d probably rather go with someone else. Would it be better to have someone to grow old with or grow old by yourself? I think these questions answer themselves.

Charles wrestles with his attachment to marriage. Like Greg, throughout his narrative he vacillates between enjoying being single and his attachment to a societal expectation of how things might be better if he were married. Charles agreed to a follow-up interview (and was the only respondent who after the first interview requested a transcript, which I sent him), but other obligations on my end intervened and we did not reschedule. In 2008, he was not married.

Paul: “At this Point, I Don’t Really Care.”

Paul, forty-one, thought he would get married, but it has not happened. He speaks fondly of his siblings, with whom he is in frequent contact, and of a family life that was nurturing and free of worry. Near the beginning of the interview, I ask does he, like some single people, see his friends as “created kin” or family? He uses this as an opportunity to highlight his transition to a single identity:

Nine [the number of people in my family] is plenty. I never really wanted to be connected to anything bigger. I feel fine about that. Although I’m sure I always thought I would be married long before now because your role models are your parents and they got married in their early twenties. I just thought it would be something like that. But at a certain point, and I wasn’t really worried about it, I maybe wondered about it, in my midthirties. But at this point, I don’t really care. I think it’s quite possible that I will be unmarried my whole life and I’m actually fine with that. I don’t know, maybe at some point in the past three years or so I have kind of gotten okay with that, not that it was ever a real problem. But I guess it was always in the back of my mind where I would wonder about it. Now I don’t really wonder about it. Not that I think it won’t happen, but the wondering isn’t.

In this exchange, Paul does several things. First, he is explicit about his identity as a person who might not marry. It is a conscious process that has occurred over the last few years. Second, he emphasizes the sacrifices of marriage, especially the cost of sacrificing parts of the self that one might value—“responsibilities” prevent one from doing things one may want to do. He also links the roles of husband and father, noting that “in some ways they tend to go together,” and children entail even further costs—“you give up a lot to do that.” And, finally, though he no longer “wonders about it” he does not rule out the possibility that he may still marry—“Not that I think it won’t happen.” In this opening exchange, Paul begins to “talk of love”; married people with children have “negative time.” The amount of work it would take to have a conversation with someone if one chooses poorly is unfathomable to him, as evidenced by his reference to his parents’ relationship. He returns to the larger cultural narrative about romantic love and compatibility later in the interview, this time intertwining the language of self-growth as central to a marriage.

I think that certainly being in marriage but even relationships, I think there is certainly a high sort of cost so I have to be, I would rather be alone than be in a relationship that I didn’t think of as being sort of optimal for both people. I think in the old days, people didn’t want to be alone or thought they couldn’t be alone. I guess sometimes it was economics or wanting to be socially accepted, so there were a lot of things that pushed people into marriage that probably weren’t the right reasons, so people either didn’t know the difference or thought it was better to be married. And I’m the other way around. I don’t rule it out, but I would have to think of it on very grand terms. Grand is the wrong word. Yeah, it might have something to do with the realization in the past three years or so where I have a sense a little of the cost. Cost is a bad word. It sounds too materialist. I’m talking more emotional sense of personal fulfillment and optimizing. I’m talking about two people’s lives that are both improved a lot by being together. That’s the ideal. A situation where either one of their lives is more or less the same I just don’t see that as a good arrangement. I think the rewards can be incomparable. I think a good marriage would have things that nothing else, it would be like nothing else and that would be wonderful . . . I think it’s the rare marriage that everyone can say, “that is such an amazing thing.”

Paul believes that marriage needs to be “grand.” His standards for love are very high—maybe “one in fifty” marriages look like the one he proposes. He notes that “in the past” people felt that they had to get married. He does not. Thus, he benefits from what he perceives to be a shifting landscape that allows him to choose life outside of marriage. When he speaks of marriage, he talks of an “emotional sense of personal fulfillment and optimizing.” He is talking about “two people’s lives that are improved a lot by being together.” We get the sense that Paul knows himself well enough to know what would be “optimizing” for him, and also that marriage itself must be a vehicle through which that self-growth happens, or why do it at all? Though Paul acknowledges he does not have to marry, his identity work reveals the work he still had to do to turn away from it—he says, “I don’t really wonder about it. Not that I think it won’t happen”—implying that, for him, marriage was the model he expected to follow. For now, he appears confident and comfortable in his identity turn to single. Paul agreed to a follow-up interview but my own scheduling conflicts precluded this from happening. In our communication, he told me he had not married and seemed upbeat about it.

Two other men were, like Paul, further along the continuum in making their identity turn to single. One was the oldest never-married man in my sample, Ed, who was sixty at our interview. Though Ed told me he had been engaged back in his thirties, throughout the interview he communicated very little struggle in letting go of a future “married identity.” “I kind of like my life,” he says, “and as I’ve gotten older I’ve gotten much more happy with the way things have been.” He thinks “marriage is great, but it just never seemed to happen. It’s just the way it is.” I asked Ed if he thought he was “attached to being single” and he said,

Yeah, now I do. There comes a certain time where if you haven’t been married, never say never, but. I’m not looking anymore. I like my life as I’ve said. I don’t know what would cause me to change it. It would have to be someone special obviously. Never rule anything out, but I really wouldn’t expect it to happen.

Unlike the men beginning to make the adjustment, Ed is further along. “Now” he is attached to single, implying that earlier in his life, he was not—as he has “gotten older [he] is much more happy with the way things have been.” This suggests an adjustment phase, even if it was one that he is now only partially aware. He no longer has an emotional attachment to an idea of a married self. Ed notes that it is not something that he “expects to happen.” Even so, he says, “never rule anything out.” Interestingly, Ed was one of the few men who had made an identity turn without relying on either the culture of love or the language of self-help in narrating his self-story. Two interconnected explanations appear likely: because Ed’s turn happened long ago, he no longer needs to work very hard to explain it to himself or anyone else. Furthermore, these discourses, though culturally resonant now, may not have been discourses that he trafficked in when he was looking for ways to understand his unexpected status.

All seven of the men who had made the turn to single or were considering it had at least a college education. Only one had divorced parents; he was the only man in this group to have a sporadic and ambivalent relationship with his parents and siblings. The rest all reported close-knit families. All of these men had been in serial monogamous relationships; all were dating or hoping to date. None of these men shared that any of their past relationships involved cohabitation. Perhaps one reason that these men have to work to make the identity turn to single is that their lives have been lived in a familial context in which marriage and traditional family life are valued.

Jeffrey: “It’s as irrelevant as it ever was”

In a clear contrast to the stories presented above, for three never-married men I interviewed, being married did not seem like an identity they needed to give up and being single did not seem to be an identity they needed to assume. Two of these men did not rely on discourses of love or the therapeutic self in their iconoclast positions. However, all three did develop counter-narratives rooted in an equally available cultural model—individual self-sufficiency.

Jeffrey, forty at our initial interview, was friendly, but not as expansive as many of my interviewees in our 2004 and 2008 interviews, both of which lasted just under one hour. He uses no self-help language in the course of our conversations; I have no sense that he spends any time contemplating how he might modify or improve his life or grow psychologically and emotionally. Jeffrey reports that he is close to his parents (his mother died one year before our interview) and he sometimes vacations with his siblings. College-educated, he works in a college town and owns a home in the country. In our conversation, Jeffrey frequently highlights his view of himself as an independent actor. Using the language of self-sufficiency he tells me that he is “concerned with being [his] own person and not following someone else’s lead.” When I ask him whether he feels any pressure to marry, he notes that he has from his parents but says, “Some people feel that getting married is the only valid way to have a relationship,” indicating that he is not “some people.” Unlike other never-married men in my sample who usually stated that what is good about marriage is “sharing” life’s ups and downs and “building” a future together, it was difficult for Jeffrey to say what would be good about being married. He thinks it would be nice to have a buddy system. “You fall down in the bathtub, there’s somebody to find you.” Throughout his interview his identity as a “single person” or as someone who has chosen to detach from marriage rarely comes up, even in questions about being single or married. He does not appear to be committed to the idea of being a husband, as in both his initial interview and the follow-up, he tells me he is “lazy,” “self-focused,” and likes to “hang out at home,” thus not putting a lot of effort into meeting women. He has not had a “serious relationship” since the 1990s, was not actively dating at the time of either interview and described himself as “asexual—almost nonexistent libido.”

Though Jeffrey tells me he watches a lot of television, he seems unaffected by the heteronormative script for the white, middle-class male. However, it seems significant that though Jeffrey works full-time in a lucrative career, owns his house, and considers himself to have many friends (whom he has over to his home once a week)—all signifiers of a commitment to something outside of himself—he self-defines as “lazy” and “self-focused.” This may be an indication of the latent ways that “singlism” works. Even for Jeffrey, whose identity work seems to take place outside “the marriage ideology” (DePaulo and Morris 2005), he may unwittingly be responding to its power. If so, that power appears dormant for Jeffrey when we contrast it to Jesse, Rudy, Richard, Greg, Charles, and Paul, who overtly acknowledge and discuss the married ideal repeatedly in order to attach to or turn away from it, making clear its relevance for their own lives.

When we spoke in 2004, Jeffrey told me he feels some pressure from his father to have children. He adds, “Just knowing that there is something left of you on earth, that seems sort of important to some degree.” In 2004 he talked about donating to a sperm bank because he has “pretty good genes.” When I ask him if this means he would like to be a father, he says, “I think I like the idea more than the reality.” While it is good “to have somebody to care for you when you are old . . . the reality of going without sleep for three years, that sort of thing is horrifying and of never being alone again” is also unappealing. When we meet again in 2008, I ask Jeffrey if he thinks of himself as successful. He says yes in terms of making a good living, being able to pay off his house, having a number of friends, but “as far as being a successful organism and reproducing I haven’t been successful.” He laughs a little and I ask him, remembering the sperm bank possibility four years earlier, “You want to raise children and the whole thing?” He responds, “Oh yeah.” He then goes on and lists all the reasons why this is probably a bad idea—he does not have the back to be lifting a child up and down. “The work involved and what you have to do is crushing. Not being able to sleep. Doing all the errands and the shopping and the cooking. In that sense, I don’t feel that successful, but I also don’t feel like it’s a big drag on my life or anything.” The responsibilities of fatherhood remain unappealing to him, but being a parent remains important to Jeffrey’s own father who wants his name carried into the future. For Jeffrey, being a “father” only seems significant to the extent that one “leaves something on earth” and passes along “good genes.” This train of thought suggests that contributing to the reproduction of the species is more important to him than reproducing the institution of “family.” This conclusion is further bolstered by Jeffrey’s declaration that marriage is “as irrelevant as it ever was.” Still aware of the heteronormative expectations of marriage that other people have, he once again tells me there is a societal focus on getting married as the “only legitimate way to live,” implicitly communicating that he is beyond such conventions. Moreover, when I ask him if he thinks there are any downsides to being single, he uses the opportunity to reiterate that the “basic buddy system” is good—“having someone to make sure you got to the hospital.” Significantly, he ends his thoughts on the subject highlighting his self-sufficiency saying, “I guess it’s seldom I ever feel I need that help, so it’s easy not to miss it.”

Because the identities of husband and father are not salient to him, Jeffrey, unlike most respondents, spends no time during either interview telling me how he is preparing to be married someday. Nor does he speak about single as something he had to adjust to. His talk of his future does not include vacillating between a married identity and a single one as the men above. When I asked him if there were models for how to live as a single adult, he responded, “Do you really need a role model to be yourself? Maybe [for] married people it’s valuable to have models so you know what is expected, but if it’s just you, who’s expecting?” Through a language of self-sufficiency—“if it’s just you”—Jeffrey implies that constructing a single adult identity requires no assistance. Further, it appears baffling to him that one would need to construct a single self at all—“who’s expecting?” Not only does marriage seem irrelevant to him, so does being single. This is punctuated at the end of the follow-up interview when I ask him if our previous conversation in 2004 made him think any more about being single than he had in the past. He said, “Not so much. I just think at this point, I choose my lifestyle and that sort of stuff works for me.” His life is his choice, and he chooses a lifestyle not circumscribed by being inside or outside the institution of marriage. He is not alone in positioning himself thusly.

Sam, forty at the initial interview, just recently graduated from college. For the first time in his life he is not working full-time but makes enough working part-time in restaurant work to get by. Early on in the interview when I ask if he has siblings, he notes that his divorced parents paid for his younger sister’s college education, but he “never accepted any money. I’ve done things for myself.” When I ask him if he has ever been married, he states succinctly and with no ambivalence, “No. And I’ve never been engaged and I’ve never had any children.” I follow up by asking who he “counts as family.” Sam laughs and says “my dog.” He continues

My friends, though I don’t let anybody else get really close to me. I guess, I keep a lot of stuff inside. I won’t tell. I don’t know why. I guess I see my friends a lot more than I do my family, but I don’t know. I depend on myself a lot.

He tells me that his mother is his “contact in case of emergency” person but that “I generally like to handle things myself.” These several references to self-sufficiency all take place within the first ten minutes of the interview. When I ask him how he would evaluate his mental health he says that he knows he “could do a lot better.” A nod to a self-help kind of discourse, but that is modified as he incorporates the language of self-sufficiency. “I did go back to school on my own. Everything that I’ve done, and maybe I haven’t accomplished that much, but I’ve done it myself. I’m strong in that. I wouldn’t mind having a serious relationship but I’ve also never been through a divorce and I’m not paying child support or alimony.” Not once during our interview did Sam indicate that marriage is a strong pull for him, an identity he must claim, or that single is anything that he needs to spend any time adjusting to. He never employs the “talk of love” discourse as a mechanism for explaining how he has more work to do to be ready for the hard work of marriage. Like Jeffrey, he is what he is. Unlike Jeffrey, he does date a lot and he is sexually active, but it is irrelevant if any of these relationships lead to marriage. When I ask him if he thinks society prepares you for being single as an adult he says, “I don’t know. I’ve never really thought about [it].” Speaking of his future his relationship status never emerges; rather he speaks of being financially successful and possibly operating a dog rescue. Whatever he gets he is “going to earn it.” He states, “Nobody’s going to give me anything.”

Jeffrey and the two other men like him represent the vanguard of single as a “taken for granted” option for adult life. These men do identity work outside of marriage, requiring no turn toward or away from a status defined by that institution. Rather, in telling us who they are, they rely on another culturally available narrative: self-sufficiency. Jeffrey is college educated as is Sam who only recently finished his degree at the age of forty; Dan, the third man I have placed in this category, never completed college. Sam and Dan work minimum-wage jobs. While Jeffrey’s parents remained together, both Sam’s and Dan’s divorced when they were young. These demographic characteristics suggest that the salience of the married identity more closely adheres to the well-educated, professional class. As previously mentioned, the four in ten Americans who find marriage is becoming obsolete (Pew Research Center, November 18, 2011) are more likely to be low-income, nonwhite, and less educated than the men in this sample. Thus, for Jesse, Richard, Paul and the other men discussed above—successful, white, well-educated men—the identity of marriage may be both something others expect of them and they expect of themselves.