I want to name as trauma the experience of not being chosen in a coupled world. The living alone, the having no one witness your life or help you make life decisions, the having no one to hold or feed you when you get sick, the practical ways that two actually are better than one – because there is certainly nothing in our culture that says we have any reason to expect such care from our friends – are hard, traumatic, enough (though there are differences, this is true for both people who have never married and people facing the “after” of a marriage). But the meaning conferred by our society onto singleness as, essentially, unwantedness is unbearable, not just because the shame of such judgment often provokes tendencies to isolate and further remove oneself from community, but because it may confirm deep suspicions about one’s self. (more…)