Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye, by Martha Thomases – Brilliant Disguise | @MDWorld

November 2, 2013 Martha Thomases 9 Comments

Over the weekend, there was a piece in The New York Times that both broke my heart and infuriated me.  The woman who wrote it lived in suburban New Jersey.  When she was widowed, her friends dumped her.

I know nothing about her personally, what her professional life is like, her personality, her income level, her family situation.  I’m going to be making judgments about her based only on what she says in this piece.

However, I do know one thing:  I have much better friends than she does.  And for this, I thank my friends for being individually awesome and I thank feminism.

She says, “Singles can’t dine in the finest restaurants. Singles disrupt the seating in theater rows. And singles can’t be seen cavorting with couples. “  Maybe this was true in the 1950s, but it isn’t true now unless one lets it be true.  I go out with whatever combination of people I please.  I go to parties by myself.  I go to events, including the theater, by myself.  I go out to dinner by myself if I feel like it.

 

This idea that we must socialize in couples assumes that every social gathering must be romantic, and that the odd single person will threaten an established relationship.  A single woman, especially, with her tempting body parts and insatiable desires, was seen as a threat to married women.

The way to fight these assumptions is not when one is bereaved, when one is emotionally adrift without one’s beloved, but decades earlier.  Before I fell in love, I had my heart broken a few times, and I learned it was better to live by myself than to live with someone wrong for me.  I learned that living by myself was a perfectly fine arrangement, that I was a person with enough imagination (and books) to keep myself amused, even if no one else would.

When my single friends married, we were still individually friends.  When my coupled friends split up, we were still individually friends.  When I was married, we socialized together when we both liked the people involved, and individually when only one of us did, or if the other person had another commitment.

Several of my friends drove my husband crazy, and vice versa.  Just because we loved each other didn’t mean we were extensions of each other.  I didn’t get married to be a helpmate, nor did John marry me to be my master.  Our relationship was not a mirror of God’s to his church.

How boring would that be?  And also, kind of creepy.

Feminism inspired me to accept myself as a woman with strong opinions, strong talents and strong emotions.  It taught me to see people as individuals, not potential mates or rivals.  My friendships were based on actually liking each other, not our roles in society.  Therefore, when I was no longer married, my friendships remained.

Another piece of advice I’d give to this woman (since she can’t go back in time and rearrange her social life) is to do something that gets her out of her own head for a bit.  Do something for another person, either by volunteering for an organization or one-on-one.  If your friends aren’t inviting you out, invite them.

Look I’m not happy-go-lucky all the time.  Sometimes, I run around in a dither, frazzled by too many commitments I’ve made.  I also spend a lot of evenings in my chair, with the television on while I look at the empty chair next to me.  Quite often, that’s all I want to do.  My friends call with invitations, or just to talk, and I cut them off because I just want to sit in my own funk.  It might be unhealthy, but it’s where I’m at right now, and that is all I can do.

That, and give advice.

Martha Thomases, Media Goddess, still has lots of books like she did before she was married, but now also has DVDs, a computer, and yarn.