KENAN MALIK Surveys suggest that in less than
a generation 40 per cent of Britons will be living in single-person households.
If they're right, that will be the biggest demographic and cultural change
of our lifetimes. For Mary Balfour, who runs this country's longest established
dating agency Drawing Down the Moon, it heralds a world of new freedoms and
possibilities.
MARY BALFOUR People think it's quite cool to
be single today and the single lifestyle and all the culture and media stuff
that goes with it is definitely okay, and I don't think people do worry about
being single any more. Now it's for the first time in history that women can
be economically independent and own their own properties. You know I mean
even back in the sixties you had to get a man to sign your guarantee your
mortgage for you if you were a woman, that's not very long ago. Now we have
this wonderful freedom and, and women can do their own thing and it's great.
KENAN MALIK What does the rise of the singleton
society mean for the way that people experience personal relationships? And
what are social consequences these changes? There have always, of course,
in every society, in every age, been people living by themselves - widowers,
divorcees, those whom we used to call spinsters. But they were always a tiny
minority, and most were single by force of circumstance rather than by choice.
What's different today is that a lifestyle that was marginal has become mainstream.
Seven million adults live alone in Britain today - three times as many as
40 years ago. According to the statistic bible Social Trends, this
figure will more than double in the next 20 years. Single people used to be
treated with condescension or pity. No longer.
RICHARD SCASE In my view, this shift to singleness
is a very good thing.
KENAN MALIK Richard Scase, a leading business
forecaster of socio-economic trends and author of Britain in 2010.
RICHARD SCASE Remember, living alone and living
with a partner is rather like getting on and off a bus, it's not a permanent
status, so the future lifestyle will be characterised by a period where one
is living with a partner, then followed by a period of living alone, then
followed by a period of living with another partner, and so on, and to me
this is an indication of, of a far more liberated culture, a more democratic
culture and one which is much more preferable than in the past, when men and
women were putting up with each other, living together, but quite literally
loathed each other. It's not so long ago there was a lot of stigma attached
to divorce. Now we live in a much more kind of hedonistic live today culture,
because we don't know what tomorrow's going to bring. In the past, a couple
would be living together, the man would work until he was 65, and would probably
die two or three years later. Now, men retire in their late fifties and there's
often a thinking amongst couples well, can't put up with him around the house
for the next thirty years, he's going to live until his late seventies, early
eighties, so let's split up. In other words, we're in a much more hedonistic,
live now, enjoy, enjoy society.
KENAN MALIK Relationships have become part of
the consumer society. Since there is less need to enter relationships for
economic reasons, many people, especially many women, have greater choice
as to how they live. Both men and women now choose partners, and living arrangements,
as they might choose their Mediterranean holiday or the colour scheme for
their loft apartment. And they often come to people like Mary Balfour when
they want to find those partners. So what are her clients looking for?
MARY BALFOUR Everybody says the same sort of
thing. They all talk about things like I want to meet someone who is independent,
who's curious, who's playful, who shares all my values and my outlook, and
I'm looking for a permanent relationship. I think everybody's looking for
the quality of the emotional connection much more now than they would have
done in the old days. Then I think they do look for something that is very
romantic in the sense of it being about tenderness, emotional tenderness,
being a best friend and a lover.
KENAN MALIK According to Mary Balfour, then,
we seem to have - or at least to want - the best of all possible worlds. Freedom
and independence on the one hand, and emotionally sustaining relationships
based on real intimacy, on the other. But for Zygmunt Bauman, Emeritus Professor
of sociology at Leeds University, the very fact that our culture seems fixated
by questions of relationships and lifestyles tells a very different story.
ZYGMUNT BAUMAN Tell me what you are obsessively
thinking about and I will tell you what you are afraid of, what creates the
most awesome difficulties in your life and what you need most energy to actually
overcome, or even to face up to. It is a question of a certain deregulation
of the environment in which we operate. There are no hard and fast rules,
there are no lasting principles of action, and tussling in this awful net
of contradictory precepts. On the one hand the need of relationship because
I must have some support, I can't be alone, I have to safeguard myself, I
need a lifejacket in this turbulent sea. On the other hand, the fear that
once I get it, that I am finished. My freedom is over and I won't be able
to properly react to the new opportunities, new chances, and so on.
KENAN MALIK And there's the rub. The same social
changes that are leading to the singleton society are creating a yearning
for durable relationships - but also make us worry that such relationships
will undermine the very freedoms we hope single living will bring.
JAN MACVARISH There's a strange combination
at the moment of this high ideal of what should be achieved through relationships
and the sense of fulfilment that we demand at any present moment, but at the
same time very low expectations of actually achieving that. And also a very
cautious approach and a very fearful approach to actually getting really involved
in the work of intimacy.
KENAN MALIK Jan MacVarish, a sociologist at the University
of Kent, who is currently conducting a major research project on the changing
lives of single women. The talk about single living providing new kinds of
freedoms, she argues, misses the point.
JAN MACVARISH The problem emerges in the way
in which we as society make sense of the increasing number of single people.
There's a danger in the way we make sense of it that we tend to re-define
what freedom means. Increasingly freedom is understood as freedom from other
people. Rather than the freedom to do things which might well mean that we
need to be involved with other people. So I think the re-definition of freedom
which had happened through the discussion of the singleton is something that
is a cause of concern for me because I do think we're starting to have a sort
of assumption that freedom means a freedom from emotional entanglements that
necessarily go along with fulfilling relationships.
KENAN MALIK What is driving the singleton society,
in other words, is not just the greater personal and economic freedom that
many people now enjoy. It is also the greater fragmentation of society and
the breaking down of wider social networks. This leads to a sort of paradox.
On the one hand, as Mary Balfour suggests from her vantage point as director
of a number of dating agencies, people look for relationships based on emotional
bonding. On the other hand, as Jan MacVarish implies from her empirical work
on single women, people seem frightened by emotional attachments, often viewing
them as a prison. It's a paradox personified by Bridget Jones - a woman who
is free and independent and yet frustrated that she cannot find the kind of
relationship she is looking for. Here's Mary Evans, professor of Women's Studies
at the University of Kent.
MARY EVANS Both men and women in various kinds
of relationships have developed ideas about relationships which are becoming
increasingly impossible to meet. The things that people are looking for are
essentially, first of all, the kind of intimacy very often that children have
with their parents and particularly with their mothers, so what we're looking
for is a curious kind of thing. We want to return to the kinds of intimate
relationships which we had, or we think we had or we would like to have had
when we were children, but at the same time we want to achieve that intimacy
within the context of greater autonomy and greater independence. Now there's
clearly a conflict here between these two things, it's very, very difficult
to meet these two things, but of course we're driven, all of us, by the need
for intimacy.
KENAN MALIK Are you saying then that the kinds
of intimacy to which we aspire have changed over the last fifty, hundred years.
MARY EVANS Yes I am saying that and I think
there's a considerable amount of evidence to support that. I think we're looking
for, for example, much higher degrees of sexual satisfaction than we used
to, people aren't content any longer to live in relationships in which they
don't, don't find sexual satisfaction, in which they don't find long term
romance.
KENAN MALIK But perhaps the conflict between
a desire for greater autonomy, on the one hand, and a childlike intimacy,
on the other, is more apparent than real. What a child seeks from its parents
is total reassurance and comfort - for its every need to be catered to. Children
may be naïve or innocent - but they are also selfish and demanding. And
that's exactly what our 'hedonistic, enjoy, enjoy' culture seems to be fostering
- an almost child-like selfishness in our assessment of relationships. Relationships
exist to provide people with enjoyment and satisfaction, and when they no
longer do so, they move on to the next photo in the dating agency folder.
And, as Professor Deborah Cameron a sociolinguist at the Institute of Education
suggests, the growth of the 'me' society has helped transform our understanding
of what intimacy means.
DEBORAH CAMERON Intimacy as we conceive it in
modern western societies is no longer just about sharing physical space or
social experience with other people, it's about being able to share their
inner lives, their thoughts and their feelings, and to do that you need language,
and more especially a particular way of using language, where you're continually
revealing to other people what your innermost thoughts and feelings are, and
that has changed what we value in communication, so if you look at advice
literature, even as recently as the 1950s, you'll find, for instance, that
it contains prohibitions on talking about yourself, that's immodest, rude,
not of interest to other people. Today in advice books on communication, the
focus is really all on talking about yourself.
KENAN MALIK Do you think relationships today
then possess a therapeutic character?
DEBORAH CAMERON I think the sort of talking
that you're supposed to do possesses a highly therapeutic character. I think
that one of the places we got this notion of intimacy as dependent on a particular
sort of talking is from the popularisation of what originated as therapeutic
techniques that were used in clinics by psychiatrists and psychologists. We're
talking about the kind of talk where someone says honestly what they are feeling,
where they use the techniques of, say, assertiveness training instead of hiding
their feelings or stating them indirectly, they'll say to someone 'I feel
hurt when you talk to me in that way or when you do this, or that', so it's
'I' statements, emotional self disclosure where you lay bare experiences,
thoughts or feelings that in polite society you might be encouraged to hide.
That's the kind of talk that is thought of as leading to intimacy. And I do
think that's a misguided belief. That relationships break down not because
of material problems or incompatibilities of a non-linguistic sort but because
people couldn't communicate.
KENAN MALIK You only have to watch Oprah
or Jerry Springer to realise that emotional self-disclosure may not
necessarily be a good thing. But a whole 'relationship industry' has sprung
up to tell us not just that it's good to talk but good to talk about ourselves.
Obsessively. Even tough guy Tony Soprano wants to bare his soul. And as our
ideas of intimacy have changed, so it has come to mean not just a greater
honesty about our emotions but also making public what once might have been
thought of as private feelings. Here's Deborah Cameron again.
DEBORAH CAMERON I'm a feminist, so I wouldn't
want to turn back the clock to a time where there were experiences or feelings
that just couldn't be talked about in public discourse at all, but I do think
that the excess of it, the constant exhortations to emote in public, may,
may cheapen the private, the more private and personal expressions of emotion.
I think they also make people feel very anxious and insecure about whether
they're doing it right in their private life. I think there's immense anxiety.
KENAN MALIK Nowhere is the erosion of the distinction
between public and the private more apparent than on the internet. Mary Balfour
runs not just a conventional dating agency, but is also a pioneer of internet
dating, with over 30 000 members signed up to her site, Love and Friends.com.
Other sites boast up to a million members. The secret of their success, as
Mary Balfour acknowledges, lies in the willingness of people to make public
their most intimate thoughts on the world wide web.
MARY BALFOUR For some people, the medium of
using the internet is, is actually encouraging them to express themselves
better, particularly men who perhaps don't express themselves verbally so
easily. They feel more confident and more safe on the internet. Probably they
find it easier to flirt, and I think women find it confidence boosting in
another way, that perhaps it's much more easy for them to take control, be
more assertive, take the initiative and this sort of thing on the internet,
so for them it's more positive and I think it brings out the best of both
men and women. I think that for a lot of people, the internet allows them
to actually get in touch with that side of themselves which is ready for a
relationship. It allows them to get in touch with it much more quickly 'cos
they're not worried about being immediately judged and it's, you know, you,
you meet someone on a first date in a cafe or a bar and you're worried about
your hair, your look, you know, what you're wearing and all of these things.
Now I know that a lot of people in the internet do have photos, but you can
choose your photo and you can choose the photo that best represents you and
the sort of signals and messages that you want to give out.
KENAN MALIK But is that not a kind of virtual
relationship, isn't part of what you are the way you look, the way are and
so on, and in presenting a false image of yourself, or potentially a false
image of yourself, aren't you creating a false basis for a relationship?
MARY BALFOUR I think for those who exploit the
internet dishonestly and give out false signals about themselves, I think
that would be wrong. But we find with Love and Friends.com that 99 per cent
of the members are genuinely out there looking for a real relationship and
they are looking for love.
RICHARD SCASE I personally know one or two people
who do use the internet who have registered with on line dating agencies.
It does become, I think rather a dehumanising experience, that they go through
website after website of photos and self descriptions and the whole thing
is becoming, I think, rather commoditised, and that is the downside of the
internet dating agency business.
KENAN MALIK Richard Scase. The internet, and
other new technologies such as mobile phones and texting, provide new means
of meeting people and communicating - not to mention of ending affairs. But
they also express the conflicts and problems of contemporary relationships.
Internet dating and chat rooms allow people to pick and choose, to move from
one target to the next, to play at relationships. They allow for relationships
emptied of the sweat and blood of real life. That's why they can seem so attractive
- and so dehumanising. That's also why, as Zygmunt Bauman suggests, they provide
perfect metaphors for the shallowness of our social lives. He entitled his
latest book Liquid Love to describe the quicksilver, skating-on-the-surface,
always-on-the-move approach that many people have to both love and life.
ZYGMUNT BAUMAN The currently fashionable expression
is surfing, we surf, we are surfing everywhere, we are surfing from one job
to another, one project to another, from one, today's geographical place to
another, from one set of connections, one network to another, even the idea
of network is like that because network, you know, connects the two notions,
connecting and disconnecting. You are guaranteed to be able to disconnect
at any moment. As one of the objects of very interesting investigation about
the contemporary manners of dating put it why he likes internet dating: because
when you use internet, you can always press delete. Now you know to be assured
that there is a way out without reproach, without guilty conscious, without
acrimony, that is the secret of moving fast. When we're skating on thin ice,
your salvation is in speed, so you have to hurry not leaving behind you traces,
very deep traces.
KENAN MALIK So you're saying that we live in
a culture in which we want to keep all our options open all the time?
ZYGMUNT BAUMAN That's precisely the point, yes.Top
pocket relationship. Keep them in your top pocket, if you need it you pick
it out, if you don't, you put it back, you know. So you are just surfing over
the network, and the wider the network - not the deeper the
network, the wider the network - the better.
KENAN MALIK It should not surprise us, then,
that the latest fad is speed dating. Several hundred strangers meet up in
a room, have a maximum of three minutes to talk to someone, and decide whether
they want to hook up with them. A perfect way, perhaps, to find a top-pocket
relationship. So what's happened to old-fashioned romantic love in all this?
MARY EVANS I think romantic love was initially,
say two hundred years ago, a form of emancipation.
KENAN MALIK Professor Mary Evans, from the University
of Kent.
MARY EVANS What romance gave to women was the
right to say I won't marry this person because I do not love him, now that's
a form of emancipation, that's a step forward from a situation in which women
were simply told, you'll marry this husband because he will support you, so
romance, a sense of personal choice, I think for the west was an emancipatory
discourse.
What, I think, has happened has been that something which was, which was an
ideal and recognised as such, has become generalised into a usual expectation.
And I think it's now become almost a fantasy, and I wouldn't quite go so far
as to say a dangerous fantasy but certainly a misleading one.
KENAN MALIK Are you not really saying that we
should have lower expectations of what we can get out of a relationship?
MARY EVANS Actually I am, which sounds awful
and grim and despairing, but I think not so much lower expectations, but I
think we should have more dilute perhaps expectations, expectations which
we can achieve.
KENAN MALIK This might seem sensible advice:
don't turn real relationships into fantasies. But it also fits in with the
zeitgeist: Don't expect too much, don't risk too much emotional investment,
keep all your options open. The fantasy of the perfect partner often goes
hand in hand with an instrumental, almost business-like approach to relationships.
People expect perfection on a plate. But they don't want to invest too much
in a relationship in case they get insufficient returns. A culture that encourages
us to cultivate the self at the expense of all else, leaves little room for
notions such as commitment or self-sacrifice - notions that traditionally
have been at the heart of any discussion of relationships. Little wonder that
there should today be such ambivalence about relationships.
What's clear from all this is that the growth of the singleton society is
both a major demographic change - possibly the biggest since the Second World
War - and an expression of a dramatic cultural shift. Yet, not a single one
of our interviewees thought that policy makers had even begun to think about
the significance of the changes taking place. For business forecaster Richard
Scase, society needs to adapt - and adapt fast - to the home alone phenomenon.
RICHARD SCASE The ramifications of more men
and women living alone is absolutely enormous, for example, it's projected
by 2015, we will need another four and a half million new homes. Eighty percent
of that demand is generated by the increase in single person households. Where
are those houses going to be constructed? Further ramifications, of course,
in terms of health and welfare. If you're ill or if you have to go into hospital
for an operation, the after care costs are much greater if you live alone
compared with if you're living with somebody where there's the mutual care
and support, and the also of course, there's the very simple kind of consequences
in terms of leisure and recreation. Leisure and recreation in Britain are
still structured around the idea of the couple. Holidays for example, single
people still have to pay a, a scandalous single person supplement. Well all
this is going to change I think, very significantly, over the next few years.
KENAN MALIK Such changes will clearly have an
enormous impact upon both our physical and social landscape. But perhaps the
biggest change will be in the very way we think of what constitutes a society
or a community. Here's Rebecca O'Neill, a researcher at the right-leaning
think tank Civitas and the author of a report on family breakdown.
REBECCA O'NEILL If they're choosing to live
alone, every time they break up and live alone, they're breaking networks.
Some people aregue that friendships - you know these people who live alone
have wonderful networks - but I think the recent, recent research shows that
that's not really the case in, in most instances.
KENAN MALIK What do you think the consequences are
for the social fabric?
REBECCA O'NEILL People who live alone, even if they're
living alone just a portion of their lives, aren't as integrated into the
community and they aren't able to, to monitor the neighbourhood as well. There
was one study in the US on neighbourhoods where it said just living in a neighbourhood
that had a high rate of single people living there, controlling the level
of income, even if you control for that, just living amongst a bunch of single
people meant the crime rate was going to be higher, much more likely to become
a victim of crime. If you're living alone, it's just a matter of you do have
to go out and look for people but unfortunately, these kind of people don't
usually, you know, volunteer, they don't usually get involved in organisations
like churches or voluntary organisations or even sort of join clubs like they
used to. Nowadays it's all very individual, they go on, they go on more holidays,
they go away for the weekend and they go to clubs, which is fine for a point
in your life, but it doesn't make for a strong community.
Marriage and partnerships are institutions and, and ways of living that don't
have to be the same way they were in the 1950s. The important thing is the
promise to stay together, to work through things. There's a range of benefits
that can be acquired for the individuals in, in a marriage, for their children
and for society as well.
KENAN MALIK This might sound like an old-fashioned
plea for the return of traditional social mores. But Rebecca O'Neill's warning
that single living raises broader questions about the viability of social
networks and institutions is surely right. As the sociologist Jan MacVarish
suggests, a debate about singleton society is far more than a debate about
singletons.
JAN MACVARISH Our ambivalence about relationships
is a problem for everybody, whether we are in relationships or not. Because
anything that encourages us to hold back or to distance ourselves from other
people is a problem. Anything that encourages us to take a cautious approach
to emotional entanglements and to see emotional entaglements as a threat to
our sense of self, will lead to a society that's reconciled to isolation.
If we place a high premium on individuals being self contained and independent
of other people, we ignore the social reality that our lives are intertwined.
The danger of the notion of a society as a singleton society is that we deny
ourselves the opportunity to experiment with those relationships and those
encounters. And instead are pre-equipped with a rationale of caution.
KENAN MALIK Just as we are building gated communities,
so we are developing gated individuals. People might tell dating agencies
that they desire relationships with greater intimacy. But they also tend to
view autonomy as keeping other people at arm's length. This is true, Jan MacVarish
suggests, not just of singletons, but of those in traditional relationships,
too. For Zygmunt Bauman, this corrosion of personal relationships mirrors
the corrosion our social relationships.
ZYGMUNT BAUMAN Fifty years ago, our fathers,
our grandfathers, thought also about happiness, they wanted happiness as much
as we do, but they thought that the road to happiness reached by making society
a better, more hospitable place for human beings. Now it is the question on
the contrary, 'I want more space', that's the war cry which you hear most.
And 'I want more space' means 'you keep away'. One would say that in the old
system, there was a lot of security and very little freedom. Now we have another
system, it means we have a lot of freedom and very little security.
KENAN MALIK We haven't simply swapped security
for freedom. Insecurity has led to a greater disengagement from other people,
in both our social and personal lives. The singleton society certainly expresses
the greater possibilities of freedom and individual choice, particularly for
women. But it also expresses the narrowing of what we mean by freedom, and
of the greater fragmentation and atomisation of society. Isn't it time we
began to address the consequences?