The Loneliest Women I Know Are the Most Independent

The night my friend Catherine told me she'd never once asked a man for help, something in my chest went tight in a way I didn't want to look at.

We were drinking a ninety-dollar bottle of wine she'd bought herself. In her apartment. That she'd bought herself. After breaking up with a man who, by any reasonable measure, had loved her properly. She said it like a credential.

"You know what I never did?" she said, swirling the glass without drinking. "Not a single time. I paid for dinner, carried the bags, booked the trips. The plumber came when the pipe froze in February and yeah, I made that call myself. Who even knows how to check tire pressure? I had to look it up. I assembled my own IKEA bed, which, honestly, I think should count for something on the relationship résumé."

Then, quieter, like she was trying the sentence on: "He left me for a yoga instructor who calls him when her car won't start."

There was a small grease stain on the pizza box between us. I remember staring at it while she talked. The worst part wasn't the punchline. The worst part was that I'd been composing almost the exact same speech about my own ex on the subway home the week before. She laughed and I laughed and neither of us was actually laughing.

I met Catherine in grad school. By thirty-eight she was a VP at a midtown firm, owned her brownstone, ran a half-marathon every spring, read more books in a year than I will probably read in my remaining life. On paper she was the whole dream.

She dated a man for almost three years. He was good. He cooked for her. He remembered the name of her childhood cat. He asked about her day, which sounds pathetic when you type it out but you know how rare that actually is. He also, eventually, started crying in therapy because he felt like a supporting character in her life. Like he'd been cast as the boyfriend in someone else's biopic. No script given, no lines, just the supporting role in somebody else's story. She came home every night buzzing, and he sat on the couch with his laptop and slowly turned into part of the furniture. Not a bad piece of furniture, necessarily. Just furniture.

I have a friend who says the problem is that we built our identities around never needing anyone and now we're surprised we ended up alone. That we read the script and played our part, and the men we wanted never signed up to love a fortress.

I have another friend who says women like Catherine settled too early. That the right man rises to meet a fully realized woman. Anything less is settling. We should have stayed single longer, honestly.

I sit between them at these dinners and I don't know which is right. Probably both. Probably neither. Probably the whole question is set up wrong.

Then there's Imogen.

Imogen is what Catherine would look like if Catherine had figured it out. She married her college sweetheart. Two kids, a brownstone, a rescue dog named after some Wes Anderson character I can never remember. Every few months someone at a dinner party asks her, with this weird performative curiosity, "So, what do you do now?"

She used to flinch. Now she smiles in a way that doesn't reach her eyes.

A few weeks ago I sat in her kitchen while the kids were at school. There was a glass of water on the counter one of the kids had left, and she kept glancing at it while she talked, like she wanted to pick it up but couldn't make her hands do it.

"I spent my whole twenties being told I was too much," she said, pouring coffee with a hand that wasn't quite steady. "Too loud. Too opinionated. Whatever. So I built this whole thing. This performance of being fine on my own. And now I'm forty-three and my husband is basically my roommate and I cannot remember the last time I asked him for anything real. Because I'm scared. I'm so scared that if I actually need something, he'll finally just say it. That he never wanted a partner. He wanted a finished woman to live next to."

She laughed. A slice of light moved across the kitchen floor. The dog walked in, looked at both of us, walked out. I wanted to say something useful. I said nothing.

Here's the thing nobody in the self-help section will tell you: when you spend a decade learning how to perform self-sufficiency, you also learn how to make yourself unneeding. And unneeding isn't strength. It's just hunger you stopped feeling. You don't notice it's gone until you're forty-three and your dog is the warmest thing in your house.

And a man who falls in love with a woman who doesn't reach, who folds her own laundry and assembles her own bed and calls her own plumber, that man will eventually wonder, in some quiet part of himself, why he is eating dinner across from someone who seems like she's already done.

I used to think the magnetic-woman myth was harmless. Aspirational, even. A corrective to the older story, the one about the woman who gave up everything and ended up crying in the passenger seat of a car she didn't drive while he talked about his career.

But the new story is harder. It tells you that if you just make yourself finished enough, perfect enough, unbothered enough, the right man will simply appear. As if love is some kind of gravitational pull. As if intimacy is a meeting of two completed projects.

Maybe the whole framework is designed, possibly on purpose and possibly not, to keep us from the harder work of actually letting someone in. Because depending is terrifying. Depending is the moment you find out whether the structure you built alone can hold when someone else is leaning on it. Depending is discovering, in real time, whether you are actually lovable in the ways that matter. Not lovable in the abstract, not lovable as a portrait someone could hang on a wall, but lovable as a person who needs and gets met, over and over, through the ugly parts.

I am thirty-six years old. I have my own apartment and my own savings and my own therapist and my own emergencies handled by my own friends. By every metric of the magnetic-woman dream, I have arrived. I have, supposedly, done the work.

Last month, in the back of an Uber at two in the morning on some random Tuesday, a man I had been seeing for four months said something I've been trying to unhear ever since. He said it kind of quietly that he didn't think I could actually be in a relationship. That he kept watching me turn every conversation about the future into a joke. He'd pull away the second anything got real.

I laughed. I told him he was projecting. I went home and didn't sleep for two days and then cried in the shower on Wednesday morning for no reason I could identify.

I'm not telling you this so you'll feel sorry for me. I'm telling you because I think there are a lot of us out here. Smart, solvent, emotionally literate women who read the script and memorized it and then, quietly, without anyone noticing, discovered that the script did not equip us for the one thing it kept promising.

I don't know what the answer is. My friends are arguing at dinner parties. Posting subtweets. Marrying and divorcing in real time, and I am mostly just sitting in my apartment watching them, eating takeout alone, trying to figure out which one of them is going to turn out to be right. My money is on neither.

What I do know is this. I keep wanting, the next time someone tells me the most beautiful thing a woman can be is independent, to ask her what she means. To ask her if she's ever been loved in a way that actually required her to need someone. To ask her, on a Tuesday at two in the morning, whether the man she pictures when she says "the right one will come" is actually a man who would love her, or just a man who would admire her from across a room and then go home.

But I'm probably going to smile and nod instead. That's what I do.

There's a draft sitting in my inbox I won't send. I keep drafting messages to him that I don't send, always one more clean version waiting to be written. I keep telling myself I'll figure it out by forty, like forty is some magic year when the answer just appears. But then it's three in the morning. I'm opening my Notes app at three in the morning.