Up First from NPR - The Art of Being Single

Episode Date: October 20, 2024

For generations, we've been sold a singular story of happiness: find "the one," live happily ever after. But what if there is no "one?" What if you're alone? When Meghan Keane, the creator of NPR's Life Kit, found the dating process miserable, she set off to find fulfillment in being single. Her new book Party of One, illustrated by LA Johnson, follows her voyage beyond the traditional path. With insights from marriage historians and rumination researchers, the ideas she gathers ease the relationship pressure on anyone – coupled, single, or somewhere in between.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

I'm Ayesha Roscoe, and this is the Sunday Story from Up First. Every Sunday we do something special. We go beyond the news of the day to bring you one big story. Today we're going to focus on a topic that's really close to my heart. And maybe close to my broken heart. But it's because like a lot of young women, I grew up and I knew from the time I was a child that I wanted to be a wife and a mother. I had just the deepest desire for family and for marriage.

I wanted to feel special and held and cared for. And a lot of my self-worth was tied up in the fact that men didn't pay me any attention all throughout middle school, high school. And then in college, you know, college is college. It was bad, bad times, horrible times. But I did end up meeting the man who would become my husband. He was my first and only boyfriend, and we were together for 17 years, nearly my whole adult life.

I was with him until the wheels fell off. And boy, did those wheels fall off. And now I am single, and not just single, but a single mother. And I'm also back in this place where I have all these insecurities that I thought I had left behind in college when I found a man. But now they've come just roaring back, questions about like, what's wrong with me? Will I be alone forever? Am I someone who can be loved fully and completely? Today we are talking to Megan Cain, the creator of NPR's Life Kit podcast.

And she knows these thoughts really well, because she actually wrote a whole book trying to unpack all of these feelings and understand why dating was making her so miserable. And I think most importantly, she has taken a look at how she could live her life as a single woman and be happy. And I really need some of that knowledge right now. That's after the break. That's after the break. president can do with his or her power. We're covering it all this year, but we can't do it without your support. So help us out and sign up for NPR+. Go to plus.mpr.org. Wait, wait, don't tell me. Fresh Air, up first. NPR News Now, Planet Money, Ted Radio Hour, ThruLine, the NPR Politics Podcast, Code Switch, Embedded, Books We Love, Wildcard … are just some. Of the podcasts you can enjoy sponsor free with NPR plus get all sorts of perks across more than 20 podcasts with the bundle

option learn more at plus dot NPR dot org. Do you feel like there's more on your to do list than you can accomplish or maybe the world's problems feel extra heavy these days. We can't eliminate stress but we can manage it. It's almost like I have a new operating system now. Like I tend to live more in this light. Stress Less, a quest to reclaim your calm, a new series from NPR's Life Kit podcast. We're back with the Sunday story. I'm talking to Meghan Cain about her new book, Party of One. Welcome to the Sunday story. Aisha, thank you for having me.

Good to be here. You open your book talking about some breakups you had in your 20s, and breakups are tough. Yes, yes, yes. So by the age of about 26, I had never been in this, like, I'm your girlfriend, and you're my boyfriend type relationship, not to reduce it to that level, but I'd never been in official romantic partnership.

I had a lot of shame around that, but somehow I was behind everyone else in my peer group. But then I did meet someone around 26. We moved fast though. We three months in, he was saying, I love you. I said, I love you back. But then I did meet someone around 26 and we moved kind of fast though, right? Three months in, he was saying, I love you. I said, I love you back. And I had also started to realize that because I was now, quote unquote, finally a part of

this club, this exclusive club, I really didn't want to be kicked out of that club. So I was really nervous about rocking the boat in any way in this relationship. You know, one time we walked by some kids lemonade stand on Capitol Hill on like a beautiful weekend day and he kind of was like, you know, I'm not sure if I want kids dot dot dot. And I just kind of left alone. I was like, let's not go there. You don't want to mess it up. You want to like, just let's stay in this moment. Exactly. And then I went a few months later on this trip with my family to Italy. It was this gorgeous time. I come home, I'm in the car driving back from the airport. I call him

and I can immediately tell his voice is off. And I was like, are you trying to break up with me? And he didn't say anything. And I was like, I'm going to break up with me? And he didn't say anything. And I was like, I'm gonna pull over right now. And kind of came apart in that way. Not that long after, you know, he met someone else and went on to have a long-term partnership with that person. So I was pretty crushed. Lord knows, Lord only knows.

I can feel where you're coming from. You had long for this thing for so long and then you get it and then it doesn't work out. Yeah, exactly. And then to top it all off, the year later, I met someone else and kind of the same pattern happened. And again, moved on to someone else pretty quickly after and they're still together too. So Oh my goodness.

Yeah. But he's not as too. So. Oh my goodness. Yeah. But he's not as happy. She's not you. You know what? I'm very happy for them. That is not the relationship for me anymore. But yeah, at the time it felt awful, right? And I realized that I was telling these really specific stories about myself to myself about these breakups. Like these boyfriends had been in long-term relationships where they ended and then pretty quickly after they met me.

And so I felt like I was kind of like the rebound girl. And that was really damaging to my own self-worth. And I got stuck on this loop of like, why me? Is there something wrong with me? Am I broken? A lot of damaging thoughts that I think a lot of people have had, right, when they go through breakups that just feel really bad. So how do you move forward from that? I started to treat my dating life at the time like I was at work, which is here at NPR. We're on deadline all the time.

If one person doesn't pick up the phone for a source, you call another person. You just have this sense of moving forward, keep going, keep going. And the high and low of that was really exhausting. And then the pandemic hit. And for me, it just felt like, man, dating was already so rough for me anyways.

And now the pandemic has made it feeling even more impossible. Like a lot of that grief and frustration really hit me one night. I was making dinner for my mom and myself, and I just started screaming and like threw a plastic colander like across the kitchen on the floor. Like I felt so stupid because it was like, it wasn't even like a ceramic one, like didn't even break, it just kind of bounced. But at least you didn't throw it at someone.

No, I definitely did not. Did your mom give you a hug? She did, she was like, well, we don't really throw things in my house, but I know you're upset. And then we sat down and we had a nice chat. Did you come to any realization at that moment? Yeah, I think what became clear for me

was that I had this story I was telling myself, this one story of it's bad to be single if you have to have partnership to be happy. And I started to realize that there's more than one story that's out there for me, for all of us about how life is gonna go. Because I was seeing that there's really two-ish realities in front of me. One is that I could be single for a long time, the rest of my life maybe, or I could maybe

find a partner for some length of time. I don't know. But I had to start treating both of those realities as amazing and wonderful and wanted to pursue both of them in a way, just because I wanted to live a good life no matter what my relationship status might be. So you started questioning the stories that we tell ourselves about relationships and you know we're talking about heteronormative whatever, but I do feel like society tells women like you need to be married like that's the prize and then when you say.

I got a husband in this like you want. What no one tells you what happens after that or if that changes right yeah no no no but you know the idea that you're getting at is that what people are striving towards is this idea of traditional marriage in america right and what often people mean by that is a heterosexual monogamous marriage, the white picket fence idea, you know, the leave it to beaver style type of marriage. And you know, I really wanted to unpack that to really understand where this vision of marriage came from in the first place. So I reached out to Stephanie Koontz. She's a historian of marriage. And I asked her to help me understand what this vision of a Leave It to Beaver style marriage actually was.

Okay, this was a family where the wife could stay home with the kids and spend time with the kids. And there weren't all the pressures of modern life. And it turns out, of course, that underneath that image was a much more complex reality. Yeah, and so what she means by this more complex reality is that this time period of quote unquote traditional marriage of the 1950s or so was more of a short speed bump in the timeline of marriage

rather than this long standing tradition, which was actually kind of a surprise to me. She told me about how the 1950s were kind of this perfect storm of factors. You had men coming home from World War II, right? They're looking for stability. Wages were skyrocketing at the time, so there could actually be a single breadwinner in the home. And we see marriages actually really spike in this time and then go down right after.

It sounds like what you're saying is this version of marriage was kind of an anomaly. Yeah, it really is. And this was really important for me to learn because we're sold this impossible standard that was made possible by an economic and political reality that we just do not live in anymore. And I was like, okay, wow, if this is the case

that this type of marriage was really a speed bump, I can take down the pressure and I can really throw out that script that I've been fed and I can write my own. You're listening to the Sunday Story. We'll be right back. Once again, we find ourselves in an unprecedented election. And with all that's happening in the lead up to the big day, a weekly podcast just won't cut it.

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week on NPR's Consider This Podcast. We're back with the Sunday story. I'm talking to Megan Cain about her new book, Party of One. So Megan, you set out to try and re-script your own life as a single person. And it sounds like step one was tearing apart these stories that you had come to believe. There was this social story of marriage. Were there other stories that were kind of bringing you down? Totally, yeah. So like I mentioned at the beginning of our conversation, I had this story I was telling myself, I was the rebound girl. I was just someone that you dated as a result of, you know, trying to mend your own heart and then move on to quote unquote, like the real important relationship. And I thought about that idea a lot. I was like,

I'm going to get to the bottom of why this keeps happening to me. But as a result of all that overthinking, I was really burning out. So I wanted to talk with psychologist and neuroscientist, Ethan Cross. He researches what he calls chatter, basically how we talk with ourselves to ourselves. And he says so many of us are taught to think we have to think so extra hard about solving our problems. How do we solve problems? What are we taught? Roll up your sleeves, you get in there, you work hard, you get results. Right? And so, so for many of us, like, I'm not afraid to work.

I've never been like, I'm going to get in there. I'm going to fix this. But that is not the mantra that accurately characterizes how to fix this overthinking problem. It's not about just working harder. It's about being smarter and how you try to navigate the solution. So how do you work smarter and not harder when it comes to overthinking? Right. Yeah. If the solution is not just think more, it's think different.

So one suggestion that Cross gave me is something he calls temporal distancing. It's basically you're saying to yourself, okay, I'm going to stop, pause, I'm going to come back to this idea another time. Every emotion has a trajectory. It gets triggered, it peaks and then it subsides. The bigger the emotion, the longer it takes to subside. But they all follow that basic shape, right? And so by not thinking about it for a few hours, a day, a week, a month, depends how big it is, that's allowing you to then come back to that emotional experience when the volume is lower. And oftentimes that makes it easier to come back with a greater perspective.

So when it came to the rebound girl story, I would use temporal distancing to think, okay, here's that story again, I noticed this is happening. Why don't I put this down for now and do something else? It also made me feel more in relationship with my thoughts rather than just being overwhelmed by them and overtaken by them. It sounds like this sort of tactic requires that mindfulness to help people deal with the sadness and the frustration with being single. Can you talk about that? Yeah.

The definition of mindfulness is paying attention to the current moment without judgment. And I was really starting to delve more into mindfulness because it helped me when I maybe had a disappointing date or was at a dinner party where it was all couples and it was just like really annoying me that night. Instead of being like, I'm bad, I'm broken, I hate that I have to do this, like all the III statements, I could just be like, I'm noting that I'm sad or just even sadness, making it really clear of this is what this is, this is data, I'm sad, I don't have to add more onto this.

And it also helped with a lot of my rumination as well. This idea of like, why is this happening to me? You know, everyone has these like kind of why, why, why thoughts. What's wrong with me? That's what I ask myself. What's wrong with me? Me specifically, yeah, exactly.

Why won't you love me? I keep coming back to that. That's a thing. I know. But so what's so hard about those questions is that they're so open-ended, right? Aisha, that you could like... And they're so mean. The answers are mean. The answers are mean. The answers are real mean. You're unlovable. That's why. Oh, no. What? That's the answer. And it feels like you're problem solving,

but you're really not. You're just hurting your own feelings. You're not. You're not. You're just hurting your own feelings. What happened when you stopped the ruminating and stopped the hurting your own feelings? What did you start doing?

Sure, so along with the temporal distancing trick that I learned from Ethan Cross, I also started doing something that I learned from Edward Watkins, a rumination expert. He suggests this great trick of flipping these big why questions into what questions. So when you get these why questions, right, of why won't this person love me?

Why haven't I met someone? The why, why, why's that just feels so bad. Instead, I started asking myself, what can I do right now to make myself feel better? What friend can I reach out to right now? What absorbing activity can I do that's gonna feel really nourishing? And what that meant was I was able to pay attention

to hobbies again, friendships. And that felt really nice because in the research of this book, I found that friendship is not a bonus to life, it's essential. There's this big Harvard study of adult development. It's one of the longest running studies done on adult life. It tracked the lives of over 700 men

over about 80 years or so. And they tracked their work, their home life, and their health, all these different factors. And one of the biggest takeaways from this study was that the thing that kept people in this study happier and healthier was just good relationships of any kind. They didn't call out marriage specifically, they didn't call out romantic partnerships specifically. The leader of this study was saying, sure, romantic relationships are good, but friendships in our lives, mentors, casual acquaintances, all of these build up to make us happier and healthier. And for me, that

shows that we need all different types of love in our life. And you talk about how your own mom has been a great example of someone who's seen the importance of friendship. And I can relate to because my mom is twice a widow. She was always in church, so she always has church, but now she's even more into church with her church friends now. So yeah, I've seen that myself. Yeah. My mom has also been a widow for 20 years or so, and I'm an only child.

And you know, when I was in the process of writing this book, my mom needed back surgery. And she kept telling me, it's gonna be fine. It's gonna be so simple. I've talked with the surgeon. They said the recovery is only two weeks. And it was really clear when we took her home that we needed a lot more help than we thought. My aunt was there with us, sleeping in the bed with my mom to help her the middle of the night, because my mom couldn't bend or twist for a few weeks. And it was really clear that my mom needed more, even more than just the three of us.

We were really calling upon all these friends that my mom has nurtured and developed for years. We had our friend who's a former nurse come over to help change bandages. We had people stop by with food. The phone was ringing off the hook all the time with just all these friends she's known for years and years and years.

So it was really clear to me that my mom and my aunt have really been modeling what it means to live a really intentional life of community and love and show all these diversity of relationships. And it was really important for me to see how that helps build this really full life. I mean, that's really beautiful. But I know for many people and even for me, even as wonderful as friendship can be, sometimes it can be hard to make friends, or a lot of times it's hard to make friends as an adult and to maintain those relationships.

What have you learned? Yeah, so I talked with Marissa Franco, she wrote this great book called Platonic, all about why friendships are so precious and how we can keep them close to us. And so one of the pieces of advice she gave me was be the starter in your friendships or new friendships, right? So often people are just waiting for an invitation. So

if you just make the quick like, Hey, I know we met at this party a few weeks ago, you were talking about this movie. Do you want to come with me? I was actually thinking about seeing it. People are kind of like, really excited to get that first invite, you know? It's almost like platonic dating, right? When you start to get texts from a new friend, you're like, oh my god, they're into me. That sounded cool. I think I'm into them. So, Marissa Franco also talks about this idea of looking for other transitioners. So, people who are also recently divorced or newly single, or even just moved to the area newly, or they're trying to, uh, you know, get invested in some new hobby or something.

And so people who are also in the same boat with you as like our lives are changing, I'm more receptive right now. That that's going to go a long way. I mean, I have to ask you after all of this, um, you wrote a book about singleness. How is your dating life going now? So in the process of writing this book, after over a decade of mostly singleness, I then got into the longest relationship of my life.

Oh my gosh. Yeah, and it's not because I, you know, worked super hard. Stop thinking about it. You did the thing, you know how they say, stop thinking about it, then it will happen. Liars, or did it true? It was true in your case. Well, you know, I like to think that I met my partner

just because it was luck and timing. You know, people are always like, oh, it happens when you give up on dating and then they show up. I was like, I have given up on dating a million times. I don't know if that's what the reason is. At the end of the day, it was just luck and timing. And so as I was writing this book and learning all these skills and starting to get into this more serious relationship, I was starting to see how I still need all

these skills, right? I still need a good, strong community of friends and new friends. I still need hobbies. I still need to good, strong community of friends and new friends. I still need hobbies. I still need to learn how to regulate my emotions and how to deal with anxiety and how I talk with myself. It just made me see that lowering the pressure to partner kind of gave me more ease entering a new relationship where I didn't feel like if this goes away, yeah, I would be sad.

Like it's a real, I love this person. It's a very meaningful relationship, but I wouldn't feel like, oh my God, I'm a horrible person. I'm bad for being single again. Like I can put that away now. But yeah, but what I really believe now is that singleness is not this exile, right? Like it's this own wonderful way of being. And if this relationship changes, I would be really sad. But I would know that I still can have a really wonderful life, no matter what relationship status I have. That is awesome.

And, you know, I will say that romance is the biggest struggle of my life. I can speak in front of 500 people. I can, you know, host these shows. But baby, I said, put on my tombstone. Girl, she had daddy issues. She tried and the men tried her. That's incredible. But I like the idea of the temporal distancing and I like like maybe not asking yourself

all those questions that are negative and like focusing more on the now being mindful of your emotions as data instead of trying to assign why you feel that way. So I like all that. I think these tools will be useful in my life and in the lives of many of the listeners. So thank you so much for this conversation and for your book. I appreciate it.

Thank you, Ayesha. This episode of The Sunday Story was produced by Kim Naderfane Petersa and Justine Yan. It was edited by Jenny Schmidt. Kwesi Lee mastered the episode. The Sunday Story team includes Andrew Mambo and our senior supervising producer, Leona Simstrom. Irene Noguchi is our executive producer. I'm Ayesha Roscoe. Up first is back tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week. Until then, have a great rest of your weekend.

Anxious? This October, Shortwave is helping wrangle that fear, and the trick may have to do with horror movies. I feel more alive when I am in situations like this. Learn the surprising science to conquering fear when you subscribe now to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.