How Single Are You?

Jan. 25, 2011 — -- Employment applications rarely give me trouble. Gardening? Yes. Photoshop? All day. But I can typically breeze right through applications. And this particular question appeared to be very simple.

The problem? My desired answer was not among the available options. The question: Are you married, divorced or single? Neither. I'm "delightfully" single, which, as you can already tell, is drastically different from your basic "single."

So, this got me to thinking. People who create applications should work on their craft. After all, most people are not just married, they're "happily" married or in lots of cases, "barely" married, right?

Divorced people are "recently" divorced or perhaps they are, as the lady standing in line behind me in the supermarket with the 12 pints of Ben & Jerry's ice cream told me the other day, "bitterly" divorced. You get the point. When it comes to relationships we need some adjectives, people.

So, back to me and my status.

It always comes up. Always. At dinner with friends. In meetings with corporate executives. At football games. Oh, and my favorite, the gynecologist's office when the topic of contraception creeps into the conversation.

"You're now single?" my doctor says, staring uncomfortably at his clipboard. "How's that going?" As if I'd been stricken with malaria.

Let's get one thing straight. I was perfectly content telling people I was single until about two years ago. That's when I started noticing all of the sad, pathetic, somebody-musta-stolen-your-ID looks I was getting from nearly everyone I told.

They'd tilt their heads to the side, dim their eyes and say, "Awwww, really?" as if I'd just told them my cat, Buttons, had died. (No, I don't have a cat. Single and a cat. Can I be any more cliched?)

"Yes, I'm single," I'd say with what I thought was a megawatt smile.

"You're not dating at all?" they often persist.

A question, I later discovered, had subtext thicker than molasses: But you are having sex, right?