Transcript of The Art of Being Single

I'm Ayesha Rosco, 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 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. Then in college, 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 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.

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Get all sorts of perks across Plus more than 20 podcasts with the bundle option. Learn more at plus. Npr. Org. We're back with The Sunday Story. I'm talking to Megan Cain about her new book, Party of One. Welcome to The Sunday Story.

Ayesha, 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 never been in official romantic partnership. I had a lot of shame around that. But somehow I was I was behind everyone else in my peer group. But then I did meet someone around 26. We moved fast, though, right? Three months in, he was saying, I love you. I said, I love you back. 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. I was really nervous about rocking the boat in any way in this relationship. One time, we walked by some kids' lemonade stand on Capitol Hill on a beautiful weekend day, and he was like, I'm not sure if I want kids, dot, dot, dot. I just left alone. I was like, Let's not go there.

You don't want to mess it up. You want to just stay in this moment.

Exactly. 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. I was like, Are you trying to break up with me? And he didn't say anything. I was like, I'm going to pull over right now. It came apart in that way. Not that long after, 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 longed 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 the same pattern happened. And again, moved on to someone else pretty quickly after. And they're still together, too.

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 the rebound girl. And that was really damaging to my own self-worth when I got stuck on this loop of, 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. The high and low of that was really exhausting. Then the pandemic hit. 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. A lot of that grief and frustration really hit One night, I was making dinner for my mom and myself, and I just started screaming and threw a plastic condor across the kitchen on the floor. I felt so stupid because it wasn't even a ceramic one. It didn't even break. It just 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 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. 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 going to 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 we're talking about hetero, normative, whatever. But I do feel like society tells women, You need to be married. That's the prize. And then once you say, I got a husband, then it's like, You won.

But no one tells you what happens after that, or if that changes, right?

No, no, no.

But the idea that you're getting at is that what people are striving towards is this idea of traditional marriage in America, right? What often people mean by that is a heterosexual monogamous marriage. The white picket fence idea, the leave it to beaver style type of marriage. I really wanted to unpack that to really understand where this vision of marriage came from in the first place. I reached out to Stephanie Kuntz. 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 pressure. Of father life. It turns out, of course, that underneath that image was a much more complex reality.

Yeah. What she means by this more complex reality is that this time period of 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 a surprise to me. She told me about how the 1950s were 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. 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 an anomaly.

Yeah, it really is. This was really important for me to learn because we sold this impossible standard that was made possible by an economic and political reality 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.

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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 trying to mend your own heart and then move on to 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. 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. And so for many of us, I'm not afraid to work. I've never been. I'm going to get in, 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 Cros 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, it 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 Girls 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 It sounds like this 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. 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 really annoying me that night. Instead of being like, I'm bad, I'm broken, I hate that I have to do this, all the I, I, I 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. It also helped with a lot of my rumination as well, this idea of why is this happening to me? Everyone has these like, why, why, why thoughts.

What's wrong with me? What's wrong with me? That's what I ask myself. What's wrong with me?

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, Aesha? 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 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 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 going to feel really nourishing? What that meant was I was able to pay attention to hobbies again, friendships. That felt really It's 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 in 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. 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 it romantic partnership 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. For me, that shows that we need all different types of love in our life.

You talk about how your own mom has been a great example of someone who's seen the importance of friendship. 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. When I was in the process of writing this book, my mom needed back surgery. She kept telling me, It's going to be fine. It's going to be so simple. I've talked with the surgeon. They said the recovery is two weeks. 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 middle 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 Marisa Franco. She wrote this great book, a book called Platonic, all about why friendships are so precious and how we can keep them close to us. 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 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 Marcia 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 get invested in some new hobby or something. And so people who are also in the same boat with you as, Our lives are changing.

I'm more receptive right now. That's going to go a long way.

I mean, I have to ask you, after all of this, you wrote a book about singleness. How 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 worked super hard. Stop thinking about it.

You did the thing. You know how they say, Stop thinking about it. This is what happened. Liars.

Or did it true?

It was true in your case.

Well, I like to think I met my partner just because it was luck and timing. 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 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 gave me more ease entering a new relationship where it didn't feel like if this goes away, yeah, I would be sad. 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.

I can put that away now. But what I really believe now is that singleness is not this exile, right? It's this own wonderful way of being. 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. I will say that romance is the biggest struggle of my life. I can speak in front of I can host these shows. But, baby, I said, put on my tombstone. The 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 maybe not asking yourself all those questions that are negative and 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 Naderfein, Petersa, and Justine Yann. It was edited by Jenny Schmidt. Quaisi Lee mastered the episode. The Sunday Story team includes Andrew Mambo and our Senior Supervising producer, Lianna Simstrom. Irene Naguchi is our executive producer. I'm Ayesha Rosco. Up first is back tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week. Until then, have a great rest of your weekend.

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