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The Loneliness of Single Women

By JUNE CALLWOOD

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ONE YOUNG HOUSEWIFE cently persuaded her husband to take care of her children for an evening so she could visit an old college friend, still unmarried, who produced radio shows. The housewife left a scene of normal, every-day chaos: the baby in a wet diaper spilling his cereal, the two and four-year-olds arguing bitterly, the television blaring hoofbeats and six-guns.

She arrived at her friend's apartment, where the rugs were pastel but spotless, the tables unscratched in glossy candlelight, muted music floating in the serenity. They ate from a copper casserole and drank sharp white wine from long-stemmed glasses.

"You've been so lucky," mused her hostess. "Children and a husband who adores you. There doesn't seem to be any point to my existence.”

The housewife hesitated, decided it was too late to change loyalties and agreed smoothly, “Yes, I count my blessings every day. Poor you."

They sighed enviously, both of them. A generation or two ago unmarried women were rare and they generally were enfolded into their families to live out obscure lives doing housework and helping to raise nieces and nephews. Even 20 years ago career women were unusual and celebrated. A woman engineer got her picture in the newspapers when she graduated; a woman surgeon who pioneered a technique for heart operations was a phenomenon, and so was a woman department store manager. All were considered part pathfinder, part sublime-and part freak.

Now the career woman is so common a part of society that she is anonymous again. Mostly she is unmarried; sometimes she has been divorced or is widowed. Whatever her former status, she has one dominating problem that she can't dodge or parry: She is biologically intended for mating, but she has no mate. Her glands are functioning as actively as her married sister's, but she lives alone. Her North American conscience is ashamed of illicit affairs and even more distraught at promiscuity, but she is beset by longings she cannot ignore.

Psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers and doctors have all given deep consideration to this eeriest of¬ contemporary problems. There is little agreement among them on how much and what quality of sex life is permissible to an unmarried woman.

Most authorities do agree, however, that passion is the most dangerous element of an unmarried woman's life. It is a betrayer and a destroyer. It has no power to bestow serenity, pride or beauty in one's life, but only power to cause desolation and a withering loss of self-respect. Passion by itself is a savage, senseless animal, a cannibal that eats the soul.

It is the nature of a man to be satisfied by passion alone. The act of love gives him a quick sense of triumph and delight. But a woman's passion must be supported by affection, gentleness and honesty if she is to be saved from an agony of shame. Women understand this perfectly, but passion sells cool judgment short every time.

An amiable relationship between two people in an office, or a woman and her best friend's husband, can change in an instant to the white heat of passion. One suburban couple had a strikingly beautiful receptionist friend who used to visit them. The husband, in mock amour, would throw his arms around her and croon, “What a doll! Come with me to the Casbah!” and all three would laugh.

One day he performed this familiar routine while his wife was in the next room occupied with the baby. This time no one laughed. Eventually a divorce was arranged. It was a situation that none of the people involved planned just uncivilized passion.

This is a lesson many thoughtful people believe must be taught to girls in their early adolescence: Passion is about as charming and safe-a toy as a triggered grenade. No woman who wants to avoid the humiliating consequences of promiscuity should ever permit herself to be, with any man, in a situation where they are likely to get "romantic.”

Teen-agers should refuse to pet in automobiles or in homes from which the adults are absent. They must learn enough about human chemistry to determine at which stage of petting the point of no return is reached; it happens early, too early.

The tragedy of the young girl who permits easy and intimate embraces is that she does so in the hope of finding affection and admiration. She is doomed unless she discovers that passion is no friend at all, but her worst enemy.

Young girls beginning to work are often victimized by the mature men in their office. They are at a stage of development when they are easily im-

pressed by a man who knows how to order in a candle-lit restaurant, has an air of authority and protectiveness in his manner of holding a door, can make sophisticated suggestions about becoming clothes, what plays to see and which books to read.

A girl is such an easy mark for such a man that it is a high form of evil for him to aim at her at all. Many unprincipled men, however, are attracted by the opportunity to enjoy uncritical awe and a conquest whose success, for them, is assured from the beginning. "My wife doesn't understand me" should properly become the clarion exit line of our age.

Women who reach their thirties without being married generally have a stock-taking period that leaves them saddened. "I was so consumed with excitement at learning and getting ahead in my profession that I didn't really notice my twenties had slipped past," remarked a celebrated singer recently. "Now I'm ready for marriage. I even have a sense that I can only describe as ripeness. But I'm afraid it is too late."

Most of the men available to such women are already married or have suffered some traumatic block that causes them to view the physical side of male-female relations with discomfort. Neither homosexual nor quite men, they are attracted by the strength and purposefulness of career women.

Occasionally the social convenience of an escort will overwhelm other considerations and such a couple marries. It's a poor bargain, with an almost classic foretellable future: The frustrated woman will become a shrew, and the none-too-masculine husband will wilt under her domination.

It is more common for the woman to find herself deeply, maturely in love with a married man who, because of pride, or pity for his wife, or responsibility to his children, will not dissolve his marriage. They may settle for an affair, an arrangement that seems potentially rapturous, exultant and wonderful.

More surely, though, it will be a period of a new and deeper loneliness, when the man is absent to celebrate a graduation or birthday with his family; embarrassment, as the couple inevitably encounter shocked friends, and the degradation that always envelops anyone forced by circumstances to be a sneak.

Few women have characters strong enough to recognize that an affair is an interval on a merry-go-round, to be enjoyed at the time as a child does,