#michael cobb

Spyro Gyra - Spyro Gyra

Designer: Michael Cobb

New Post has been published on https://real-estate.newonline.help/webinar-the-time-machine-is-real-path-of-progress-real-estate-opportunities/

Webinar: The Time Machine Is Real - Path of Progress Real Estate Opportunities

Perhaps single people secretly wish to reclaim an original state of being, somehow sense that we do not need to be completed by another, somehow sense that we are able to complete ourselves. The single person might just be too self-possessed."

michael cobb nails it. i actually had a really intensive conversation about this issue yesterday with one of the rare people in my life who gets this. about how typically the notion that love makes someone a better person and more enjoyable to be around when in both of our experiences it merely just turns them into self-centred assholes. although i am not against seeing loved ones happy, it just seems like such a one-dimensional exclusionary process that alienates everyone involved. but that is not necessarily a bad thing, right? at least not for the person oblivious, happy and in love (but then there we go again, privileging romantic love over other forms of monumental life-long relationships) i have also been starting to uncover how my (semi-perpetual) singledom and social anxiety interact, and how much of that identity is chosen and how much is beyond my control/true desire and how the stigmatization of singledom (as a young, queer girl) plays into the triggering of mental health shit for me.

Michael Cobb, 39, an English professor at the University of Toronto, also teaches in the university’s Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies. He’s the author of God Hates Fags: The Rhetorics of Religious Violence and now of Single: Arguments for the Uncoupled, a literary theorist’s take on how popular culture has not caught up to social reality when it comes to singles. Despite the fact that singles now outnumber married people, they don’t really exist as a recognized category, because our prevailing cultural narrative sees them as “real” people in waiting. Single is Cobb’s opening volley in a culture war.

Q: You’ve written quite a polemic over something scarcely noticed by the world. But singles’ cultural invisibility is the starting point of your issue with coupledom.

A: I had a lot of frustration with why singles weren’t being represented. We were always pre- or post-coupled—widows or bachelors or divorcees, unfortunates of some kind. Just a really awful category. When I started the book, I’d been single for 10 years of my life, and quite happily so, and not because I had endless freedom to pursue whatever person or fleeting irresponsible experience [I wanted]. It was more a joy of being by myself and being able to cultivate all sorts of relationships and not have one person completely be the centre and focus of the world.

Q: Still, you were unhappy being the odd man out?

A: It started to occur to me that single people really are a strange sexual minority category, and perhaps the least valued. There’s no history, there’s no language, just a lot of pity that’s foisted on us. Carrie Bradshaw launches Sex and the City—you know, fabulous, glittering New Yorkers—to answer, she once wrote, “the burning question” about herself and her friends: “Why are we still single?”

Q: So there’s schadenfreude too?

A: Oh, yeah. A lot of bad feeling. There’s always an assumption that you need to be coupled off to complete yourself. Even though we all know that people are not all saved and made happy in their coupledom. There are lots of distressed couples, lots of divorces, lots of frustrating, sad marriages. I tried to question all that. I’m not against couples—I’m against the fact that in our society it’s the way people become legitimate. Think about this: any major politician in the U.S., have they been single? When you start thinking about it, it’s just absolutely everywhere.

Q: Even when you think it’s not, as you found in Beyoncé’s All the Single Ladies.

A: It’s supposed to be an anthem for single ladies, and when you hear it for the first time and don’t think about the lyrics it’s great: very exciting, uptempo, a great video that everyone absolutely adores—especially Kanye West. But the idea you think you’re getting—all you single ladies bond together, you’re going to be okay—no, it’s all about single ladies who are single because the man has chickened out, hasn’t “put a ring on it.” Now he’s faced with seeing Beyoncé or some other single lady in the club later on with another guy, and there’s regret and sadness. She’s basically announcing to him, “You had your chance, you should have given me a ring; now I have someone else.” It then gets weirder when she says, “But if you actually decided to treat me how I deserve, which means become a couple with me, there could still be a future for you.” That’s pop culture’s basic message on being single. So this anthem, this celebration of singleness is about how one day you’re going to be strong enough and grown up enough to get married. That’s distressing to me.

Q: It’s more than enough to make you question yourself.

A: There’s that great moment in Bridget Jones’s Diary when she’s being interrogated at a dinner party full of couples and she’s the one single person, and they ask her, “So why is it that women are not getting married?” Meaning, “Why are you not married yet?” and she replies, “Oh, it’s because we’re covered in scales.” They all look like they’re actually entertaining the thought that it could be true. And there are times, when you’re being really hard on yourself, when you get to thinking that “maybe there is something wrong with me.” That’s the thing I resent more than almost everything else—there are very few examples growing up when self-esteem is correlated to an experience of being by yourself. Family and school will tell you that you can be whatever you want to be, but they never say, “And if you want to live by yourself and have a cluster of friends around you, that’s wonderful, too.”

Q: You also talk about all the classic indignities of the single life: the wedding invitations with “and guest,” the puzzlement when you go alone to a restaurant—all of it ongoing even while the world changes. The growth in people living by themselves is remarkable and yet there’s no language, no narrative to reflect this.

A: When I’m with my busiest friends, I’m thinking how we actually are more in relationships with our technology than each other, people staring at iPhones or BlackBerrys, to the point that I think, “Okay, something else is happening here, we are removed, we have other ways of associating.” Somehow we are often actually more comfortable associating with people far away than beside us. I’m not lamenting that, I’m just saying that it’s a dynamic that is happening, but the old grand narratives about how you belong to a culture and a world, a society, haven’t changed. There has been an extraordinary amount of singles studies that have appeared in the last year or so. The cover story for the Atlantic in November, written by a friend of mine, Kate Bolick, called “All the single ladies,” pointed out that sometimes successful women don’t want to get married, even in their late 30s. You start a conversation on this and you find a swell of support from people saying, “Yes, this is exactly what I experience myself.” Many single people are craving some kind of language, some kind of analysis that says you do not have to do this thing: married, children, retirement.

Q: Does the gay community bring a particular insight or emphasis to this?

A: It’s been very interesting to watch what has happened to gay politics in the last decade or so. Marriage equality—especially in the States—became the major focus. In Canada, we got it relatively quickly, and it wasn’t traumatic—the sky didn’t fall. But it shows the power of the couple idea. Sexual minorities felt like, “Okay, one way that we are constantly officially delegitimized is because we are not able to marry,” and it’s true. I’m appreciative of that desire to correct that civil wrong, but on the other hand it still proclaims the most legitimizing thing you can be is married, which will enable the rest of the world to say, okay, now you can inherit each other’s property, you can have visitation [rights], you can make stable custodial arrangements for the children. I don’t know if a lot of people have done enough thinking about this. Why is the couple and very official couple-making the goal we’re all driving toward?

Q: Your argument goes further, though—it is a polemic, after all: coupledom doesn’t just overwhelm singleness or isn’t always as perfect as claimed, it’s actually often toxic.

A: Coupledom shrinks the world. I use that language deliberately because being part of a couple is the thing that’s supposed to save you, as it does at the end of almost every single romantic comedy. I’m not saying people don’t have wonderful, large, fantastic relationships, but they are also anxiety-producing. They do shrink the world. You have fewer friends, you have fewer opportunities to go out in the world and explore and have all sorts of intimacies and associations and friendships and activities. Some people really like that, but I don’t think it’s much better than any other kind of situation. I’m trying to knock it off its hierarchy a little bit.

Q: Your point is that there are far fewer pairs who complete each other than there are couples?