The Counter Narrative Podcast: Successfully Single: Rewriting the Rules
Breaking free from societal pressures, Dr. Kris Marsh's illuminating research reveals a powerful truth: singlehood is a vibrant and fulfilling way of life, especially for women. Discover how being single isn't about settling for less but about unlocking the full spectrum of possibilities, where happiness knows no bounds and 'single and bitter' is simply a myth.
Read and listen to "Successfully Single: Rewriting the Rules" below.
Rihanot Ojo-Oba:
Welcome, dear listeners to the Counter Narrative podcast. Today, we are in for a treat as we dive into a topic that challenges stereotypes and opens our minds to new perspectives. I am Rihanot Ojo-Oba, and joining me is the incredible, beautiful and talented, Tiaraoluwa Oluwabukunmi Fadeyi.
Tiaraoluwa Oluwabukunmi Fadeyi : Thank you, Rihanot. We have a distinguished guest with us today, Dr. Kris Marsh, who has authored the remarkable book, The Love Jones Cohort: Single and Living Alone in the Black Middle Class.
Dr. Marsh, welcome to the Content Narrative Podcast.
Dr. Kris Marsh: Let's do it. Okay.
Rihanot Ojo-Oba: Dr. Marsh, in your study, you interviewed 62 Black adults, 43 women and 19 men with an average age of 38. Can you enlighten us on the metrics and consideration that led to the selection of this group or your study?
Dr. Kris Marsh: Oh, that's such a great question. So I had to make a hard, fast decision as a scholar on whether or not I just wanted to include Black women in the cohort. And part of the reason why I had to decide that is because Black women definitely dominate the category and I am all about supporting Black women, period, full stop.
So I wanted, but I also wanted to be sensitive to the fact that there were men that had been interviewed. And so I, as a scholar, made the decision to include men in the conversation, and I'm glad that I did for two reasons. One, because there were like some gender differences that showed up in the book, and if I hadn't have interviewed the men, it wouldn't have been possibly as clear and I could talk about those if you want me to.
The reason why I am really happy that I included men in the book is because my mentor was like "now if you want to, you can write a book all about just Black women and, and submit that to like a trade press and make it much more accessible and more readable".
Dr. Kris Marsh:
And I was like, oh. So I have options and opportunities because I started with both men and women. But back to the first point, there were two things that I thought really were really fascinating that showed up and I'm so glad I included men, although they don't dominate the category.
One centers around like the desire to be married and partnered. And a lot of women in the book talked about that. They were hopeful that they might get married one day, although they were very happy with their single lives, but the men said it's just a matter of time before they do get married.
So men were very emphatic that they were just going to marry and women were hopeful. And me as, as a scholar, I grapple with what that means all the time for the women. What it clearly signals to me as a sociologist is that they do want to be partnered and married, but they're not willing to settle.
Dr. Kris Marsh:
One of the reasons why I wrote this book is because I wanted to de-stigmatize singlehood. The title of the book is The Love Jones Cohort, and hopefully we can get a chance to talk about how the title came up. But the subtitle is called Single and Living Alone in the Black Middle Class. And one of the things I wanted to do as a scholar is I really wanted to de-stigmatize singlehood because there are a lot of people that are in relationships that are oppressive, toxic, abusive, and unfulfilling simply because they don't want to hold the title of single.
And so I wanted to write a whole book talking about singles and talking about how they navigate their single lives as opposed to asking them, "why aren't you getting married? Why aren't you, why don't you have any children?" So the women in the book were like, I would like to be partnered, but it's gotta make sense.
Dr. Kris Marsh:
I'm not going to just settle for anybody to be in a relationship. But the men were like, "oh, I'm gonna get married at some point in time". So I do wonder if there's some level of settling with men and or if the men are picking like the better of the two options to just marry someone. And what does that mean about how, how, um, fulfilling that relationship might possibly be.
So that's one thing, one gender difference that showed up, another gender difference that showed up and I'm really happy and excited about this 'cause I think that this has real application. The Black women in the cohort talked about how friends played a central role in how they navigated their single lives. And so sometimes people say singles are lonely and so on and so forth, but friends played a central role for these women.
And so they, the women talked a lot about non-romantic nurturing relationships, but the men in the cohort did not talk about having these non-romantic nurturing relationships.
Dr. Kris Marsh:
And a few of the men that did talk about friends, they talked about how they're not super close with their male friends because they may be thought of as being soft or they may be thought of as being gay. So they don't have these non-romantic nurturing relationships.
So I do hope after reading the book, men can—we can normalize non-romantic nurturing relationships and people can be more inclined to be in those type of relationships. Black women tend to do that, but Black men don't necessarily do that. So I hope the book has practical need usage for Black men and they start having these non-romantic nurturing relationships.
Rihanot Ojo-Oba: I feel like it captures so many things. You're talking about how men, when they show affection, they're seen as soft or gay or some certain way and these things are very important in our daily lives.
We talk about female friendship with so much joy, the way we'll talk about sexual relationships as well. "Oh my friend gives me joy". I'm saying "I love you" to my friends. I'm hanging out with my friend, I'm holding my friend. But so many men are like, "oh, I can't touch my male friend".
Like why can't you? Why can't you hug? Why can't you hug your male friend? What is wrong in being expressive towards your friend? Right? So these conversations are so important.
Dr. Kris Marsh:
Yeah. And I really hope that people will, after reading the book, it's like we can really normalize that men can embrace and that doesn't mean that they're gay. They can talk to their friend and say, "Hey, I'm sad today". And they're not thought of as being weak.
Black women—we can do that and it's not a problem. So here's the other thing that I think is really interesting. Um, a lot of people like think, "okay, if I can just get married, all of my issues will go away. If I can just get married, I can just get married".
I'm like, first of all, why do people think if you get married, that's like the panacea that's gonna solve all of your ills. Okay? But what happens a lot of times is that men in particular or people that are married, they put all of their eggs in the marriage basket so they forsake their other friends and they just cultivate a relationship with their partner.
Dr. Kris Marsh:
But some of the data's really clear that sometimes, and I'm drawing from one of my colleagues who wrote a book called Happy Singlehood. And one of the things he suggests in his book is that people that are long-term never married can be happier as they age.
Part of the reason why they can be happier as they age is because they build a network and so you have people that are married and they think that they're going to be together forever, but for whatever reason, they find themselves returning back to singlehood. Whether or not it's because widowed separation or divorce, but they put why they returned to singlehood, they just returned to it, but they put all their eggs in the marriage basket. So now they have no friends and now they're older and they don't have a network to draw from.
I have a network that I can go to church with that I can play golf with, that I can use profanity with. Sometimes I use profanity, I admit it. People I can— friends I can go to, I can go out to have brunch with. I have a different set of friends for very different things in my life and that's really important. And we really need to normalize the value in non-romantic nurturing relationships. We absolutely just have to.
Tiaraoluwa Oluwabukunmi Fadeyi:
Fantastic. My goodness, I love this. Thank you so much. Thank you so much Dr. Kris. So The Love Jones cohorts. It challenges traditional media portrayal of Black families, like the middle class family and I'm sure that you've got some pushback from it.
Can you tell us some of the pushback you got when you, when you published the book?
Dr. Kris Marsh: Okay, so I wanna go on record saying this. I think I say it like in page three, paragraph four, line seven, that I am not anti-marriage and I am not anti love, I am not.
Here's what I'm trying to get people to understand though. I think when we think about marriage and we think about Black love, we think about marriage, we think about community, we think about it in very narrow and focused kind of ways.
And so when we think about the Black middle class, a lot of the social science, literature and media had a very specific view of what the Black middle class meant. And it was this heteronormative mother, father, 2.5 kids and a Black picket fence.
What I appreciate about that. So in America, when we think about the quintessential or the typical Black middle-class or upper-Black middle-class family, you would think about the Huxtables on the Cosby Show.
Dr. Kris Marsh: Yeah. That was like the Black middle class family. Yeah. But where I'm really, really appreciative is that we started to see a demographic shift in the characters with the movie The Love Jones. And the characters in this movie were young, Black professionals, they weren't married, didn't have children.
And so when I as a scholar was trying to think about the Black middle class and the way we have a very narrow view of what the Black middle class does, I wanted to pay respect and homage to the show or the movie that actually started to change the tie to look at people that were young, professional, didn't, weren't married, didn't have any children.
So that's why I called the book The Love Jones Cohort. Cohort is nothing more than a traditional demographic term. But one of the things I argue in the book, and here's where I get a lot of pushback, people, two things.
Dr. Kris Marsh:
One, when people automatically read the title of the book, they think I'm saying, "oh, Black women don't need no Black man. We can do it on our own. And blah, blah blah, blah, blah".
Simply because I have the word single in their single and living alone, I get hate mail from people saying, "I'm bad for Black America. I'm not supporting Black marriages". "Here's why you see such a rise in single parenthood". I do not talk about single parenthood at all in my book, but they think that I'm just saying like, you know, this is, I'm saying Black women don't need a Black man. Read the book and then they can email me about this conversation. But as sure as my name is Chris Marsh, I get that kind of, um, pushback all the time because people just assume what I'm talking about in the book.
Dr. Kris Marsh:
And that's not what I'm saying at all. But so you have to read the book to kind of understand exactly what I'm saying. But I get that without people that have read the book.
But people who do read the book, I get a lot of pushback. 'cause one of the arguments that I make in the book, and it's interesting because when I first wrote the book, I was um, afraid that people would challenge me, afraid that people would challenge me on some of the arguments that I was making.
And a few arguments that I was making, I thought I would get challenged by don't get challenged there. We can talk about that if you want to. But here's where I do get challenged a lot. One of the arguments that I make in the book is that if we wanna be more inclusive of Black love as opposed to like this mother, father I idea, um, or husband and wife idea, how about we think about the way in which we define family?
Dr. Kris Marsh:
So in America, the way in which we define a family, and I'm basing this on the Census Bureau, which is kind of the gold standard for data collection in the US. A family is someone you're related to by blood marriage or adoption.
So I, Kris Marsh, if I don't fit that category, 'cause I'm single and I'm living alone and not saying the book is necessarily about me, I would not show up in the data set as a family. I would show up as a household, but I would not show up as a family.
And so I'm arguing that we need to redefine family and I should be considered a family of one. And some people were like, absolutely yes, I can see why that is the case. Other people say, "oh no, no, no, no, no. Family has always been more than one person and you have to be related" and so on and so forth.
Dr. Kris Marsh:
So to supplement my argument, I say that you can either be a family of one or we should be able to institutionalize augmented families. Which gets back to the argument that I was making before. We have these non-romantic nurturing relationships. They're not related by blood marriage or adoption, but sometimes these relationships, i.e friends are closer to us than our own family.
We should be able to develop an augmented family and be recognized in different spaces and places. Here's why I think this conversation is really important and it's universal. Whether or not we're here in America or we're talking in another country, another continent. Because when we think about family, sometimes people discriminate in plain sight against people that are not in families. And one way people can wrap their mind around this, whenever I talk about this is the tax structure, no matter where you are, single folks tend to pay more in the tax structure than do married folks or people that are in a family.
Dr. Kris Marsh:
And so it's a great book by a scholar named Dorothy Brown and she wrote this book called The Whiteness of Wealth. And one of the things she argues in her book is that everybody should file taxes as a single person. And I think that's a great idea. And if I'm, I'm arguing if we can't file 'em as a single person, everybody should be able to file as a family and I should be considered a family of one.
So I get a lot of pushback simply because I use the word single to think I'm not promoting marriage, I am all for marriage, I'm not anti-marriage. And then people gimme pushback when I try to think, when we think more critically about some of these terms that we use and have to think about whether or not family is a way to discriminate in plain sight.
Tiaraoluwa Oluwabukunmi Fadeyi:
Oh wow. I figured that would be that would one with pushbacks you'll get, thank you so much for sharing that with us.
Rihanot. When you hear a family of one, what comes to your mind?
Tiaraoluwa Oluwabukunmi Fadeyi:: (I) think of one person.
Rihanot Ojo-Oba: Exactly. But it's like, you're not allowed to say that because how dare you be a family of one?
You know, it's ridiculous to, because it's like you must be partnered, it's a thing, right? It's a thing you, how dare you say what? So like you're a family of one, one how?
Is it like, it doesn't mean that you have a child, like no, it's just me, myself and I. It would blow people's minds and then there are conversations and arguments. But again, it's really important that we redefine so many things. This is the—things have changed, Things are changing. Also, not everybody is going to have the luck of a partner. So where do you put them?
Dr. Kris Marsh:
Right. And see the reason, and I, and I'm just trying at the end of the day, at the, when it's all said and done, I am not necessarily concerned about the word family so much.
I, what I really am concerned about is how some people are advantaged and get advantages because they're in a family and others don't.., if you wanna call me x, y, and Z, you can call me that. Please just make sure I get the same advantages that a family gets and the reason why I think that this is a really important conversation, which is one of the main arguments or one of the main crux of the book.
I'm trying to get people to understand that when we talk about singlehood, especially in Black America, it's not just an individual conversation. We have to overlay structure into the conversation. So one of the things I consistently say in the book and whenever I talk about the book is that we have to understand that structural forces constrain our personal choices.
Dr. Kris Marsh:
If I were to say that differently, racism constrains our personal choices. If I were to give you an example so you could wrap your mind around it, if I, Kris Marsh wanna marry another heterosexual Black man who owns a PhD makes 150 US dollars, has his own home and has estate planning in place, they're simply not there. And so it's not so much that it, it has to be a structural conversation.
It cannot just be like, "oh, something's wrong with me. That's why I'm not partnered" and people unfortunately leave it at the individual level. But I'm pushing back saying we have to have a structural conversation when we're talking about singlehood because especially in Black America, there's just some racism that has limited the choices for some people and we have to have that conversation.
Rihanot Ojo-Oba:
Fantastic. And this brings me to my next question. In The Love Jones Cohort, you explored how Black women view the single and living alone status. Is this status often a matter of choice or circumstance? And how do these women navigate this status, especially in the light of the sometimes judgmental nature of the Black community towards single and child-free women?
Dr. Kris Marsh:
So, you know, so one of the things I think is really, really important. So the book just came out in audiobook, I believe. Oh, August. 'cause we're in September now. So it came out last month. And so one of the things everywhere I go, I tell people you have to read the afterword because I don't typically read the afterwords in books. But a lot of the really good stuff is in the afterword.
One of the things I'm explicit about in the afterword or in the end of the book, I tell people after reading this book, "I hope you're just as likely to ask somebody, why are you married as you are to ask somebody why are you single?"
Listen, listen, we always ask single people, why are you single? And so much so, but people in the cohort talked about how they had to get their whole narrative ready.
Dr. Kris Marsh:
So when they get to the family function, to the family dinner, to the holiday dinner, they have to have a whole conversation, a whole narrative that they plan out because they're gonna be asked that question. But we don't ask married people, "why are you married?"
And so we need to be asking everybody or we need to be asking nobody but, don't just ask single folks. Because the problem in that is that, that we're normalizing marriage again, right? So I think it's really important the way in which we think about singlehood.
Now so to the point to your question, directly to your question, especially if you understand that structural forces constrain personal choices, why are you asking me such an individual question? Why aren't I married?
There's structural forces we have to talk about and we have to think about. So here's what we talked about in the book.
Dr. Kris Marsh:
I asked people in the cohort whether or not they were single by choice or by force. And a lot of people talked about how they were single by choice, but then they talked about how circumstances forced them to be in a space where they're like, "I'm choosing not to be in a relationship or to date right now".
So it really is an amalgamation of both choice and force or or circumstances. Nevertheless, with that being said, again, I think the much larger overlaying context is that structural forces have constrained their personal choices before they even get themselves into the dating market.
And that's the part, that's the connection that's not always made. So structural forces has constrained your personal choices, but of the personal choices that you have, you're like, "I'm good. I'm gonna go ahead and just leave myself out of this dating market for a while".
Dr. Kris Marsh:
And overwhelmingly people were happy with their singleness. They were happy with their singleness, but I also wanna be very balanced in my conversation. Part of the reason why they're very happy in their singleness is because they built a network, family, friends, um, these augmented families that I talked about to help them through, uh, their, their singlehood or help them with their singlehood.
So we often think that love has to be between a husband and a wife or between two husbands and two wives, but it can be between non-romantic nurturing relationships.
It's also really important for us to understand that although we have these augmented relationships, there was a little bit of loneliness that the singles talked about, but I wanna be really clear, it wasn't this chronic loneliness whereby they pulled the sheets up over their head, they stayed in the bed for six weeks, they close the blinds, their room is dark.
Dr. Kris Marsh:
No, it's situational, it's mild and it's a very short segment of time. For example, like people in America, people may be single, people may get a little lonely around Valentine's Day. That's a day we're supposed to like just supposed to celebrate the people you love.
I don't understand why you can't celebrate the non-romantic nurturing people you love. Why does it have to be the romantic ones? But I digress. Sometimes people said like maybe around like New Year's Eve, you're supposed to always have somebody to kiss on New Year's Eve. But they talked about it in very short snippets of time. It's like a day or so.
They have, they have their friends, they have their networks, they hang out with their people, they do themselves, whatever that means and then they're feeling better the next day. So overall, they're highly happy with their decision. They, um, embrace their singlehood. If it happens, great. If it not, they are still living their lives and when they do get those little hiccups where they feel a little lonely, they have ways and mechanisms to get through that and get through that in very quick kind of, um, in a very quick kind of fashion.
Rihanot Ojo-Oba: Fantastic.
Tiaraoluwa Oluwabukunmi Fadeyi: Thank you so much for that response. So, it's also pretty interesting to observe that successful, unmarried women like Tracy Ellis Ross, we have Genevieve Nnaji in Nigeria, we have Elvina Ibru.
They often face more scrutiny regarding their status than their male counterparts who are unmarried. What do you think is responsible for this? What do you think contributes to this?
Dr. Kris Marsh:
Right. Um, so again, you have to read the afterword 'cause I kind of talk about some of that in the book.
Here's what I think is really important and I think, um, whether or not you're a Black woman in America, you're on the continent of Africa, you're in, uh, the UK somewhere.
People constantly wanna police what we do, they wanna tell us how big our butts can be, how big our butts can't be. They wanna tell us how long our hair should be, how natural our hair should be or shouldn't be. How loud we should or should not be. Who we should and should not marry. How many children we should and should not have. I don't know why people insist on wanting to try to police Black women. Let Black women be, let them do whatever they want to do.
We do not police Black men or I would argue probably any other group, the way in which we police Black women. And I don't know if they think we're the path of least resistance, which is so not the case historically, but for some reason people all constantly want, people constantly wanna police Black women and always want to look at like what they should be doing, how they should be dressing, how they should be acting. And I can, I consistently say, keep Black women's names out of your mouth. Let us do exactly what we want.
Rihanot Ojo-Oba: Unapologetically Dr Kris, Absolutely. Dr. Chris. I wish , I love this.
Dr. Kris Marsh: You know what so funny though too? Tracy Ellis Ross in particular, she talks about how, you know, she's, she talks about her single, singlehood. She talks about it in a very, uh, affirming kind of ways. But people are still emphatic, "oh, she must be lonely. Oh, she must want somebody".
I'm like, why do, I'm like, even when you hear it out of people's mouths, they think like, 'cause we've been conditioned from a very young age. It's so funny and I love telling this story.
I have a friend that lives here in America and he recently got married and him and I were talking one day and he's like, I just like light-skinned Black women, which I talk about colorism in the book as well. And so he was like, I just dislike light skin. By the way, his wife is very light-skinned. He's like, I just like light-skinned Black women.
Dr. Kris Marsh: And so I looked at him, looked him in his face, and I said, "no, you don't". And then I proceeded to say, "you've been conditioned from a very young age that closer to white is right. I would respect you and appreciate you if you said that, that you've been conditioned and you bought into a hook line and sinker". But instead you're like, I just like, I just like light skinned Black women. No, you don't.
I also believe we can take that same conversation and overlay it on the idea of marriage. I think from a very young age, we were told we have to be partnered. We have to be partnered, you have to be in a relationship and anything which is really, can be really dangerous because again, it gets to the point where people end up in these relationships. Now, we didn't say, I didn't say you have to be in a good, healthy, fulfilling relationship.
Dr. Kris Marsh: You just have to be married and people just end up married. But these relationships are oppressive, toxic and even abusive. But you've been told from a very young age, this is what you're supposed to do. So you stay in those relationships. And I'm like, oh no, I'm pushing back against that hard. And when you have a Tracy Ellis Ross who was talking about her singlehood and talking about it in very affirming kind of ways, it's a disconnect in their mind. They were like, there's no possible way she can be happy. I've been taught from a very young age, the only way to be happy is to be partnered and or to be married.
And so it's, to be honest, it's not always easy to have this conversation because some people are so stuck in their ways and they think all these lonely people are sitting up crying every night. "I'm so lonely, I want somebody". I was like, I wish married people would be honest. I really wish married people would be honest and talk about how lonely they might be in their relationships.
Rihanot Ojo-Oba:
I say I would lie about so many things, but as girls, as women, do not let us lie about motherhood, marriage and childbirth. Why are you lying? Let's talk about it. Do not, don't hold back. You can be partnered and miserable.
You can be partnered and because you desperately want to be so married. You are in a partnership where you're being oppressed and abused and you are being controlled. But because you have to remain a Mrs to someone, you're just there like, "I'm fine". Girl, you are not! blink twice if you're not happy.
Dr. Kris Marsh:
Right, right. And see that's, and that's kind of the point. Married people—well I had a dear friend of mine who was single for a while and then she got married and she said, as soon as I got married, then married people wanted to talk about how bad marriage was.
Rihanot Ojo-Oba: We had a conversation this morning. Yeah,
Dr. Kris Marsh: I would, I would admonish married people to just be more honest because I think single people are like, okay, we're looking over there. "Like, okay, there, it's always, the grass is always greener on the other side. If I can just get married, I'll be okay".
But I was like, married, people need to be more honest. They absolutely need to be more honest and Tracy Ellis Ross is standing in her singleness and she's being honest and people are not trusting it.
And similarly related to the conversation, and I think I put it in a footnote in the book, and I, as a scholar, had to grapple with this because, um, only I interviewed 62 people and only two people talked about sex and so I decided to put it in a footnote to show that only two people talked about sex and people have argued me down.
Dr. Kris Marsh:
They're like, "well, you just didn't ask the right questions. Well maybe they just didn't feel comfortable talking to you and your research team". I was like, why are we equating single hood with sex in particular? Why are we equating singlehood with being promiscuous?
The subtle assumptions that all these singles are out here having all this sex. I interviewed 62 people and only two people talked about sex.
And so I think it's shortsighted and it's naive and it's immature to say just because you're single, you're automatically out here having a sex, a whole bunch of sex or being promiscuous. The two don't necessarily go hand in hand. And again, if we're talking about, married folks, let's talk about how much sex you are or not are not having in your relationship too. Then let's talk about that. So yeah,
Rihanot Ojo-Oba: Because you have so many married people who say, oh, I'm always busy. I do this, I do that. I don't even have time for sex.
I thought, "oh, I thought you guys said it was just single people that weren't getting some", but apparently they, how do we say they're not getting it as well because we married, it's like when you wake up, you are going to work till you sleep.
Dr. Kris Marsh:
Right? Right.
Rihanot Ojo-Oba:
You have time, but the time is for others. It could be your children, right? Your husband, the house itself. So when you project these things on single people, it just may be that you are screaming for help, but we cannot tell because you're not being honest.
Dr. Kris Marsh:
Right. And I think a really, um, and I often talk about this a really easy question, but I think it's got a lot of implications and people have to really think through this kind of gets back to the conversation I was having earlier about being conditioned from a young age. It's a small question, but I think it has big implications. Why do you want to be married?
That is a question everybody should ask themselves. I think it's a really, because is it because, oh, I've always been told I need to be married because I wanna be middle class because I have, because one of the arguments in the social science literature is that, and at one point this was the case, but the labor market has changed globally.
Before you had to be partnered to try to be married, to try to catapult yourself into middle class status but now you have these people that are doing well, they're making six figures. They're buying houses, they're owning property, they're owning companies, and they don't necessarily have to be married. And so it's not an, maybe it's not an economic thing. So why exactly do you want to be married?
Rihanot Ojo-Oba: And this brings me to my next question about when you see moms or you see single women, and when people ask why, just like you said, why do you ask married people?
When you ask single people, why are they not married? Do we ask married people why they are married? And this brings me to my next question.
As we witness a great number of people, particularly women choosing to be single, child-free and live alone. It raises questions about enjoying the status and leaving authentically. Dr. Marsh, do you have any tips for individuals on embracing and enjoying this status while resisting societal pressure to conform to traditional norms?
Dr. Kris Marsh: Right. So I, yes, I wrote a whole book about it! Buy the book. I think the book will, so it's really great 'cause I've gotten, there's three compliments that I get from the book. One, I hear people tell me that "I've been seen for the first time". So thank you. That is such a huge compliment for the book.
Number two, I am a professor, so people say "I learned something". Even sociologists say like, "I learned something". So it's so great to hear that.
And then three, my younger college student, Black females in particular, say, "Dr. Marsh, thank you. You started a movement, you gave us another narrative for the way in which we can envision our lives".
People often think when you go to college or as you get older, you can get all the degrees you want but if you don't have an "MRS" degree, that's all that really matters.
Dr. Kris Marsh: I mean, if you're not married to someone, yes, that's all that matters. And so I think the book gives, the book is actually a love story to singles and I'm happy that there's another narrative out there.
And I'm like, live your absolute best life. Because again, why do you think if you get married, everything's gonna be okay? And people often talk about, "well, you know, I don't wanna die alone". Again, I think that we've been the, like social media, institutions have instilled in us this fear of dying alone and it's a fear that we now kind of like grapple with and we have internalized.
And because we're like, we're afraid of dying alone, we decide to marry somebody who may not be good to us again, maybe abusive, maybe a toxic relationship, but at least I have somebody that's gonna care for me when I get older.
There's some data that's out and look, I was trying to find the person that was citing it, that spouses are leaving their spouses when their spouses are sick. 'cause they don't know how to deal with a sick spouse.
Rihanot Ojo-Oba: Yes! We read it a lot.
Dr. Kris Marsh: Why do you think it's because you're married? Your spouse is gonna show up for you.
Rihanot Ojo-Oba: By your friend, your mother, your sisters than your partner.
Dr. Kris Marsh: Your friends are going to show up for you, cultivates your friendships. Because when you're old and you need somebody that's gonna be there for you, your friends will be there for you. You will not be alone if you have yourself some friends. And I was talking to a young group of women earlier and they were saying, "as I age, I'm not really worried about having a spouse. I'm really worried about having those really close friendships because that's what I see. I saw with my grandmother, with my mother. And I wanna, I'm in college now and I wanna cultivate those"
In America, I'm not sure where they talk about finding your best friends that you'll have for the next 60 years of your life. I hear "go to college and get yourself a husband", but I don't hear the conversation about finding your best friends that you will have for the next 60 years. I don't hear that conversation.
And so I think it's really important that we celebrate our singleness. We stand confidently in our singleness. And here's, here's the way I think about it. If you're not confident and happy and healthy and whole in your singleness, you should not even consider being in a relationship yet.
You need to stand confidently as your individual, as your whole self before you even think about a relationship. But if you think that the relationship is gonna make you whole, I'm not sure that that relationship has the ingredients it needs to succeed.
Tiaraoluwa Oluwabukunmi Fadeyi: Good. Thank you so much. You know, like we really enjoyed talking to you. This is very enlightening.
Build your friendships, get more friends.
Friends are going to be the ones that will stay with you through, like they're the ones that they'll be there. They, they were there before your partner and probably will be there after your partner. So friends you whilst in partnership. Yes. They always be there.
So it's very important to make friends. So this is like my major takeaway from this, the fact that having a network,
Rihanot Ojo-Oba; having a network and important nurturing the network because how do you just abandon all of your friends and put all of this love, like energy into one person.
Dr. Kris Marsh: But, you know, I also get offended when people say, "oh, I wanna be in a relationship or I'm not in a relationship". No, you're not in a romantic relationship, but you have a lot of non-romantic nurturing relationships that you're forsaking, that you're ignoring, that you're giving no credit to when you say, oh, I wanna be in a relationship. Excuse me?
Rihanot Ojo-Oba: My girl, what are you saying? Are you saying you don't see, you don't matter.
Dr. Kris Marsh: Right, right, right, right. That's, I'm like, you have to say like, I need people to specify now I wanna be in a romantic relationship and explain why you want to be in a romantic relationship. Yeah, absolutely.
Tiaraoluwa Oluwabukunmi Fadeyi: Thank you so much Dr. Marsh. This has been wonderful. Like I totally had fun and learned so much. Thank you so much for doing this with us.
Dr. Kris Marsh: It is my pleasure. Okay, so there's a couple things. If people decide to get the book, there's a couple things I wanna say about the book real quick.
I highly recommend that you get the book, uh, 'cause I do think that it's not what I have heard, what people have told me. It's not the kind of book that you're gonna just pick up. You're gonna say, "I'm gonna sit on the couch and read it over the weekend". It's not that kind of book, which I didn't necessarily need it to be that kind of book.
But what I've heard people say is like, it's the kind of book you'll read something, you're like, "wait, what did she just say? Let me put this down, let me go think about it And let me come back to it".
And I didn't necessarily wanna write it that way, but that's just the way it came out. So I do think that everybody can get something from the book.
Singlehood is a universal conversation. I decided to insert myself at the single-living alone-Black-middle class stage. But singlehood is a universal conversation. And here's what I think is interesting about being single and depending on how you think about this.
um, people have always been, we people know what it's like to be Black people know what it's like to be a woman. Only some people know what it's like to be Black. Only some people know what it's like to be a woman. But we've all held the title of singlehood—single. All of us have held that title at some point in time. So if we read the book, I think it can strengthen our relationships.
Dr. Kris Marsh: If we're in a relationship, if we're single, it can help strengthen us as individuals, as singles and whether or not you are Black or not, I think that you can just have a really good conversation about how we think about singlehood and class dynamics. So everybody can learn something from the book.
But when you're reading the book, it's important to understand that it is an academic book and so the introduction and chapter one are very theoretical. I'm not a very theoretical person, so I had to copy edit the book before it came out. And I was so bored reading the introduction to chapter one and I wrote it!
So it took me an entire day to copy edit the introduction in chapter one. Once you get to cha—hold on, your brain is gonna hurt in chapter one and the introduction, your brain will probably hurt if you're not a theoretical person.
Dr. Kris Marsh: But if you hold on till chapter two, chapters 2 through 10, I was really emphatic about writing a book that even if you don't have a PhD, you can pick this book up, learn something from it and understand the arguments that I'm making in the book. So for the theory people, introduction in chapter one is for you, for everybody else that's interested in just understanding, Singlehood chapters two to 10 are for you.
I also put in the footnotes. I also have footnotes—a lot of footnotes in the book. And I put them at the end of the page. If you get the hard copy or in the audio book, um, I'm not sure where they are. Part of the reason why I did that is because my editor said I tend to go off on a tangent when I write, I can't imagine him saying that.
Dr. Kris Marsh: Uh, but you know, I can talk and talk and talk and talk. So I could write and write and write and write. And so he said, "if you feel like you're going off on a tangent and you're, you're going away from a main point that you're making, put it in a footnote. But keep your footnotes to a minimum".
So I have 120 footnotes in the book because I had a whole lot of things I wanted to say that didn't make it in the book, so please read the footnotes.
Some of the really interesting things are in the footnotes and I think you'll really get a better understanding of some of the background context if you read the footnotes. So please do read the footnotes and then read the afterword. I think the afterword poses about 10 or 12 really important questions we should be asking ourselves about singlehood after reading the book.
Thank you. Thank you so much for reaching out to me, it's such a pleasure and an honour to be here and chat with you this morning. So thank you so much for having me.
Rihanot Ojo-Oba and Tiaraoluwa Oluwabukunmi Fadeyi: We're delighted, we're delighted to have you. You are delighted. So you are, you're full of life. You're so wonderful.
Tiaraoluwa Oluwabukunmi Fadeyi: Really what an enlightening conversation. Dr. Kris Marsh. Your work reshapes our understanding of singlehood and living alone.
Rihanot Ojo-Oba: Honestly, T, if there was anything that I enjoy the most about speaking to Dr. Kris is bubbly.
Tiaraoluwa Oluwabukunmi Fadeyi: She's so bubbly and (has) excited energy.
Rihanot Ojo-Oba: She's full of life. and if we were left to us, she could, we could talk for hours.
Tiaraoluwa Oluwabukunmi Fadeyi: For hours.
Rihanot Ojo-Oba: It was, it was really insightful and she said, well, it's really important that we have a network. Yes. One person cannot be a network, one person being just your partner. So many people have counter it. So many people have turned their partners into their whole lives.
Rihanot Ojo-Oba: Yes. And Dr. Kris is saying that it's really important to have a network also, in our conversation she mentioned how when a woman is ill, you are more likely to be cared for by your parents, your siblings, your community, more than your partner. 'cause we had cases where men are likely to abscond or leave their wives when they are sick.
So if you do not live life having a community, what happens as you grow older?
Tiaraoluwa Oluwabukunmi Fadeyi: If you do not invest in friendships, if you do not invest in a community, if you do not invest in a network, it's, you know, it's, it's going to be difficult to navigate life. Because even when your partner is there, you still need friendships.
You still need people that you share the same ideals with, not just your partner.
Rihanot Ojo-Oba: and to our listeners, remember that life is full of choices and each one should be celebrated free from societal judgments. Okay, that's a wrap for today's episode of the Counter Narrative Podcast. Thank you for joining us. And until next time, keep questioning, challenging and amplifying your voices.
Tiaraoluwa Oluwabukunmi Fadeyi: Stay curious, stay informed and remember your perspective matters.