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In many cases, women who choose the single life have looked at those around them and vowed not to make their mistakes. "My mother married her first boyfriend. All my relatives stayed in marriages that are really tough," says Pam Henneberry, 31, an accountant who lives in Manhattan. "When I looked at the unhappiness that was in my parents' marriage, I said, 'I can't do that.'" If Cynthia Rowe, 43, a Los Angeles area store manager and divorce, gets depressed, she thinks of her five closest girlfriends. "They are all just existing in their marriages," she says. "Two of them got married when they were young. Twenty years later, they had outgrown each other. One has not got over her husband's affair. Two friends aren't even sleeping in the same bedroom with their husband anymore. Their personal happiness is placed last, and their kids know they are miserable."
Some women, of course, have learned from their own life. "At 28, I was terrified of the world," says Mary Lou Parsons, a Raleigh, N.C., professional fund raiser, recalling her 1980 divorce. "I'd been raised a Southern woman, sheltered and protected by my family, then by my husband." In the ensuing 20 years she learned to raise her kids on her own--and how to start her own business, buy a town house, move to Alaska and back and, most of all, relish life on her own. "I had to get beyond that thinking in a lot of women's minds that aloneness is not O.K. But now I find solitude exhilarating." Marcelle Clements, author of The Improvised Woman: Single Women Reinventing the Single Life, notes that there are many women, like Parsons, who were "taken by surprise. They were in relationships that broke up, hit what they thought was catastrophe, only to find that they were O.K., and [they] adopt an attitude that said, I'm fine, I don't need to be with anyone else."
Not surprisingly, many conservatives are disturbed at this growing acceptance of singlehood and its implied rejection of marriage. Danielle Crittenden, author of What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us, argues that women have set themselves up for disappointment, putting off marriage until their 30s only to find themselves unskilled in the art of compatibility and surrounded by male peers looking over their Chardonnays at women in their 20s. "Modern people approach marriage like it's a Bosnia-Serbia negotiation. Marriage is no longer as attractive to men," she says. "No one's telling college girls it's easier to have kids in your 20s than in your 30s."
Women who have chosen the single life sometimes have their own qualms. Singlehood does not yield itself to a simple, blithe embrace. It's complicated, messy terrain because not needing a man is not the same as not wanting one. For all the laughs on Sex and the City, one can feel the ache that comes when yet another episode ends with the heart still a lonely hunter. And if you think being a single woman is all fun and games, just listen to star Parker, who is married to actor Matthew Broderick. Even as she's become a mascot for the feisty new single woman, Parker says she often stands on the set in her spike Jimmy Choo open-toes and see-through shirts, worried that she isn't being a good traditional wife. "I know he doesn't have his laundry done, that he hasn't had a hot meal in days," she says of her husband. "That stuff weighs on my mind." Parker regales single friends with tales of how boring married life is and how much luckier they are to have freedom and fun. Does she really believe it? "Well, no," she admits. "It's just a fun thing to say to make single people feel better."
Even women who generally reflect on their choices with assurance find themselves sometimes in the valley of what-ifs: What if I made the wrong choice to walk away? What if singlehood turns out to be not a temporary choice but an enforced state? "My sister knows that I'm good for a call every couple of months just crying, 'What's wrong with me?'" says Henneberry. "I'm not willing to accept someone who's going to make me unhappy. But there are days when I have a physical need to go to sleep and wake up with someone there." Mary Mayotte, 49, has a successful bicoastal career as a public-speaking coach. But she admits the occasional pang of regret. "There was a point where I had men coming out of my ears," she says. "I don't think I was so nice to some of them. Every now and then I wonder if God is punishing me. Sometimes I look back and say, 'I wish I had made a different decision there.'"
Some feel women are on an impossible search for the perfect man, the one who not only makes you feel, as Julia Roberts said of meeting Benjamin Bratt, "hit in the head with a bat," but also better for it. "Marriage is not what it used to be, getting stability or economic help," says the National Marriage Project's Whitehead. "Marriage has become this spiritualized thing, with labels like 'best friend' and 'soul mate'" Some sociologists say these lofty standards make sense at a time when the high divorce rate hisses in the background like Darth Vader. But others suggest the marriage pendulum has swung from the hollowly pragmatic to an unhealthy romantic ideal.
Michael Broder, a Philadelphia psychotherapist and author of The Art of Living Single, decries what he calls the "perfect-person problem," in which women refuse to engage unless they're immediately taken with a man, failing to give a relationship a chance to develop. "Few women can't tell you about someone they turned down, and I'm not talking about some grotesque monster," he says. "But there's the idea that there has to be this great degree of passion to get involved, which isn't always functional. So you have people saying things like, 'If I can't have my soul mate, I'd rather be alone.' And after that, I say, 'Well, you got your second choice.'"
Single women are used to hearing this complaint, and most don't buy it. "Some in my family think I'm not stopping till I find perfection," says Henneberry. "I don't feel like that. I just want the one who makes me go, 'Finally.'" Harvard sociologist Carol Gilligan notes, "There's now a pressure to create relationships that both men and women want to be in, and that's great. This is revolutionary." Even Ellen Fein, co-author of the notorious 1996 dating guide The Rules, says her man-chasing disciples don't settle for just anyone. "Most of my clients have jobs; they can pay the rent; they can take themselves out to dinner," says Fein. "They want men to value them." Many women can tell the story of a friend or relative who looked at her and said, "If you really wanted to be married, you'd be married." The comment can sometimes slap like a wet towel, in part because it is true and in part because of its implicit message: You could have compromised, perhaps settled, and been among the married. And so, the logic follows, you have no one to blame but yourself.
But these women have fought for years to be themselves--self-reliant, successful, clever, funny, willful, spirited--and for all the angst that the single life can bring, they're not willing to give it up for any arrangement that would stifle them. "It would be great if I found a relationship that allowed me to be as I am and added something to that," says documentary producer Pam Wolfe, 33, sitting in her one-bedroom condo in New York City. "But I'm not going to do anything to attract a person that means changing. I've worked long and hard to be myself."
--With reporting by Tammerlin Drummond/New York, Elizabeth Kaufman/Nashville, Anne Moffett/Washington, Jacqueline Savaiano/Los Angeles and Maggie Sieger/Chicago