![]() 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. 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. It's complicated, messy terrain because not needing a man is not the same as not wanting one. Singlehood does not yield itself to a simple, blithe embrace. Women who have chosen the single life sometimes have their own qualms. ![]() "No one's telling college girls it's easier to have kids in your 20s than in your 30s." Marriage is no longer as attractive to men," she says. "Modern people approach marriage like it's a Bosnia-Serbia negotiation. 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. Not surprisingly, many conservatives are disturbed at this growing acceptance of singlehood and its implied rejection of marriage. They were in relationships that broke up, hit what they thought was catastrophe, only to find that they were O.K., and adopt an attitude that said, I'm fine, I don't need to be with anyone else." 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. "I had to get beyond that thinking in a lot of women's minds that aloneness is not O.K. "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. "At 28, I was terrified of the world," says Mary Lou Parsons, a Raleigh, N.C., professional fund raiser, recalling her 1980 divorce. ![]() Some women, of course, have learned from their own life. Their personal happiness is placed last, and their kids know they are miserable." Two friends aren't even sleeping in the same bedroom with their husband anymore. One has not got over her husband's affair. Twenty years later, they had outgrown each other. "Two of them got married when they were young. "They are all just existing in their marriages," she says. "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. All my relatives stayed in marriages that are really tough," says Pam Henneberry, 31, an accountant who lives in Manhattan. In many cases, women who choose the single life have looked at those around them and vowed not to make their mistakes.
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