Lonely Hunters and Broom Riders

Also: a cleaner

Some time in her early thirties, Aimee Lutkin found herself the only single person among couples at a dinner party in Brooklyn. After everyone updated everyone else on their romantic situation, it was Aimee’s turn to say if there was anything new in her life and if she was seeing anyone. “Well, I just think some people are bound to stay alone,” she said after the preliminaries. “I’m probably going to be alone forever, and I’m fine with that.” The usual cries of protests followed, and the “You’ll find someone for you when you least expect it!” and “There’s someone for everyone” etc. None of her friends, some happily coupled, some seeing people who are already in a relationship with someone else, seemed to share her view that there is nothing incomplete about the single person. It’s a value judgment incredibly hard to dislodge: two are better than one. 

In her own heart too, it turns out. After six years of not going on a single date while living a busy life of working in NYC online media and performing in an improv comedy troupe, Lutkin resolved to introduce some changes. She joined three dating apps and made it her goal to go to two dates every week - preferably with different people. Why? So she can get used to rejection, is how she explains it to herself, which is supposed to make her more resilient and less fearful to open herself to other people. Besides, a huge increase in the number of dates is going to increase, she reasons, the likelihood of meeting someone who is right for her. And sex, after such a long sexless spell, was not a small concern. 

I first came across Lutkin when she was a guest in Andrew G. Marshall’s psychology podcast, The Meaningful Life. This was some months after the book came out, and in that interview she talked about how and why she gave up on online dating completely and non-negotiably. (“Just like at the casino, the house always wins,” she said in that conversation. The goal of dating apps is for the users to keep using the dating apps, and not to find someone.) The book ends with her still selectively going on dating apps, so the change of mind must have taken place after the publication. Already in the book, she registers some recurring frustrations and bizarreries with online dating, but she presses on. The fact that you are a match does not mean you will start talking. The fact that you are talking does not mean that you will ever meet in person. Anyone who’s ever tried online dating will know there are a good number of people who are only interested in chatting. There’s another huge chunk of people who are already in a relationship. Two thirds in the book, Lutkin actually says something to the effect that most people on dating apps are already in a relationship and either have just recently opened it up (because unhappy; because bored; to change things up) or are, oh dear god, “polyamorous”. 

So we follow her on dates, voyeuristically and grateful that it was not us sitting with a new person every few days, having to get to know them and show your best self to boot. She dates men and women; with about two or three of them some stage of relationship potential is reached, only to collapse not long after; and she falls desperately in love with one guy. But you are not supposed to “catch emotions” in this world (of ours), and certainly not show to the other person first that you had; both keep it cool and as if they don’t care. 

The book is written with verve and a degree of humour, but ignore the end chapter which calls for a wholesale reform of American society and was clearly written during the AWokening Summer of 2020. Lutkin is at her best when she steps out of the specifics of a situation and takes a longer historical or sociological view. Coupledom of heart and the nuclear family, she reminds us, is a relatively recent default of human organization. There are some intriguing passages on the history of dating (family members arranging marriages for their offspring gets replaced in the upper classes by “gentlemen callers” visiting single women at their homes, under loose supervision of the family elders - which by the early twentieth century, again for certain classes likelier than for others, is followed by women and men meeting in public spaces, when “dating” proper begins to fledge). Coupledom becomes extremely important as other forms of attachment and connection are choked off. Including the amorous attachment between women friends (and men friends, I’m sure!).

The more people Lutkin sees, the less clear to me is the purpose of the exercise. And probably to her, too. To get used to rejection? But why? She herself says in one place that she is not sure the two years of intense dating (and the one falling in love) taught her anything more useful than how to date well. And is she looking for the Right One, actually, through all this? “Did I want to be in love with another person, or was that the clearest example of satisfaction, safety and validation I was familiar with?”

“I’m done dating online and I lack for nothing now”, Lutkin said in that podcast interview. We’ll see what her next book is going to be… Remember when Canadian writer Emily White published a book about loneliness (and how she’s always been “constitutionally lonely”) to great fanfares… and then got married? I’ve read somewhere I believe that she is back to being single but… beware of putting all your “brand eggs” in one basket, I suppose. 

While reading Lutkin, I remembered this Nancy Jo “Are you slut-shaming me” Sales interview that Danielle Crittenden did for her now-retired podcast Femsplainers that went viral. Sales wrote a very rancorous book about her experience with online dating but would not take any responsibility for the unsatisfactory outcome. Her settings on whatever app she was using apparently have been for young men around 20-something, and for “casual encounters” (not relationship). Of course you weren’t going to find a husband that way, you nutter. But she took exception to Crittenden coming close to implying it. Anyway, Lutkin is not like this – but she did give up the apps for her own mental health. 

There have been quite a few books, not all good, it’s now a publishing phenomenon to be tapped into, coming out about singlehood and online dating, mostly by women. I’ve lined up a few to read that cover something that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately–oh, for no reason whatsoever: women (but people in general too) reaching the third age without childcare obligations or without a partner, whether gay or straight. We live longer, never retire, have no-fault divorce, move around, keep reinventing ourselves - so it’s no wonder that the number of people who need to think through their third age and how they are going to live it is probably higher than ever in human history. I’ll call this, provisionally, the Annals of Spinsterhood. I include in that women who have had children who have grown up and moved away and are not present in their parents’ lives in any substantial way outside the Christmases and such occasions. (I’ve met a few women like that and I found I had things in common with them.) Should I include unpartnered, childless men in this? TBC. But not a lot of them are writing about that existential condition. 

So here’s another contribution: Mona Chollet’s In Defense of Witches (2018, English translation by Sophie R. Lewis 2022). The witches themselves only appear in the first and the last chapter: the book is about what the culture makes of older, childless women these days. In the beginning, Chollet gives a rundown of the history of the persecution of women in the western world who are past reproductive age and who live alone (but not always - a lot of married women have been burned too). While presumed to belong in the “dark ages”, the witch hysteria is an early modern phenomenon, fuelled by the invention of the printing press. (I won’t draw the obvious parallel with the emergence of the internet because it’s just too depressing.) There was some overlap with anti-Semitic persecution - witches were also presumed to have their “sabbaths” - and the campaigns got so intense in the late 1500s in some villages that all but one or two area women died at the stake. “Whereas previously the courts disallowed their testimony, European women only achieved the status of subject in their own right, in the eyes of the law, for the purpose of being accused, en masse, of witchcraft.”

The core of the book however is a weird collage of philosophy, history, American feminism, Hollywood films, French tabloids and TV, personal experience, and career grudges and gossip. This mix doesn’t quite hold together, and sweeping generalizations abound. The book was written around 2017, only two years after Trump's election and in the middle of the MeToo Harvey Weinstein investigation, so it’s a little too breathless. There’s even one section in which the author tries to strengthen her case for not having children by playing out the climate crisis scenarios, which is now a familiar genre of columnizing, oversupplied by self-important progressive navel-gazers. 

It’s also a book not a little obsessed with the US. Was it, somewhat cynically, written for the American translation? I’d like to think not, but is the Gloria Steinem - Betty Friedan difference (one cool, unmarried, childless by choice; other, argumentative middle class wife who worked out her own liberation through a more complicated process) so crucial for the history of womankind, or even for American feminism or even for Mona Chollet’s book? And is Uma Thurman talking about feeling disrespected during the filming of Kill Bill really such an epochal testimony? The book is at its best when it uses French sources and local and Continental European examples. French sociologist Erika Flahault in Une vie à soi, for instance, an inquiry into French women living alone, distinguishes between women en manque, “who feel something’s missing but put up with the situation”, women en marche, “who are learning to appreciate their situation”; and the apostates du conjugal - “women who have left marriage behind, who are deliberately organizing their lives, loves and friendships outside the framework of the couple.” There are a dozen French philosophers, sociologists, comedians, comediennes, authors who have grappled with the vie à la spinster that I was glad to learn about. Mother of them all, probably, de Beauvoir - whose memoirs are of course present in the book, but so are the attacks from her detractors (“you could have married Nelson Algren and have children with him, but no, you kept hanging out with Sartre” is one of them). 

It was good to be reminded of Thérèse Clerc too, the now late elder of the French women’s liberation movement and stuff she’s been up to in addition to founding La Maison de Babayagas, a sort of retirement kibbutz for older women in Montreuil, outside Paris. I’d also forgotten about the Beguines, women who have “given up both men and the Church” to live in a sort of secular order and do whatever the heck they want with their time, whether virtuous or creative. 

Chollet however skips her next-door neighbours the Britons completely; not a peep about them; you’d think the isles saw no feminism whatsoever. (There’s even more CanCon, thanks to a few Québècoises and Sarah Barmak’s Closer, than BritCon.) There’s no awareness either of the incel phenomenon - not even to mention that they took the name off an essay by an involuntary celibate woman - or the “Men going their own way” movement, or the uncomfortable fact that women are the most ardent foot soldiers of many cancellation campaigns today, against other women particularly. 

The concluding chapter on the female sex in the eyes of medicine and life sciences provides some excellent background, but occasionally veers into woo (alternative and holistic medicine really descended from the witches’ herbalist and healing arts, really?) and Chollet appears unaware that in the angloworld at least, the old gendered division of doctors-male, nurses-female doesn’t hold as much any more because women are dominating med schools and a certain number of branches of medicine already. But it’s true, the medical knowledge vs care division of labour still tends to gender itself into what men do and what women do in most of the rest of the world. Even in OB-GYN.  

And now for something completely different

David Mitchell with a relaxed Greg Davies

You don’t usually come to Long Play for TV recommendations, but I just watched the entire first season of Greg Davies’ Cleaner in two sittings (a BBC production, streams on Hoopla, BritBox and Amazon Prime). Davies plays a crime scene cleaner – very different from regular cleaner, he insists – who spends each of the 30 min episodes with a different person. In episode one, a middle class wife played by Helena Bonham Carter stabbed her husband an unnecessarily high number of times and disappeared. As Paul “Wicky” Wickstead gets going with the clean-up, she reappears and puts a gun to his head. She’d come to collect her stuff and clear out again, but also use her bathroom after two days hiding in the woods.

In episode two, Wicky spends his day with a narcissistic novelist (David Mitchell, excellent) who just wants some quiet in his own home while trying to meet a deadline. It’s his granny who was electrocuted in a gory manner (the deaths are not very believable but you don’t care) but he’s more worried about writer’s block and the book club groupies who keep coming to his door. In further episodes, all structured as first-conflict, then-hanging-out, he spends time with a woman in a wheelchair who’s a militant vegan, a YouTube star who wants to talk about the incident on his live-stream channel, and an old aristocratic lady in a country pile who fought back a burglary attempt. The best episode must be the final one of the S1, in which Wicky ends up in the home of his first “proper” girlfriend and memories of their relationship flood back. No, you ugly-cried during this episode. 

If you liked High Maintenance and Inside No. 9, you will like this too. Now I only have to find S2 and the Christmas Special somewhere…