No one is an island but...

One of the many nice things about visiting my parents is that they still subscribe to an actual, physical newspaper. So every morning, I come downstairs and read the paper at the kitchen table while drinking my coffee, usually with my mom. At home, I read the paper online and I usually just skim the news headlines, only clicking on the full articles that look the most interesting; with the physical paper, I read almost all the sections, including columns and features like Dear Abby (who is really the most incredibly judgmental woman!). I'm not sure why I enjoy it so much but I do.

Anyway, this morning, the San Jose Mercury had a front-page story about a group of elderly Silicon Valley residents, and how they are embracing 'old age'. Much about their stories is inspiring and certainly makes me feel like I've got no excuse at all to be as much of a sloth as I am. But the main reason I'm sharing this here is because there's one section in particular about how many seniors are 'going it alone':

As much as she has missed her husband since he died, Connolly has fully embraced independent living. "I was always taking care of people," she says. "My husband was the absent-minded professor. There were very few times in my life when I just had to think about me, and now I've gotten used to that and it's kind of nice. I can enjoy doing what I want to do without even considering another person. And I'm fine with that."

Her four grown children sometimes are able to show up around the holidays, and sometimes they aren't. "My kids live in four different time zones, and my daughter who lives in San Francisco might as well live in Hawaii because she's so busy," Connolly says. "You can't count on your kids for company or companionship. They have their lives, so I don't depend on them. You need people your own age you can be with."

The next time someone asks you why you don't have kids and alludes to kids taking care of you when you're older, show them this! There was also something that made me think about how the happily-single community seems to focus more on women than men:

So far, that has not involved pairing off with any of the Saratoga center's male residents, who are in such scarce supply they are prized as companions. "It's harder for single women than single men because we haven't been brought up to be that bold and aggressive," Connolly says. "I've found some very nice women friends here that I can do most things with. I can't go dancing anymore, but you can't do everything."

Connolly actually has plenty of company in her solitude. According to a Census Bureau survey in 2003, three-quarters of the Americans 65 or older and living alone were women. Men, however, seek a significant other. At 85 and older, more than half the men were still living with a spouse — frequently not their first one — while only one-eighth of the women had a husband.

The reality is that even if you're in a great relationship, with a wonderful partner, kids, etc., it's important to be OK with being on your own as well, because you never know what's going to happen and where you'll end up in the future. The only guarantee we really have is that the one person you will ALWAYS have for support is YOU.

Will you still love me in the ER?

Jezebel had a great post about a story on another site (that honestly, I don't feel like linking to because it's so stupid I don't really want to be a source of any traffic to it) that dealt with a woman who had basically been abandoned by two so-called friends. In a nutshell, the woman thinks she was drugged at a club, ended up in an emergency room, and the friends she had been with at the club almost couldn't be bothered to pick her up from the hospital. The response in the post-I-don't-want-to-link-to was that she shouldn't have expected them to! That sure, you can expect that of a significant other, but not friends (see the Jezebel post for the relevant quotes). WTF?

When I read this, the first thing I thought of was an incident three years ago when one of my best friends got food poisoning and needed to go to the ER because he'd been throwing up for several hours. Ironically (in the context of 'this is only a job for significant others'), his wife was out of town and SHE was the one who called me at 1 in the morning to ask me to take him to the hospital. I have no doubt that if our situations were reversed, either one of them would not hesitate to do the same for me. Would I call my boyfriend first? Probably. But anyone who thinks that being in a relationship is a guarantee that someone will always be there at 1 in the morning so you don't need other friends, is sadly deluded.

The second thing I thought when I read the Jezebel piece was that no one in their right mind would call these people friends but worse, they don't even sound like very decent human beings. Forget boyfriends, best friends, family, or whatever other relationships you might call on first - when push comes to shove, I think a truly decent human being will help another human being in need. OK, maybe I wouldn't call some random stranger to pick me up at the hospital at 1 in the morning, but I can imagine a scenario where every person I would normally call was, for some reason, unavailable and I might call someone much further down on my acquaintance list. Maybe I'm being too pollyanna but I honestly think that most of the people that I associate with in any dimension would be willing to come. They might be bewildered why I was calling them and they might not be excited about it but I can't imagine someone flat out saying "No, I just won't." Is that naive? Would you help someone out who asked, even if they were not someone you considered a close friend?

Managing social media and multiple personalities

Problogger's 'social media love-in' has me thinking once again about what exactly I'm doing with all this social media stuff. I have a Twitter account, and I'm on del.icio.us, StumbleUpon and Facebook but I'm not very active on any of them. This is partly because I don't know very many other people who are actively using any of these sites, other than a couple who use Facebook a lot (among my friends, I'm definitely an early adopter). I also worry about what a huge time suck it could become if I actually started spending time finding new people to interact with. But mostly, I think it's that I'm simply not sure how to use these sites effectively to engage with people. That is, I just don't really get it - how does sharing my bookmarks or 160-character blurbs lead to real connection? In contrast, one of the things I love about blogging is that I feel like I can have conversations with people.

Still, I went ahead and added my info to Problogger's love-in*, figuring that maybe if I got to know more people who are on these sites, I could figure out what the appeal is and how to use social media more effectively. At the very least, I figured maybe I could get people to visit my blogs, which I feed through Twitter. But that raised a separate issue for me that I've been struggling with: how to manage my different 'identities'. I have two blogs, this one (obviously) and another that is closely related to my job as an economics professor, where I blog about teaching and economics. When I comment on other peoples' blogs, I usually identify myself with whichever blog fits the context. There isn't much overlap in the audiences for the two blogs and I actually have them set up under two different usernames, because I don't necessarily want my students to be reading my personal blog (I don't think it's a huge issue if they find it, I just don't really want to make it particularly obvious or easy for them).

But on my social media accounts, everything is jumbled together. My Twitter followers see my feeds from both blogs, my Facebook profile (which is the one account where I actually connect with my 'real world' friends) has a bunch of stuff that I don't necessarily want random other people seeing, and my Del.ici.ous account has all my bookmarks. Maybe it isn't that big an issue because people will use tags to find what they want and/or just skip over all the stuff that they find irrevelant. But does anyone else try to keep various aspects of their lives separate, even if those different aspects are all out in the Web somewhere? Any advice for a social media newbie?

* by the way, I don't make money off my blogging, I just really like reading Problogger for ideas about being a better blogger in general.

Friendships with parents

It’s a bit of a cliché that parents, particularly new parents, can’t talk about anything but their kids. I feel truly fortunate that my closest friends all seem to recognize this and they make an effort not to fit the stereotype. On more than one occasion, someone has said to me, “OK, I’ve talked enough about the baby, tell me what’s going on with you.” Of course, part of the reason I'm friends with these people is precisely because they are the sort who would say this type of thing and ironically, that also means these are the people I'm most willing to listen to go on and on about their kids (or, if they really are going overboard, that I'm most comfortable telling them straight out that I'd like to change the subject).

But recently, it also occurred to me that there is a big difference between my friends talking about their kid, and them talking about being a parent. To be honest, I’ve only got so much patience for the former because, in many cases, I don’t actually know the kid very well and who wants to hear endless stories about someone they don’t know? It’s not like the stories most parents tell about their kids are all that interesting in their own right (unless, of course, you’re Bill Cosby). But I realized that when my friends talk more about what it’s like for them to be a parent – how they’re coping with the new schedule, whether she wants to go back to work full-time or not, how relieved he is that the kid isn’t a screamer – that means I’m actually finding out more about them.

I should say that, contrary to the common stereotype of women who choose not to have kids, I do actually like kids (I don't think I'm very good with them but that's sort of a different issue). So I may have a higher tolerance for kid-related talk than most single, child-free women. But even if I didn't like kids, I'd like to think that I'd still be interested in talking to my friends about what is going on in their lives. After all, I have certainly not liked some of the people my friends have chosen to date and I've still been willing to listen to them go on and on about those relationships for hours. But I think the key is focusing on my friends, encouraging them to talk about themselves, which will naturally include a lot of talk about being a parent, but doesn't necessarily have to be just about their kid.

Related posts:
Baby boom

Community for the Single Woman

I've mentioned before that many single women actually enjoy larger and stronger communities than many coupled people and I know that for me, building a strong community is a conscious priority. But I admit that I have also sometimes lamented that doing so requires such a concerted effort; somewhere in my brain, I think couples must have it easier because they don't have to do anything, they have an automatic support system, even if it is only a community of two. Of course, I know that good relationships take effort too, though it's a different type of effort. At any rate, I have often wondered if other singles also struggle with this, with finding the energy to deepen relationships and build stronger ties with people, absent a romantic relationship, or if it's just me. So I found it particularly interesting to read a recent Blogher post asking are academics the loneliest professionals? since part of my 'is it just me' wondering has included wondering if it has something to do with my profession. Academics spend a lot of time alone - even if you have co-authors on papers, much of the actual research and writing is done on your own, and even if you are at a large university, there may be few opportunities to interact with colleagues outside your own department. I have often listened to my non-academic friends talk about their interactions and social outings with co-workers and been a bit envious. On the other hand, I've also listened to their stories about bosses or co-workers from hell and been exceedingly grateful for my job so I do understand that it cuts both ways! But I do wonder if it is easier for people in other occupations to find lasting friendships through work. Anyone care to enlighten me?

Single people live in the village too...

Someone asked me what National Foster Care Month has to do with being single and other people’s kids, other than the fact that foster kids are obviously OPKs. I guess I can see why that would be confusing since most people don’t think about singledom and kids in the same train of thought. But as I mentioned in a previous post, the fact that I don’t want kids of my own doesn’t mean I don’t like kids. I’ll admit I’m not all that great with little kids (for that matter, I’m not great with anyone, of any age, that isn’t capable of being particularly rational), but one of the reasons I love my job as a professor is that I get to constantly interact with young people. Given that I don’t want kids of my own but I do like being around young people, I have often thought that doing some sort of volunteer work with kids would be a good way to achieve that. So my train of thought was something like, “I don’t want kids of my own but I like being around young people sometimes. All my friends have kids and I’m looking forward to being a part of those kids’ lives but aren’t there other kids out there that would benefit from having someone like me around once in a while? Hey, there’s an ad about it being National Foster Care Month – I should look into that…”

I’m apparently not particularly unusual in this thinking. Kay Trimberger points out that many happily single women have strong relationships with younger people; indeed, single people tend to enjoy larger and stronger communities in general than coupled people. That certainly makes intuitive sense to me though the economist in me starts wondering how much causation there is, and which direction it really goes. That is, is it being happily single that leads women to build strong communities (i.e., women who have no intention of settling may go out and build strong communities to ensure they still have a support system they can rely upon)? Or is that have a strong community makes women happier about being single (i.e., women who happen to have strong communities are less likely to feel the void of being alone)? Or is it that happy women with strong communities are less likely to settle for a less-than-stellar partner and so remain single? The explanation is probably some mix of all of the above, and different for every woman who fits this particular mold…