I loved being single. I love being married. Do I owe anyone an apology?
Alex Cooper, me, and the people who feel betrayed when others change
When I started writing Happy Endings — this publication about the sex life of my marriage — some friends were surprised. A relationship blog is conceptually trad, and I fancied myself otherwise. For most of my life I’d advocated for breakups and lauded the joys of being single. I knew some people would call these positions contradictory. I wondered if my friends thought my pivot was hypocritical.
Thanks to The Cut’s comment section on this piece about Alex Cooper, host of Call Her Daddy, and her pregnancy, I don’t have to wonder. Plenty of people see a woman who celebrated slutty singledom opting into conventional motherhood, and they read it as betrayal. Cooper’s listeners (of which, full disclosure, I am not one) want her to apologize. To repent for leading them down a path she didn’t follow to its end. I find that insane. Let me explain.
If People Didn’t Change, Who Would We Be?
When I knew I was falling in love with my husband, Joe, I was scared. I thought I’d figured out myself, and love. I was comfortable as a relationship anarchist. I didn’t need commitment. I was 27.
The moment before I realized, I was standing at the Clapton Overground platform on my way to get drinks with Joe near London Fields. My boss called. The wind whipped my hair in my face as she said the team would love me to move to New York City. She remembers this call. She said I was aggressive. What I remember was an intense, overwhelming wave of confusion.
Logically, moving to New York for this job was exactly what I wanted. But leaving London meant leaving the person I was about to get pints with for the seventh Friday running. On the phone with my boss, I wasn’t ready to admit this to myself — that I, the woman who loved being single, wanted to do something monogamous. I was so emotionally constipated that instead of saying, “I’m so glad you’d like that, I’d like it too, but I need to think about timing,” I said something more like, “I thought you were fine with me being remote? Are you not fine with me being remote?”
I’ve found it’s common to see betrayal when really what you’re feeling is confusion. I wasn’t ready to admit I wanted something I thought I never would. I wasn’t ready to change. But clinging to what felt comfortable wasn’t who I was either. So a few weeks later, I told Joe I loved him.
One’s Relationship Status Doesn’t Negate Another’s
I loved being single. Being single rocked. As a single woman, I learned who I was. I learned to love myself, and after a lot of practice, I did it very well. So well that when I found someone worth sharing the limited resource of my time with, I discovered that loving myself and loving another person who loved me back was also — key word, also — a great thing.
Being single is no better than being in a relationship. They’re both great choices for different people, or for the same person in different seasons.
When I tell people that I loved being single, it says nothing about my marriage. When I write about how brilliant this relationship feels, it says nothing about how I once felt being single.
The trouble isn’t which relationship status one has, but the contentment one has with their relationship status — or, really, the contentment they have, period.
Your Relationship Status Says the Least About You
I started Happy Endings partially because I was stunned that a “modern feminist” could feel so satisfied inside a traditional system. I’d expected to find contentment difficult. What I found was the opposite: partnership lifted my life. I don’t want to convince anyone to follow my path, only to show it’s possible. The marriage wasn’t the point. It was the sex, the love, the joy, and the navigating of pain, together. Sluttiness isn’t relegated to singledom. Mothers can be whores, too.
At its bones, Happy Endings is me as my friends have always known me — oversharingly honest, slightly provocative, and a sap for love (of the self, and others). Even when I was in a codependent relationship that should’ve ended earlier. Even when I was in the midst of heartbreak and wishing I wasn’t single. Even when I embraced the solitude.
And when I hear Call Her Daddy acolytes annoyed at the host for “abandoning” everything she applauded, I hear myself on that Overground platform, talking to my boss.
No One Can Tell You Which Relationship Style is Best For You — Not Even Past You
When I’ve felt dissatisfied, I’ve been quicker to feel misled. It’s easier to blame than to make a change.
To deal with dissatisfaction, I’ve learned to investigate it. To look inward for what feels lacking, and find a way to give it to myself.
Sometimes that meant breaking up. Sometimes a therapist. Sometimes getting really obsessed with karaoke, or a haircut, or a new job working for an alternative to conventional porn. Sometimes it meant admitting I loved someone even if it wasn’t logical.
But like most moments that require self-reflection, these decisions (minus karaoke and the haircut) are fucking hard. Knowing what’s best for yourself isn’t quick or painless. It’s a never-ending, ever-unfolding process. It can feel like backsliding when you measure yourself against everyone around you, and it takes even longer when you’re pouring all of yourself into someone who might not be loving you well, because you don’t yet know what that looks like.
It’s far easier to keep doing what you’ve always done. Easier still to swap internal validation for external: to take your cues from someone who seems to have all the answers. A podcaster. A friend. Especially in a world that is increasingly challenging to thrive in.
So when that person makes the human, progressive decision to change, the people following her who are dissatisfied with their own lives feel hurt. The person who helped them outsource their self-acceptance stopped validating their choices. Choices that might be great for them, or not, but nobody but them will ever be able to say.
The last time I was annoyed by someone changing, I threw my own pity party — outside the comments section, thankfully — and then I looked in the mirror and asked myself what I actually needed. Then I forgave myself for not giving it to myself. I didn’t ask for anyone to apologize.
As I won’t be doing myself. My husband thinks I apologize too much as it is (I’m a Minnesotan!), and that piece of advice feels useful to me. And as for Cooper — she said, “Choosing motherhood in my 30s doesn’t erase the right to have enjoyed my 20s.” Who can argue with that?
I love that you love love, too. Thank you for reading, dear person. I will see you again on Monday. In the meantime, drop me a note — tell me your trajectory, or opinion, or perspective on unapologetic versus apologetic behavior:
Such great writing - love this.
Abigail, the Overground platform scene gives the essay its center because it catches change before the narrator has language dignified enough to admit it. The piece keeps returning to that pressure: people often experience another person’s evolution as betrayal when the real discomfort is that a borrowed certainty has stopped doing their inner work for them. Your strongest move is refusing to make singleness, marriage, motherhood, sluttiness, or partnership carry the burden of being a final ideology. Grateful for the wit, honesty, and self-interrogation you bring to the unfinished work of becoming someone who can change without apologizing for having once meant what she said.