All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation by Rebecca Traister Page A

the City used shoes and closets and cocktails as material emblems of larger freedoms, I reveled in my own pricey symbolism; 450 square feet of unrenovated rental apartment.
    However, while I was conducting interviews for this book, journalist Jessica Bennet described to me one of her lasting memories of single urban despair: After having broken up with her long-term boyfriend, she recalled the sense of exhaustion, defeat, and loneliness she felt while trying to lug an air conditioner up four flights of stairs to her apartment. As she spoke, she provoked in me a very vivid memory:
    I’m standing outside a Lowe’s Hardware store, just four blocks from the new apartment—my very own apartment—into which I have recently moved and which I adore. It’s early summer, five-and-a-half years after my arrival in New York, and I have never felt so happy, so capable. But it’s so hot, over 100 degrees. And the air conditioner is so heavy. I can’t pick it up, let alone carry it home. I’m so happy, I tell myself. I’m so capable. But I’m so tired. And so lonely.
    Who’s going to help me? Not the city—this great city, with itsindependence and its friends and its spaces—the city is what got me into this mess. With its no cars and its sweltering pavement and its steep stoops and its array of similarly unmarried friends, who are wonderful but who also don’t have cars, and are, also, in the midst of this unexpected heat wave, wrestling their own air conditioners into windows and weeping with the hot, sweaty solitude of it.
    No, the only thing I want at that moment is a partner: not someone to do this for me, exactly, but to do it with me. I am twenty-seven years old and I want a goddamn husband.
    And, at almost exactly the moment that I think this, perhaps even utter it under my breath, a taxi driven by a woman—still a rarity in New York—drops off another Lowe’s customer. I look longingly at the car and the driver rolls down her window and asks if I want to get in. I don’t have cash. Do I have cash at home? She asks. Yes. This woman gets out of the cab, helps me lift the air conditioner into the trunk. When she pulls up at my apartment, my new landlord is there, smoking a cigarette on the stoop. He helps me the rest of the way.
    I scoot back out to pay the cabbie and thank her. “You looked stuck,” she says in an Eastern European accent. “Sometimes, you just need a lift.”
    Sex and the City got unlocked from HBO and began airing in syndication at around the same time that I moved into my own apartment. I never did watch the series all the way through, but enjoyed the episodes I’d land on. For a while, it seemed that I always flipped to the same one, about Fleet Week. It was a half hour that ended with Carrie riffing on Didion, opining that if “You only get one great love, New York may just be mine.”
    I loved that line. By the time I carved out my own space in the metropolis, I had come to agree with it.

CHAPTER FOUR
Dangerous as Lucifer Matches: The Friendships of Women
    In 2009, two women living in Washington, D.C., were invited to a Gossip Girl viewing party. Ann Friedman, then twenty-seven, arrived with a boyfriend; Aminatou Sow, then twenty-four, was wearing a homemade “Chuck + Blair” shirt, in reference to two of the show’s nubile protagonists. They noticed each other right away.
    Amina said she knew immediately that Ann—funny, tall, loquacious—was someone she wanted in her life. Even as they left the party that first night, she hoped that Ann and her then-beau would be walking in her direction; They weren’t. “I remember being really heartbroken,” Amina said. But when she got home, she discovered that Ann had already friended her on Facebook and knew then that they were “meant to be.”
    In a bit of social kismet, both women were invited to another event the very next day. They