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

started hanging out all the time, discovered they shared pop culture and fashion interests. Ann was a journalist, Amina a digital strategist; as a way to get to know each other, they started a pop culture blog, called “Instaboner,” that chronicled their literary, political, and stylistic obsessions. “We learned to speak the same language,” said Amina.
    â€œWe were instantly close,” agreed Ann, in a separate interview.
    Though their connection wasn’t sexual, the process of falling for each other was almost romantic. With Amina, Ann said, she found “the thing I always wanted but didn’t get from relationships with men: pushing me tobe better without seeming like they were constantly disappointed in me.” She very quickly began to rely on Amina for emotional support, personal advice, and professional counsel. “All these things people say they turn to a partner for, I turn to Amina for,” said Ann.
    Among the largely unacknowledged truths of female life is that women’s primary, foundational, formative relationships are as likely to be with each other as they are with the men we’ve been told since childhood are supposed to be the people who complete us.
    Female friendship has been the bedrock of women’s lives for as long as there have been women. In earlier eras, when there was less chance that a marriage, entered early, often for practical economic and social reasons, would provide emotional or intellectual succor, female friends offered intimate ballast.
    Now, when marriages may ideally offer far more in the way of soulful satisfaction but increasingly tend to begin later in life, if at all, women find themselves growing into themselves, shaping their identities, dreams and goals not necessarily in tandem with a man or within a traditional family structure, but instead alongside other women. Their friends.
    Aminatou Sow was born in Guinea. The daughter of a Muslim diplomat father, her mother one of the first women to get an engineering degree in Guinea, Amina grew up in Nigeria, Belgium, and France, and attended the University of Texas at Austin. She moved back to Belgium briefly after college, to care for her father and siblings after the sudden death of her mother, but soon returned to the United States for work, and, within nine months, received female genital mutilation asylum that enabled her to stay.
    Ann Friedman was raised in Eastern Iowa. Her parents are Catholic, and she went to the University of Missouri.
    â€œI grew up in this very international world,” said Amina. “Ann is a Midwestern girl. In lots of ways we’re so far apart. There are a lot of things about us that complement each other and a lot of things we don’t see eye to eye on.”
    Among the things they had in common was their interest in and commitment to personal independence.
    For Amina, whose parents were the first in their families to marryfor love and not as part of an arranged union, and whose grandfather had three wives and twenty-one children, living alone, unmarried, into her late twenties is an almost political statement. Singlehood, she said, simply “isn’t part of the world where I come. It is a thing that never, ever happens.” She is the first woman in her family to live alone, the first to make as much money as she does.
    Ann, who broke up with the boyfriend she’d brought to the Gossip Girl party several months after she and Amina became friends, has found enormous satisfaction in her adult singleness. In large part, she said, that’s because in the years she’s spent officially uncoupled, she’s found that friendships have become paramount. “There is not a romantic relationship or a sexual relationship with a man that has even come close in two years,” she said. Both women believe in what they call “chosen families.”
    â€œI don’t mean just on a feminist or academic level,” Ann clarified,