I said to myself, the only place this horrific jealousy exists is inside of you. If you stop feeling it, it will disappear.

Didn’t she remember that being single is more than just following your whims – that it also means having nobody to help you make difficult decisions, or comfort you at the end of a bad week?

In 1896 the newspaperwoman Nellie Bly asked Susan B. Anthony if she’d ever been in love. Her answer: “Bless you, Nellie, I’ve been in love a thousand times! But I never loved any one so much that I thought it would last. In fact, I never felt I could give up my life of freedom to become a man’s housekeeper.

I was most alive when alone, negotiating odd encounters on the subway, surging along the sidewalk with a million faceless others. It was an expansive sensation, evasive, addictive. Each morning I rushed from the apartment to find it, as if late for an appointment.

She’d raised me in her image to be the one true friend she’d never had, and now neither of us would ever know the conversations we’d waited for all our lives.

At first I thought it was simply that the specter of the crazy bag lady has been branded so simply into the collective female consciousness that we’re stuck with her. Now I realized I was wrong. What is haunting about the bag lady is not only that she is left to wander the streets, cold and hungry, but that she’s living proof of what it means to not be loved. Her apparition will endure as long as women consider the love of a man the most supreme of all social validations.

Those of us who’ve bypassed the exits for marriage and children tend to motor through our thirties like unlicensed drivers, unauthorized grownups.

We need much better and many more models. We need movies where women are attractive and interesting and have great lives and may not be married.” She cautioned that conjuring possible selves on our own isn’t enough – institutional support is also necessary. “Schools, workplaces, laws, norms, the media – they all need to make it clear that there are other ways to be a woman or a member of one minority group or another.

It inspired me to diversify my portfolio of attachments, so to speak, partly so I wouldn’t overwhelm any one person with the fire hose of my ‘undelivered discourse,’ but also to protect myself from leaning to heavily on a buttress that couldn’t and shouldn’t sustain my full weight.

If a woman liked to play with words and set them in patterns and make pictures with them, and was taking care of herself and bothering nobody, and enjoyed her life without a lot of bawling children around, why shouldn’t she?