Eck (2013) - Identity Twists and Turns: How Never-Married Men Make Sense of An Unanticipated Identity

Journal of Contemporary
Ethnography
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Identity Twists and Turns: How Never-Married Men Make Sense of an

Unanticipated Identity
Beth A. Eck
Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 2013 42: 31 originally published online 2
September 2012
DOI: 10.1177/0891241612457045
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Identity Twists and

Turns: How NeverMarried Men Make
Sense of an
Unanticipated Identity
Journal of Contemporary Ethnography

42(1) 3163
The Author(s) 2013
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DOI: 10.1177/0891241612457045
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Beth A. Eck1
Abstract
Marriage rates in the United States are declining, but being married remains a
potent status marker. In this article, I examine how white, middle-aged, nevermarried men understand their unmarried status. An analysis of face-to-face
interviews reveals that most men in this study use the discourses of self-help,
loves labor, and individual choice to construct narratives that help to explain
how they are on the path to marriage, or alternately, how remaining single
might represent the best future for them. Findings reveal an instance of a
more generic process I call the identity turn which describes the transition
from one understanding of self to another. Significantly, three men in this study
did no identity work around the institution of marriage; thus they required no
identity turn. They may represent the vanguard of singles who can lay claim
to an identity outside of the married ideal. They rely on the language of selfsufficiency and independence in constructing understandings of self.
Keywords
men, marriage, single, identity turn, narrative
James Madison University, Harrisonburg,VA, USA
Corresponding Author:
Beth A. Eck, James Madison University, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, MSC 7501,
Harrisonburg,VA 22903, USA.
Email: eckba@jmu.edu
32
Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 42(1)
Fewer Americans than ever are married (51 percent, Pew Research Center,
December 14, 2011). This decline highlights a cultural shift in how people organize their adult lives. Sex, cohabitation, and procreation can and do reside outside
of marriage, making marriage seem optional. Indeed, young people today do
not believe that getting married is necessarily better than remaining single
(Thorton and Young-DeMarco 2001). A Pew Research Center report (November 18, 2011) found that four in ten Americans believe marriage is becoming
obsolete, and a recent survey of Singles in America, conducted through
the dating website Match.com, pronounced Only 1 in 3 Americans Wants to
Get Married (Levy 2012). As early as 1992, Giddens (1992, 154) surmised
that marriage was just one lifestyle among many.
Given the declining rates of marriage, and the ambivalence attached to
them, it is curious that so little attention has been paid to those who do not
marry. Perhaps the reason this population is underexplored is because, despite
the evidence above, being married remains a potent status marker, and getting
married is highly regarded (DePaulo and Morris 2005; Geller 2001). Marriage
affords legal privilege and material reward, and is more highly valued in the
United States than in other industrialized nations (Cherlin 2004). Cherlin
(2004) argues that as the practical importance of marriage has declined, its
symbolic importance has risen. Being married is now an achievement that caps
other milestones of adulthood as opposed to precipitating them. Cherlins
(2004) claim is bolstered by data from Thorton and Young-DeMarco (2001,
1030), who note that young Americans in the 1990s were more committed to
the importance of a good marriage and family life than they were in the
1970s, and young men, especially, more strongly prefer and expect marriage
than they did three decades earlier. In addition, the same Pew Research Center
report cited above found that 61 percent of all never-married Americans hope
to marry. Thus, despite the low rates of marriage in the United States, evidence suggests that it remains an important social institution.
Being married is an especially important identity for those who are
white, middle class, and college educated. White, middle-class Americans
have higher marriage rates than their less economically advantaged counterparts (Pew Research Center, November 18, 2011). Because middle-class
whites are more likely to marry, there is also more expectation that they do
popular culture not only romances heterosexuality, but white weddings
in particular (Ingraham 2008). Furthermore, those who believe that marriage
is becoming obsolete are more likely to be under twenty-nine years of age,
nonwhite, and noncollege educated (Pew Research Center, November 18,
2011). Thus, some groups may have an easier time than others believing that
marriage is just one lifestyle among many.
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Eck
This article examines how fourteen middle-aged, white, never-married

men understand their unmarried status. In doing this work, they construct
narratives that help them to make sense of an identity they had not fully anticipated. Most of the men in the research presented here confront the potential loss
of the joint and linked identity of husband and father by either shoring up the
reasons they will marry or relaying why it may be best if they do not. In doing
so, they rely on discourses of love, self-help, and choice. This research reveals
an instance of a more generic process that I am calling an identity turn, a turn
that is negotiated when people confront unanticipated identities. Though we
carry our identities with us, people most frequently become conscious of
[them] in moments of transition (Vinitzky-Seroussi 1998, 3). For adult men,
this transition takes more than a moment; it is not a turning point (Strauss
1959), as the movement from one status to another is not demarcated by
events, ceremonies, or biological imperatives that indicate a milestone has
been reached. There is no one event that represents the moment when one
begins to shift his concept of self. Yet, through their stories we sense a turning
of the wheel, a shift in navigation. When one is making an identity turn, one is
looking ahead from the position one is in and anticipating a change in course.
The turn may be calibrated to reach a specific destinationthis is the case of
men making the turn toward married. While other turns involve channeling
attention elsewhere, on a destination they did not anticipate but believe is
worth exploringthis is the case when men experiment with making a turn
away from marriage. Significantly, three men in this study did no identity
work around the institution of marriage. They may represent the vanguard of
singles who can lay claim to an identity outside of the married ideal. They
rely on the language of self-sufficiency and independence in their identity
work. Using the narratives of never-married men, I show how these various
cultural discourses are put to use in the construction of an adult identity
around or against the institution of marriage.
This research serves as an important addition to the existing literature on
singles. While the research on single mothers is robust (Collins and Mayer
2010; Edin and Kefalas 2007; Hays 2004), the existing literature on childfree
singles is scant. The work of DePaulo (2006) and DePaulo and Morris (2005),
who examine how single men and women experience their lives in the face of
a cultural narrative that suggests they are deficient, serves as one exception.
Another is the focused attention given to single women (Dalton 1992; Davies
2003; Gordon 1994; Reynolds and Wetherell 2003; Sharp and Ganong 2007,
2011; Simon 1987; Trimberger 2006) and how their understandings of self
are shaped by the gendered expectations of wife and mother that they, and
others, have for them. Never-married adult men have not received the same
34
attention. They tend to surface as the comparative case when discussing the
advantages of marriage (Marks 1996; Nock 1998; Waite and Gallagher 2000).
Throughout this article, I use the terms never-married and single
interchangeably. Never-married is the term used on most government forms
and employment applications where one is required to designate ones marital
statusa request that further reproduces the institution of heterosexuality
and heteronormativity in general (Ingraham 2008). Though the term nevermarried is problematic in significant ways, I use it here to highlight that
although marriage may be on the decline, it remains the default category for
the white middle class. Significantly, being never-married also accurately
represents the men in this study who still want to get married as well as those
who see their identities linked to marriage even as they begin to choose
single. Thus, for the men in this study, never-married is a more accurate
designator than ever-single. Given the increasing numbers of never-married
individuals in the population, this exploratory research hopes to serve as a corrective as we more deeply explore our changing social worlds.
Single Identities, Single Stories

DePaulo argues that unmarried adults face a form of discrimination she terms
singlism (2006). The working assumption is that if one is not married then
there must be something wrong with them. To wit, DePaulo and Morris
(2005, 62) find that when college students and adults are surveyed, couples
are rated better than singles in terms of being happier, more secure, more
emotionally close to others. Married people are also believed to be more
socially mature (less lonely, shy, fearful of rejection, and immature).
Moreover, DePaulo and Morris (2005, 62) find evidence that adults grow
into the stigma of being single. When targets were described as 40 years old
(compared to when they were described as 25), the singles were perceived as
even more socially immature and maladjusted than the married targets.
These views are often shared by the never-married themselves. Klinenberg
(2012, 65) notes that in his interviews with people who live alone and are
never-married that when men and women approach forty they begin questioning why they havent coupled yet, and whether they would be happier if they
did. Geller (2001, 17) describes how the marriage mystique is especially
engrained in women; at every turn they are asked to link the ideas that wedlock is their central project and marital commitment is a precious commodity
to be reified and guarded. Thus, while DePaulo (2006, 5) argues that all
singles have to confront stigma, existing prejudices remain in place, with
single men facing less stigma than single women.
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A number of researchers have explored the prejudices single women confront and note the ways in which gendered expectations of women to assume
the roles of wife and mother are felt keenly (Dalton 1992; Lewis and Moon
1997; Reynolds and Wetherell 2003; Sharp and Ganong 2007). For example,
with singlism and the Standard North American Family ideology (SNAF) as a
backdrop, Sharp and Ganong (2011, 956) argue that the single women they
interviewed feel both highly visible when their status is pointed out and invisible when people do not understand how they actually live their lives. Women
are aware of the changing realities as they get older (who they can marry at this
point, pregnancy risks), are reminded that they are on a different path through
inquiries and triggers (e.g., weddings; siblings getting married and having
children), and are displaced in their family of origin (parents not believing they
would ever get married or just giving up). In earlier work, Sharp and Ganong
(2007) demonstrate how delaying marriage allows single women to question
whether or not marriage is right for them, to control the parts of their lives they
can, and to emphasize the positives of being single. Even so, Lewis and Moon
(1997, 115) indicate that single women may have unresolved ambivalences
about being single, that even when content, they still experience feelings of loss
and grief. These feelings, Lewis and Moon (1997) note, can be difficult to reconcile to self and others. As Reynolds and Wetherell (2003, 507) note, women
lack a definitive and valorized way of understanding their single selves, as too
much focus on the positives makes considering marriage difficult, while any
talk of desire for a nonsingle life suggests to others that they are not really
happythey risk being seen as deficient and desperate, and marked by their
failure to find a man. Thus, Reynolds (2008, 3) concludes that single women
experience a troubled identity as they navigate the extremes of feeling denigrated and empowered.
While the specific cultural roles that men and women achieve through
marriage are different and thus the form of stigma they may experience will
vary, both genders must find a way to transition into new understandings of
self if they thought of themselves as eventually married. In an investigation
of Canadian singles, Davies (2003) explored the similarities in these transitions. Relying on early work on singles by Stein (1981), Davies (2003, 349)
finds the middle-aged, middle-class white men and women she interviewed
are moving from a state of temporary voluntary singlehood to a state of
involuntary stable singlehood. These never-married adults now prioritize
intimacy over a marital relationship, relying on their knowledge of bad relationships to buttress their new status and taking comfort in the fact that they
are often not lonely and have plenty of friends to comfort them when they are
(also see Klinenberg 2012). Davies (2003, 351) notes, The transition to
36
singlehood is an unanticipated change in social identity that is associated

with aging and must be negotiated within a marriage-oriented cultural
context.
Constructing a coherent view of the self may be a particularly salient feature of middle age as midlife is the time people integrate the competing
images of who they are and construct a mature identity (McAdams 1993).
Though we cannot choose who our parents are or the conditions under which
we were raised, McAdams (1993, 92) asserts, maturity demands the acceptance and meaningful organization of past events. He further suggests that in
this organization of self, there is a tension in identity commitment . . .
between the individuals needs and proclivities on the one hand and the
demands of society on the other (McAdams 1993, 94). McAdams posits that
construction of an adult identity requires that one be true to self and to ones
time and place. Thus, it is quite plausible that given the cultural and political
changes in our environmentincluding changes in social rules, practices,
and institutionseven the mature identity that we narrate will shift as the
landscape and the embedded relationships therein change as well (Somers
1994). A self-story that we tell in one place and time may represent one organization of past events but change again as changing social conditions require
or allow another organization of those same events. This shifting understanding of even our mature self seems inevitable if our lives are to make sense
to ourselves and others in any given moment.
Talking through the Turn

The identity turn the men in this study are making, focused or exploratory,
involves reflecting on ones past life, understanding how one has gotten to
this point, and then anticipating a future self by putting ones current practices in a framework that helps to explain how one is making the turn and
why it makes sense. It is a turn that signifies becoming, a turn that anticipates a future self that one can see down the road. Unlike the turning point
Strauss (1959) illuminates, this turn does not necessarily involve a change
in relations with others as much as it requires a change in relations with
ones self. Surely, others have a part to play in this new construction, but the
real work lies within each man to understand who he is now and who he
might be in the future based on where/who he has been and the certainty of
his destination. In the future, if men marry, they will experience a turning
point from one status to another; but for now, like the men who are thinking
about turning away from marriage, the turn is in process.
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As they make this identity turn, men rely on narratives of self that are
culturally resonant. Few of the men I interviewed presented a linear a to b to
c story. Rather, their discussions and descriptions of different life events and
answers to questions about family, friends, relationships, and their futures
demonstrate their own evolving understanding of themselves as they weave
together their past, present, and future (Irvine 2000; McAdams 1993). In this
process, middle-aged never-married men in this study appear to draw on
three popular and interrelated cultural discourses; these public narratives
connect to cultural and institutional formations larger than the single individual (Somers 1994, 619). Following Reynolds (2008, 12), I demonstrate
how these public stories or (2008, 48) interpretive repertoires can be
used as a resource for understanding ones own experiences.
One public narrative these men rely on is the culture of love discourse
outlined by Swidler (2001), which includes seemingly oppositional beliefs
that (1) day-to-day marriage is hard work (see also Kipnis 2003), so one
must be practical in choosing whom to marry, but (2) if an individual marries
the one s/he will live happily ever after fulfilling a romantic ideal.
Swidler (2001) identifies this as the tension between real love and mythic
love. While the latter encourages us in our quest for romance, it is tempered
by the understanding that real love is hard work, that no one is perfect, and if
one has real love then the strength and length of the marriage will be the
measure. This idea of love influences the married and not-married alike, asking of every relationship if it can meet this test. Thus, stories we tell about
marrying or not rely on shared knowledge that relationships are hard.
Part of doing the hard work of marriage is doing some work on the self.
The second interrelated discourse that men rely on involves the language of
self-help that arises from the postmodern preoccupation with the self
(Lasch 1979). In her analysis of this ethos, Rimke (2000, 62) states that it is
based upon notions such as choice, autonomy and freedom [;] self-help
relies upon the principle of individuality and entails self-modification and
improvement. Part of the self-help discourse is the therapeutic attitude
(Bellah et al. 1985). This attitude is characterized by the individual finding
and asserting his or her true self because this self is the only source of genuine relationships to other people. . . . Only by knowing and ultimately accepting ones self can one enter into valid relationships with other people (Bellah
et al. 1985, 98). One need not go through formal therapy to be familiar with
this discourse; it is virtually taken for granted that discovering ones feelings
allows one to get closer to others (Bellah et al. 1985, 99). Part of working
ones way toward marriage is working ones way toward self-understanding.
38
For some men in this study there is often an explicit appeal to feelings or the
psychological, but for others this language is more like Strauss (1959)
concept of stock takingassessing where they are now and what they need
to do to be somewhere else. Both kinds of accounts rely on some form of selfhelp discourse. If one knows oneself well, one will more readily be able to
assess the compatibility of a marriage partner. This kind of self-help work
may be aided by living alone, as all but one of the men in this study do. As
Klinenberg notes (2012, 18), living alone helps us discover who we are as
well as what gives us meaning and purpose.
The third discourse is the language of individual choice and it is inherent in
and bound to these other public narratives. One chooses whether or not he is
ready to do the hard work of marriage; one way he determines that is by
assessing the work he has done on himself to become ready. Ultimately, people must take responsibility for deciding what they want and finding relationships that will meet their needs (Bellah et al. 1985, 108). This discourse relies
on the belief that individuals are deliberate and conscientious decision makers.
This kind of individualism is built into the language of self-help when people
believe they can exercise control and mastery of themselves and their lives
(Rimke 2000, 62). Both explicit and implicit elements of this discourse were
evident throughout all of the interviewsby both the men who were making
an identity turn in relation to marriage and the three who were not.
Data and Methods

The larger research project from which the following analysis is derived
involves divorced men as well, but it is the never-married male that remains
a curiosity and often occupies a deficit identity (Reynolds and Taylor
2004). Here I discuss only the never-married. I secured the approval of my
universitys IRB to conduct the face-to-face interviews for this project; most
took place in the fall of 2004 and spring of 2005. The average length of the
interviews was two hours. In 2008, I successfully filed an addendum on my
initial IRB protocol to conduct follow-up interviews with the initial subjects.
Seven of these were conducted with never-married men. In those interviews,
I revisited issues we had discussed four years prior and used the opportunity
to explore features of the first set of interviews that I found interesting.1 In
all interviews, men were assured that their names as well as other identifying
information would be changed in any resulting presentation of my research.
That promise of confidentiality has been kept here.
At the initial interview, twelve of the never-married men were in their forties, one was in his fifties, and one was sixty. The sample is unintentionally
39
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skewed in favor of higher education, and among the never-married men all
but one had completed college; eight have a postgraduate degree. A snowball
sampling technique was employed, the intent of which was to get further and
further out from my core contacts. As a well-educated woman, my initial
contacts were similarly situated, as were the men they referred.
The semistructured interview consists of more than fifty questions about
family life, work, sex, mental and physical health, lifestyle, and the stereotypes, perceptions, and consequences of being single men. The follow-up interview guide in 2008 covers much of the same ground but also asks men whether
or not the initial interview had changed how they thought about their single
status and if today they are able to see models for adult single living around them
or in popular culture. The never-married men I discuss in this paper reside in the
mid-Atlantic region of the United States. They are from a small agriculturally
based city of forty-one thousand, a larger college community of ninety-one
thousand, and a large Eastern city of a half-a-million people.2
Potential interviewees were told that they were participating in a study
about the lives of single men in midlife. When we met face-to-face for the
interview, I began the interview by introducing the research topic. During this
introduction, I told the men that little is known about single men and that they
are generally only referenced in the scholarly literature as a comparison point
to married men. As a single woman myself, and as a sociologist who teaches
a Families course, I told them I was interested in singles in general, but
particularly men because less examination of their lives has been conducted
than on single women. Thus, from the beginning, the men I interviewed knew
that I had never been married. Together, my research subject and I occupied
a categorysingle person. The accounting of their lives these men gave me
may be formal, as it was contained within an interview situation, but it was
also intimate. As a middle-aged single person, the author was seen as a sympathetic other (Goffman 1963) who had the potential for understanding.
Thus, though I did not project responses onto my respondents, they may
have believed that they were talking to an empathetic hearer/listener. They
would be right.
Unlike alumni attending their high school reunions (Vinitzky-Seroussi
1998), the interview itself did not represent the same kind of autobiographical occasion. Meeting these men for the first time, I did not know their back
stories as I might if we were former classmates looking to confirm or redefine the views we had of each other. Thus what I know about the past lives of
these men is what they chose to share with me; how they used that to construct their present understandings of self was circumscribed by the interview
process. Following Reissman (2000), I acknowledge that I helped to shape
40
the story these men shared by the questions I asked (or did not), the order in
which I asked them, and whether or not I chose to follow-up on particular
threads or statements. Analysts work with fragments; this is especially the
case when stories are drawn from a semistructured interview guide. Because
men knew that in general I was exploring the lives of single men and how
they live, that I was unmarried myself, and because single men throughout
the interview acknowledged the stigma against them (i.e., that they are pathological in some way), their answers to even the most general questions may
have been framed in such a way to tell me something about their own understandings of how and why they are single (Ochs and Capps 2001).
In order to try and understand the degree to which a female interviewer
might be handicapped (or advantaged), I employed the help of a male research
assistant who conducted three of the initial interviews. My readings of those
transcripts do not suggest subjects were more open with him than they
were with me. In fact, three of my subjects told me that I now know more
about them than anyone else.3 Others made like statements.
All interviews were digitally recorded, transcribed, and then analyzed by
the author through the process known as open coding. At first, transcripts
were coded in a way that simply reflected my desire to know how men
thought about and organized their lives (e.g., family and work), but as
my analysis continued, I became more interested in how men might be what
I loosely referred to as socialized into singlehood. Thus, transcripts were
read and reread with an eye toward how these men constructed their identities
as single men. Various narrative themes emergedmen frequently used the
cultural discourses of love and self-help to explain how they thought about
themselves as becoming single adult men. This revealed how men were using
those same discourses to make the identity turn to marriage. Sometimes,
these discourses were used in talking about their views of self as successful
(or not), stigmatized (or not), and so on. Thus, the goal was to identify concepts that fit the data (Glaser and Strauss 1967; Strauss 1987). I was able to
look at how men spoke to various themes in different and similar ways. Along
the way I devised coding memos and submemos to help organize the data.
In this article, subject names and identifying information have been changed.
Being Married and Understandings of Self

Most of the men in this sample were either making the identity turn to
married (four men) or single (seven men) using similar language to reach
different conclusions. All but one of these men used the culture of love
discourse in articulating these processes; eight of them used the language of
41
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self-help, including the therapeutic discourse. All of them implicitly or

explicitly used the language of individual choice. In order to illustrate how
men make the identity turn to married, I focus on one narrative and highlight excerpts from another. To illustrate how men make the identity turn to
single, I present two narratives that highlight the varying degrees of work
and emotion it takes to identify as a single person. These narratives are situated within the range of men on the continuum between just beginning to
imagine not being married and comfortable with the idea. I provide brief
excerpts from the stories of three other men to highlight both ends of this
transition. Significantly, the focal men I have selected to demonstrate the
identity turns articulate the cultural discourses best; thus they make processes of adherence to or detachment from a married identity clear. There
were three never-married men in this sample who seemed to do no identity
work in relation to marriage. Rather, in telling me who they were they relied
on individual choice and the language of self-sufficiency. Only one of these
men relied on the culture of love discourse; he was also the only man to
dispense self-help language in speaking with me. I share one mans selfstory to illustrate this point.
Identity Turns
Committing to Marriage
Jesse: I can make things happen if I want to. For four of the never-married
men in this study, the identity of being married was so central to their understandings of self and future that they did not engage in any talk which could
be construed as transitioning into a future single self. Rather they reported the
ways in which they were on the path to marriage, explaining away past relationship endings and noting the steps they were taking in order to become
married men.
Jesse is forty-seven, has multiple advanced degrees, and lives in a major
city on the East Coast. Jesse has a close relationship with his mother; his
father died a few years prior to the initial interview. He is only loosely in
touch with his one sibling. Jesse believes that he could be married by now if
he wanted to be. This belief is common in my respondents; nine of the fourteen never-married men I interviewed stated the same. Thus, not being married is a choice. However, in Jesses case, the older he gets, it is an increasingly
troubling one. Jesse clearly understood the centrality of marriage as an organizing principle of adult life. Virtually all my respondents, never-married and
divorced, told stories of being left out of social engagements as single men.
42
Jesse noted specifically that not having a traditional family unit is difficult
over the holidays, adding, You have to try to make holidays good and meaningful for yourself. He says the access to people and events within most
middle-class, Western dynamics become less and less as a single person . . .
as you get older as opposed to more and more.
Jesse has many hobbies and pursuits in addition to his work life. He
engages in solitary leisure activities that provide much time for self-reflection.
Jesse says of himself that he has a lot of time to ponder his mental health and
because of that he can speak at length about how most people would see him
and how he sees himself. He notes he is trending toward positive, despite
his sense that for most single people the trend towards negative grows as one
gets older. There is a point in life where the positives become less positive
and the negatives become more negative. Incorporating the language of selfhelp, he says,
Im a person whose contentment lies in the realization that I have the
tools to make things better. Meaning that I dont feel that I have any
elements of discontent that I dont have the tools to change them into
contentment. So, I think most people who are discontented dont think
they have any way to trend one way or the other. I am confident I have
the tools that I [need]. Ill be very disappointed if I dont. . . . [The]
things that worry me are that Ill be lazy, sloppy or not as emotionally
facile to take positive steps in my life.
Through Jesses remarks, we hear the hallmarks of the self-help discourse.
He believes that he can modify his behavior as he strives toward selfimprovement. He knows himself well enough to worry that he might not rise
to the occasion; that he will take negative rather than positive steps.
Ultimately he will choose the path his life takes.
Jesse notes elsewhere in the interview that in the past he has been superficial in his relationships with women. He thinks many men are, in that they rely
too much on a womans appearance in making dating decisions. Jesse articulates a clear link between singleness and immaturity. Being able to recognize
this about himself enables him to take positive steps in his life. We are
invited to see his progress on the path to self-improvement when he tells me
about his current relationship. Jesse tells me he is dating a woman 20 years
younger than he. They met standing in the checkout line of a grocery store and
he says she is dramatically beautiful. But he is ending the relationship
because he is starting to realize that as wonderful as people can be, shared
experiences are so important to emotional-level experiences. He continues,
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So if someone hasnt had the 10 or 15 years of experience that youve
had its hard for them to meet you on common ground. Thats a kind
of compatibility Im starting to see as more and more important.
Here we can see Jesse drawing on the tension between what Swidler (2001)
calls mythic lovehe is dating a dramatically beautiful woman that he
met serendipitouslyand prosaic realismone needs to meet on common
ground. That common ground includes shared experiences because they
are so important to emotional-level experiences. The culture of love discourse is intertwined with that of therapeutic self-growth. He is working on
himself, and part of the process is understanding what marriage requires and
what he needs to do in order to be ready to be married. The practical considerations of what makes a marriage successful are weighed against the romantic ones. Thus, though Jesses primary way of understanding himself is
through the language of self-knowledge and growth, he uses that language to
speak to and manage the language and culture of love.
In the following exchange, Jesse speaks to the salience of marital and
fatherhood roles, choice, and the work on the self he is doing in mapping out
his future. I ask him about the role of children in his future. He says:
I like children. But see Im convinced that at some point I will have a
family and children, it will just be later than most people did and hopefully more successful because I did. But I think family is a good thing.
. . . I would prefer a relationship with children than without it.
I: You would? So those two things are linked?
J: I find that for my life and my values I can only see positive results
when the two things go together.
I: You dont see yourself thinking someday in the future, I didnt get
married. Ill adopt a child.
J: Hmmm. (sighs). Thats funny. I never even thought it wouldnt go
that way. Because again I can make things happen if I want to. In the
last three years there are five women that had I asked to marry me
they would have said yes, so I cant imagine why it couldnt be next
year. I could maybe evolve and get more mature and get more ready,
become a better guy and maybe work on a few of the stumbling
blocks and maybe get married if I want to get married.
Explicit in this exchange is Jesses belief that he will get married. He is in
control of when this happens; in the past three years, there are five different
women he could have married. Because he has waited and is evolving,
44
becoming more mature, getting more ready, he will be more successful

when it comes to the work of marriage. Furthermore, he states, family is a
good thing. He sees nothing but positive results when marriage and children go together. The married identity is one that he intends to attach himself
to; he cannot imagine it wouldnt go that way. Throughout his narrative, his
quest for ultimate contentment appears intertwined with taking steps to finding a more compatible partner and the positive value he places on marriage
and family. Elsewhere in his interview, he notes that there are upsides and
downsides to both marriage and singleness, but for him, marriage is better.
This belief is connected to his view that marriage is better for society in
terms of stability, emotional, spiritual, sexual, public health, land use, passing
on of property, and the like. Thus, one strategy for moving toward the married identity is to align oneself, as Jesse does, with the history and benefits of
the formal institution and his affirmation of a value system that centrally
locates the institution of marriage and childrearing. Jesse is enormously successful, in good health, wealthy, and highly educated. His narrative and projected identity in the current culture is convincing and resonant. Jesse did not
respond to a request for a follow-up interview; thus, I cannot examine how
and if the intervening years have changed his conception of self in relation to
marriage.
In an effort to place Jesse as the representative voice of this identity turn,
consider Rudy, who at fifty tells me that he could have married three or
four of the women he has dated. A married identity is very important to him.
He wishes he could put down wife for his contact in case of emergency
person. Working through some residual issues with a mother whom he
describes as one who would throw bombs, Rudy says that he realizes it is
important for him to be with women who are a little gentler and a little nurturing. In that environment, I feel safe and can give fully. He says, I really
want to be married. I envy people who wear wedding rings. Rudy is looking
for someone who will knock my socks off, but he notes at the end of the
interview, relationships are hard work and to me its the work that is the fun.
I think through the exploration both people grow. I think marriage is a lot of
compromise. Rudy really want[s] to be married. Using a therapeutic discourse of self-help, he enlists the labor of love to share how the exploration
of the hard work is what is fun, and he hopes, echoing mythic love, that
the woman he does this with will knock his socks off. Like many of the
men in this study, Rudy too could be married if he wanted. When I contacted
him for a follow-up interview, he was.
The men attaching to a married identity were alike in a number of ways.
All of these men had at least a college education. All had grown up
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Eck
comfortably middle to upper middle class. Notably, all of these men had been
in a series of long-term relationships with women that had not led to marriage; only one had cohabited. All of the men expressed the ways in which
they had or were working on themselves; thus the language of self-help
was on display. All used the culture of love discourse to highlight the work
of marriage. All indicated the ways in which they were stepping up, in the
words of one, to the responsibility it would entail. And, significantly, none of
these men ever mentioned the possibility that they would remain single,
implying that Jesse is not the only one who can make it happen if he wants.
The turn they are making is focused on one destination.
Moving toward Single

The move toward single resides on a continuum, with seven men in my
sample sitting somewhere between just beginning to imagine it and comfortable with the idea. What connects these men is that all of their narratives
included some conscious and stated rendering of their identities in relation to
marriage. They are also connected by their use of discourses: self-help, the
language of love, and individual choice are prominent in these narratives. For
four of these men, their stories demonstrated the difficulty of abandoning the
dominant cultural model and the ambivalence this produced; for three, the
turn seems easier. These men, even those for whom the turn seems smoother,
imagine a turn in one of two directionsthey could still get married, but it is
okay if they do not. They can imagine taking on an identity they had not
anticipated and this is what distinguishes them from the men above. Thus,
they are not navigating in one direction, they twist this way and then that,
experimenting with the turn to single.
In this section, I share two longer narratives and then situate them within
shorter excerpts of the other men on this continuum. The first man, Richard,
is representative of the men who seemed to struggle a bit more with the identity turn; he is considering it, unlike Jesse, but he demonstrates just how hard
it can be to turn away from the core cultural institution of marriage. Through
the second narrative, we can see that Paul is more clearly and cleanly making
a turn toward the single identity. He values marriage, but not at the expense
of his single self. He has had to work to adjust, but his navigation of this turn
does not currently require much emotional work to understand and manage
his feelings about who he is.
Richard: There might be a reason for it. Richard lives in the country outside a college community and has many close friends. He reported close contact with his many siblings, parents, and a remaining grandparent. All of his
46
siblings are married with children. When I first met him in 2004, he told me
as he gets older he is really beginning to question whether marriage makes
sense anymore, or whether having a family makes any sense. When I asked
him what accounted for his change in thinking he said that he questions
whether he would be able to find someone who is a good fit and stated, I
have a certain level of companionship from friends and meeting people and
so forth so maybe the marital relationship isnt necessary or necessarily desirable. And, at forty-two, unless I marry exactly the right person, taking on
children is a bit much. Richard relies on his friendship circle for companionship and getting out to meet people; thus he has learned to organize his adult
life outside marriage. We also hear how, for Richard, marriage and fatherhood are linked. While he can be a father in the future, he acknowledges that
the time for that may have passed. He tells me that he had thought of himself
married with children until recently. Our exchange continued,
I: Has it been hard to think of yourself differently?
R: Not differently. It is a little painful to think that may not happen, but
Im also sort of thinking that you know, there might be a reason for
it. Theres a reason why people have children in their twenties. They
can go on no sleep, they have more patience. They havent gotten
to a point where their career is beating them up and requiring a lot.
Here Richard explicitly states there might be a reason for him to have
remained unmarried up to this point. Thinking about his age and his career, a
married life with children may not fit the person he has become. The energy,
time, and work marriage and fatherhood would require may not be attractive
at this time in his life. If it were going to happen, his twenties may have
made more sense. Therefore, he finds now that marriage may not be necessary or necessarily desirable, even though he also acknowledges it is a little
painful to think that may not happen.
Remaining unmarried has its drawbacks. He tells me that a downside to
being single is loneliness, lack of companionship. He continues,
You get to a certain age, when you are in your twenties youre in a
pack, in your thirties you might still be in a pack but you date more.
When you get to your 40s there really isnt much of a pack so youre
either dating or youre alone because all the married people are hanging
out with the married people and they dont know any single people
unless their childrens friends parents happen to be divorced. Loneliness
is a huge downside.
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Eck
In this part of Richards story, he echoes Jesse by explicitly referencing his

understanding of the life cycle of adulthood (a narrative strategy of the single
women Reynolds and Taylor [2004] interviewed as well). The passage of
time is encased within a cultural marital context (Davies 2003)all the
married people are hanging out with the married people. Both men are articulating their conscious awareness of being unpartnered as they get older and
situating their own lives against the dominant cultural model. In fact, toward
the end of the interview, Richard reiterates this point by saying that the freedom one has as a single person is really only good and interesting till a certain age and that he has noticed that since the age of thirty-six, the lack of
having someone around, having companionship starts to outweigh the positives. But Richards ambivalence is part of a larger adjustment he is making
to a single identity. For example, when I ask Richard how he envisions his
life going forward he says,
I dont know right now. You know, as I mentioned, Ive started to see
that I might not marry. I may not have children that kind of thing.
Starting to think that that might be better, maybe not. Going back and
forth.
Unlike Jesse, who takes for granted his eventual marriage and fatherhood,
Richard is working through a process, a transition into a potential and unexpected identity. Part of that process is the emotional work he is doing to
understand and manage his feelings about the trade-off in identities. One
thing that helps Richard justify his single state is that he has only recently
been psychologically prepared for marriage.
I can tell you after some self-exploration in the past few years that I
truly believe had I married prior to two or three years ago, I would
have married the wrong person. The wrong person for me certainly.
And at this point, emotionally, psychologically, I can bring more to a
relationship than I could have before.
This is a nod to the hard work of marriage as well as the therapeutic conditioning that requires one to work on the self before entering a relationship.
After some self-exploration . . . emotionally, psychologically, Richard can
bring more to a relationship than in the past. Using these discourses he
attempts to square his past with his current realityto make the parts of his
story cohere. Even though earlier on in the interview Richard suggested
48
theres a reason people raise children in their twenties, later in the interview
he claims that if he had married in his twenties or thirties he would have
married the wrong person. The decision to marry is his to make and because
he has taken the time to improve himself, he can choose more wisely.
When I interview Richard four years later, he remains ambivalent about his
relationship to the institution of marriage. He is now used to occasional
loneliness but no longer views it as a huge downside of being single. He
talks affectionately about his pet; caring for her has made him less selfish,
something he connects to making himself better for marriage if he decides to
go that way. Richard also shares stories about relationships he has had with
women since the last time we spoke. This talk highlights the ways he is still
working on himself, noting that in a current relationship he has reached vastly
beyond anything [hes] had with anybody else. Richard notes that his friends
who married right out of college are all divorced now, save one, and that he
has witnessed new relationships among friends that have begun after age
thirty-five. These markers highlight the implicit understanding that marriage
is hard work as well as Richards normalcyhe is not that unusual; marriage
could still be in the cards for him. When I ask him if he hopes to get married
someday he says, I dont know that Im hoping. I think its likely. I think its
not something Im steering clear of or avoiding, I think there is some benefit
to it. Right time, right place, right person. When I ask him again if at this
point in his life he is single by choice or circumstance he responds: Largely
by choice. And that being I want to do it once. I want to do it right.
Unlike Jesse who never waivers in his future identity as a married person,
Richard says that even though he is not hoping to get married, he is not
steering clear of it either. Whatever happens, he implies, will be fine.
Putting a coda on his experiences up to this point in his life he told me at the
end of the interview, it [marriage] may not be what I want. One gets the
distinct impression that if Richard marries, it will be what he wants; if he
does not, the opposite will have been true. He can make the episodes of his
life fit into whatever denouement results. Thus, he experiments with an identity turn to single.
He is not alone. Forty-seven at the initial interview, Greg notes he enjoys
the gratitude of being single, the independence of it, the freedom. But, he
says, Im kind of a romantic at heart and I miss, I miss being able to share
my life with someone and being able to share theirs with them. He pauses
for a while before continuing,
Now, again, some of that when I think about this, I think some of that
is imposed from the outside. Because when we go to the movies or
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Eck
when we read books, of course, its by choice, but whats presented to
us in great preponderance has these wonderful romance scenes
between two very attractive, mentally healthy people going off into the
sunset together. I guess I still have that sort of image in my mind and
Im not sure what to make of that. I have to own it. Its there. Its not
just something on the outside. I feel it.
Greg tells me that he carries this envy toward people who are in relationships, but when they talk to me, if you followed these people home and
found out what was really going on, it is really hard. . . . Men and women
who are just having hellacious times in their relationships. Through just
these small excerpts from Gregs interview, one can hear how difficult it is
for him to turn away from a future married self. He is a romantic at heart,
one who recognizes the heteronormative push toward marriage seen in movies and books (Geller 2001; Ingraham 2008), but he recognizes his own
desire as well. Using the language of self-help, he has to own it; he does
not believe it is just something on the outside. As he looks toward his
future, Greg tells me that if he stays single he would turn a lemon into lemonade kind of thing. Being alone is not what I prefer. . . . But I see myself
being able to deal with it in a positive way if it doesnt work out. When I
ask him, he clarifies for me that ideally he would be married, not just coupled. Significantly, however, unlike Jesse above, he can envision a future
single self. He is adjusting the wheel, preparing himself for not being married. When I interviewed him four years later he was still adjusting to thinking of his future self as unmarried.
Another on this side of the continuum is Charles. He volunteers that he
has always been introspective and is even more so now. At forty-two, he
tells me that its probably easier to say that I want to want it [marriage and
children], than to say I want it. He notes that If I wanted to be married, I
could be and that its been a long time since I didnt think I was ready to
be married. Not being married is a choice; he believes he is ready though
he also tells me he worries that he may be emotionally immature because
he has not. Like Greg, Charles seems aware of the deficiency narrative
(DePaulo and Morris 2005) of the middle-aged single male, and, to some
extent, internalizes it. Charles tells me he is not clinging to his singlehood, but that remaining single is not an unattractive alternative as he
looks to the future. However, he also tells me that while the upsides of
being single are good,
50
Presumably, you would find someone you would rather be doing things
with rather than doing them alone and be able to depend on them and
so on. . . . Is going to the theater better by myself than going with
someone? Probably not. Im happy to go by myself, but all things
equal, Id probably rather go with someone else. Would it be better to
have someone to grow old with or grow old by yourself? I think these
questions answer themselves.
Charles wrestles with his attachment to marriage. Like Greg, throughout
his narrative he vacillates between enjoying being single and his attachment
to a societal expectation of how things might be better if he were married.
Charles agreed to a follow-up interview (and was the only respondent who
after the first interview requested a transcript, which I sent him), but other
obligations on my end intervened and we did not reschedule. In 2008, he was
not married.
Paul: At this Point, I Dont Really Care. Paul, forty-one, thought he would
get married, but it has not happened. He speaks fondly of his siblings, with
whom he is in frequent contact, and of a family life that was nurturing and
free of worry. Near the beginning of the interview, I ask does he, like some
single people, see his friends as created kin or family? He uses this as an
opportunity to highlight his transition to a single identity:
Nine [the number of people in my family] is plenty. I never really
wanted to be connected to anything bigger. I feel fine about that.
Although Im sure I always thought I would be married long before
now because your role models are your parents and they got married
in their early twenties. I just thought it would be something like that.
But at a certain point, and I wasnt really worried about it, I maybe
wondered about it, in my midthirties. But at this point, I dont really
care. I think its quite possible that I will be unmarried my whole life
and Im actually fine with that. I dont know, maybe at some point in
the past three years or so I have kind of gotten okay with that, not that
it was ever a real problem. But I guess it was always in the back of my
mind where I would wonder about it. Now I dont really wonder about
it. Not that I think it wont happen, but the wondering isnt.
I: Its not occupying a lot of your time. Youre content with your life,
is that what it is?
P: Yeah, in a way. I used to compare my life with my parents life
and I think about things that they did that I dont do because Im
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Eck
not married and I felt that maybe I was missing something. And
maybe in the last three years, Ive thought about it the other way. I
think about things I do that they couldnt or didnt, mostly couldnt
do, based on responsibilities. Im realizing that their life was rich
in some ways but in other ways, intellectually, I think my father
is intellectual by nature and I think in a weird way he was sort of
starved for that kind of endeavor. My mother is not intellectually
inclined so he would have debates with us all the time and I thought,
What did the two of you do before us? And what do you do now
that were gone? . . . . Thats just, intellectual stimulation is the
most important in some ways for me. And, I mean, I admire soccer
moms and everything, but you give up a lot to do that. So I dont
know. In some ways maybe starting to appreciate the advantages to
being single. More than being single. I think not being a parent. Getting married is a big thing but having kids, in some ways thats even
bigger. And obviously, in some ways they tend to go together. Its
just that sometimes I think I dont have time and then I look at my
brothers and sisters and I say Ive got so much time. Compared to
the average person? Its unbelievable how much time I have compared to them. I mean they have negative time.
In this exchange, Paul does several things. First, he is explicit about his
identity as a person who might not marry. It is a conscious process that has
occurred over the last few years. Second, he emphasizes the sacrifices of
marriage, especially the cost of sacrificing parts of the self that one might
valueresponsibilities prevent one from doing things one may want to do.
He also links the roles of husband and father, noting that in some ways they
tend to go together, and children entail even further costsyou give up a
lot to do that. And, finally, though he no longer wonders about it he does
not rule out the possibility that he may still marryNot that I think it wont
happen. In this opening exchange, Paul begins to talk of love; married
people with children have negative time. The amount of work it would take
to have a conversation with someone if one chooses poorly is unfathomable
to him, as evidenced by his reference to his parents relationship. He returns
to the larger cultural narrative about romantic love and compatibility later in
the interview, this time intertwining the language of self-growth as central to
a marriage.
I think that certainly being in marriage but even relationships, I think
there is certainly a high sort of cost so I have to be, I would rather be
52
alone than be in a relationship that I didnt think of as being sort of

optimal for both people. I think in the old days, people didnt want to
be alone or thought they couldnt be alone. I guess sometimes it was
economics or wanting to be socially accepted, so there were a lot of
things that pushed people into marriage that probably werent the right
reasons, so people either didnt know the difference or thought it was
better to be married. And Im the other way around. I dont rule it out,
but I would have to think of it on very grand terms. Grand is the wrong
word. Yeah, it might have something to do with the realization in the
past three years or so where I have a sense a little of the cost. Cost is a
bad word. It sounds too materialist. Im talking more emotional sense
of personal fulfillment and optimizing. Im talking about two peoples
lives that are both improved a lot by being together. Thats the ideal. A
situation where either one of their lives is more or less the same I just
dont see that as a good arrangement. I think the rewards can be incomparable. I think a good marriage would have things that nothing else, it
would be like nothing else and that would be wonderful . . . I think its
the rare marriage that everyone can say, that is such an amazing thing.
I: Do you know marriages like that?
P: Yeah, I do know a few like that, but they are rare. I would say one in
fifty or something like that.
Paul believes that marriage needs to be grand. His standards for love are
very highmaybe one in fifty marriages look like the one he proposes. He
notes that in the past people felt that they had to get married. He does not.
Thus, he benefits from what he perceives to be a shifting landscape that
allows him to choose life outside of marriage. When he speaks of marriage,
he talks of an emotional sense of personal fulfillment and optimizing. He is
talking about two peoples lives that are improved a lot by being together.
We get the sense that Paul knows himself well enough to know what would
be optimizing for him, and also that marriage itself must be a vehicle
through which that self-growth happens, or why do it at all? Though Paul
acknowledges he does not have to marry, his identity work reveals the work
he still had to do to turn away from ithe says, I dont really wonder about
it. Not that I think it wont happenimplying that, for him, marriage was
the model he expected to follow. For now, he appears confident and comfortable in his identity turn to single. Paul agreed to a follow-up interview but my
own scheduling conflicts precluded this from happening. In our communication, he told me he had not married and seemed upbeat about it.
53
Eck
Two other men were, like Paul, further along the continuum in making
their identity turn to single. One was the oldest never-married man in my
sample, Ed, who was sixty at our interview. Though Ed told me he had been
engaged back in his thirties, throughout the interview he communicated very
little struggle in letting go of a future married identity. I kind of like my
life, he says, and as Ive gotten older Ive gotten much more happy with the
way things have been. He thinks marriage is great, but it just never seemed
to happen. Its just the way it is. I asked Ed if he thought he was attached to
being single and he said,
Yeah, now I do. There comes a certain time where if you havent been
married, never say never, but. Im not looking anymore. I like my life
as Ive said. I dont know what would cause me to change it. It would
have to be someone special obviously. Never rule anything out, but I
really wouldnt expect it to happen.
Unlike the men beginning to make the adjustment, Ed is further along.
Now he is attached to single, implying that earlier in his life, he was not
as he has gotten older [he] is much more happy with the way things have
been. This suggests an adjustment phase, even if it was one that he is now
only partially aware. He no longer has an emotional attachment to an idea of
a married self. Ed notes that it is not something that he expects to happen.
Even so, he says, never rule anything out. Interestingly, Ed was one of the
few men who had made an identity turn without relying on either the culture
of love or the language of self-help in narrating his self-story. Two interconnected explanations appear likely: because Eds turn happened long ago, he
no longer needs to work very hard to explain it to himself or anyone else.
Furthermore, these discourses, though culturally resonant now, may not have
been discourses that he trafficked in when he was looking for ways to understand his unexpected status.
All seven of the men who had made the turn to single or were considering it had at least a college education. Only one had divorced parents; he
was the only man in this group to have a sporadic and ambivalent relationship with his parents and siblings. The rest all reported close-knit families.
All of these men had been in serial monogamous relationships; all were
dating or hoping to date. None of these men shared that any of their past
relationships involved cohabitation. Perhaps one reason that these men
have to work to make the identity turn to single is that their lives have been
lived in a familial context in which marriage and traditional family life are
valued.
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Rejecting Marriage
Jeffrey: Its as irrelevant as it ever was. In a clear contrast to the stories
presented above, for three never-married men I interviewed, being married
did not seem like an identity they needed to give up and being single did not
seem to be an identity they needed to assume. Two of these men did not rely
on discourses of love or the therapeutic self in their iconoclast positions.
However, all three did develop counter-narratives rooted in an equally available cultural modelindividual self-sufficiency.
Jeffrey, forty at our initial interview, was friendly, but not as expansive as
many of my interviewees in our 2004 and 2008 interviews, both of which
lasted just under one hour. He uses no self-help language in the course of our
conversations; I have no sense that he spends any time contemplating how he
might modify or improve his life or grow psychologically and emotionally.
Jeffrey reports that he is close to his parents (his mother died one year before
our interview) and he sometimes vacations with his siblings. Collegeeducated, he works in a college town and owns a home in the country. In our
conversation, Jeffrey frequently highlights his view of himself as an independent actor. Using the language of self-sufficiency he tells me that he is concerned with being [his] own person and not following someone elses lead.
When I ask him whether he feels any pressure to marry, he notes that he has
from his parents but says, Some people feel that getting married is the only
valid way to have a relationship, indicating that he is not some people.
Unlike other never-married men in my sample who usually stated that what
is good about marriage is sharing lifes ups and downs and building a
future together, it was difficult for Jeffrey to say what would be good about
being married. He thinks it would be nice to have a buddy system. You fall
down in the bathtub, theres somebody to find you. Throughout his interview his identity as a single person or as someone who has chosen to detach
from marriage rarely comes up, even in questions about being single or married. He does not appear to be committed to the idea of being a husband, as in
both his initial interview and the follow-up, he tells me he is lazy, selffocused, and likes to hang out at home, thus not putting a lot of effort into
meeting women. He has not had a serious relationship since the 1990s, was
not actively dating at the time of either interview and described himself as
asexualalmost nonexistent libido.
Though Jeffrey tells me he watches a lot of television, he seems unaffected
by the heteronormative script for the white, middle-class male. However, it
seems significant that though Jeffrey works full-time in a lucrative career,
owns his house, and considers himself to have many friends (whom he has
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Eck
over to his home once a week)all signifiers of a commitment to something

outside of himselfhe self-defines as lazy and self-focused. This may
be an indication of the latent ways that singlism works. Even for Jeffrey,
whose identity work seems to take place outside the marriage ideology
(DePaulo and Morris 2005), he may unwittingly be responding to its power.
If so, that power appears dormant for Jeffrey when we contrast it to Jesse,
Rudy, Richard, Greg, Charles, and Paul, who overtly acknowledge and discuss the married ideal repeatedly in order to attach to or turn away from it,
making clear its relevance for their own lives.
When we spoke in 2004, Jeffrey told me he feels some pressure from his
father to have children. He adds, Just knowing that there is something left of
you on earth, that seems sort of important to some degree. In 2004 he talked
about donating to a sperm bank because he has pretty good genes. When I
ask him if this means he would like to be a father, he says, I think I like the
idea more than the reality. While it is good to have somebody to care for
you when you are old . . . the reality of going without sleep for three years,
that sort of thing is horrifying and of never being alone again is also unappealing. When we meet again in 2008, I ask Jeffrey if he thinks of himself as
successful. He says yes in terms of making a good living, being able to pay
off his house, having a number of friends, but as far as being a successful
organism and reproducing I havent been successful. He laughs a little and I
ask him, remembering the sperm bank possibility four years earlier, You
want to raise children and the whole thing? He responds, Oh yeah. He
then goes on and lists all the reasons why this is probably a bad ideahe does
not have the back to be lifting a child up and down. The work involved and
what you have to do is crushing. Not being able to sleep. Doing all the errands
and the shopping and the cooking. In that sense, I dont feel that successful,
but I also dont feel like its a big drag on my life or anything. The responsibilities of fatherhood remain unappealing to him, but being a parent remains
important to Jeffreys own father who wants his name carried into the future.
For Jeffrey, being a father only seems significant to the extent that one
leaves something on earth and passes along good genes. This train of
thought suggests that contributing to the reproduction of the species is more
important to him than reproducing the institution of family. This conclusion is further bolstered by Jeffreys declaration that marriage is as irrelevant
as it ever was. Still aware of the heteronormative expectations of marriage
that other people have, he once again tells me there is a societal focus on getting married as the only legitimate way to live, implicitly communicating
that he is beyond such conventions. Moreover, when I ask him if he thinks
there are any downsides to being single, he uses the opportunity to reiterate
56
that the basic buddy system is goodhaving someone to make sure you
got to the hospital. Significantly, he ends his thoughts on the subject highlighting his self-sufficiency saying, I guess its seldom I ever feel I need that
help, so its easy not to miss it.
Because the identities of husband and father are not salient to him, Jeffrey,
unlike most respondents, spends no time during either interview telling me
how he is preparing to be married someday. Nor does he speak about single
as something he had to adjust to. His talk of his future does not include vacillating between a married identity and a single one as the men above. When I
asked him if there were models for how to live as a single adult, he responded,
Do you really need a role model to be yourself? Maybe [for] married people
its valuable to have models so you know what is expected, but if its just you,
whos expecting? Through a language of self-sufficiencyif its just
youJeffrey implies that constructing a single adult identity requires no
assistance. Further, it appears baffling to him that one would need to construct a single self at allwhos expecting? Not only does marriage seem
irrelevant to him, so does being single. This is punctuated at the end of the
follow-up interview when I ask him if our previous conversation in 2004
made him think any more about being single than he had in the past. He said,
Not so much. I just think at this point, I choose my lifestyle and that sort of
stuff works for me. His life is his choice, and he chooses a lifestyle not circumscribed by being inside or outside the institution of marriage. He is not
alone in positioning himself thusly.
Sam, forty at the initial interview, just recently graduated from college.
For the first time in his life he is not working full-time but makes enough
working part-time in restaurant work to get by. Early on in the interview
when I ask if he has siblings, he notes that his divorced parents paid for his
younger sisters college education, but he never accepted any money. Ive
done things for myself. When I ask him if he has ever been married, he states
succinctly and with no ambivalence, No. And Ive never been engaged and
Ive never had any children. I follow up by asking who he counts as family. Sam laughs and says my dog. He continues
My friends, though I dont let anybody else get really close to me. I
guess, I keep a lot of stuff inside. I wont tell. I dont know why. I guess
I see my friends a lot more than I do my family, but I dont know. I
depend on myself a lot.
He tells me that his mother is his contact in case of emergency person
but that I generally like to handle things myself. These several references
57
Eck
to self-sufficiency all take place within the first ten minutes of the interview.
When I ask him how he would evaluate his mental health he says that he
knows he could do a lot better. A nod to a self-help kind of discourse, but
that is modified as he incorporates the language of self-sufficiency. I did go
back to school on my own. Everything that Ive done, and maybe I havent
accomplished that much, but Ive done it myself. Im strong in that. I wouldnt
mind having a serious relationship but Ive also never been through a divorce
and Im not paying child support or alimony. Not once during our interview
did Sam indicate that marriage is a strong pull for him, an identity he must
claim, or that single is anything that he needs to spend any time adjusting to.
He never employs the talk of love discourse as a mechanism for explaining
how he has more work to do to be ready for the hard work of marriage. Like
Jeffrey, he is what he is. Unlike Jeffrey, he does date a lot and he is sexually
active, but it is irrelevant if any of these relationships lead to marriage. When
I ask him if he thinks society prepares you for being single as an adult he
says, I dont know. Ive never really thought about [it]. Speaking of his
future his relationship status never emerges; rather he speaks of being financially successful and possibly operating a dog rescue. Whatever he gets he is
going to earn it. He states, Nobodys going to give me anything.
Jeffrey and the two other men like him represent the vanguard of single as
a taken for granted option for adult life. These men do identity work outside
of marriage, requiring no turn toward or away from a status defined by that
institution. Rather, in telling us who they are, they rely on another culturally
available narrative: self-sufficiency. Jeffrey is college educated as is Sam who
only recently finished his degree at the age of forty; Dan, the third man I have
placed in this category, never completed college. Sam and Dan work minimumwage jobs. While Jeffreys parents remained together, both Sams and Dans
divorced when they were young. These demographic characteristics suggest that
the salience of the married identity more closely adheres to the well-educated,
professional class. As previously mentioned, the four in ten Americans who
find marriage is becoming obsolete (Pew Research Center, November 18,
2011) are more likely to be low-income, nonwhite, and less educated than the
men in this sample. Thus, for Jesse, Richard, Paul and the other men discussed
abovesuccessful, white, well-educated menthe identity of marriage may
be both something others expect of them and they expect of themselves.
Discussion
Like single women, never-married men reflect on the passage of time within
a marriage-oriented cultural context (Davies 2003). Men experimenting
58
with an identity turn toward single focus on the positives and question
whether or not marriage is right for them (Sharp and Ganong 2007); they also
use their knowledge of bad relationships to help bolster their belief that the
decisions they have made up to this point are the right ones (Davies 2003).
Like the women in Reynolds and Wetherells study (2003), these men rely on
repertoires of choice, independence, and self-development as a way of making meaning of the unanticipated state. In addition, most of the never-married
men in this study also rely on the discourse of love. As they account for their
unanticipated identities at this point in their lives, men, like the women interviewed by Reynolds (2008), use cultural resources to put together parts of
their stories so that their current status makes sense. They use the same public narratives (Somers 1994), however, to construct different ends that nonetheless resonate with social understanding. Furthermore, we see in the
narratives of never-married men the heteronormative pull toward the institution of marriagesometimes this is overtly stated, other times implicitly
referenced as men construct their understandings of self in its shadow, an
instance of the singlism that DePaulo lays out (2005). The stories most of
these men tell underscore the salience of the married identity and the work
that it takes to turn away from the dominant adult identities of husband and
father and in doing so highlights how in the organization of self, there is a
tension in identity commitment . . . between the individuals needs and
proclivities on the one hand and the demands of society on the other
(McAdams 1993, 94).
Being single in midlife does not come with its own institutional markers;
one gauges his status, and hence his conception of self, against the institution
available for this purpose, marriage. Individuals who may never marry construct narratives to help them become the selves they imaginedmarried
or to explain the lives they had not anticipatedsingle. Some do have
unresolved ambivalences (Lewis and Moon 1997) about their current status, while others believe they are moving forward to be the married self they
have always imagined, and still others find it difficult to imagine what the
fuss is about. Thus, this research reflects the competing images of marriage:
on the one hand, that most men find the need to account for their relationship
to a married identity suggests single is not the option it is touted to be;
rather it is what one is in the absence of marriage. On the other hand, that men
like Jeffrey can find marriage irrelevant and others can make the identity turn
to single suggests that the institution and its corresponding identities are
changing.
This examination provides a starting point for understanding how
Americans see their identities in the shadow of the shifting marital landscape.
59
Eck
While marriage is something one can turn away from, the societal expectation that marriage is an ideal adult status may only be gaining traction.
Challenges to the Defense of Marriage Act at the national level, and individual states allowing same-sex marriage, make it hard to imagine that marriage
will really become obsolete. To the contrary, gays and lesbians who experience being single in a community of couples, may now find themselves in the
same situation as the men in this studynavigating their identities around the
institution of marriage, elevating marriages role as an identity marker even
more. Further, if marriage rates continue to be relatively low for the poor who
value marriage but believe it to be intimately tied to financial security (Edin
and Kefalas 2007), marriage may only increase in symbolic significance for
the middle class (Cherlin 2004), thus increasing the work those in that strata
have to do to turn away from it.
Today, there are organizations like Alternatives to Marriage as well as
active blog posts about singles facilitated by DePaulo at Psychology Today
that promote nonmarried life as normal, debunk myths about singles, share
current research about singles, and challenge assumptions that automatically
link material and social reward with marriage. However, as Klinenberg
(2012) highlights in his work on single living, it is difficult to organize singles. Even with the knowledge that there are more of them than evertheir
population exceeds those in the married ranksoftentimes they do not share
the same interests, and most do not claim single as their master status,
making any sort of political organizing problematic. In addition, it is hard to
find a set of idealizing images . . . for unmarried people (Geller 2001, 160)
or ask about ones family without assuming that a marriage partner (or the
seeking of one) should be part of the answer (Reynolds 2008). Thus, though
it seems clear that the rise of never-married men and women is bound to continue, societal attitudes and images frequently suggest that their status is
unusual. Because this is the case, many never-married men and women will
continue to readjust and transition into this unanticipated identity (if only to
help others understand them).
Though identity construction is a fluid process and happens in all social
interactions, I argue that recreating our adult identities can be especially challenging for people for whom the taken-for-granted path has not been met. This
paper has used never-married men as a case of a more generic process that I
have called the identity turn, a term that designates the transitioning process.
There is not one clear marker of progression that can designate the moment(s)
of this turn. One is not converted to a new status marked by ceremony, promotion, diagnosis, or other events that can be seen as milestones. It is far more
gradual than that. Other cases of this process could include others in like
60
states of transitioning (e.g., the involuntarily childless before a diagnosis of

infertility is pronounced, the separated who are in a process of being
divorced). The identity turn requires a status to navigate toward. This study
has used initial and follow-up interviews over a period of years to investigate
how peoples views of self in relation to a status may change over time. More
studies of this sort would be instructive in fleshing out the identity turn concept, exploring the transition as opposed to the endpoint.
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank Matthew Ezzell, Sarah Corse, Amy Paugh, Kerry Dobransky, members of the James Madison University Sociology/Anthropology research roundtable
and the anonymous reviewers of this journal for their comments on earlier versions
of this manuscript.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Notes
1.
I sent emails to the men I had interviewed previously and met with some of those
who responded to my request. Not all of the initial interviewees could be reached
as I could not locate contact information for them, others responded in the affirmative, but competing demands on my time did not permit me to follow up with
all of those who were interested. Most of the initial interviews were conducted in
the homes of these men; only one of the follow-up interviews was likewise conducted. I let the men choose where they would like to meet and most suggested
over lunch or coffee.
2. These figures come from the 2004 Census.
3. This is not unlike Scully and Marolla (1984, 532) who found that in their interviews with convicted rapists, subjects volunteered more about their feelings and
emotions to the female interviewer and her interviews lasted longer.
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Bio
Beth A. Eck is an Associate Professor of Sociology at James Madison University.
Her teaching and research interests include families, gender, and culture. Her previous work has appeared in Gender & Society and Sociological Forum.

Eck (2013) - Identity Twists and Turns: How Never-Married Men Make Sense of An Unanticipated Identity

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Identity Twists and

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This article examines how fourteen middle-aged, white, never-married

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Single Identities, Single Stories

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singlehood is an unanticipated change in social identity that is associated

Talking through the Turn

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Data and Methods

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Being Married and Understandings of Self

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self-help, including the therapeutic discourse. All of them implicitly or

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becoming more mature, getting more ready, he will be more successful

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Moving toward Single

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In this part of Richards story, he echoes Jesse by explicitly referencing his

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alone than be in a relationship that I didnt think of as being sort of

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over to his home once a week)all signifiers of a commitment to something

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