Happy Halloween from a Scary Single Female

Like most single women over 40, I don’t need to dress up for Halloween because my existence frightens people enough as is. Most people dress single women up in a variety of stereotypes that are far scarier than stock Halloween costumes for women. Who’s scarier, Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction or a haggard old witch on a broom? Now you see my point.

Every day is Halloween (without the candy), as others invent identities for us that bear little relationship to reality: the ultimate third wheel; the crazy aunt; the obsessed career chick; the frustrated spinster . . .

Having always dreamed of achieving exceptional levels of social and cultural conformity, I find the limited roles available to me troubling. The fact is, society has designed very few characters for an older single female that I am eager to play.

The Third Sexual Wheel. Sometimes marital boredom becomes such that one is pressed to invite others into the fold, to stir a pot a bit that they have difficulty stirring with their own teaspoons (no, I swear that’s just a metaphor). Yep, I have been “invited” (if you call a friend’s husband showing up unannounced and nude in your bedroom an “invitation”) to a threesome under the auspices of a leisurely golf weekend in the country. Unfortunately, threesome is not a game I play.

Crazy Aunt. I think my nieces and nephews genuinely like me, at times, but they have also been raised to recognize that my life is somehow wrong. When I was 36, my 6-year old nephew declared gleefully that I was an old maid. When I turned 40, my 8 year old niece thoughtfully suggested that I was ugly as a witch and should have my nose fixed—you know you can’t take any company for granted when your own niece tells you that you need plastic surgery. I still wonder whether she would have reached the same conclusion were I married and there were someone out there who had managed to like me in a long-term sort of way, despite my unfortunate appearance.

The Husband Stealer. As spinsters, we must be decidedly lonely. Therefore, my married female contemporaries, we must be after your husbands. If my alleged fascination with your husband makes him seem more attractive to you, then great, but, truth be known, I have no designs on him.

Desperate for a Divorcé. He’s a bit broken from a prior marriage and age has tarnished the single girl’s eligibility. So, then, what better a pairing for the 40+ single female than a divorcé looking for a second wind. We may be tabula rasa when it comes to marriage but we weren’t born yesterday. I would rather reread last Sunday’s paper than spend an evening with one of those divorcés who drones on wistfully about his ex-wife, what a great husband he was, and most appallingly, how no wife has ever been more sexually satisfied. Putting aside the crudeness of broaching the subject of physical intimacy on a first date, if a guy has to tell that to a near stranger, could he even possibly believe it himself? Sadly, that too was a true story.

Mrs. Cougar Robinson. As a woman of a certain age, I am not prohibited from speaking with 30 year olds of the male species but there are implications . . . Cougar is the label if you speak with a man 10 years younger than you, even if just to ask the time of day. More than 10 years? Then they start singing “Mrs. Robinson,” even when ironically, you're not married. At this age, the presumption is that I have no, and have never had, any maternal instincts. Mrs. Cougar Robinson is just an unsated animal on the prowl.

Frustrated Nun. Single at this point means you’re either uptight and moralistic or abnormal (and perhaps all of the above). I confess I’ve joked about becoming a nun, but, then I saw the movie Doubt. Now that I appreciate that male priests can indulge in wine and other pleasures every evening while nuns are not permitted to advance beyond skimmed milk, I’m no longer willing to don a habit.

Obsessed Career Psycho. Ms. Career Psycho can be satisfied only through financial and competitive achievement. Even modern cinema still casts her as the ball-buster who can love only her resume and her bank account, like the Chief Risk Officer (played by Demi Moore) of the thinly disguised Lehman Brothers in the recent movie Margin Call. As the aging CEO Jeremy Irons explains her severance arrangement and the fact that hers is the head that must roll before the bank dumps a ton of toxic assets into the market place, she toys with the ring on her finger, her right hand finger. It couldn’t be the left because women like this do not marry or experience the same range on the emotional spectrum as her male counterparts.

At the end of the day, we’re really not that scary or extreme. We’re not trying to seduce your husbands, we don’t bite, and we don’t eat our young (or your young for that matter, because we may not have any). We’re a lot more like you than you think: sometimes we’re happy and sometimes we’re not. We get tired, hungry, lonely, silly, etc, just like you. So just remember, when you see all those ghoulish characters out and about this Halloween, they are probably far scarier than a single female over 40.