Constructing the single woman in therapy

Singleness, like its counterpart marriage, is a social construction. It is hard to pin down its meaning in a changing society – who is single? Are divorced, widowed, those in relationships to be included with the never-married in this catch all category? The experiences of single women, at least in part, result from the ways in which singleness and partnership are understood socially. In spite of the degrees and varieties of partnerships and sexual orientations that exist, it is still not uncommon for singleness and marriage to be seen as binary alternatives: to be single is to be not married. Studies of single women suggest that there is a complex picture of both positive and negative effects of being single (Marks, 1996; Reilly, 1996). Therapists writing of their clinical practice and their research have noted the potential for single women of thinking of themselves as necessarily flawed because they are not married (Bickerton, 1983; Schwartzberg, et al., 1995; Lewis and Moon, 1997). Women who have identified, for instance, low selfesteem, or longstanding difficulties in relationships as barriers to successful partnership, may then seek therapeutic help to remedy these troubles. Schwartzberg and colleagues remark how often therapists collude with such a view and allow development of the self in the service of finding a mate to stand as a legitimate goal of therapy.