Here’s my review of Moira Weigel’s Labor of Love for The Washington Post

Let’s Talk About Dating–Seriously

It’s a sad truth: No matter how much progress women have made in the workplace — and it’s still pretty limited — the message about our romantic prospects remains stubbornly mired in the past.

“I belong to a generation that grew up hearing that girls could do everything,” Moira Weigel writes in her fascinating social history “Labor of Love.” And yet Weigel, who is in her early 30s, contends that women are still judged in large part on their ability to secure romantic partnerships. “Since we were children,” she writes of herself and her friends, “we had heard that romantic love would be the most important thing that ever happened to us. Love was like the final grade: Whatever else we accomplished would be meaningless without it.”

Despite these monumental stakes, she notes, love and romance — the ways humans begin their most intimate relationships — are still dismissed as silly girl stuff, fodder for pink-covered books and scented fashion magazines.

The lack of serious conversation about dating has left Weigel with rich territory to explore, and she makes excellent use of it. MORE

When you do a lot of interviews about your book, you can sometimes fall into some fairly canned answers. But a great podcast host will fix that, and recently I had the pleasure of talking to two who got me thinking about things I had never contemplated before:

The School of Psych

Jared DeFife was such a delight to talk to–I kind of forgot that we were being broadcast.

School of Psych episode 4: Why Am I Still Single? A causal quagmire:

Unclassified Women

More recently, I had the great pleasure of speaking with Australian Life Coach Michelle Marie McGrath about life without kids for her Unclassified Women podcast. Childless? Childfree? Non-parent. It appears there is no good word for those of us without kids, so we talked about that and many other things.

Unclassified Women 35: Fulfillment Later in Life

This week a client wrote me about a disappointing evening. She met a guy she liked at a networking event and … it didn’t go the way she hoped.

Anyone who has been single for any length of time has probably had this kind of night. It can feel very significant in the moment, even though it doesn’t really mean anything other than that you’ve had a bad night.

Unfortunately, my client went home and read a blog post that made her feel much worse.

I hesitate to link to this post—I’ve lived happily with my husband for ten years, and it stressed me out. I also don’t mean to pick on this blogger in particular, as I’ve seen variations on this message in countless books, articles, posts, and television segments. But that is the point, so here goes: (more…)

When author Klancy Miller was attending culinary school in Paris, she came down with a bad cold and yearned for a bowl of old-fashioned chicken noodle soup. A single woman who lived alone, she realized she’d need to make it for herself.

The incident set Miller on a path that ultimately led to her first book, Cooking Solo: The Joy of Cooking For Yourself, which is full of bright, easy-to-prepare dishes for singles to make for themselves, their friends and their romantic interests. Miller recently spoke with me about what she loves about cooking alone, how a novice can get started, and why a good rib eye can change your outlook on life. (more…)

During Rebecca Traister’s many single years, she was often irritated when the men she dated disrupted her routine. She didn’t like it when they urged her to leave work earlier than she wanted, or when their presence in her apartment obstructed her weekly cleaning ritual. She was impatient with men who called too frequently, or who wouldn’t try the bars and restaurants she liked.

“I got used to doing things my way. I liked doing things my way. These men just mucked it all up. I knew how I sounded, even in my own head: picky, petty, and narcissistic. I worried about the monster of self-interest that I had become,” writes Traister, in her terrific new book All The Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation.

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Dear Sara: I am 37 years old, and I am single. I have had two long relationships but have been single for a while now. Sometimes I feel great about my life, and sometimes I feel very depressed about being single. Sometimes people are really supportive toward me, and sometimes they are not.

I discovered that my strength is that I go on dating sites, follow dating coaching, and go to networking events, etc. But I find it difficult to allow feelings of sadness to just be instead of doing things all the time to desperately change my single status. I realized that, underneath all this, I feel that I am not good enough the way I am. One date mentioned that I was too sweet. Another guy gave me the feeling that I was not rich or trendy enough. I had the feeling that in order to make us fit together I had to change the interior of my apartment into a more modern style and come across as somebody who loves to socialize a lot just as he does. (more…)

I’ve had the opportunity to have a lot of fun conversations on podcasts and other outlets. Here they are:

I had a blast talking to Jacqueline Raposo and Ben Rosenblatt on Love Bites Radio:

It’s Not You! You’re Single in Your Thirties? Enjoy It!

It was also great to talk to Janelle and Rob Alex on the Mission: Authors Talk About It podcast:

27 Reasons You’re Single

And while I didn’t always agree with WABC’s Errol Gluck, I really enjoyed talking to him:

http://glucksolutions.podomatic.com/entry/2016-01-15T09_56_03-08_00 …

On the non-audio side, M.M. Finck at Women Writers, Women’s Books asks me some really interesting questions. Here’s our Q&A.

If you’ve recently created a dating profile for yourself, you’re not alone. This is the busiest time of year for online dating sites.

Along with your height, eye color, and favorite films, you’ve probably attempted to include language that informs the reader that you’re worth a look. You want to distinguish yourself from all of the other 5’10”-inch brown-eyed men who like movies and the outdoors. More to the point, you want to convince the gentle strangers reading your profile that you’re a winner–smart, successful, well-rounded, good-looking. You want to set yourself apart. (more…)

This will be the year: that you start getting up at five a.m. to go running, that you go on two dates a week, that you develop a system that keeps your closet clutter-free.

There’s a funny optimism that occurs at the beginning of a new year. Somehow, despite all evidence to the contrary, many of us become convinced that we’ll be able to alter fundamental aspects of our personalities—or at least become upgraded versions of ourselves.

And every year, sometime around mid-March, we realize we’re still hitting the snooze button, still weeding through overstuffed closets, still spending way too much time with our Netflix queues. We didn’t become shinier, happier or more popular versions of ourselves. We’re still basically working with last year’s model, and we see that as a problem. (more…)

After I asked readers to describe their feelings about the holidays, many expressed frustration. They wrote of nosey relatives who grilled them about their romantic lives, of being relegated to air mattresses while married siblings received guest-room accommodations, and of wanting to vaporize during New Year’s Eve kisses.

But perhaps the largest source of grief was the simple understanding that a time that is supposed to bring joy so often brings pain instead.

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