The stickiness of singlehood: Single women and the accumulation of affect

While social research has long centred on the heterosexual couple, singlehood has become a focus for sociology, particularly as intimacy research continues to shift with an increased emphasis on alternative intimacies and relationship diversity. In this article, I argue that singlehood is becoming increasingly complex as young women in Australia and elsewhere must navigate compounding conditions of an extended young adulthood and the perceived dominance of heteronormative couple ideals in their social lives. Drawing on a temporal lens that attends to the affective circulation of feelings, this article examines how stigma both shifts and ‘sticks’ over time. To justify this, I explore how young Australian heterosexual women have negotiated being single through young adulthood and into their thirties. Employing a novel biographical approach that analyses two case studies of young women based on survey data collected over 17 years by the longitudinal Life Patterns Project and interview data, this article conceptualises the stigma of being single as a temporal and affective process that attaches unevenly to single women across the life course. In my analysis, a distinct form of emotion work emerges from navigating societal expectations around heteronormativity and relationships, which can result in a ‘sticky’ accumulation of feelings over time. These feelings coalesced when the research participants reached their thirties as they faced the material and tangible consequences of singlehood. The ‘stickiness’ of singlehood represents the invisible burden or stigma that women must carry through young adulthood.