Quirkyalone

“Dear Quirkyalone: Advice for QuirkyLiving” is a weekly guest column by the authors of the brilliant blog Onely. It appears every Monday. When you’re making up your own road map for (quirky)living, you need thoughtful advice. We’re here for you. We welcome your questions; send them on to onely AT onely.org.

Dear Quirkyalone,

When a woman is in a relationship with a guy who everyone else can see is treating her badly, what goes on in the woman’s mind that prevents her from seeing these very same things? How does she qualify staying with this guy and why? What’s behind the excuses she makes for him?– Bobby

Hi Bobby,

This is an excellent question indeed. While I can’t claim to be able to speak for the woman in question, I can offer a few theories (which, as a side note, could be applied to either men or women, as well as lesbians and gay men):

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You’d think it was the first time anyone’s ever gotten a divorce.

Sandra Tsing Loh’s recent admission in The Atlantic that she’s divorcing her husband after 20 years (following her own extramarital affair) has ignited a firestorm of high-minded controversy debating the pros and cons of marriage. The story was picked up nationally, with nearly all the major news outlets chiming in online, on air and in print.

The particular point of contention is Ms. Loh’s theory that perhaps the reason we have a divorce culture is because we marry too often. Citing “all the abject and swallowed misery” she observes in modern marriage, she wonders, “Why do we still insist on marriage?”

Then she really gets down to it, ending her polemic with a

“final piece of advice: avoid marriage—or you too may suffer the emotional pain, the humiliation, and the logistical difficulty, not to mention the expense, of breaking up a long-term union at midlife for something as demonstrably fleeting as love.”

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“Dear Quirkyalone: Advice for QuirkyLiving” is a weekly guest column by the authors of the brilliant blog Onely. It debuts today and will appear every Monday. When you’re making up your own road map for (quirky)living, you need thoughtful advice. We’re here for you. We welcome your questions; send them on to onely AT onely.org.

Dear Quirkyalone,

Besides Oprah, who is a good model of single living in our culture?   –Special K

Dear Special K,

Good question. I think it’s much easier to come up with examples of poor single role models than admirable ones. Momentarily blocked for ideas of my own, I googled “single role models.”  Here’s a sampling from the first page of results:

Using Role Models to Succeed With Single Women

Lack of Male Role Models For Young Children From Single-Parent Families

They Were Single Too: 8 Biblical Role Models, by David M. Hoffeditz

“Oh dear,” I thought, “Surely there must have been a few notable singles since John the Baptist?” With Google apparently hijacked by heteronormatives, I was forced to actually search of my own brain for ideas. Here’s a sampling from those results:

Notable Singles Nowadays

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor:

She is not only a “wise Latina”, but she has supported gay rights, which is crucial for being nominated as Supreme Quirkyalone. Singles, as a (somewhat) oppressed demographic themselves, should be accepting of all kinds of relationships, not just couplings and definitely not just heterosexual couplings.

And speaking of Supremes:

According to this Ebony article, singer Mary Wilson “says that being single has allowed her to develop in ways that being married did not. ‘Now, I can play without asking permission from my husband or parents,’ she says. ‘I like the idea of being able to make my own choices about what to do.’ ”

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Dilemmas, conundrums, burning (or mundane) questions about quirkyaloneness and quirkytogetherness: We all have them, and we want to hear yours. What questions do you have about optimum quirkyliving? What’s come up in your life recently where you could use some advice, a pep talk, or maybe even some tough love? We’d like to know, because we’re launching a new quirkyalone (or more broadly, quirkyliving) advice column. It will answer everything you ever wanted to know about quirkyliving and were(n’t) afraid to ask. The advice dispensers will be the lovely and talented writers over at one of my favorite blogs Onely.

We’ll be launching the column this month. Send your questions to onely AT onely dot org.

To sweeten the deal we’re sponsoring a contest for the first question askers. Send a question to the Onely ladies and let me know you have done so by leaving a comment on this post “I asked a question for the new quirkyalone advice column.” Leave your comment by Thursday, July 16. I’ll choose one of you at random; you’ll get a signed copy of Quirkyalone.

We’re ready and waiting to pore over your problems, so bring them on!

Transparency is a major buzzword in Internet circles these days. It’s about sharing who you are through YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, enough to make you seem more real and a little vulnerable. Transparency is said to bring us closer together. In business and government, transparency theoretically makes institutions more accountable.

It’s strange to be a nonfiction writer who has always specialized in writing about culture through the prism of my own life now that everyone is sharing tidbits of their lives online. I’m suspicious of the belief that we should all be transparent. I know how carefully I and other nonfiction writers and memoirists consider which stories and details to share. We don’t tell them in real-time. It’s impossible to predict how careless sharing will haunt us in the future, whether in the workplace or a relationship.

But now I feel blocked, I decided to give the whole transparency thing a try. What’s the worst thing that can happen?  If there’s anything I’m passionate about, it’s honest communication.

I have decided that it might be interesting to be more transparent at this moment about my tangle of ambivalence  regarding quirkyalone ten years after originally writing an essay defining the term (and five years after publishing my book).

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Today I am oh so pleased to unveil the new, resdesigned quirkyalone.net!

The new site has been designed to showcase popular content so that when you land on the blog, there are easy ways to click and find more of what interests you. The changes include:
- Daily fresh content on the blog. Soon we’ll be adding new contributors writing on the single life, quirkytogether marriages, politics, pop culture, travel, and more.
- Top tabs surfacing the most popular and featured blog posts along with contributors and archives
- Sample chapters from the book
- Cool new galleries to display images, like those in the IQD party pack
- Threaded comments (now you can reply to someone else’s comment on a post)

Thank you to Randy Jones from Aquatoad Design for working with me on every last detail. Thanks also to Sara Cambridge, Matt Albiniak, and Bonni Evenson.

Please take a whirl around and leave comments with any bugs you find. I was eager to launch before I head to New York for a sure-to-be wacky and surreal Twitter event: the 140 characters conference, where I will be a “character.” In all the last-minute madness, I haven’t had time to do full QA on QA–so eager to hear about any bugs you find! Looking forward to your comments, feedback, and ideas and the continuing evolution of quirkyalone.net. xo Sasha