Session 132: Reimagining Single Life

Published Nov 13, 2019, 8:00 AM

The Therapy for Black Girls Podcast is a weekly conversation with Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, a licensed Psychologist in Atlanta, Georgia, about all things mental health, personal development, and all the small decisions we can make to become the best possible versions of ourselves.

Today we’ll be digging into what it might look life to reimagine our image of the single Black woman and for this conversation we are joined by Dr. Jessica D. Moorman. Dr. Moorman and I discussed the messages we get about dating and relationships from the media, how we can challenge and recreate some of these narratives for ourselves, what it looks like to embrace the freedom and potential that comes with being a single woman, and how you can begin to develop your single woman action plan.

 

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Welcome to the Therapy for Black Girls podcast, a weekly conversation about mental health, personal development, and all the small decisions we can make to become the best possible versions of ourselves. I'm your host, Dr Joy hard and Bradford, a licensed psychologist in Atlanta, Georgia. For more information or to find a therapist in your area, visit our website at Therapy for Black Girls dot com. While I hope you love listening to and learning from the podcast, it is not meant to be a substitute for relationship with a licensed mental health professional. Hey, y'all, thanks so much for joining me for session one thirty two of the Therapy for Black Girls podcasts. Today we'll be digging into what it might look like to reimagine our image of the single black woman, and for this conversation, we're lucky enough to be joined by Dr Jessica D. Mormon. Dr Mormon received her PhD in Communication studies from the University of Michigan and her Masters of Health Science from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Her research explores the roles of media and interpersonal relationships in shaping black women's experiences of single life. Dr Mormon and I discuss the messages we get about dating and relationships from the media, how we can challenge and recreate some of these narratives for ourselves, what it looks like to embrace the freedom and potential that comes with being a single woman, and how you can begin to develop your single woman action plan. If you hear something while listening that really resonates with you, please be sure to share it with us on social media using the hashtag tbg in session. Here's our conversation. Thank you so much for joining us today, Dr Mormon. Oh, thank you for having me. Yes, I'm very excited. So I love when I get a chance to talks and researchers because it always brings such a I think, different level of insight to the topics that we're talking about here on the podcast. And so your research is all about exploring the roles of media and interpersonal relationships and how those shape Black women's experiences of single life. So it sounds incredibly exciting. So tell me about the research exactly. You've summarized it correctly there, Dr Joyce. So, as you said, my work focuses on basically Black women's experiences of being single I'm a trained media researcher, so I tend to the questions of dating advice representations of single Black women in the media, think about advice interpersonally, so the messages we get from friends, from family, and how all of these kind of different messages, different inputs, different sources for ideas about single life, shape how we see ourselves, how we approach being single as Black women, and how basically Black women try and strategize life as a single woman. And so I think again, as a media researcher, I focus really kind of tend very closely to questions of dating advice. In particular, I think two thousand and nine was a big year for many of us because that was the year that Steve Harvey's Act Like a Lady Like a Man came out. I was wondering if that's what you were gonna say, yes and oh yeah, in your professional opinion. Was that kind of like the turning point for Black women getting dating advice? I think in terms of this modern kind of ear and modern way of dating advice, for sure, because I'm sure we can point to any number of representations or dating advice books from earlier eras. So for example, Waiting to Exhale is a perfect example of a representation that tends to the lives of single black women. And in that representation there was any number of pieces of advice shared back and forth between the characters. But two thousand and nine became a very important year, again marked by Steve Harvey's act like a lady, think like a man, and that we have men kind of positioning themselves as dating advice experts and offering advice to women about how they should behave in the context of dating relationships in particular. And so that book gave rise to any number of other kind of properties, first and foremost for Steve Harvey himself, right, So he was had a sequel to that book, two movies from that book, and we all know his you know Strawberry letter segment on his radio program that you know eventually get spun out into a talk show that is, my understanding, is no longer on the air. Tyrese released a dating advice book for women with his co author Rev Run entitled Mannalogy. You see Devon Franklin and his wife Megan Good releasing a dating advice book. And so there's any number of examples of married celebrities, married male celebrities, in particular directing advice to black women of out their experiences, and what are your thoughts about that, Doctor Mormon, as a researcher, because I have my personal thoughts about what that, what that feels like, but I'm curious to hear as a researcher, what are your thoughts about, like how that has now been impacted black women who are single. Okay, so we can't say I can't make a kind of categorical statement that all of this is vice is wrong, right, because even a broken clock is right twice a day, absolutely, And also advice is very personal, right for some of us, some pieces of advice are more salient than other pieces of advice, right, So it might be more important for you to understand, for example, your approach to dating and want to hear a man's perspective about what he's looking for in a potential partner. But there are many pitfalls when we talk about thinking about men advising women, but also married people advising single people. First and foremost, what I found in my research and what I found in you know, reviewing the literature on this question, is that these media properties tend to contain misogynistic pieces of advice, So they construct women in a particular way, they construct men in a particular way, and they construct black relationships in a particular way. So, for example, we can think about black women as needing to look a certain way to be appealing to the male gaze and as a primary means to attract a mate. Typically we think about this in the context of popular culture, as you know, lighter skin, because colorism comes into some of these media properties as having more Anglo features, because again the kind of physical appearance part of it is there. And so what you see is that this advice kind of advises a way to look. We can think about this kind of misogynistic element as showing up into terms of behavior, So thinking about women not being advised to make the first move with the potential male partner, or having a set of expectations of men in their lives, for example, that all men are to pursue women. And so these kind of ideas about relationships have a tendency to be out of sync with our actual experiences and the world, and they reinforce a particular set of ideas about how men and women should interact with one another in the context of relationships. The second kind of element that I've noticed in my research is that dating advice is just that it's advice about dating, it's not advice about being single. And so in my work, I'm a qualitative researcher. I'm currently working on a project that's focused on interviewing single Black women about their experiences of being single, what their priorities of single life are, how they approach being single. And what I found is that the kind of things on single black women's minds day to day are not being tended to in this advice. So, for example, in my project, I found that single Black women were using their kind of experiences of being single to advance their careers, to focus on education, to establish financial security, to travel the world, to focus on spiritual and religious growth, to focus on community participation, and any other kind of number of elements that comprise a full and whole life. Typically you don't see that addressed in dating advice or advice directed to single women. It's typically focused around how to get a mate, how to construct yourself in a particular way, how to behave in a particular way, as opposed to, you know, here's how you should go about the business of establishing an I rara for example, or here's what you should be doing if you want to start your own small business. And so I find that the messages tend to be a bit limited. They tend to rely on these kind of more ideological constructions of relationships, and they just kind of tend to misconstrue and misunderstand single black women's lives, right, because I think that there is this common perception that you're only single and so you find a partner, right and leaving out this whole spectrum of people who maybe don't want that or who will not be partnered exactly. You're raising a great point, which is how we're defining single. So in my work, I think of single as being unmarried, so in line with the sensitive definition of being single, and we know that kind of marriage is an important threshold in terms of accessing tax benefits, for example, how you are perceived in loan documents for example, And so that's the threshold at which I kind of tend to the question of being single. But then there's also this kind of other conception of being single as not being in relationship. And as you've highlighted, there's a big gap between being unmarried and not dating someone. So, for example, in my research, I've had any number of participants who have had multiple dating partners that they're not living with, they might be seeing casually, and we might think of those women as being single. We might not, depending on what our expectations of single life are. But again, there's a lot built into the idea of being unmarried, so to speak, and you know, being unpartnered if you will, m hm, So, Dr Mormon. Are there other like media entities that you feel like you've seen doing a good job of actually speaking to the experiences of single black women. Yes, Actually, I'm sure that you and your listeners have you know, flipped on Oprah's network periodically? Yes, And so there's one show on there that I love. It's called Mahitia, Mind Your Business, and I have only seen one season of it, but it's with and I forget the company that she's in charge of, but it's this natural hair care line that she developed, and Mahitia would be the And again I don't remember her last name off the top of my head GIFs Dillinger, isn't it? Yes, yes, exactly. And she had a reality television program where she basically worked with black women business owners to get their businesses on track, and so the program was focused on how to establish an LLC, how to put together a business plan, how to pitch a product to a potential buyer. Again, many of the women in that program were single, but the advice there was geared towards entrepreneurship, which tended to be a priority of UM. You know, I found among my participants, you know, thinking about small business, thinking about kind of growth and um, developing one's brand, if you will. And so that's one program that I absolutely love. I would also highly recommend your program, of course, and actually did so in my dissertation and highlighted yours as one of kind of site for conversations and discussions about unpartnered life that extend beyond simply how to get a man and thinking about the kind of pitfalls and you know, privileges of living life on partnered But then I would also just think about, in addition to the media, just thinking about the types of messages we're taking in from our friends and family, one site for this being social media. And I think we've had any number of conversations as a culture of about how we need to curate our social media profiles and curate our social media feeds to kind of invite in and avoid certain types of messaging. So that's another site that I would be kind of mindful of. Is our folks following kind of more relationship oriented content? Are they following I personally love a young Levan's aunt. I know that she can be controversial as a you know, a therapeutic figure, but as an entertainer, I think she's quite on the nose. She puts out a lot of kind of interesting content about being single and how to think about single life in a more holistic way. And so those would be some of the places that I would start to think about and some of the you know, things to put in your listener's ear about what to consider when they're thinking about who to follow or thinking about the content that they're consuming. Do these messages actually relate to my life? Am I getting something out of this content? Does it make me feel bad? Is this content actually speaking to some portion of my experience or is it you know, a set of messages that are actually motivating or pushing me towards, you know, experiences that I actually don't want to have. So I'm curious if there are other really interesting things that have come from new work. I'm sure there are tons, but there are other particular thieves that have come from talking to these women that you think it would be important to highlight. Sure, And so one of the things I want to highlight is just sort of thinking about being single as um the kind of motivations for being single. So I believe a couple of weeks ago you had a discussion about freedom and relationships, which I really truly loved, and in that discussion, your guests talked about how being you know, free or having perceiving one's freedom as being a reason why women avoid relationships. I co signed that and reinforced that, and have found that in my work is that maintaining one's freedom is an important dimension about why women choose to be single, because again, I think we like to think about being single as a circumstance or something that has some negative thing that has happened to us, but we overlook typically the agency of black women in that content. X. Right, I'm choosing to be in relationship or I'm choosing to avoid relationship Along those same lines, in addition to preserving one's freedom, I found that women actively choose to remain single to avoid experiences of violence or irresponsibility. And I think we can think about that at the level of an individual partner, like, for example, I'm going to leave David because he has been violent with me. But my work has found that not only is it, am I going to leave specific person over here because their behavior was bad, but I'm then going to avoid other relationships going forward because I'm not even interested in having to deal with the stress of negotiating a violent or irresponsible partner again, in addition to violence, thinking about irresponsibility, not being emotionally supportive, all of these potential concerns about partnership. Another aspect of being single that I found in my work is that women preserve their single status as rejecting monogamy. And so I found one or two of my participants discussed that they found monogamy restrictive. They found the expectations of marriage and the expectations of a monogamous marriage to be overwhelming. And you know, one participant I'm thinking about in particular, she had been married for almost twenty years. Her relationship was abusive, her husband expected her to dress a certain way. She described it as dress and looked like a mom, and she just didn't want to have to live up to his ideals and expectations of what a partner would be. She was more interested in exploring kind of sexually things that he wasn't interested in. When he ended their marriage, she ended up having five boyfriends. You know, she wanted to date this one, this one can take me to the mall, this one can go with me to lunch, this one can take me to breakfast, etcetera, etcetera. And she lived independently. She raised her kids, but she maintained a series of dating relationships. And so we can think of nonmonogamy as being another kind of reason why women choose to be single. Another import an element that I think all of us at some point in our lives have experienced but might not have words for, is the ways that single status is stigmatizing, both in broader society but also in our kind of smaller social networks. And so one kind of big theme or big idea that emerged from this project was the ways that single status was weaponized against black women in the context of their families. So say more about it. So one of the things that we can so again backing up as a researcher, I think more about kind of the meanings of institutions like marriage, or the kind of significance that we grant to being single or being married, and we can trace that back to popular conceptualizations of what marriages and thinking about kind of let's put our eighteen hundreds hats on and think about kind of the roles of women in general and society. Because this contract of the cult of pure womanhood which I'm trying to speak about now defines marriage in many ways for women. So thinking about kind of white middle class women's roles in society being very limited, marriage became an outlet for or one way to access a middle class life. If you were married, you had value. If you were married, you could be seen as a pillar of society. If you were married, you were fulfilling your roles to God and to your country in many respects. Well, we know that, you know, the eight hundreds weren't the friendliest time for black women, so typically black women were excluded from this kind of ideal. But the importance of thinking about the cult of pure womanhood is that it defines marriage in many ways. It helps us to shape our ideas about marriage as an important institution for validating women's roles in society. As a woman, because I am married, I now have value. My sexuality is legitimate, my child bearing is legitimate, My kind of public facing persona is legitimized because of how marriage defines me. We can also think about the important role of how black women see each other. And I'm sure you've tended to the question of respectability politics on your show before, but as a reminder, respectability politics grows out of this kind of early nineteenth century Baptist club movement that helps, you know, migrants from the South, black people leaving the South entering the North and integrate into society. And so we get the idea of respectability politics, you know, with good intentions to help black people and black women integrate into new kind of northern spaces. And so this concept and idea has evolved, right, And I think we can all think a colloquially or in pop culture where respectability politics rears its ugly head. But we think about respectability politics as being kind of a set of norms for behavior, expectations for women's behavior, expectations for appearance, expectations for decorum, for chast behavior. And so these ideas about how black women should behave in society and chast kind of more decorus ways that reflect their position as lauded members of black communities, and these ideas about marriage as a legitimizing institution for women's roles in society. These constructs come into play in terms of stigmatizing single black women. And so what does that mean in the context of families, and so that can be slights around you know, once fertility outside of marriage, So judgments about having kids before you were married, or judgments about having kids unpartnered, that can be manifest as ideas that you're not capable of caring for children or caring for the members of your community, because again you're not valid dated through marriage as being experts in those arenas. And so I'm thinking about one participant in particular who shared a really interesting quote about her experiences of being single. Would you mind if I shared this quote with you and your listeners, Dr Joy, Please do, please do. This participant is a thirty three year old marketing executive. She worked for a Fortune five hundred company, and she had no kids, and she was in the context of our interview describing some of the criticisms and judgments that she encountered from her friends and her relatives, and so she goes on by saying, I have relatives who are like, are you gay, as if I'm single because I'm gay. I have younger cousins who now have babies, even if they're not married, they have a baby, and so there's like, I know that this person wasn't single at some point because they have a child. So I think that's always like the issue of the question of family, like how they perceived your singleness. I had a bunch of aunts. My dad has four sisters, and they were all together and I was holding a baby. Somebody was like, let me get a picture of this, because we don't know if we'll ever see Do you know how to hold a baby? And I'm like, excuse me, I'm single, but I know how to hold a baby. I've dated a lot of guys who are like, so, why are you single? Like a what's wrong with you kind of thing. You're damaged goods if you're single. Well, mother, you're single too, so what's your damage. I think it's just like nobody questions men in their singleness. I have an older cousin he has a different girl at every family function, so there's a rotation there, but nothing serious. My brother doesn't bring his girlfriends around necessarily, but there's no question of his singleness. Nobody is like, is male cousin gay? Is brother gay? Because they don't come with girlfriends. But you know, I'm the one end quote, and so she highlights a lot of really important ideas in that quotation. Again, judgment from family. I'm sure all of us, you know, single folks out there have encountered judgments from men that we were dating in the moment, Interrogations about sort of why are you single, what's wrong with you for being single? This assumption that there's automatically some damage going on with you because you're single, And then this expectation or idea that because we are not partnered to a man, we then are vulnerable to critiques about our sexuality. Regardless of our sexuality. Do you want someone inquiring about your bedroom behavior who you find attractive it's really not necessarily appropriate. Or judgments about one's capacity in the context of families. You know, Auntie's in many ways are pulling. We're helping out everybody, right, because we're keeping kids, we're ushering parents to appointments where supporting members of our family who might otherwise not be available, but instead that childlessness or that unpartneredness is used to basically Marcus as insufficient or Marcus as deviant, Marcus as out of our role. And so one of the things that I tend to my work is thinking about the costs and implications of that, right, the anxiety that comes with, for example, joining maybe family occasions because you know how you're gonna be on the butt of many jokes or the butt of many judgments for the fact that you're not bringing a partner, or thinking about maybe taking the lead or asserting yourself in in domains that maybe you have been seen as not invited into, so for example, like starting childcare business, or taking on more of a lead in terms of keeping nieces and nephews or friends kids. And so those are some of the implications that I'm trying to tend to in my work. We also know that this stigma has social implications too. We know that there are implications for black women encountering stereotypes about single black women in the context of hiring. So one common stereotype that invoked against black women in employment context. Is this concept of the quote welfare mean end quote this this supposedly hyper reproductive quote unquote lazy black woman who's just looking for an easy dollar or you know, to partner herself to someone that's going to give her money, or conversely, these other kind of ideas about a single mothers where they're going to just be the hardest workers and will settle for anything I give you because you're desperate for this work. And so these have implications for for example, when black women go up for promotion, how they're evaluated when in the context of interviews, how black women are evaluated in the context of healthcare settings as well, how we're evaluated in terms of our reproductive health and our reproductive choices. And so this idea of single stigma has broader implications than simply just you know, our interactions with our cousins and our our aunts, but also how we're perceived and broader society. So Dr Mormon, does your research kind of get to the intervention space, like, Hey, the women talked about what kinds of things have been helpful for them or institutions that they found helpful in kind of reducing some of the stigma at this stage of my research, I haven't done any work tending to the question of intervention, but I can talk about some of the ways that my participants have pushed back against these ideas and these notions. One of the ways is basically just sort of reframing their own experience and hearing. For example, am I incompetent with children simply because I'm single? No, I'm actually a great aunt. I'm a great mother, And so maybe kind of speaking back to those ideas internally evaluating oneself based on one's own skills. A lot of this also is is thinking about pushing back against the media representation. We get one kind of consistent although I have to say Insecure is doing a really good job representing kind of the myriad of experiences of single Black women. Queen Sugar is doing a great job looking at the experiences of unmarried and unpartnered Black women, and so there are numerous representations out there that offer more nuance and more depths into the kind of experiences of black women. But I'm thinking about media literacy as being another domain for this kind of pushback against some of this these kind of stigmatized notions and messaging and really understanding that because we're seeing it in popular culture, because we're seeing it on television, doesn't mean that it is that there's any kind of truth to it, right. But that's the problem with media is that it kind of creates its own reality and creates its own narratives. And so the more that we are consuming these messages about maybe single women as toxic, single women, as desperate, single women, as antagonistic or combative, the more that that shapes our ideas about the world as well. And so again I'm a big proponent media. There are any number of things in our environment that we can't control. One thing that we can absolutely control is the imagery and the content that we consume. And so another kind of site for intervention would be just sort of being very intentional about what you're actually consuming, what messages you're tending to, what content you're taking in. I think that's going back to her earlier comment about social media. I think that that's one of the things that has been really encouraging, right, is that people have been you know, like independent creators are able to kind of share their like short films or different web series or those kinds of things with a wider audience that might not have been able to access that before. Absolutely, absolutely, and so YouTube can be I mean, well, YouTube has its problems as well, there's right like without its its critique, but um, you can find and access a wider range of imagery and a wider range of messages and representations for sure. And I want to also go back to your earlier point, Dr Woman, because I don't know that I had thought about all of the different kinds of things that like single women would be more interested in than like just dating advice. I want to hear more about the idea of like people being interested in opening businesses and like how do you open an I ra A? Like are there other things that have come up in your research around other things that these women are interested in? In terms of thinking about kind of how we are popularly representing or popularly thinking about being single, we have any number and I've been highlighting about stereotypes, but any number of common messages. I almost want to leave space for your listeners to chime in and the radio it's like, what do you think being desperate? Right? Um? And so again stepping back and thinking of a life holistically, not everybody's trying to find a man. First of all, not everybody wants to be married. Some people are very happy being single, and that was one of the features of the interviews that came out. And so what does that mean If you're not focused on finding a partner and you're content being single, You're gonna want to invest your energy into yourself and invest your energy into kind of being the person and becoming the person that you want to be. And so I think one of the things that really speaks to this is the ways that we advise one another. And so there's a gat and black women advising one another, and so any any number of us can point to advice we've been given from friends, family about how to get a man. But I think we can also point to advice from friends and family about how we should grow in ourselves and how we should focus on developing ourselves as women and establishing security for ourselves as women before we pursue romantic relationships, right, And so thinking about going to college or getting a degree, getting a professional certification, experiencing the world, you know, working in different kind of contexts, all of these were priorities for my participants, so much so that there was almost kind of a drumbeat or a kind of common refrain going on among participants about you know, leave them boys alone and just focus on your education, or you know, you need to work on getting your degree, work on getting your job, work on seeing the world, work on getting your property, work on getting your savings together, and then at that point you can start thinking about dating and relationships. And so that narrative, I think really speaks to the alternative ways that women conceptualize being single for themselves as a growth oriented, purpose driven values kind of guided phase of life where you know, I'm very much a person that subscribes to the idea of purpose and living in one's purpose, and my participants really spoke to that idea of I need to be living in my purpose and being single, being unpartnered or dating provides me the opportunity to really focus in on my goals, to really focus in on my priorities, and to hone and grow and develop those areas is of life. And what I would say, again, I'm not a mental health professional, so I don't want to confuse participants by saying our participants goodness, by saying, you know that this is kind of a piece of advice. Ay that they should take, but be that they should consider is coming from a mental health perspective or sort of grounded in the work. Think about goals that you have for yourself and missions that you want to achieve for yourself. Have you been developing an idea for a small business or are you trying to turn a hobby into something that's a stream of income. Being single is a perfect time to do that. You can focus more on your goals. You don't have to worry about the responsibilities of relationships, because I think that's another dimension of this, is that my participants weren't really interested in being tied up with the responsibilities of relationships. Having a man and kids is hard, and that is time consuming, and it is resource consuming, and it requires a lot of energy. You know, whether you have kids or not, relationships require work. And so many of my participants thought, and we see this in kind of broader research as well, it's like I can invest that work in that time and that energy and those resources into another person, or I can think about as that as a space and time to invest in myself. And so that's another kind of thing I would lag for your listeners is that single life can be an opportunity for growth personal development, and it really just takes a bit of strategizing and a little bit of thinking about kind of how you want to tackle those next steps, you know, of curating a single life for yourself, because the other thing we have to really address is the fact that some of us just aren't going to be partnered. And I think that, you know, going back to this narrative of first you go to school, then you get a job, then you travel, etcetera, etcetera. Built into that idea is the expectation that at the end of that, you know, kind of paved golden road, is a man, is a family, is all of these kind of markers of success around marriage. And we just know that doesn't happen for some Black women, right, Black women. And this is no judgment on us, it's not it's that critique of our character, but we have the highest rates of being single of any kind of group of women in the country. Currently, sixty of Black women over the age of fifteen are not married. That doesn't determine anyone's life course, certainly because we know that percent of black women get married at some point in their life, right, so the majority of us do kind of get married, but that's not guaranteed for all of us. And so I would just say and and kind of encourage your your listeners to think about, well, you know, not not to to speak anything into existence, but if this was my life, if being unpartnered was my life, how would I want to live that life in a way that a reflected my purpose but be kind of challenged me to grow and push beyond my comfort zone, to accomplish things that maybe I had dreamed about accomplishing but really never saw myself doing. Because it is a space where you have more freedom than nest than you would if you were in a kind of partnership. Yeah, and I do think, you know, it's also encouraging to think about Dr Mormon that there is space for these conversations now, right, because I think maybe twenty years ago, we would not be having this kind of a conversation, right, We would be talking about all of the things that you laid out in terms of respectability and like this is the natural life course of what a black woman's life should look like. And so I think just having these conversations allows more people to kind of define their lives in ways that don't necessarily include partners or children. Absolutely, you set the word defined there, and I think that that is the word. How are we defining unmarried life for ourselves? How are we defining single life for ourselves? We could frame our experiences in the context of what we don't have lack I don't have a partner, I don't have kids in marriage, I don't have the family I have envisioned. Or we could think and frame our lives in the framework of abundance. I have time to pursue the experiences and the kind of accomplishments that I want to take on. I have space to reinvent and reimagine myself again and again and again. I have flexibility and availability with my time to be in service of my family, you know, my friends and loved ones who I found in in this world, or you know, to take on the role of a mentor in my community. And so that's one other kind of key thing, is just thinking about how we're framing these ideas for ourselves. Single life is what you make of it, it really is. Single life is how you think of it. And so again encouraging folks to maybe step back and take account of some of the ways and ideas that they have been talking to themselves about being single, some of the beliefs that they have about being single, and mapping those back to their own experience, Like do I really believe that I'm desperate simply because I don't have a man, Or is that the belief out of sync with my experience and out of sync with how I see myself? Yeah, So what's next for your research active women? So one of the things that I'm tending to is thinking about the question of age and retirement in the context of single life for Black women. Before I took on this project, I never thought of, for example, my granny as being a single black woman or being a single woman. She was just granny. But I realized it's like well, as an unmarried woman. There are particular challenges around saving for retirement, around maintaining the home, around preserving one's health, around managing kind of just day to day aspects that can become more laborious as you age. And I think that that is gonna I know for me, that's going to be the next kind of area of exploration. And so in this first project, I looked at women toty six. In this next round of studies because I plan on ultimately turning all of these interviews into a book. This next round of data collection that I'm looking to do will be done with women between the ages of fifty and eighty, and so thinking about how retirement planning goes for someone who doesn't have the benefit of a dual income. How does kind of support and social support in the home? What does that look like for somebody who's I'm partnered. We have to think about alternative living arrangements, you know, perhaps living with a sister, living with a best friend. Do we need to think about alternative ways of wealth building buying property with a collective of women. My research takes place in the city of Detroit. I'm a Detroit or shout out to Detroit, and that's a space where you know, real estate is a is a big kind of question, and ownership of property and you can kind of have you could buy have a block if you wanted to, very very literally in Detroit. And so thinking about how the process of buying operator or the process of community building, um, how that has to look intentional for women who are older, just because I mean, we're human creatures. We can't do everything on our own. Especially you know, as our bodies just naturally change and age, and so that's one of the kind of bigger questions, and I think one of the biggest questions we're gonna have to face as a society truthfully, is how are single women managing their experiences of of retirement, of aging, of maintaining their health and older years. Well, that definitely sounds very exciting. Dr Mormons that we will definitely stay in touch and want you to stay in touch and with the community to let us know when the book is happening and when this next round of research is released. Absolutely so, where can people find you online? Do you have a website or any social media handles you'd like to share? Sure? But can I share one final thought with you all before we sign off? Yeah? Absolutely so. One of the things that I would again advice take it with a grain of salt. People. The things that I would kind of encourage your listeners to do is to be very again intentional about planning their single life. Right, there's a lot of things we just kind of can't take for chance because we don't have marital partners. So, for example, talking about the role of a dual income household, single black women are just making less money than they're married peers, which has implications for how you can save and spend money. And so I would encourage your listeners to be very intentional about planning their single lives, thinking about who, for example, they can turn to when they are in need of help or assistance, and creating a very kind of clear and intentional system of support with maybe friends, family, or neighbors. Knowing your neighbors is going to be very important because you don't want to be in a situation where, for example, your power goes out and you don't know who's around you, right, And so I would encourage your listeners to be a very intentional about, you know, how they're planning their finances, how they're building community and social support, what they intend to do with their time, and shifting away from this idea that you know, being single is something you know, I have to get a man, for example, and thinking about it more intentionally about what do I want my life to look like? And so I would just encourage your listeners who are single to put together your single woman action plan. Who is going to be my major health contact, What does my retirement program look like? Who can I turn to in times of crisis. I would also say one final thing is about advice is take all advice with a grain of salt, right, so a particularly in popular cultural contexts. So thinking about you know, maybe Steve Harvey works for you. I'm not here to judge anyone, but be critical of the messages that you encounter about single women. And if something doesn't feel right, you don't have to subscribe to it, you can reject it. All advice is there for a reason, and take what works for you and leave the rest. So I think that would be my final thought for your listeners today. Perfect. We appreciate that. So where can people find you online? You can find me acting a full on Twitter at j D Mormon m O O R M A N so it's at j D. Mormon all one word, and then you can find me acting less of fool on Instagram at professor Underscore j D. M. I don't have a website, but if you're interested in knowing more about my work, and one of my website will be going live, those would be two of the places you can find me Perfect, but we will include all of those in the show notes. I really appreciate you sharing with us today, Dr Mormon, Oh, no problem. Thank you for inviting me this one. Absolutely. I'm still glad Dr Mormon was able to share her expertise with us today. To find out more information about her, be sure to check out the show notes at Therapy for Black Girls dot Com slash Session one thirty two, and don't forget to show are this episode with two people in your circle, And don't forget to share your takeaways with us either on Twitter or in your I G stories using the hashtag TPG in session. If you're searching for a therapist in your area, be sure to check out our therapist directory at Therapy for Black Girls dot com slash directory. And if you want to continue digging into this topic and meet some other sisters in your area, come on over and join us in the Yellow Couch Collective, where we take a deeper dive into those topics from the podcast and just about everything else. You can join us at Therapy for Black Girls dot com slash y c C. Thank y'all so much for joining me again this week. I look forward to continue in this conversation with you all real soon. Take a care

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The Therapy for Black Girls podcast is a weekly conversation with Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, a license 
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