Drafted on March 11, 2026.
Revised on March 13, 2026.

Prior to my divorce, something that I thought I could appreciate on an intellectual level, but not really feel on a visceral level, is what a greater cognitive load single people have to carry. I understand this is not everyone’s experience in divorce; many women had partners who were so unwilling to contribute anything to partnership that divorce actually freed up their cognitive load and restored their time (especially those who now share parenting duties with their ex). That, however, is not my story. As much as the way my husband ended our marriage was unexpected and traumatizing, he deserves credit for carrying quite a bit of household and cognitive labor during our marriage that I’ve now had to shoulder over the last year.

Because everything like taking the cat to the vet or the car for repairs or doing the dishes or the laundry all now falls entirely on me, it can be really hard to stay on top of all of this in a timely manner. Because outside of spousal support I have little money coming in right now and am trying to avoid touching my savings, it also means I’m not willing to throw money at the problem (I’d love to get more takeout to reduce my cooking, but if I’m going to spend extra money on food then I’d prefer it to be a meal with a friend).  

I’m glad that in the conversation about women choosing to remain single, the concept of the “singles tax” is gaining more widespread recognition. There is the obvious stuff, like how much more housing costs when you’re a single person (even if you have a roommate and share a 2 BR, it’s likely not as cheap as a couple sharing a 1 BR), but I don’t yet see a lot of discussion about the single tax extending beyond the monetary to the kind of emotional and cognitive calculations that single people have to navigate in a world designed for partners. Did you know that in the United States, almost half of Americans are single and over a quarter of households are occupied by singles?

The cognitive costs of being single show up in both large and small ways. I had to update my legal paperwork recently to remove my ex from stuff like my estate and healthcare documents, and added on a trusted family member and a trusted close friend as my designated agents. I asked both for their willingness but did have a brief flickering moment of panic where I was afraid they would say No.    

I saw my primary care physician a couple days ago, and since I’m now 40 I get to start learning about all the fun medical tests on the horizon (assuming we don’t all die in a nuclear apocalypse first). The age of a first recommended colonoscopy recently went down to 45. My initial reaction was not “oh boy, I better start eating more fiber” but “oh gosh, I have five years to either find another partner or bribe a friend to take my loopy ass (literally) home from having a camera in my butt.”  

But the small and noticeable ways in which the cognitive load shows up a lot for me is not having a person to be a daily sounding board or witness to my life. Last summer when I was early in the divorce process, I realized how much I missed just sharing the mundane details about my day with someone, and losing that was a massive emotional adjustment. I’m fortunate to have a lot of group chats where I can share those things and I have a lot of standing phone calls with friends but it’s not the same as having someone’s physical presence with me when I’m sharing. This eats at me so much it’s part of why I’m seriously considering getting a roommate again sometime in the future, because I miss the way that a good roommate is someone you can experience the soundtrack of your life alongside.  

I’m dipping my toe back into dating and sometimes when someone I’ve recently met asks me a totally innocuous and nice question about how my day or week is going, it sends me into a mild tailspin. Do I share all the gnarly details about things like my mom’s messy health issues or my landlord neglecting to fix the chirping smoke detectors that have been keeping me on edge for days or a client being weird and annoying about paying my invoice? That feels like heavy stuff to lay on someone I don’t know very well. I want to be honest about how my day is going but not so honest that I scare them off. I have zero desire to get into another serious life partner relationship anytime soon, but if I am honest with myself I really, deeply miss having the daily sounding board associated with a close romantic partner.    

None of these observations I’ve shared are revelations that feminists and queer writers haven’t discussed ad nauseum (Dean Spade’s book Love in a Fucked up World digs into some of this). The valorization/elevation of romantic partnership is not just a reflection of patriarchy, it’s also a band aid that prevents us from demanding policy changes or embracing cultural shifts outside of a nuclear family or monogamous couple framework. But there is the theory, and then there is the lived experience that doing this extra cognitive labor to organize a life outside of/without a partner to share the load is… a lot of work.  

Sometimes it feels like being single is doing everything on hard mode, and as someone whose standard operating mode is doing things on hard mode anyway, I keep feeling like I’m falling behind with getting everything done that I want to do. But I keep trying to remember that holding myself to the standards I had when I was married and had someone to share the workload with is not fair to myself. It’s not a big deal if I rarely cook anything very complicated anymore because having to spend as much time cleaning up as I did cooking is a pain in the ass and I’m not just being a whiny baby.  

I really appreciate how disability activists often point out that if you live long enough, you’ll almost certainly have a disability at some point, and hence we need culture and policy to have accommodations for disability. I’d argue the same thing exists for being single, but being single is so often framed as a liminal place people should try to exit from as quickly as possible that almost no one is taking the social and policy needs of single people seriously. And just like home owners have little motivation to be invested in say, renters rights, I see little appetite for married people to take a policy interest in single people’s needs (despite the fact that many married people will eventually find themselves single whether through divorce or widowhood!).  

I saw a meme recently that said friends are the safety net that catches us when romantic relationships fail. There’s a lot of truth to that, but that sentiment can let us off the hook from thinking about friendship in a much more expansive way than we typically do in late stage capitalist empire. I don’t want friendship to be reduced to a safety net, I want it to be at the pumping heart of my life (after all, I am a member of a religion called the Religious Society of Friends!!). For many of us, investing so much of our emotional and life administrative expectations within our romantic partner can be akin to a form of relational monocropping - and if there’s a crop failure (i.e. divorce) it can have wide-ranging consequences across the rest of your life.

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