Single life `isn’t an affliction’

Go ahead. Feel sorry for single people. View them as less than, as the smug marrieds do in Bridget Jones’s Diary. But guess what? There’s a growing contingent of folks out there who are single by choice, and loving it. “There’s no question that the pendulum is swinging in a different direction,” says Xavier Amador, co-author of Being Single in a Couples’ World (Fireside, $12). “Singles are happy being single. It’s a different world we live in these days.

Spinster…Really?!

I never knew I was a spinster until my bank told me so. It’s true I am an unmarried woman. I like to think of myself as an independent, financially secure woman who is capable of buying a home by myself. But I suppose that takes up too much space on the line next to my name. My married friends didn’t have to deal with this humiliation when they signed up for their mortgages. And my single guy friends were described as “bachelor.”