EKatja Kullmann only finds her title in the middle of her book. And if you want to put it in a cheesy way, she finds her way there. After mostly writing about the “unaccompanied woman”, the “single-in” or the “single woman” in the first half of the book and citing other terms or insults – “late girl”, “cat lady”, “frigid freak” – , a mini showdown occurs. In a party argument with a (not single) woman, she comes up with the term she will use from now on to describe what is important to her: the “singular woman”.
By women, Kullmann means “all people and machines that pose as woman understand”, with singular she means: without a love relationship. And because her book is a first-person non-fiction book and she explores its subject based on her own person – white / West German / hetero / cis – when she says the two-person love relationships, she means those with men (which she does not define further) or, as they say on one place, “the hetero drama” as it has been happening serially in so-called Western culture since the invention of romantic love.
Kullmann criticizes heteronormativity only in passing, above all she criticizes what is called “amatonormativity”: the idea that the purpose and happiness of a life lies in the monogamous, possibly eternal couple relationship. This applies in particular to women, whose existence without a focus on a man is often found to be inadequate, even by themselves, for no real existence at all.
The “singular woman” questions these assumptions through her way of life, which is “a variant of applied feminism”. “singular” call meanings between “unique” and “isolated” on; but the new term also allows Kullmann to capture and appreciate the most recent edition of the woman without a man (in life) in its peculiarities. Not as a woman who is missing something, but as one who is more than ever enough on her own.
Everything – including the book – begins with the “moderate self-knowledge shock” that the journalist and author Kullmann experiences in her late 40s, when she realizes that she has been without a relationship for 14 years, while she has largely lived her adult life before in a relationship had spent. “Being alone has happened to me.” It was not a goal, but a consequence, the logical, at least unconscious plan to plan no more future commitment.
When Kullmann realizes that her non-relationship status is no longer a transitional phase, she begins to consider it, and despite the shock it is immediately clear: Kullmann likes this status, her life and the unaccompanied woman – as a social type and as an individual case. She follows this woman, these women, from the “field of love” to track down herself and her desertion from the field. She interweaves descriptions, thoughts and arguments of often single authors from literary, autobiographical or theoretical texts with personal experiences and those of acquaintances and friends.
Dating dilemmas and break ups
It’s about dating dilemmas and breaking up, the desire to have children, the desire for sex and getting older, about loneliness of the tolerable or nasty kind and the “monster question” as to why you’re still single. (By the way, if at all possible, the best answer to this is: “Why aren’t you slim?”)
In doing so, Kullmann makes herself and her story the most important case in her study, so honest and relentless, self-deprecating and funny that even chapter titles such as “Why I am a good person” and the talk of one’s own “wonderful” life are manageable. Doubts and ambivalences arise early enough when she – “a person who has long been slightly wrinkled” – maneuvers her way through the “slightly neurotic, quarter to semi-intellectual middle-class milieu” in Berlin.
The woman without a man had her places and times
Again and again Kullmann distances herself from her self-narrative and returns to her. She contextualizes herself. This gives form to what then hardly needs to be said: Lived relationships, like the fantasies of them, are culturally programmed and conditioned by external – political, economic, social – circumstances. However, sufficiently unfamiliar relationships can also change the circumstances.