You quote Valerie Gibson [“We’re a materialistic society, and we want to hang onto what we’ve acquired.”] and Shinan Govani [“In Toronto, when you say how are you?’ to someone in a bar, they’ll say ‘I’m good.’ And that’s the end of the conversation.”] on Toronto as a dating city. Do you yourself think there’s anything unique to Toronto’s singles scene?
I don’t find Toronto that cold. I think it’s very easy to typecast a city. I think what Valerie was talking about was the mercantile nature of the city, how property and real estate figure into relationships in perverse ways. But no, I think people are people, pretty much; it’s not a civic thing.

There is a great image in the piece of singles being like “rogue elephants,” threatening to disrupt the herd of couples. Can you talk more about that?
I think it’s true. There’s a grid and marriage puts you in a certain category in that grid. Singles are not mating in the conventional way. Further to that, single women used to be considered threats to marriage in terms of stealing husbands. But now, there’s a sense that they’re offering inspiration. I’ve seen lots of examples. When you’re single you can be pretty conventional, but you’re not necessarily playing by the same rules. That said, I talked to lots of people who were desperately trying to get out of singledom. I think there’s a reflex assumption that singles are on the hunt, willing to seek and destroy to achieve coupledom. My observation is that that’s not the case; in fact, many singles have a pretty caustic view of coupled life, perhaps as a survival mechanism.

You talk a lot about how singles, specifically single women, represent such a large market, the “new yuppie.” Do you think that’s a way of corralling these rogue elephants?
Oh, absolutely. The paradox of singles marketing, particularly to single women, is that it has two strains—how to get out of being single (that’s targeted to men as well) and the other side, in which you celebrate your singleness in the form of acquisition. Which is just ridiculous. It’s substitute behaviour: you don’t have a man, so buy a house. It’s faulty. Especially on the other side, when they’re selling an image of single life as being pathetic, and that’s what people are buying: to get out of it. It’s a catch-22.

A very strong through line in the piece is your discussion of I-centric behaviour. Do you view that negatively?
I don’t think selfishness is a good quality. But people can be very selfish in relationships. There’s this sense that single life is self-indulgent, and I don’t think that’s necessarily true. I know lots of people in relationships who are far more I-centric. But you can get very self-reliant when you’re single, and lose that sense of caring for another person. There’s a line from David Foster Wallace: “It’s a kind of modern tragedy to live your life and never love another person more than yourself.” I think about that a lot. Not that that’s my experience personally, but I think, whether single or coupled, as a society we’re very self-defining and self-satisfied.

More so than say, 25 years ago?
I can’t speak to that. The latter part of the 20th century is probably of a piece.

Do you think that’s partly because couples and families don’t provide what we thought they could provide at one point?
The thing is, you don’t have to get married. Women don’t have to get married. The entire landscape changed in the second half of the 20th century. Marriage became an option. And, with the acceptance within the marketplace, you have a whole different definition of what it means to be single. The fact that we’re having this conversation proves we haven’t really moved as far as we think we have.

You talk about feeling extremely lonely when you’ve been in a couple, something I think most people have felt at some point. Do you think that’s a qualitatively different kind of loneliness?
Oh, it’s much worse. Come on, it’s totally worse. There’s nothing lonelier than being with someone and feeling an absence in the room.

Before I read the article and your book The Meaning of Wife, I expected to find more about your own personal life in both. Do you think people expect that when reading about these subjects?
Yes.

And do you deliberately avoid writing about yourself?
Yep. [Laughs] Well, I don’t deliberately. I’m interested in cultural and social observation. Obviously, I do observe myself. And there’s a bit of me in that piece. The assignment was to talk about what has changed in single life, observations about the single scene in Toronto, and we agreed at the outset that it wasn’t going to be a piece about me. Because what’s interesting to me about single life is that it’s not a singular experience. I didn’t want to contribute another essay about “Oh, I have good days and I have bad days…” The thing is, I really like being single. I’m good at being single. But I found myself becoming almost defensive writing that. I thought people would think I was making that up. That struck me as interesting—that there is this pressure, that you can’t really be happy unless you’re with somebody.

You’ve never been married, right?
No. But I was in a really long-term relationship.

But you have no objection to marriage?
No, I’d love to meet the man I want to marry. I see relationships and marriage like the weather. When the right atmospheric conditions occur, it rains. And if they don’t, it doesn’t. If it’s not there, it’s not there.

You talk about becoming so comfortable being single that it becomes almost self-perpetuating—
I talked to a lot of people. I did about 13 interviews, with everyone having a slightly different perspective. A couple of women I talked to, though, said they’d been single for so long that they’d built this shell no one could penetrate. Because you do have to become self-reliant, and there becomes no point of entry. I think there is that worry, that you might not seem vulnerable enough. There’s this shiny veneer that keeps people away. I don’t personally feel that, but I certainly talked to a number of people who expressed it.