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[Bella’s intro: When Romanian scholar Adriana Savu first told me that she was studying single people in her country, I was delighted to hear it. I would like to learn much more about singles in parts of the world beyond the U.S., and I think lots of other people would, too.
In Romania, as in so many other countries all around the globe, the number of single people has been growing. Adriana Savu should have been able to find many to interview. But in the city of Bucharest, there were many fewer single men than single women, and the single women were reluctant to talk to her about their lives. What was that about? I am grateful to her for sharing her experiences and her wisdom in this guest post.]
Studying Single Women in Romania
A guest post written by Adriana Savu
Imagine you open the door of a thick-walled building, where you live as a semi-recluse, to a noisy square of a global downtown. That's how I felt when I started doing research on middle-aged, never-married people in Romania.
A few years ago, I suddenly became aware of the fact that many of my friends and acquaintances of “a certain age,” mostly women but also a few men, shared the same marital and relationship status. They were legally and socially single, as in never married and not in a relationship, and they didn’t have children. They had different upbringings, career paths, previous romantic experiences, and personalities.
It was enough for me to be intrigued. I was myself a single woman who (might have) held a self-image as an odd duck, but at that point, it was like strange birds were flocking, and few people really seemed to take notice.
I live in the capital city, Bucharest, the biggest economic and university center in the country. Some even say it’s like a small, different country within the country. The delaying of marriage and increase in cohabitation are certainly more evident in urban settings, even in Romania, but those people I knew were the uncoupled and lifelong singles.
Because I am a person who gets enthralled by the rush of information digging, I started to look for more data. I went to the worldwide digital space and found myself in... the all-time square of “strange birds” and “ornithologists.” I was surprised to find out that what I had noticed was actually just a small part of a bigger, global trend and that a huge body of work on single and solo-living people was available in English and other languages. That’s how my doctoral endeavor started.
The plan has been to explore the life stories of the capital's residents older than 35 years, never married, without a partner and children, to identify the circumstances that led them to that point in life and look for gender differences and any particularities of the Romanian cultural space with regard to singlehood and never-marriedness.
When I started to roll the snowball in recruiting eligible subjects, I faced what I called a “resistance to rolling.” That included several rather unexpected rejections from some of my acquaintances who otherwise shared a lot of personal information with me. I remembered Margaret Adams's account in the beginning of her book about a discussion with a bus driver who could not imagine why anyone would want to talk with a never-married man over 40 and who had no intention to introduce such "strange species of male" to Adams.
Unexpectedly, the recruitment of participants itself became highly charged with relevant information. As I asked people whether they knew any person who fit the criteria for my study, some answered affirmatively, but they added that those individuals would never agree to participate in a study because they were a little (or more) weird or crazy. The word “crazy” appeared in more than one conversation. Several others gave me the contact data of eligible persons they knew, but upon finding out that the latter refused my invitation, they attributed those refusals to the individuals’ quirkiness and not to their right to choose whether they want to participate in a study or not.
A few people promised me they would think of eligible subjects within their social circles, but they held back the fact that one of their siblings or even themselves were eligible. Two people I interviewed had another sibling or a former partner who fit the criteria for my study, but they didn’t want to refer them to me. A couple of women who agreed to participate in the study subsequently repeatedly postponed the interview meetings on the grounds of being too busy, until I stopped calling.
I received all sorts of reasons for why some of my direct acquaintances did not consider themselves eligible for my study: they had a partner (even though they rarely saw each other, or the partner was actually married), they changed their residence outside the city, or they just knew they were not good subjects, because they had nothing interesting to say, and so on.
I could take the above responses at their face value or put them down to my shortcomings as an interviewer, but it is probably more than that. The works of Bella DePaulo and Anne Byrne, for example, on social prejudice and stigmatization of single people, especially women, helped me to gain a better understanding of what was happening.
I realized that the people I chose to study represented the most stigmatized segment of single people, almost everywhere in the world. At least some of the individuals who avoided participation in my study were probably trying to control the information about a socially discreditable part of their identity. Their marital and relationship status is not something they advertise or want to be known for.
Most of my interviewees and those who refused my invitation were not actively looking for a partner. In everyday life in a big city, within the work environment and circles of professionals, or even friends, in the case of middle-aged and older adults, the relationship status is rather less visible or talked about. Never-married people have learned how to avoid situations that put them on display.
[From Bella, again: This is an excerpt adapted from a longer essay. Check out the complete version to learn more about Adriana Savu’s work, as well as the place of singles in Romania and in Romanian scholarship.]
About the Author
Adriana Savu is a Ph.D. student in Sociology at National University for Political Studies and Public Administration in Bucharest, Romania. She has a B.A. degree in psychology and Master’s degrees in anthropology, gender studies, and business. In the last 10 years, she worked in the private sector.
