Single, by choice!

Being single in a nation where marriage and motherhood are the highest validations for a woman is a tough call but Status Single offers them a platform to share their problems and celebrate their singledom, writes Ranjita Biswas

Status Single’s Bengaluru meet-up

Single, and proudly so is the philosophy of a motley group of urban women congregating under the umbrella Status Single that started as an online group of like-minded women but which has now transited into an offline platform. To live as a single woman after a certain age is not that easy in India with its own socio-cultural conundrum. Is that why this kind of platform was necessary? And, how did the idea come about?

Says Kolkata-based Sreemoyee Kundu, 44, author, columnist and founding member of the community: “In 2018, I used to write a column called Below the Belt on a digital opinion platform that became quite popular. Often I’d write on slices of my own life, which naturally captured vignettes of my single existence. When I shared the same on my Facebook timeline, I was overwhelmed by the outpouring of responses. Single women across India reached out to share their own stories on various issues.” That led to a non-fiction book proposal on single women. For the publishers, there was a viable market and target audience, as Sreemoyee points out because government data showed that the number of women-headed families has been growing in India and that 74.1 million women were now single in India. This includes widows, divorcees, unmarried women, and women who are separated from their husbands. Consisting of more than 300 first-hand interviews of women from cities and second-tier ones, the book Status Single became an instant hit and featured even in publications abroad as a seminal work on female identity.

“The book is a hard, invasive look at the reality of being single in a nation where marriage and motherhood are the highest validations for a woman. It wasn’t a flaky, superficial book with single celebrities,” Kundu asserts.

This led to an online collective platform with the eponymous name where single women, by choice or circumstances, shared their problems — discrimination faced while seeking housing, single shaming at work, sexual harassment, the taboo around divorce or being shunned as a widow, etc.

This organically moved towards an offline meet-up. The first time it happened was on the occasion of Vijaya Dashami in Kolkata during Durga Puja last year. In Bengal on this final puja day, the ritual of sindoor khela is an integral part when married women apply vermilion (sindoor) on Goddess Durga before embracing each other and smearing sindoor on one another. The members of Status Single also observed it symbolically in a mood of joy.

As of now, Single Status has six chapters in the metros with close to 2,000 members — from resilient single mothers to unmarried and child-free women by choice to differently-abled.

After all, as Sreemoyee says, “there’s no single kind of single woman.” However, Single Status is open to starting chapters in non-metros as well. What is the USP of Single Status to attract so many women in such a short time? Says Vieshakha Dutta, 43, a corporate executive, who heads the Bengaluru chapter, “Here, we can exchange our thoughts and our needs that singletons can empathise with.”

Smita Maitra, 56, a school teacher and a single mother to a daughter, anchors the Kolkata chapter. She finds in Status Single “a dynamic group trying to create space for single women. Meeting like-minded women can also be empowering as
interaction with women in similar situations can help in confidence-building. We have in our group lawyers, doctors, health professionals, etc., whose advice and
support are invaluable too. I don’t think there’s any other organisation in this format in India.”

Status Single has many plans for the future, Sreemoyee says, to make this vibrant platform a support base for single women tackling day-to-day problems that have been aggravated by the pandemic. For a beginning, in November last year, the topic of women and wealth creation took off. It aims to achieve this by promoting single-women owned businesses and celebrating solo entrepreneurial ventures, offering a space for members to post job alerts every Monday on the Facebook community page and their respective WhatsApp city groups, and finding avenues for financial wellness.

Other areas underway in the discussion are HR support in top corporate houses for victims of domestic violence, bringing back women into the workplace after a career gap, understanding a woman’s financial and property rights, gaining a deeper knowledge of laws governing divorce, alimony and child custody rights, creating a common resource pool of gynaecologists, medical professionals, HR facilitators, legal and financial experts, assisted community living for senior singles, to name a few.