Frustrated by the Odds, Single Women Over 30 Seek Answers in Therapy

Not long ago, Manhattan psychotherapist Renee Goldman called a colleague, wanting to refer a client. Barely were the words out of Goldman’s mouth when her associate thundered her reply.

“If this is another single woman over 30 wanting to get married,” the second psychotherapist railed, “don’t even think about it.”

The description was a precise fit, and Goldman’s colleague made it entirely clear she did not need to add another husband-seeker to her client roster. It was an epidemic of sorts, they agreed, this seeking to make sense of the single status. Never married or long divorced, a growing number of single women are taking their turmoil to psychologists and psychiatrists.

“It is a phenomenon of this era, it really is,” Los Angeles psychologist Annette Baran said. “I would suspect that the great majority of any psychotherapist’s practice--maybe two-thirds of anybody’s practice--is single women who have relationship problems.”

Dwelling on the Odds

To help explain the trend, mental health professionals cite media reports spotlighting a so-called man shortage and dwelling on the purportedly dismal odds of marriage for women over 30. A widely publicized study earlier this year by two Yale sociologists and a Harvard economist, for example, asserted that only 20% of white, college-educated women who reach age 30 without marrying can be expected to do so. After age 35, the figure dropped to 5%. For those over 40, the researchers said “perhaps 1%” would marry.

Other social scientists have since questioned the findings, stressing that the Census Bureau figures show that the nation’s marriage rate has actually been increasing since 1980. Moreover, Census data indicate that median ages for first marriages have climbed from 20.5 in 1964 to 23.0 in 1984--a significant change in the parlance of demographers. Marriages for highly educated women between the ages of 27 and 39, the figures demonstrate, rose between 1970 and 1980, a time when the marriage rate for the population at large was in decline.

But numbers are scant consolation to women who feel they are unwitting players in some great game of coast-to-coast Old Maid and who share a collective sense of terror about their prospects of marriage.

List of Common Elements

Those in the mental health field point to certain common elements among these women clients: highly successful careers, high incomes and, often, family backgrounds that are almost baroque in their complexity. But they fail to pinpoint a pathology that characterizes these women, agreeing only that it is a major concern.

“It’s happening more and more,” said Kenneth Druck, a psychologist with a large practice of single men and women in San Diego. The unmarried, over-30 woman, he said, “is coming in because she thinks something is wrong. She has an underlying sense of failure, a nagging suspicion that perhaps she has missed the boat somewhere. The fact is, she doesn’t have a relationship. She’s not part of a family.

“What she is saying is, ‘If there’s something wrong with me, change me,’ ” Druck said.

The issue itself was subjected to analysis this fall when New York psychoanalyst Janice Lieberman presented a paper, “Issues in the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Single Women Over 30,” at the annual conference of the American Psychological Assn. Wrote Lieberman, “These women enter treatment in order to better understand themselves and why they have not been able to get into ‘a stable relationship with a man,’ meaning marriage. Usually this affect-laden word, ‘marriage,’ is not used in the first sessions. ‘Being single’ is occasionally raised as the presenting problem, but more often than not, it is mentioned after several sessions have elapsed. . . .

“The casual way in which the problem appears,” Lieberman continued, “belies the fact that many of these patients bring to treatment a hidden agenda: to find a husband .”

Certainly the issue of confusion, if not outright discomfort, over marital status is not exclusive to women in this age bracket. “You see it with men, too, by the way,” Druck said. “There are more and

more men who come in and say they want a wife and a family.”

But traditionally, women have sought psychological help in far greater numbers than have men. Men are less likely to consult a psychological professional at all, and when they do, the questions they raise are apt to be of a different nature entirely. They may complain of difficulty in sustaining a relationship, but their focus is likely to differ dramatically from that of their female age peers.

As Druck pointed out, “While men may have some of the same concerns, there aren’t a thousand books out about women who hate men, or about men who love too much.”

No Role Model

For Carla, a 38-year-old officer for a foundation in Boston, “This is the issue: I don’t have a role model. The old role model is mother--the grow-up, get married and have babies role model. What I did was go to graduate school and become a quote, unquote success in my scholarly field. I’m going in a direction that is absolutely dark. There’s nobody guiding me, no role model for a woman who has a series of relationships, but not marriage.

“A lot of women are looking to therapy for this,” she said, “so they can make up their own goals. I think we are all confronting the old ways on one hand, and the unknown on the other.”

Carla said she sees her therapist on a weekly basis “because I want to be able to get to a point where I can nurture myself.” But sometimes, she said, “I feel like you’re going to a therapist and you’re just paying him to be your pal.”

She would like to be married, and though her child-bearing days are numbered, Carla said she still thinks about having children. But the realities of the marital marketplace do not fill her with optimism. “Life is just a free fall, it really is,” Carla said. “I figure the only safety net you have is, you know, your IRA.”

Bloodied in the Trenches

Her lament is a familiar one to Mill Valley’s Pierre Mornell. “I see a lot of women who’ve made it in the trenches, and they’re bloodied. They’ve got a right to say ‘Is this all there is?’ ”

Mornell, a member of the clinical faculty at UC San Francisco and author of “Thank God It’s Monday” (Bantam, 1985) and “Passive Men, Wild Women” (Simon & Schuster, 1979), said single women in therapy often express the need for family, for children. “Whether that is due to estrogen and progesterone or it’s the reality that you’ve been out in the trenches and you’re bloodied and battered, there’s something rather profound in terms of genes and wanting to nurture and raise children, and have a quieter, simpler life, or simply a withdrawal from the (professional) battlefield.”

Virtually uncharted, this mid-life, male-female psycho-emotional territory is also convoluted and confusing, Mornell said. “What you’re touching on is the tip of a very complicated iceberg which I know I don’t completely understand.”

Particularly among women patients, Mornell often encounters a series of symptoms: poor concentration; eating or drinking too much; sleep disruption; a general blue view of the world. Taken together, the symptomatology points to depression. “When you start taking a history,” said Mornell, “men or the lack of men are one aspect of that history.”

‘In the Wrong Office’

But that issue, he said, is seldom what sends them to the therapist’s office in the first place. “If somebody came to me and said they wanted to find a man, I would say you’re in the wrong office.” In any case, said Mornell, in treatment, “I think, you get off how-do-I-find-a-man very quickly, and touch upon what kind of men have been there--and therefore what kind you want.”

Among many successful women he has treated, “one theme that often emerges,” Mornell said, “is that they’ve often had alcoholic fathers. What they grew up doing was learning to be perfect, to be successful, to be in control. Control becomes an important theme because somebody in the family was wildly out of control.

“It becomes very complicated,” he said, “as you take it down from attraction to unavailable men into what you can control. And in any good relationship, one party or the other is at some point going to have to give up control.”

In various forms, control is an issue that often surfaces in psychotherapy. For single women vexed by their status, Janice Lieberman suggests, the control question can be particularly confounding.

“If there is something wrong with me, then I can change it, and it is a controllable thing,” Lieberman said. “If it’s out there, and you can’t change it, then it’s not controllable.” An actual shortage of available men, she reasons, is not controllable.

The Nearest Straw

Women become desperate, Lieberman said, grabbing at the nearest available male straw. “You heard about the woman who moves into an apartment, and meets the guy next door?” she asked. The man calmly tells his new neighbor about his sordid past as a bank robber, a murderer, an embezzler and a tax evader. “ ‘So,’ she says, ‘are you single?’ ”

Among women longing for a satisfying relationship, Robin Norwood’s giant best-seller, “Women Who Love Too Much” (Tarcher Press), seems to have ignited a nationwide brush fire. On any evening of the week, women across the country gather in homes, classrooms, church halls to examine the phenomenon of excessive--and what they call addictive--love.

Though she has adapted the term slightly, calling her groups Women Who Give Too Much, Hermosa Beach psychotherapist Myrna Miller now has well over 50 such women meeting in weekly and bi-weekly groups. Recently, she filled a classroom in a Manhattan Beach adult school with 23 women (and one man) eager to understand the “too much” phenomenon, anxious to build a solid relationship. “I’ve never had turnouts week after week like I do now,” Miller said. “It’s become almost like a movement.”

Santa Barbara psychotherapist Norwood takes a cautious view of the proliferation of groups ostensibly inspired by her book. “The book is misunderstood a lot,” she said. “There are therapists out there teaching classes where the bottom line is how to find a man, and it’s not about that.” Norwood’s book, as well as most of her practice, she said, deals primarily with “women who are in relationships with men who are addictive.”

Still, Norwood in no way disputes the distress, even despair and desperation, that sends these women into such gatherings. “We pursue relationships the way people used to pursue religion,” she said. “The irony is that women who don’t have a man think they’d be fine if they had one, and vice versa.”

In “Too Many Women” (Sage Publications, 1983), a book he co-wrote with his late wife Marcia Gutentag, University of Houston professor of psychology and education Paul Secord called attention to “the fact that sex ratios have changed dramatically in the United States from 1960 to 1970, from having an adequate supply of men to an inadequate supply.”

‘The Marriage Squeeze’

He attributes this phenomenon to what he calls “the marriage squeeze,” or the fact that women have tended to marry men several years their senior. As divorce rates have climbed and birth rates have dropped, the practice has continued, leaving fewer men in the so-called “eligible” category. Soaring incomes have narrowed the marital choices for these women still further, since the same tradition that condones a man’s right to choose a partner of a lower social and economic status essentially forbids the same practice by a woman.

According to Secord’s sex-ratio thesis, “when you have a surplus of men, then relationships between men and women are very different. Men court women, and are willing to make a long-term commitment. Women are also apt to be relatively content with the marital role, and you have a moral tradition that expresses strong sanctions against things like adultery or premarital sex, especially for women.”

But a surplus of women, he said, means that “everything changes. Men tend to have more alternative relationships with women. They are less likely to make commitments to women, and more apt to have higher divorce rates.”

In the view of Los Angeles psychologist Annette Baran, the surplus of women is not the only aspect of the male-female equation that is off balance these days. “We have a whole generation of men who wanted to remain boys, who didn’t want the responsibility of being men. Adolescence for men I think used to last until 30. Now it lasts until 40.” At the same time, she said, “you have women who have learned to take care of themselves--who have, in effect, become men. The pieces aren’t fitting. It’s become skewed.”

This shift in expectations and development has accounted for another casualty in the ongoing gavotte between the sexes, said Baran. “I think there is something that happens once the women becomes an emancipated, independent adult, once she learns to take care of herself. If she manages to make that, then she is not nearly as tolerant or accepting of any kind of settling into a relationship. She is not going to settle as easily.”

“It’s not that they don’t want to be married,” said Melody Anderson, a psychotherapist in private practice in New York and at Manhattan’s Resources for Mid-life and Older Women. “It’s that they don’t want to marry the men who are out there who are still brought up to believe that women’s major role is to supply them, the men, with their emotional needs.

“Women want to marry equals,” she said. “They don’t want to marry sons.”

These same women, Anderson said, “are expecting more, because they are not these dependent, child-like adults.”

A Commanding Specter

Yet powerful myths and strong conditioning persist. The wife-and-mother role--Harriet Nelson, Mrs. America--is a commanding specter for women born before 1955. Baran recalled one client, a successful professional, who was at once agonizing and rejoicing over the marriage of her younger sister. “She is a romantic,” Baran said of her client, “but what she wants has to fit all kinds of Ladies Home Journal mythology that doesn’t exist for her.”

She may have rejected those domestic options, the psychotherapist said, but still she feels nostalgic for them.

Marriage, however, may not be the gold at the end of the rainbow. On the contrary, said Rosalind Barnett, a clinical psychologist in private practice in Weston, Mass., and co-director of the Women’s Lives Project at Wellesley College, “The whole assumption that if you’re married, you’re happy is obviously blatantly ridiculous. Look at all the women who are getting out of marriages.”

Without dismissing the women who want to talk about the lack of male relationships in their lives, Barnett refocuses the matter. “If you look to someone to make yourself whole, you’re on the wrong track. No man is going to make you feel whole.

“If they’re going to use therapy in a healthy way,” Barnett said, “it’s going to be to learn to accept what they’ve got and to make the most of it. If you constantly look at the quest for what you don’t have, if you mortgage the present for the future, then today doesn’t matter.”

Added Barnett: “I have a lot of single women who say they’ve never been happier than they are today. They’ve done that through therapy.”

Psychotherapist Diana Adile Kirschner, co-director of the Institute for Comprehensive Family Therapy in Spring House, Pa., says her single female clients are “highly motivated,” commuting from as far as Boston and New York to undergo treatment.

“These are women who have master’s degrees and Ph.D.’s,” she said. “They are lawyers, they are women who are into management-level stuff in corporations, and they are doing quite well. At this point in their life, they could care less about career. They don’t want to hear about advancing.”

Many, Kirschner said, “have opted for a career, then turn around and find themselves devoid of eligible men, and in a position where they haven’t developed certain skills and arenas in order to pursue men and connect to them.”

Return to Traditional Values

Kirschner focuses her treatment in the context of cultural norms. “We are returning to a traditional value system,” she said, “and at the same time, I really believe that to a certain degree there are actual biologically based yearnings to reproduce and so forth.” Exploring her clients’ histories, she said, “generally, what you do find is that there is something wrong psychologically.”

During therapy she strives for a “corrective relationship,” or “re-parenting,” that includes homework, directives and role-modeling from women who have combined marriage and career. Kirschner also concentrates on confidence, a quality she contends “goes back to earlier programming in the family. These women don’t have it. They can be confident handling difficult business interplay, they can be brilliant in the courtroom, and you put them in a social situation with a man and they are absolutely terrified.” She even gets down to such intersexual brass tacks as “making eye contact with men.”

Kirschner is optimistic. She emphasizes that “the reality is that there are very, very few men statistically,” but adds, “the other side of that is that there are some.”

Janice Lieberman is less sanguine. “You’ve got to realize it’s a needle-in-the-haystack thing,” the New York psychoanalyst said. “If you keep getting caught in the hay, then you can’t go on.”

Her paper for the American Psychological Assn. confronted this question head-on, then went on to upbraid some members of her profession for failing to acknowledge this condition adequately. Wrote Lieberman: “The male shortage is a fact that is commonly denied by society and by psychoanalysts. I believe that this denial stimulates self-image difficulties in single females.”

In her New York office, Lieberman is more forceful still. “I’m so sick of all this ‘Smart Women, Foolish Choices’ stuff. The therapists throw it back to these women. They say, it’s your fault, you’re making the wrong choices.” Indeed, said Lieberman, “One therapist even told me, ‘If I acknowledge the male shortage, my patients will give up on therapy.’ ”

Single herself, Lieberman maintains that too many of her professional colleagues are simply unaware of the horrors of mid-life dating and mating. “We tend to deny unpleasant things,” she said. “If people are dying at the age of 80, it’s a horrible thing, but we can accept it. We do not accept that fact that beautiful, bright women may be very sad because they are never going to find somebody. It argues with a fundamental part of our culture: the promise we have all had that you’re going to find somebody.”

No Magic Wands

To the dismay of the unmarried woman who would like a prescription, whether for a husband or for a happy life alone, no magical elixir is known to exist. “Therapy is a catalyst, but it’s definitely not the panacea,” said Ken Druck’s wife and fellow psychotherapist, Karen Druck. “No therapist has a magic wand in his pocket. You have to change yourself. You can’t ask the therapist to do it.

“Therapy is a lot of work,” she added. “If you really want to make changes, it takes a lot of getting in touch with what basically made you the way you are.”

As men and women turn to therapists to help them understand--or change--their single status, psychotherapists also face new demands. Said Pierre Mornell, “The therapist is definitely taking on a role today that was not envisioned.”

At present the matter is a maze. “I can raise all the questions,” Janice Lieberman wrote in her paper on treating single females over 30. “I do not have the answers.”

“Where it’s going to end up for men and women, no one can be sure,” Mornell said. “But think of the late ‘60s, trying to predict where we could be in the future. I think the pace of change is so much faster now.”