To say that Super Model Linda Evangelista has been through it on the relationship front is to speak mildly. Between a rough marriage and her medical challenges (two bouts with breast cancer, a rare genetic condition that caused her lung to collapse on a regular basis, and a CoolSculpting disaster), this week’s Single Icon has plenty of reasons to be bitter and depressed.

For a while she was. She spent years in seclusion, believing that she had ruined herself with the cosmetic procedure.

She credits her son, Augie, with snapping her out of it when he once asked, “Remember when you used to be a fun mom?” She’s done the work and while she still has challenges she is also back in the world.

About dating she says, “Not interested. I don’t want to sleep with anybody any more. I don’t want to hear somebody breathing.”

Same, sis. Same.

Recently a headline in the Guardian caught my eye. It read, “Poland’s birthrate is in free fall. The cause? A loneliness epidemic that state cash can’t solve.” Author Anna Gromada argues incompatibility between what young men and women want in relationships is the cause of this plunge in the birthrate.

She says that as young women are learning to care for themselves, set boundaries, and champion their needs, young men are doubling down on the language of “duty” and “norms” and “expectations.” She argues that this, among a number of other social factors, is the key to understanding why cis het men and women are no longer forming couples and having families.

Gromada’s argument seemed compelling but then, four days later, a Polish woman replied with an insight that knocked me back a step. It’s not about loneliness, the author, Marta Zboralska pointed out. It is about Poland’s intensely restrictive abortion laws. Zboralska writes, “Women are scared that if they fall pregnant and experience complications, they will not receive adequate care.”

This is a far more practical explanation that beautifully undercuts the usual argument that women are being obstinate and selfish by simply refusing to accept their divinely designated lot in life.

And the two authors don’t contradict each other. The ideologies of “duty” and “norms” and “expectations” are given concrete agency by way of these restrictive abortion laws.

The ideas and the laws are about the same thing: men’s abject terror of women’s domestic independence in general and bodily autonomy specifically.

I make the point about domestic independence because, as Zboralska points out, all of this is happening in a former communist state that very deliberately “. . . reject[ed] the “bourgeois model of family.” It’s great in theory but in reality, while the state and the men who ran it were fine with benefitting from women getting educations and jobs, they still wanted their dinner on the table by 6pm.

As a result, what Zboralska notes as a philosophical power-struggle between women’s desire for autonomy, recognition, and respect, on the one hand, and men’s desire to maintain a status quo that women find restrictive, on the other, is acted out in the fact of an anti-choice law that very significantly restricts pregnant people’s autonomy, recognition, and respect.

Men now arguing that rejecting the entire system has backfired for women by leaving us lonely so completely misses the point that it’s like the man who is flabbergasted when his wife says she wants a divorce and insists he never saw it coming. Once again, “The Patriarchy” silences women who are demanding liberty by refusing to acknowledge the demand that actually underlies the growing movement to skip romance.

Claiming that women are lonely without men and really should make more babies is just another tactic that patriarchal systems use to fight to remain in power and maintain control over women’s domestic and reproductive labor. It’s a scam. Don’t fall for it.

Live an elevated life on a single income. Explore strategies for beating the system.

Learning how to build a business online and thrive is easier than ever. Don’t get me wrong - I’m not saying that actually building it is easy. Success as an entrepreneur still requires consistency, tenacity, and sweat. But learning what to do is so much easier that it was just 10 or 15 years ago.

And also harder because there is just so much more information to choose from!

If you find yourself overwhelmed by the vast amount of information out there and paralyzed by the hundreds of choices you need to make, check out this video by YouTuber and business owner Nischa.

Nischa’s gift to you is a curated list of books on business that covers a range of topics that are key to understanding entrepreneurship. These books will help you to understand where to start, what to do, and how to make what you do work for the type of business you want to create.

I have read and benefited from many of the books she recommends. This library can deliver your personal MBA.

My bet is that those of us who chose to self-partner have a very strong drive for authenticity: to be our own selves on our own terms without bowing to the conditioning that our societies seem hell bent on forcing on us.

On the other hand, from birth, our very survival as infants depended on attachment. Human infants simply cannot survive without attachment.

For many of us a struggle ensues as we mature and independence becomes possible. We become afraid to express our authentic selves for fear of alienating those whom we still believe to hold the our survival in their hands.

This is especially true when our caregivers reject our authentic selves. We learn to suppress our authentic selves, sometimes so thoroughly, that we lose connection with who we truly are.

If fear of being alone is holding you back from expressing your authentic self, understand that your fear comes from a primal place. It is a fear of dying. It is biological, instinctual, it is powerful.

But suppressing your authentic self is also a form of death.

What would it take for you to come alive?

In this talk Gabor Maté shares why authenticity is essential and how authenticity can heal your trauma.

What inspires you to live un-partnered? We’d love to hear from you. Comment “What had happened was” below to get instructions for how to share your story.

WE HAVE AGENCY! Protesters in St. Paul, MN are demonstrating how to hold agents accountable during ICE raids and provide help to detainees. The Immigrant Defense Network, a coalition of more than 100 organizations, provides infrastructure that facilitates rapid responses to ICE raids and constitutional observer training that teaches participants how to exercise their constitutional rights to document federal agents in action. Gathered information is forwarded to legal partners who step in to provide legal services to ICE detainees. Read more . . .

House Republican Exodus GOP members of the House of Representatives are leaving Congress by the dozens. Will that be enough to allow Democrats to take the house during the next election?

State of New Mexico Offers Free Childcare to All. The first in the nation, the State of New Mexico, governed by Michelle Lujan Grisham, has done the rational thing by defining childcare as a public good and making it free to all regardless of income.

Sheryl Sandburg Finally Gets It as Women Lean Out of the Corporate Rat Race. Criticism of Sandburg’s book, Lean In seems to be vindicated as she acknowledges that corporations have cut back on creating the support women must have to advance up the corporate ladder. Women, in turn, are doing the rational thing and leaning out.

Is a Humanoid Home Robot For You? Meet Neo, the $20,000 humanoid robot that might revolutionize life for everyone, including self-partnered women. Having someone or something else available to do daily chores would be a massive game-changer for me. The technology is very young and has some way to go before I would invest but the possibilities seem endless. But see: Battlestar Galactica.

Celebrating everything wonderful about being self-partnered and satisfied.

Romance is Tyranny!