Commitment-Phobes/Bridget Joneses

SINGLE ISSUE POLITICS: Thanks to Bridget Jones, Unmarried Women Are
By Vicky Allan

There's a telling scene in Bridget Jones's Diary. Invited round for dinner, the only single female among a group of "smug marrieds", Bridget (played by Renee Zellweger) is asked why young women like her are still single. She snaps back, "because we may seem normal to you but underneath our clothes we're covered in scales". It says a lot about how women have traditionally been perceived, as alien life- forms, their singledom a disfiguring disease. One British MP in 1922 even said: "A woman alone is an atrocity! An act against nature. Unmarried women pose grave danger to our civilisation."

According to Helen Fielding, when she first created the fictional character of Bridget Jones in a column in The Independent in 1995, "the only word to describe a single woman in her 30s was spinster".

Fast forward to 2004. The Bridget Jones phen-omenon has been wildly successful, spawning two best-selling novels and two films, the second of which, The Edge Of Reason, is out this Friday. Its cultural impact is such that a new epithet has entered the lexicon, "singleton". Yet this word describes a woman who is warm and friendly - not to mention awash with booze and fags. In a matter of years, Fielding's anti-heroine has become, despite her neuroses, an almost aspirational state. Now, as many "smug marrieds" quiver with envy as cluck with sympathetic dismay.

But how much impact has her fictional creation really had on the image of the single woman? For Jenny Colgan, author of a series of chick-lit novels, the mark is indelible. "Women now say, 'Oh, I'm such a Bridget.' But that makes it hip too. It implies you have a lot of fun, cocktails and hip friends. I don't think Bridget's a sad character at all really - whenever she gets depressed she just has a fag and some chocolate and thinks about something else."

Not everyone sees her impact as positive. Yvonne Roberts, the feminist writer who coined the phrase "feminism was not about joining the system but changing it", sees Bridget as a "joiner", one who has taken on bachelor characteristics - for example, smoking to be cool and liberated - to fit in with established norms. Meanwhile her view of relationships and what it means to be a woman is illiberal. "I wish she had changed how we view single women," Roberts says. "But it's the same story. Bridget still gets her man, still worries about being fat."

Of course, part of the Bridget Jones phenomenon was that she was not a feminist ideal, but rather a woman struggling to deal with the many pressures and contradictory aspirations of our times. As Fielding as confessed, Bridget was a zeitgeist thing, ripe for being explored fictionally. Ally McBeal, for instance, was her counterpart on the other side of the Atlantic.

Bridget is undoubtedly one of an expanding social group. "One in four households are single," read one of her Diary entries, "most of the royal family are single, the nation's young men have been proved to be unmarriageable, and as a result there's a generation of single girls, like me, with their own incomes and homes who have lots of fun and don't need to wash anyone else's socks." Since then, times have changed: now one in three households are single. Projections for 2021 suggest half the women between 30 and 44 will never have been married. This is not a sad state of affairs. Women will have taken this route out of choice not pressure (it has often been demonstrated in surveys that the happiest groups of people are married men and single women). It's not that these women are desperate to be married, rather that they have chosen the single life and are having trouble giving it up - regardless of what Bridget's uncle Geoffrey refers to as the "tick-tock-tick-tock" of the biological clock.

Traditionally, women were the driving force behind getting men to commit. Now, with so many opportunities, they are just as likely to be slamming on the brakes as putting their foot on the gas. There are almost as many female commitment-phobes as there as male. Indeed, Bridget, for all her desperation, often appears to be one herself. In spite of her life seeming to revolve around her search for a Prince Charming, she seems attached to her singleton existence in the bosom of her "urban family": Shazza, Jude and Tom. The pressures towards marriage are exterior, from her family; she herself has her doubts. "If you'd asked tonight," she says at one point in The Edge Of Reason, "the answer would have been, 'no'". There is as much of a skittish pull away from the aisle as there is propulsion towards it. As Mariella Frostrup, former It-Girl turned agony aunt, puts it in the book of her columns, Dear Mariella: "The only difference between women and men is terror of commitment is one emotional state men aren't afraid to admit to. Women, on the other hand, are suffering a sort of mass delusion. The modern Ms pretends all she wants is a stable relationship and then does everything in her power to avoid it."

Of course, many singletons are anxious about their state and, naturally, aspire to finding love. For Jenny Colgan, herself now married, this is more about a fear of living alone than of being left on the shelf. "It's the concept of being discovered dead at home eaten by Alsatians. I don't think this is just a woman's thing. Single men think that too. It chimes with the fact more and more people live on their own." In other words, men have anxieties too. The stereotypes of chick-lit and lad-lit are achingly similar: that women are insecure and desperate and men are just simply insecure. There are, as Tony Parsons put it in one of his columns, as many Brian Joneses out there as Bridget Joneses.