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It's no sex and the single woman
By Geoff Botting
April 13, 2004
Kyoko Ikegami is a vivacious 27-year-old who has been single for three and a
half years. Is she sad and lonely, yearning to meet Mr. Right?
Not at all, she says.
"It's a lot easier just being single," the temp staffer claims. "At first, I
felt loneliness, but now I can use my time and money any way I want."
Her favorite hangout these days is a small bar, a place with all the coziness
of "a student dormitory," she says.
"The vibe is really friendly and warm because of all the regulars who go
there," says Kyoko, who always arrives -- and leaves -- alone.
Ikegami is one of several women who are in their 20s, guyless and profiled by
Spa! It's part of the magazine's in-depth piece probing the single lives of
such women, a topic of immense interest to its readers, who are, after all,
predominately men in their mid-20s to mid-30s.
Spa! finds out that young women adapt to single life in a multitude of ways.
Some, like Kyoko, relish the freedom, some are ambivalent, while others are
continually depressed and lonely.
Miki Yoshiyuki, who is 27 and works for a bicycle manufacturer, falls clearly
into the third category.
"I was screwed up right after being dumped by my previous boyfriend so I just
went to parties all the time," she recalls.
The "parties" were outings consisting of small groups of men and women, with
the purpose being matchmaking. Miki attended about one a week, evidently
without much success. The memory of her ex, whom she broke up with about 10
months' back after a relationship of around three years, is still stuck in her
mind.
"I liked him intensely, and we were going to get married," she laments.
To get a more comprehensive picture of what it's like to be young, female and
single, Spa! conducts a poll of 200 women.
One notable finding is that nearly half the women blamed the singles scene,
rather than themselves, for their prolonged state of singlehood. Asked why they
had no boyfriend, the most common response by far was "because there aren't any
good men out there."
Compare that to the mere 24 percent who said, "because I'm not appealing [to
the opposite sex]."
Many of the women, around 40 percent, responded to single life by turning
inward, the poll indicates. "I stopped dealing with my body hair and cleaning
my apartment," says a 21-year-old university student.
Others, like Kyoko, took the opposite approach, becoming more involved in the
world around them.
"Beauty services alone have cost me more than 500,000 yen," a saleswoman, 28,
says, adding that she's now also enrolled in night school to learn about
personal computers and English conversation.
Another part of the survey found that the average period of being single was
11.4 months, and that the women dated their serious boyfriends for one year and
five months on average.
Psychologist Yoshihiko Morotomi interprets these figures to surmise that single
women in their 20s fall into two distinctively different groups when it comes
to the length of their relationships.
"There are more and more women who date, but not for long periods of time. On
the other hand, we have many women who hang in there for long periods of time
waiting, but never actually approach the goal [of marriage]," he says.
Morotomi says romance is a kind of addiction. Some women are constantly in
search of stimulation. Yet others have the willpower to hold off and wait, and
in the meantime enjoy their freedom. The danger for the latter group, he says,
is when that long period of freedom grows to become indefinite.
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