How to Be a High-Quality Single Person in a Noisy, Vulgar World

If you're still single, we won't wish you a speedy exit from it. We wish you a good, active single life — and a quick escape from the folk fantasy of "the empress of the East Palace bakes the flatbread while the empress of the West Palace peels the scallions."

Single people feel more and more of society's warm concern these days. They are forever receiving comfort, compliments and good wishes, such as:

You've lived here by yourself all these years? That must be so hard!

Single dogs have it hard enough already — could celebrities please stop torturing us with their PDA?

You never have to text, date or fight with a partner, so you must have loads of free time. I'm jealous.

You're single because you're too good a catch and too picky.

Congratulations, you've got the degree and the job. Find a partner and you're a total winner at life.

You cook this well and you're still single? The men (or women) out there must be blind.

Off to the gym? Good — a nice body makes it much easier to find someone.

— To people who pity the single, being single is mostly about gloom, loneliness and misery. Full of compassion for the world, they love handing out warm, maddening advice in the "empress of the East Palace bakes the flatbread" style.

For a single young person, the thing that grates even more than "creative PDA torture" is probably this: creative discrimination wearing the face of heartfelt concern.

"You're excellent, so you're picky, so you're single" and "you're a good person, but other people are blind, so you're single" both carry the same implication — whatever kind of person you are, being single is a problem, and a problem needs a cause. Whatever you have been through, whatever you have, as long as you're single your life is not quite complete, and you should be working toward "finding someone" and "getting married" (and letting the people who supposedly care about you watch you work at it).

At the group level, though, studies of urban populations all find that the more educated and higher-earning people are, the later they marry. Those late marriers were more likely to have been single when they were young. So the truth may be that plenty of single people are both well-off and happy.

Which is exactly as normal as "plenty of single dogs live miserably." People tend to see only the second kind, and magnify the anxiety of the whole group. In fact nobody has ever counted what share of single people are happy.

At the individual level: put stereotypes aside and just think about the lives and love lives of the people around you. Can you really boil singlehood down to a general rule that "single life is so miserable"? Are the couples who fight to the rafters every few days, blackmail each other emotionally and use their children to fulfil their own ambitions really living richer, more interesting lives than most single people?

Heh.

So here is our field manual for single young people facing this noisy, vulgar world of creative discrimination. Charge forward. Be a high-quality single person:

How do you find a restaurant for eating alone?

Beyond the "restaurants good for eating alone" recommended in Zhihu threads and WeChat official accounts, how do you judge whether an ordinary restaurant is single-friendly?

One way is to look at the restaurant's photos on Dianping: does the food come in big pots or on small plates, and is the seating mostly ten-person private rooms or counter stools? If the pots and plates are more than half a metre across, think twice unless you have an iron stomach. If the place has nothing but banquet-hall round tables draped in red cloth, eating there alone turns into an occasion far too grand for comfort.

The other way is to avoid restaurants that sell themselves on attentive service. To show off how thoughtful they are, they will keep checking with you, warmly and relentlessly: "Just yourself, sir?" "Oh, sir, your friend hasn't arrived yet?" "Sir, would you like a second dish — the second one is half price?"

Remember: pick a restaurant that treats you with dignity, not one that treats you like an overgrown baby.

How do you cook rations for one?

The worst trouble for single people is having no time to cook, not knowing how to cook, or buying a full set of expensive cast-iron pots and then being unable to finish what you make — one burst of eager cooking condemns you to the same batch of food for your next three meals. We recommend meal prep and the permutations method:

Meal prep caught on first among busy American gym-goers. It means preparing the week's food in one or two concentrated sessions. For the sake of health, taste and storage you can bend the method: chop all the vegetables in advance and keep them in the fridge, then stir-fry or boil a batch each day; eat the leafy greens that spoil fast in the first half of the week and the root vegetables that keep in the second half; cook a lot of meat at once, but do the vegetables fresh each time.

For planning the daily dishes, permutations get you twice the result for half the work. Two ingredients make one dish; three ingredients make three. Chicken, eggs and okra give you stir-fried chicken with okra, stir-fried egg with okra, and oyakodon.

Buying smaller cookware is also the rational move. When you buy an oven, there is no need to chase the size that "fits a whole chicken," and no need for the giant bowl meant for "treat yourself to a mala hotpot feast."

How do you show off your rations for one?

In theory a high-quality single person does not need food photos on Moments for a sense of accomplishment. But since photographing food is a daily need, we cautiously offer a few tips:

1. Mind the light. Two rules: use natural light whenever there is enough of it, and when there isn't, consider the kitchen's secret weapons — the range hood lamp, even the microwave lamp. Shooting food with a flash makes it look like a zombie.

2. The overhead (flat lay) rule. When you have a lot of dishes, shooting from above gives a fairly fashionable composition. Standing on the restaurant table to get the shot is not something we recommend.

3. The caption is the seasoning of a food post. Keep it under 20 characters. Two notes on the two wildly popular captioning styles out there: no inspirational fluff along the lines of "bloom, and the breeze will come" or "be the best version of yourself"; and don't blindly pile up fancy ingredients, which reads as trying too hard and sounding unsure at the same time, like reading a menu aloud.

4. Most dishes should not be posted at all:

Cheap brag posts — "ate at such a fancy restaurant today, the vibe was so nice, the food was so good" — don't post them.

Food that broadcasts "my life is so pathetic, please save me," like unphotogenic takeout or instant noodles: post sparingly.

Homemade culinary disasters, posted once or twice as if by accident, can be endearing. Seven or eight times and it just looks silly.

How do you keep your mind at the supermarket?

Ah, out of milk, better buy milk… ah, this new brand of milk looks nicely designed, might as well try it… ah, the yoghurt in the next fridge is on sale, grab some of that too… not sure the yoghurt will survive the trip to the office, oh, buy ten boxes and get a cooler bag… come to think of it, yoghurt goes well with nuts in the afternoon, get some nuts, where are the nuts…

That is the supermarket crisis of the mind: you plan to spend 100 yuan and come home with 500 yuan of food, more than the fridge holds and far more than one person can eat.

How do you avoid buying too much?

The rational method: write the shopping list before you go in, keep your eyes forward, head straight for your targets, treat "bulk pack" as a blocked keyword and buy only small packages.

The emotional method: take a basket at the entrance instead of pushing a trolley, so you feel the weight of everything you pick up.

The practical method: buy your milk at the convenience store by your door. They don't run buy-ten-get-a-cooler-bag promotions, so you waste less.

How do you avoid being fooled by style guides?

Being single doesn't mean going it alone, but here's how to buy clothes without a best friend or a bro for backup. Looking at street-style photos and style guides in advance helps you shop with a plan. A note for single straight men: reading them is nothing to be ashamed of. Search Baidu or Zhihu for "single" and "clothes" and most of the top results are aimed at single men.

Style guides aren't necessarily reliable, though. Some advice is a waste to read and a waste to buy into, and only leaves men more lost. The bad ones are easy to spot. If a men's guide tells you to "wear your plaid shirt like the upper class," it was probably brought to you by the Society for Making Programmers Even Uglier. Guides that recommend "embroidery, prints, a tropical feel" every summer, or that roll out "15 ways to pair a top hat with your cuffs," suit only flawless hot guys; an ordinary man in those will simply look deranged.

Women's style guides have fewer landmines, but note: in plenty of "how hobbits should dress" guides the models are all over 165 cm, and in "how short girls with thick legs can look tall and slim" the models all weigh less than 45 kg.

How do you live decently?

Single young people are imagined as unwashed, living in a cramped space covered in stinking socks, dirty clothes and empty cans. That is not really the norm for single young people in cities. A single young person may not spend a fortune on a place of their own in a big city, but is quite likely to share with old classmates and friends, or with flatmates found through a Douban housing group, and to have a room of a dozen-odd square metres.

Single young people mostly upgrade their living conditions with the help of "what cheap things improve your quality of life?" threads, but some of the flashy advice has to go. Yes, "the flat is rented, but life isn't" — still, don't fall for these pretty fantasies:

"If you love food, even living alone you'll own a set of exquisite cookware and make yourself a heartwarming breakfast for no reason. Because life is meant to be elegant and warm."

"Buy a few plants and flowers; even the jars and bottles in a corner can make a fresh little nook."

……

If your budget allows, a big enough wardrobe and a good mattress and pillows will do more for your happiness. Living with flatmates also takes some life skills. Assuming everyone involved is a normal human being, and whether or not you end up friends, sharing a flat is a contractual relationship. The key to settling who cleans, bringing someone of the opposite sex home, keeping pets and making noise during rest hours is to set the rules in advance and say the unpleasant things first.

From your own side: don't bring people you barely know home, and don't get drunk carelessly and make your flatmate haul you back.

How do you keep a regular schedule?

A high-quality single person should draw a line against a dissolute schedule. If you live alone, the biggest problem is that nobody makes you sleep or get up. Here is our blunt fix: don't hang curtains. Being woken every morning by the six or seven o'clock sun also makes you sleepy around ten at night. Beyond that, a dog may be more useful than a partner. When the dog's barking stops you sleeping till the afternoon, you won't have the heart to hit it; when the dog needs its evening walk and stops you staying in all day, you won't be able to refuse it either. Trust us: embrace the dog, reject the curtains, and you will live the peak life you always wanted.

How do you take blind dates rationally?

A blind date answers less the question "how do I find a partner" than the question "what do I look like to the other person," so a level head matters.

How reliable the matchmaker is depends on the generation gap between you, how well you know each other and how odd they usually are — for instance: distant aunts and uncles = eccentric friends < your parents < relatives your own age < your buddies.

A blind date is less a matter of finding yourself a partner than a social game with the matchmaker. If the matchmaker is seriously unreliable, the question shifts from "can you handle every type of date they might set you up with?" to "if it doesn't work out, how do you keep things as they were with the matchmaker?"

Our advice: take blind dates rationally. Meet only the people recommended by friends you actually trust, and skip every date you would be attending only because you couldn't politely refuse. Better to decline at the start than be reviewed afterwards as "too picky" or "not sincere." You can decline by claiming a long-distance partner — a long-distance partner can be invented on the spot, and can just as easily be invented to have broken up with you whenever you need.

How do you avoid getting stuck on blind dates?

Not getting stuck on blind dates takes emotional intelligence and patience.

When relatives and friends you're not close to ask about your lack of a partner, for instance, what's really going on is that they have run out of things to say. The best fix is to move the conversation to something more eye-catching: send a red envelope in the group chat, ask after a relative's grandson's grades, or, best of all these past few months, bring up house prices. Mention house prices and your love life vanishes from the conversation.

Your parents nag you every day mainly because the social pressure they face over your being single may be greater than your own. So while you're relieving your own stress, relieve theirs: take them travelling, or buy them a travel package. It gives them something to talk about in front of relatives and friends, and their better mood is a great help and support to you.

How do you handle an ex?

A high-quality single person may have several exes, and may run into one at a class reunion or a friend's wedding.

For that situation, here, warmly, is our guide to seeing an ex:

1. Wear normal clothes. Harbour no wicked scheme to win by surprise. Dressing to outshine everyone makes it obvious you care too much, and clothes you can't normally carry off — a suit, high heels — invite disaster, physical or aesthetic.

2. Don't pointedly avoid talking to your ex, but don't force a conversation either. Wait until the whole room hits the same note — the emcee embarrassing himself at the wedding, say, or the class monitor saying something dumb at the reunion — and grumble about it together. Aim for the tone you'd use on Jianguo sitting next to you, not on your ex.

3. Pretend not to hear if they ask "how have you been lately." The moment someone opens with that, they have entered the melancholy nostalgia of a film protagonist, which is awkward and dangerous. You can sneeze, blow your nose, and steer things away with "my stocks are still underwater, boo hoo" or "I've found an amazing new detergent lately" — or just pretend you didn't hear. Otherwise "good" and "not good" come out sounding the same: like the two of you are about to get back together.

4. If the other person starts asking "how have you been lately," it may mean guilt, or it may mean flirting. The surefire way to stop them going further is to ask to borrow money right away. Start with "money's been a bit tight lately" and get them to retreat as fast as possible.

Being single was once considered bad and dangerous. In his book Going Solo, Eric Klinenberg notes that American commentators used to treat living alone as a social problem, a sign of narcissism and the collapse of social morality. Now more than 50% of American adults are single, and American attitudes toward single life and family life have changed.

Today's single young people may well be living disciplined, active lives. As a stage of life, time spent single gives people a rare freedom, and gives society a different shape of family.

Using "single" as a label to sort people into a group is simply boring. Once someone is stuck with it, their other qualities tend to be ignored; once "single people" are treated as a group needing special attention, the variety inside that group is forgotten too. They don't necessarily think they're miserable, and they don't all want out of it.

Once this odd binary is set up, people who marry and have children early are sometimes accused by single people of "having no ambition," and people in long-distance relationships keep asking, "why do you only care about single dogs and not about us?"

Being single is just a state, nothing more. If we have to name a difference between single people and everyone else, it is this: being single means you are sometimes lonely and sometimes free. Being in a relationship means you sometimes feel the calm of having someone there, and sometimes feel hemmed in and irritated by their presence.

And single people, for now, don't have to spend time and energy maintaining a relationship, which gives them more chances to spend time with themselves, and means their choices and decisions answer to no one but themselves. Their lives aren't miserable, and you needn't trouble yourself finding a reason for their being single. Plenty of them hold themselves to high, strict standards, pursue their own growth, and live rich, happy lives.

If you're still single, we won't wish you a speedy exit from it. We wish you a good, active single life — and a quick escape from the folk fantasy of "the empress of the East Palace bakes the flatbread while the empress of the West Palace peels the scallions."

Cover and in-text images: Lin Xiaoyao, tumblr@booksandart, dongman.fm