Continuing your education is a good idea for the up and coming spinster for many reasons. Here, I’ll bullet them to get you used to reading Powerpoint as in a lecture class:
- Truly, you are improving yourself; increasing your intelligence, expanding your knowledge of the world and yourself.
- In an economy such as our current one, making yourself more viable within your career or stepping into a new field is a considered a wise decision by credible publications such as the magazine headlines I read in the checkout at grocery stores and drug stores.
- You will be surrounded by people 10 years and more your junior, excluding you from any dating pool.
- No one can reprimand you for being single when you are an adult going back to school, especially if you maintain any type of employment. It’s just considered bad form. Clearly your plate is full of integrity and self worth, why should they bother you with such petty questions as “Are you seeing anyone special?”
I’d like to extrapolate on some thoughts here, going back to school often means you are in your 30′s or 40′s, this is ideal for the spinster in training. If you are fiscally frugal you may find yourself at a community college completing pre-requisites your prior degree did not demand. A community college is nothing like that witty and odd television show Community with that handsome and charming gentleman from Talk Soup. It is primarily filled with young adults aged 18-21 who could not get into a university or have fiscally frugal parents who are forcing them to do their pre-requisites at the local community college. They will show up to class drunk and high, they are loud and brash and seem to only own sweat pants and pajama bottoms. They will disregard you or roll their eyes at you when you sit in the front asking the professor questions. Here, you do not have to worry about putting yourself into a situation that will require dating or even its threat. Best case scenario you may meet some other soon to be spinsters or better halves of couples who you may befriend, create study groups with and after that really bad test, get drunk with.
When choosing the why to go back to school, I suggest you aim big. Don’t go for some sort of certificate course that only occupies 6 months of your life, and don’t go for an associate degree. Get another bachelor’s, get a master’s, get your Ph.D. You want to ensure that all of your free time will be spent hunched over a computer writing papers and if you’re lucky, establishing that Dowager’s hump early! The bigger the degree, the longer you can commit yourself to this path avoiding dating with the dignity of a scholar, ensuring more spinster shawl wearing for sure. Personally I’m considering moving forward from the accelerated nursing program obtaining my second bachelor’s to a doctorate program at the urging of a few of my professors.
While I personally am a proponent of excessive exercise as a form of sublimation, I mean, processing and stress relief, don’t do it in a local gym where people your own age convene to work out, restrict yourself to the University’s gym where only undergrad’s go. You will think you stick out like a sore thumb, no one will notice you’re even there.
Finally, embrace a new, highly elevated stress level as being your baseline. That way, even if for some reason you do in fact start spending time with someone special, you will be so high-strung and filled with anxiety about your new educational path (was this the right choice, always being broke, will there be a job after school, will there be this relationship after school, is spinsterhood real or a myth, why are there so many papers and why are they so hard to write, why do the younger students seem to “get it” so easily, etc., ad nauseum) on a 24/7 basis that you’ll be sure to drive that special someone away before the relationship gets stable enough to weather the bad times.
And remember, as I said before, no one can judge you for being single if you are involved in an intense academic program, this will help as sometimes the question “you’re so wonderful, why are you still single?” can stump even the wittiest and quickest of thinkers. And saying “school is just so all-consuming” sounds so much more valiant than “I have no freaking idea, like none.”
