Living among the soccer moms and the school buses, surrounded by power mowers and mini-vans, Jeffrey Glassman is a stranger in his own land. He is, after all, single in suburbia, living alone in a culture that blossomed as a haven for families half a century ago and is still ruled by them.
“There are no-o-o-o-o other single people around here,” muses Glassman, a 31-year-old Boston attorney, as he sits in the living room of the two-bedroom, shingled Cape he owns on a leafy lane in Chestnut Hill. “It’s culture shock to drive home at night and see the street flooded with kids. That’s when I say, `What am I doing here?”‘
What he is doing is what more and more people like him are doing. Although pop sociologists have yet to concoct a catchy handle, youngish unmarried suburbanites (“Yussies,” anyone?) sightings are definitely increasing. Census Bureau figures show that several suburban Boston communities–from Duxbury in the south, to Natick in the west, to Georgetown in the north–experienced faster growth rates among never-married 20- to 44-year-olds between 1980 and 1990 than for their overall populations. There is no reason to think this trend has abated. “Within the past year, about a dozen singles have bought property though us,” reports Lorraine Kelley-Alessi, a real estate broker with offices in Sharon and Stoughton. “Fifteen years ago we probably would have gone a year without seeing a solitary single person.”
But the live-alone homeowners are definitely out there now, drawn to the types of dead-quiet neighborhoods in which they grew up, or by the jobs that have percolated outside the city, or by the fact they’re tired of pouring money into the deep hole of urban rent. Besides, why wouldn’t they want what the rest of America wants when it chooses suburban living: a little greenery, a little elbow room, a little piece of the American Dream?
“Just because I’m single doesn’t mean I have to miss out on some of the things married people have,” says Marciann Dunnagan, a 35-year-old managing director of a legal placement agency, who last year moved out of a two-bedroom apartment in Boston’s South End and bought a four-bedroom Cape on a quarter-acre lot in Natick.
Such as?
“Such as space. Back-yard barbecues. Dinner parties. Things like that.”
Indeed, the life of a suburban single often looks like the life of a suburban anybody. Susan Shadle, a 40-year-old bank operations manager who recently bought a home in Randolph after living in an apartment in the same town for 14 years, seldom bothers with Boston. You’re more likely to find her on the fairways of the Norwood Country Club, or perusing the local Christmas Tree Shop, or sitting down to dinner at a nearby Ninety-Nine Restaurant. “I do the same things that other people here do,” she says.
Still, there are trade-offs. Many young suburban singles say they are neighborhood oddities who don’t mix particularly well with their neighbors because they lack the requisite ability to chitchat about, say, local schools. The arrival of an unmarried person among the suburban crowd tends to engender curiosity, occasionally even suspicion.
When 35-year-old Debbie Lavigne moved into a two-bedroom house in Plymouth last month, a neighbor came by to look her over even before the movers had departed. “You bought this place just for yourself?” Lavigne remembers the woman asking. “What’s the matter? Don’t you like boys?”
Sitting at her kitchen table in her pristine new home, Lavigne laughs. Then her smile disappears, and she shrugs. “I never expected to be single at 35,” she says, “but here I am.”
And here is Jeff Glassman, the lawyer who finds himself alone and ambivalent in Chestnut Hill. A once-confirmed urbanite who formerly lived in apartments on Beacon Hill and in Back Bay, Glassman hesitantly rented his late grandfather’s home in 1995 when his Boston rent skyrocketed. By this spring he liked suburban living enough to plunk down $250,000 for the small house, complete with three bathrooms and a two-car garage.
“The more I lived here the more I enjoyed it,” he says, conceding that the April day a falling tree branch did $15,000 worth of damage to the house was an exception. But he admits he misses strolling through Back Bay, biking along the Esplanade, or dropping into Tower Records. He’s traded Morton’s showy steak house on Boston’s Boylston Street for the predictable Cheesecake Factory in Newton’s Atrium Mall. He prunes trees and strips wallpaper and wonders why his Home Depot bill is so large. When friends come to visit — from the city, invariably — he feels compelled to “play host” and whip up a little something on the barbecue.
But, hey, the neighbors are friendly, right? “One couple even invited my girlfriend and me over for brunch,” Glassman notes proudly. “Of course, the husband spent a lot of time talking about sprinkler systems. I was sitting there asking myself, `Jeff, are you really, really ready for this?”‘
Ask a single why he or she has taken the suburban plunge and you’re likely to hear a tale or two like this:
– Roots. Both the baby boom generation and Generation X grew up in the suburbs that sprouted across America after World War II. These people are now adults, and the burbs still feel familiar. Consider Lauren Kiddy, a 30-year-old secretary who was raised in Stoneham. When it was time to leave home, at age 25, Kiddy didn’t give a moment’s thought to the bright lights of Boston. She bought a one-bedroom condominium in Winchester, not far from her family. “I like the city as a place to visit, but not to live,” she explains. “It’s kind of intimidating. The suburbs are more comfortable to me.” And more like home.
– Gigs. America’s suburbs were created as a place to live, not to work. But that’s changed, and the businesses that are now woven into the suburban fabric have lured workers to what was once considered the hinterlands. Tracey Collum, a 27-year-old computer software trainer, works in Bedford, so why live in the city? Instead, she owns a two-bedroom condo in North Andover, 12 meandering miles from her office. She only occasionally hits heavy traffic in her new Toyota Corolla as she listens to her Eric Clapton CDs on her way to and from work. “It’s a good way to wind down,” she explains, which no one would say of a commute into Boston.
– Aversion to paying rent. Home ownership is still a major slice of American pie, and who cares if you don’t have a spouse and kids to share it with? Thirty-three-year-old Paul Crivell lived in Canton with his parents until last year, diligently saving money from his small landscaping business to buy his own home. He landed in a four-bedroom ranch in Stoughton. “I deferred gratification for a long time for this,” he says, sipping a beer in his large living room. “My friends said I should leave home, rent an apartment, but I wanted to wait until I could afford my own place. That was very, very important to me.”
But despite their increasing number, almost all suburban singles complain that there’s one thing they frequently can’t find around their neighborhoods: each other. Yes, they can work the crowds at places like the Sports Resort in Weymouth or Diamonds Lounge at the Burlington Marriott. They can hang out and hope for the best at a Chili’s or a Ground Round. But there’s no equivalent of Boston’s Lansdowne Street in the suburbs. Move there and you trade Kenmore Square for just plain square.
True, singles’ dances and singles’ church groups dot the suburban landscape, but they’re often populated by divorced folks with kids at home. Organizations such as Singles in the Suburbs, which covers a handful of communities northwest of Boston, try to bring people together through the likes of bowling, canoeing, and miniature golf. LunchDates, a major local dating service, started in Brighton 15 years ago and has followed its market into the suburbs by opening four offices outside the city.
“But suburban neighborhoods are still mainly full of families, and the parks are full of soccer games,” points out Steve Penner, a co-owner of LunchDates. “The shopping is great, but meeting people is hard.”
