Go out and take notice
Nightlife is dominated buy single women and married men
SINGLES by Karenina Yaptinchay
Manila Standard, P. 30B, 7 December 2000

Friday, 6pm - I was dying to go out, you know, just to get a break from my sometimes monotony-prone life. I called a friend but he couldn’t make it. Text message: "wud u like to join us for drinks?" I didn’t mind that I had to drive and brave the Edsa traffic that night. I badly needed a to see some friends, especially those whom I haven't seen for a long, long time. I didn’t know who else I was meeting up with, except for two college friends. When I arrived there, it was just the two of them -- both married and male.

Saturday, 9am - Text message: "r u awake? will hve lunch in mkt. c u l8r." The message came from two friends of mine who are married to each other. They were leaving for Los Angeles the following day after a month long vacation in Manila. At around 2pm, I met up with the couple and two other couple friends. The day dragged on until about 11pm. We could have partied the whole night, especially if it were 10 years ago, but there are more important things to consider now like feeling guilty when the spouse is at home waiting. In the group, I was the only single. The score: two to two. I was with two married females and two married males.

Sunday, 6pm - I went to mom's house for dinner and went to mass before going home. These are the only two things I must accomplish every Sunday. The rest of the day is always spent in bed.

Monday, 6:30pm - I met up with friends of mine for the rare art exhibit of Anita Magsaysay-Ho. I think I had too much wine that night. I went out with two college friends after the formalities of the exhibit. Again, both of them were married and male.

Tuesday, 4pm - Text message: "last night out before the wedding." Because of the wine the night before, I swear I almost forgot about the text message until about 6pm. Two friends of mine are getting married to each other on Sunday and today was the last chance my friends and I could go out with the couple as singles. I hooked up with a friend so we can go together, of course, only after my aeroboxing class. Thirteen of us, plus two spouses, showed up that night. Surprisingly, we were a big group, considering we had all been extremely busy. Of the 13 friends, only three were married and all of them are male. If we consider the about-to-be-married couple, the tally would be four married males and one married female (they got married last Sunday). Of the remaining 10 who are still single, only two are male. If we include the spouses my married male friends brought, then the married female category would be two.

Wednesday, sometime in the afternoon - Text message: "badly need ur help. nid to talk to u." Text reply: "call landlyn." I thought this day was the day when I can catch up on my sleep but what the heck! Tomorrow's a holiday. I had dinner with my friend that night. Aside from talking about how his business was going, we also had much time to catch up and whine about Philippine politics. He is single like me.

Thursday (Holiday) - I slept.

Friday, 7pm - It was weird not to go out since that's what I had been doing for the past seven days, so I called a single friend who just arrived from Singapore so we can catch up. Besides, I didn't feel like cooking myself some dinner.

Six nights with different sets of friends can be very tiring but since I had nothing better to do at night, I figured, maybe I deserved to have a little bit of fun. Besides, what's a single girl to do? In a way, the past week "quashed" the assumption of someone who wrote me that I don’t seem to have any friends.

But what is more interesting about the past week was that I found myself in the company of, if not single people, married male friends. Since I started this column, I got into the strange habit of counting the people I see and categorizing them in my head. The final score: nine married men, two married women (four if we include the spouses of my married male friends), three single men, and 10 single women. (The numbers I had been drawing from my experience are not necessarily reflective of the whole society. I am merely sharing what I saw and making sense of it.) And the winner of the "still-can-go-out-at-night" award is --- the single women! First runner-up -- the married men! The fight was close because the score would have changed if I consider the fact that one single male friend and one single female friend got married last Sunday. In this case, the winner would have been the married men!

A friend who manages a restaurant in Malate had the same observation. Single females go into the restaurant in packs. Somehow, single women can now go out without men who are expected to pay for their expenses for the night. Someone a lot older than me observed that since women today have careers and make their own money, they just don't see the point of waiting for a man to ask them out for them to go out and have some fun.

Whatever happened to my married female friends and single male friends?

Well, majority of my female friends have married, in fact, outnumbering my single female friends. But they hardly go out. Most, if not all, of them have to plan way ahead before we can actually do something together. Their days are spent managing the household, taking care of kids, and avoiding arguments with their husbands. Most of them have lost touch. Sometimes, their names don't even come up anymore when we plan reunions. Two of the married female friends I went out with just had to make it because it was a "bon voyage" sort of thing. We didn’t know when we would be seeing our friends from LA again.

I guess society and even its members are resigned to the fact that women are born for domestication while men are to provide them the means by how they can be effective in their domestic responsibilities. And because they provide, maybe they have more of the right to go out than their wives.

As for my single male friends, most of them got married and are now included in the "married men" category. Not surprisingly, married men I know remain active in the night scene, unlike the married women I know. Why? Probably because married men, at least those I know, spend less time managing the household or taking care of the kids than their wives. Maybe it's just the company I keep but the results of my mini-anthropological case study, no matter how small the sample, seem to show a reality that more married men can afford to go out at night compared to married women.

Is night life now dominated by single women and married men? Geez, I would like to see more single men out there! I am not trying to sound so desperate (or obsessed, as my reader puts it). What I am stressing here is the unequal gender ratio of single people. I guess that's reality for you. But somehow, I am still glad that my married male friends can still go out and that their wives are so nice and understanding because sometimes, they are the only ones who have the will and the time to have nights out with friends.

Is it because it is very suspicious when married females ask permission from their husbands if it's okay to go out with their friends? What makes it more suspicious than when their husbands ask permission to go out with their friends? When I went out with a married female friend, I swear I got at least 10 calls from her husband. No, he didn’t call her cell phone. Instead, he called mine probably to make sure I was really with his wife. Maybe the men my female friends have married are either narcissists or members of the "serve-me-with-all-your-soul-so-I-won't-be-insecure" club. But romantically speaking, maybe the husbands just can't last a moment without their wives so they just try to keep them home as much as they can. Sure. But whatever the reason, the fact remains that single women are left to hang out with married men. Deadly.

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