ABSTRACT
This section presents an in-depth analysis of two prominent themes. These themes reveal (1) participants’ understanding and negotiation of being single in a heteronormative marketplace and (2) their active unravelling of the gendered construction of singleness. Almost all of the data presented in this section relate strongly, either directly or indirectly, to participants’ clear-sighted awareness that singleness was ‘othered’ by a dominant paradigm of heterosexual coupling that was both age-and gender-sensitive.
