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Writer's pictureOlivia Swindler

In Defense of the Childless Cat Lady

I started planning my wedding before I was in kindergarten. My mother had a silk robe that I thought was the most beautiful thing in the world, and I walked around the house pretending it was a wedding dress. Almost every afternoon of my childhood, I lined up my baby dolls and spent hours pretending to be their mother. To my young brain, marriage was the first step to my ultimate goal—motherhood. 


My whole life, I have wanted to be a wife and mother. I wanted to be an interior designer, a teacher, an author, but always a wife and mother in tandem. Never did I doubt that this would be my future.



I am now 31, single, and childless. And while I am allergic to cats, I have a dog, Luna, who is as spoiled as any child. I am, for all intents and purposes, what JD Vance would classify as a childless cat lady.


When I first heard the term earlier this summer, I thought it was a joke—a politician wouldn’t reduce women to such simplistic terms. But then I saw the resurfaced interview, and I was filled with rage as I listened to someone with whom I share a faith blame many of America’s problems on women like me—childless cat ladies. He was articulating something that had been buried in my subconscious since I first started attending Sunday School, but this time, it was coming from a vice president hopeful and not a church volunteer. His message reiterated the old rhetoric—if a woman is single past a certain age, something is wrong with her. For a lot of my life, without much thought or questioning, this was something I accepted and believed to be true.


And then suddenly, I was the childless lady.


Suddenly, there had to be something wrong with me.


Suddenly, I was the problem.


As a kid in church, I was told I needed to be successful, but not too successful, or you will scare away the men. Make sure you like sports, but not too much, because you don’t want him to feel insecure about how much you know. Always do your hair and makeup, but never too much; you don’t want to give the wrong impression. Ask good questions; men want to talk about themselves. Don’t talk to a guy unless you are interested in dating him because you might lead him on. And never go on a date with someone unless you’re thinking of marriage.


For much of my childhood, I thought that if I followed these rules, I would be married by 23, have a baby by 26, and send Hallmark-worthy Christmas cards for the rest of my life. 


I have spent too many hours this election cycle thinking about this childless cat lady moniker. What has struck me is how much this conversation about singleness and childlessness revolves around women. Multiple times throughout the election cycle, comments have been made about Harris being a stepmother instead of carrying her own children (though, for the record, no president before her has birthed children either). This is not just insulting to women who choose not to have children or who are unable to have children but to blended families. 


Somehow, the women choosing to or not to have children is the sole focus. Why are we not talking about the men?


The rise of women’s independence and agency seems to have created a fear in some Christian men. As if a woman's progress negates the accomplishments of men, as if in order for one gender to be successful, the other must be sidelined. What is the most concerning about this way of thinking is the divisions it creates between men and women. The longer this narrative stews, the more the genders feel like adversaries instead of members of the same team.


For my own life, I saw two options. I could either sit around and wait for the right guy to appear, pouring all my effort into becoming the perfect future wife, or I could do something with the life I have right now. The doing something felt like a risk at the time. As if in pursuing my dreams, I might scare away a future partner.


In my 31 years, I’ve written and published two books, lived abroad, traveled, made amazing friends, and adopted a dog. I am so proud of the things I have accomplished. 

Though this is not the case for every woman, I would still love to be married and have a child. But the older I am and the more I date, the more I realize there’s nothing wrong with childless cat ladies. There is something wrong with the way the church develops men. 


Many of the men I’ve gone out with seem stunted. While I’ve felt the subconscious pressure to “do something with my life” and to justify my singleness, many men I’ve dated don’t know how to do laundry, never learned to cook, and only know how to hold conversations that revolve around their careers. The expectation sold to them by the church was that someday they would find a wife who would handle these things for them. These men are not ready for a mature relationship. 


When I’ve gone out with men who fit this category, I’ve noticed that instead of trying to figure out if we are compatible, these men are seeking someone to validate their accomplishments and act as a pseudo-mother.


Here are a few of my favorite examples: I once went out with a guy, and within the first five minutes, he told me he was number two in his department, never asking me about my career or workplace accomplishments. Another guy took me to an open house for a potential $1.3 million investment property on our second date and asked if I thought he should buy it. One guy said he guessed he could respect me after I disagreed about a very minute Biblical belief (but only after arguing to me—not with me as I barely said a word the entire rant—for thirty minutes).


My personal favorite occurred when I mentioned on a first date that I had a book publishing the next week. He said that he understood how hard it was to write fiction because he wrote a Dungeons and Dragons script every week and proceeded to explain, for an hour and a half, how to write compelling fiction, never asking any questions about my work or writing. It felt as belittling as it did insulting.


As a woman, I often feel stuck. I’ve slowly (aka through lots of therapy) shed the restricting view of womanhood that I was taught. I have a life that I love.


So many of these behaviors, by men and women, are rooted in the narratives that have been repeated since childhood. While I’ve focused primarily on women, this is not to say the narratives prescribed to men are easier. There is so much toxicity in the “man up” narrative. 


These scripts don’t just harm women but men as well. Vance’s attempt to use childlessness against women does nothing but put distance and resentment between the two sexes. This is not a zero-sum game. I don’t think being childless is a problem.


I think the problem is viewing women, or men, as the enemy. So much of the political narrative I’ve seen in 2024 revolves around women. It is divisive and hurtful. A certain type of woman is the enemy, and she must be stopped, must be tamed, must be made a mother. Or else, she might do something radical, like vote for Harris. (Jesse Watters had a rant in 2022 about how, as a country, we needed women to get married because single women are captured by Democratic policies that want them to stay single.)


What I’ve learned in my years of dating is that I would rather be a childless cat lady than marry a man just for the sake of being married. 


I am 31, childless, and single, and I am happy. I love the life that I’ve built. I hope that someday I get married, and maybe I will have kids, but no matter what, I will pour my energy into building the life I love. And regardless, I want my life to be defined by more than my marital or parental status.


xx A Childless Dog Lady





1 Comment


Gwen Simonalle
Gwen Simonalle
Oct 10

I could not agree more! This is so well put. The zero-sum war of the sexes needs to end.

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