I really like the above sentence. It bottles the answer for the next time my married with children colleagues turn up their noses.

Your point about cooking, cleaning and maintaining a nice household only for yourself (and not for a partner or children) nicely illustrates the tendency to think of single people as selfish. Slaving away at keeping house for a family is self-sacrificing, which fits with stereotypes and norms about women. But, keeping house for yourself is either unintelligible, or gets understood as unnecessary and therefore self-indulgent. But, for those who have the means to control their reproductive lives and who have quite deliberately chosen to have children, having made that choice is equally as “selfish!” It’s not like the human race is in danger of dying out or something. So it appears that the selfishness claims really just boil down to whether or not the things you value are in line with the culturally dominant group’s values or not.

As child-free by choice, who is also a never-married single, I am frustrated at times by the fact that our society is heavily child-centered. On a smaller, more personal scale, the curriculum at my place of employ is impacted to a degree by the teachers, mostly female, who have children. In other words, the scheduling of certain classes is determined based on what is best for the teacher in question, instead on the basis of what is best for students.

I often believe that as a child-free single, the assumption is made that people like me have nothing better to do than to be at work. I fact, lots of erroneous, unfair, and prejudiced assumptions based on ignorance are made about me, not only as a child-free single, but as a single in general. A case in point: People are surprised that I don’t cook, or clean, or invest in nice household furnishings, because, only a woman with a spouse and children does these things.