'Singleness is sultanness'

Bekarlık sultanlık

This is an actual saying in Turkish. I think about it fairly frequently.

My new waxist, aged 18, asked me if I was married or single. Single, I said. Nice, she said. She doesn't like being married, not at all. Her parents both died, though, and all her older siblings are married, so perhaps she had no choice. She's working at the beauty salon to save money for a vacation in western Turkey. At this thought her face lit up.

Yesterday two women and I were walking in the fields outside of a village and we stopped to talk to an old man that was flooding a field for cotton planting. He wanted to know about me. Why don't you marry someone from this village? He asked. I'm not thinking about marriage, I said. Bekarlık sultanlık, he conceded.