Single Girl?

Recently, on the way to making my main point in a story, I said something to my friend Cain about being a single girl.  His surprise was startling to me.

"Really? You think of yourself as single?"

"Well, what the hell else would I be?"

I've always thought of myself as a single girl. Footloose and fancy-free.  A bachelor with a little black book.  Slut about town.  A free agent.

Cain's heard many of my slutty adventures over the past 6 months or so; how could my characterization of myself as "single" mystify him?

Part of his bafflement stemmed from the fact that my relationship with one of my lovers has a strong D/s component, and many Doms are a little more  - what?  territorial?  controlling? - than Adam is with me or with any of his subs. The idea that I could have a Dom in my life and still think of myself as a free agent was the puzzling bit.

Fast forward a few weeks, and I'm out to dinner with a couple of other subs including my friend Adah, telling the story I just told you about Cain.  And Adah jumps in with, "Wait, what?  You identify as single?"

Her take on it was completely different from Cain's. She said she would have seen me as "SoloPoly" (a term I had never heard until that moment and while apt in its precision seems to be kind of burdensome in its specificity).

Adah tells me that when she hears women describe themelves as single, she hears "looking for Mr. Right", which I admit, is not an accurate description of how I have arranged my social life.  She summed it up by saying that to her, single was like being on the first rung, about to climb Relationship Ladder, rather than a declaration of "nah, I'm not going to climb that ladder."

Single to me is light-hearted, an affirmation of freedom, not an expression of being lonely or unfulfilled in my relationships. After all, I'm the one who made the choice to be a lifelong single girl.

What does "single" say to you?