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Why are you single?

It's a question Liz Tuccillo calls “the most annoying question. You'll be asked it at family gatherings, weddings and on first dates.” And it's one that “you'll ask yourself far too often. It's the question that has no good answer.”

For the 45-year-old author, it's also a query that has propelled much of her literary success, as a story editor in the famed writers' room on Sex and the City, as co-author of the bestselling He's Just Not That into You and now as a novelist with How to Be Single (Simon & Schuster), a book that explores female singledom in her home city of New York and around the world.

Meeting her for a glass of rosé at Bymark in Toronto's business district, I am determined not to ask the question.

But as our girl talk progresses, it's irresistible: Why on Earth would this slight, dark-eyed beauty with a great big laugh and a career to match end up unhappily alone for years on end? It just doesn't make sense.

No one understands this injustice and confusion better than Tuccillo, who made her reputation as a TV writer by selling the myth of the One.

But in person she is far more realistic.

“In my darkest hour, I really wonder why we're all taught that we're entitled to true love in life, that there's a lid for every pot, a pea for every pod, etc.,” she tells me, while polishing off her second mini-burger. “We're not all taught that we're entitled to be rich and famous or beautiful, so how did it get to be that we're all supposed to be destined to have romantic love?”

The female characters in Tuccillo's book certainly approach life with this expectation (as does virtually every woman I know) and with decidedly mixed results. Surely the high divorce rate in North America – along with the scads of beautiful, bright, perennially single women – are in part the result of our unrealistic expectations about love, sex and marriage? Tuccillo agrees that this is true, yet, unlike most so-called dating experts, she does not – cannot – advise women to settle. In fact, her entire being seems to rail against it.

“My divining rod is: Who am I jealous of? It's not the women I know who've settled – and lots of women do. I'm jealous when it's real. I'm jealous of my friend who met a man with whom she has a complicated, difficult but ultimately passionate relationship. I'm jealous when she reads me the love letter he wrote her on the opening night of her Broadway show. But that's real. It's like one character in my book says, ‘I'm interested in being in love and I'm interested in being single.' Both are uncompromising ways to live. Anything else is boring.”

But being single can be boring too – and when kids are involved it can be downright drudgery. This unromantic fact was pointed out this year by single-mother-by-choice Lori Gottlieb, whose Atlantic article, entitled “Marry Him,” made a practical case for single women to settle early and often if they want a happy, stable middle-aged personal life.

“Of course we'd be loath to admit it in this day and age, but ask any soul-baring 40-year-old single heterosexual woman what she most longs for in life and she probably won't tell you it's a better career or a smaller waistline or a bigger apartment. Most likely, she'll say what she really wants is a husband – and, by extension, a child.”

Gottlieb goes on to observe that “settling will probably make you happier in the long run,” since “marriage isn't a passion-fest; it's more like a partnership formed to run a very small, mundane and often boring non-profit business. And I mean this in a good way.”

While she liked Gottlieb's article, Tucillo observes, “She's telling women to settle, but at the same time admits that she couldn't settle. In the end, it comes down to priorities. If I'd wanted a family, I would have made it my life's priority. Instead, if I was on a date, I'd think, ‘I'd rather be writing or with my friends.'”

Are dissatisfied female singletons like Tuccillo a valiant, post-feminist army of uncompromising idealists or they just unrealistic girls buying into a romantic myth?

Tuccillo remembers the issue coming up among the writers of Sex and the City. “One woman was complaining about how a guy gave her carnations. Another was complaining about how a guy sent her 1-800-Flowers so she broke up with him. Another wouldn't date a guy who was a bad speller.

“Finally, our boss, Michael Patrick King, who normally put up with our girly bitch sessions, lost it. He said: ‘You deserve to be single!' We had this big debate, ‘Are we too picky?'”

So what was the verdict?

Tuccillo's face lights up. “In the end, all the single women in that writers' room ended up finding partners. And none of them were carnation-givers or were bad spellers. They're all in relationships now!” She smiles wryly and pulls her cardigan around her. “Except, of course, for me.”

But honestly, why should a pot this lovely settle for a lid that's anything less?