confirmed bachelor

WOVOW

A bachelor is an unmarried man. A confirmed bachelor is one who intends to remain that way forever—he’s settled on it, he’s resolute, he’s confirmed.

The phrase confirmed bachelor became popular during the Victorian era, when it was used primarily to describe men who disliked or avoided women. The Christian Examiner, for instance, used the phrase in 1843 for a “solitary, melancholic, and monkish man.”

Another early use of the phrase was in an 1863 court trial where a man was accused of pursuing another man’s fiancée. The defendant styled himself a confirmed bachelor, claiming he had no interest in women, and that his “wife” was the armchair in the men’s club he was a member of.

I've decided to be like Clooney or Charlie Harper and just be a confirmed bachelor forever. No heartache, and always free to pass gas.

— Jeff Tillbrook (@tillbrook) May 14, 2010

By the end of the 19th century, a confirmed bachelor began to refer to men who didn’t want to be “trapped” by marriage to a woman. An 1892 article in the British magazine Pick-Me-Up humorously noted that a confirmed bachelor‘s “idea of ever getting married is quite too absurd for anything.”

By the mid-20th century, confirmed bachelor was being used as a euphemism for “gay man.” American and British newspaper obituaries at this time—when men largely remained closeted due to stigmas against homosexuality–used language like never married or confirmed bachelor instead of terms such as “homosexual.”

Rereading Midnight in the Garden of Good & Evil. As naive kid, didn't realize stigma & meaning of "confirmed bachelor" #hugstomygayfriends

— inbetweencurves (@inbetweencurves) August 6, 2014

This euphemism persisted into the late 20th-century, early 21st centuries even with the greater visibility and acceptance of LGBTQ people and social issues. Writing for The Independent in 1994, Helen Fielding lamented the use of the word bachelor, both as a euphemism for homosexuality and for shaming people’s decision not to marry.

In a 2011 article for the magazine Out, editor Aaron Hicklin explained that terms like confirmed bachelor imply that homosexuality is shameful—why else conceal it?

One of the biggest challenges when talking about LGBT+ history is the lack of it. LGBT+ people have been systematically removed from the historical record, or their otherness whitewashed away in phrases like "confirmed bachelor" and "just friends" #LGBTHistoryMonth

— LGBT+ Physics (@LGBT_Physics) February 4, 2019

The phrase confirmed bachelor was notably used in the 2017 film The Phantom Thread, where famed dressmaker Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis) describes himself as a confirmed bachelor, married only to his art (though also complicating his sexuality).