I was once interviewed by a reporter writing a cover story for the Washington Post Magazine on people who stay single. I told her that I love being single. It is who I really am. I’m Single at Heart. In the story she wrote, she said that after talking to me, she tried to think of people she knows who fit my category, and she could only come up with a few. It was easier for her to think of single people she knows who don’t want to be single.
That was a decade ago, and I still remember the reporter’s remark that she did not know very many single people who were like me. I’ve always wondered two things: first, was it true that hardly anyone she knew was like me, and second, does it matter?
I’ve heard from many people who are Single at Heart over the years, and it is not uncommon for them to be reluctant to proclaim their love of single life to people who might not understand. The conventional wisdom insists that people like us don’t really exist. Many people are invested in the belief that true happiness only comes from romantic relationships (it doesn’t), so single people who say they like being single are just fooling themselves. Research has even shown that people are harsher in their judgments of single people who want to be single, and kinder toward single people who wish they were coupled.
It is possible, then, that there were people in the reporter’s life who were happily single and wanted to stay single, but never quite said as much to her. Maybe that was especially likely to be true because at the time, most of her writing was for the “On Love” section of the Post, where she covered weddings, romantic love, and romantic relationships. I’m just guessing, though; there is no way to know for sure.
As for the second question of whether it matters, research published in 2021 suggests that it might. Andrew Gelman of Columbia University and Yotam Margalit of Tel Aviv University were interested in understanding the influence of particular groups, recognizing from the research in political science that bigger groups don’t always have more clout than smaller groups. One thing that might matter, they thought, was the personal reach of the members of a group. They described their findings in “Social penumbras predict political attitudes,” published in the PNAS, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The Study of Social Penumbras
Just as individuals have social networks, so, too, do groups. Gelman and Margalit call those networks “social penumbras.” Social penumbras consist of all the people who know someone in the group in question. They didn’t study people who are happily single, but if they did, they would have asked a representative sample of adults to report the number of (1) close family members, (2) close friends, and (3) other people they know who are happily single. “Other people they know” are defined as “people that you know their name and would stop and talk to for at least a moment if you ran into the person on the street or in a shopping mall.”
When more people personally know someone in a particular group, that group has the potential to have more clout. The researchers believe that could happen because personal interactions “can facilitate greater understanding of, and sympathy toward, the needs and interests of the group.” Social psychologists who study intergroup contact have found some evidence for that.
Gelman and Margalit tested their ideas using YouGov data collected from a representative sample of 3,000 American adults who were interviewed in 2013 and again a year later. The participants were asked about the people they knew in 14 different groups, and their attitudes toward various policies relevant to those groups.
Bigger Groups Do Not Always Have Bigger Penumbras
The number of people who know a member of a given group (that group’s social penumbra) is typically much bigger than the number of members in that group. One of the most striking examples involves the group of people active in the military. Fewer than 1 percent of American adults are part of that group, but nearly half of the participants in the study said that they knew someone in the service. Gays and lesbians are another example. Nearly three-quarters of the people surveyed said that they knew someone who is gay or lesbian, compared to the 4 percent who identify as gay or lesbian in the general population, according to the researchers’ estimate.
An example at the other extreme are women who have had an abortion: “relatively few people report knowing someone who had an abortion in the past 5 years, despite there being millions of women who fall into this category.” Sometimes group membership is not readily apparent, and people in some groups are reluctant to reveal themselves.
Does It Matter If More People Get to Know Members of a Particular Group?
What if someone did not know anyone in a particular group the first time they were questioned, but then they did know someone by the second time? Would they then be more supportive of policies that would help that group? Across all 14 groups, the answer was yes, a little bit.
As the size of the penumbra increased for a particular group (more people got to know someone in that group), attitudes toward relevant policies became a bit more positive. The results were strongest for four groups:
- When more people got to know someone who was caring for an older person, there was more support for tax breaks for caregivers
- When more people got to know someone who was unemployed, there was more support for unemployment insurance benefits
- When more people got to know NRA members, there was less support for bans on guns
- When more people got to know Muslims, there was more opposition to airport screening
Sometimes there was very little relationship between the increase in the penumbra and the increase in support of relevant policies, but none of the links were negative – so, having more people getting to know members of a particular group never backfired. That doesn’t mean it never could, only that it didn’t for the 14 groups studied and the particular policy positions that were assessed.
Should Happy Single People Let Their Friends, Relatives, and Acquaintances Know That They Are Happy?
In the U.S. and many other nations, married people are advantaged in ways that unmarried people are not. For example, in the U.S., there are more than 1,000 federal laws that benefit and protect only people who are legally married. Workplaces, too, often offer more benefits and accommodations to married people. Examples of singlism (the stereotyping, stigmatizing, and discrimination against single people) can be found in just about every domain, from housing and medical care to politics and religion.
When I last wrote about examples of singlism that are serious enough to be life-threatening, a reader wrote me a scathing note saying that I do not get to complain about unfair treatment of single people because, if I want to be treated fairly, I can just get married. Of course, I don’t think anyone should have to get married in order to be treated fairly.
Would it sway people like that reader to know that lots of people are happy being single and don’t want to marry? I’m not sure. Based on the research showing that people are look more kindly upon single people who yearn to be coupled, maybe more people would be persuaded by a sympathy pitch: these single people really want to be coupled and it is just not happening, and they should not be penalized for that.
Despite the risks of being judged and disbelieved, I would still like more of the happy single people to let the people in their lives know that they are happily single. Each time we speak out instead of hiding how we really feel about our lives, we offer people an opportunity to think about single people in a new and more enlightened way, even if they resist it at first. And when one of us speaks out, it makes it easier for the next person, and the person after that. Somewhere down the road, a reporter will think about the single people she knows and realize that a lot of them are happy just the way they are.
[Notes: (1) The opinions expressed here do not represent the official positions of Unmarried Equality. (2) I’ll post all these blog posts at the UE Facebook page; please join our discussions there. (3) For links to previous columns, click here.]
About Bella DePaulo
