Getting single people and single life taken seriously should not be a hard sell. In the U.S., nearly half of all adults 18 and older are not married. On the average, Americans spend more years of their adult lives not married than married. This is not just an American or even a Western thing. The rise of single people is a global phenomenon. All around the world, the number and proportion of unmarried people has been growing for decades.
And yet, the project of “taking singles seriously,” something I have now been working on for many of my 69 years, has been a hard sell. Only in the past few years have I seen signs of what I consider genuine progress, the kind of progress that is likely to continue into the future.
What It Means to Take Singles Seriously
By “taking singles seriously,” I mean at least three things. First, recognizing the importance of this demographic juggernaut. Seeing them as people whose single lives matter, rather than dismissing them as a bunch of people who are just stopping by singlehood on their way to committed romantic coupling (or recoupling), and only deserving of attention when they get there.
When there is more and more scholarly and media attention to single people, as there is now, that’s a way of taking singles seriously in this first sense. But if the writings perpetuate singles-shaming myths, that’s nothing to celebrate.
That’s why the second sense of “taking singles seriously” is so important. It means treating single people’s lives respectfully. It means resisting all those insulting deficit narratives of single life. You know the ones – they come with the attitude, “aw, you’re single, you poor thing.” It means challenging the myth that what all single people want, more than anything else, is to become coupled. Taking singles seriously means recognizing the ways in which people can flourish when single. And in fact, for some people, such as the Single at Heart, single life is more meaningful, fulfilling, and psychologically rich than coupled life could ever be.
Third, “taking singles seriously” means that the basics of human dignity, such as health care, mental health care, economic security, decent food and water and housing, are available to all. No one should have to marry in order to receive important rights, benefits, and protections.
Scholarly Attention
I have been urging my fellow scholars to take single people seriously since 20007, when Rachel Moran and Kay Trimberger and I published “Make room for singles in teaching and research” in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Mostly, our message was met with a shrug. Until now.
Over the past several years, more and more scholars are turning their attention to people who are single, and not just in the usual way of including them as a comparison group in studies that are really about marriage. For example, in October 2020, Ketaki Chowkhani and Craig Wynne organized an interdisciplinary online global conference, Singles Studies, featuring scholars from Australia, India, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Poland, Romania, and the United States. And in 2023, the Journal of Family Theory & Review is going to publish a special issue on theorizing singlehood. Many important scholarly books relevant to single people have been published in the past few years and more are forthcoming. (Some examples are listed in the next section.) Happily, they are all reader-friendly and can be enjoyed by people beyond academia.
One of the most active disciplines in the study of singlehood is the law. For several years, the Washington University School of Law and their Law Review have been hosting an annual Nonmarrige Roundtable. At the University of Chicago Law School, Mary Anne Case has been running a workshop on the regulation of family, sex, and gender. In November 2022, Dr. Chowkhani and Diksha Sanyal organized a conference on singlehood and the law in India. Other scholars addressing legal issues relevant to single people include Dorothy Brown, Naomi Cahn, Chao-ju Chen, Elizabeth Emens, Nancy Leong, and Qian Liu, among many others.
Scholars of single life have been creating research networks and discussion groups. The Research Network of Singlehood Studies, organized by the Finnish scholars Dr. Marjo Kolehmainen and Dr. Annukka Lahti, includes a blog and an email list and has hosted several events. A new interdisciplinary forum for discussions of all issues relevant to singlehood, Singlehood Studies, was just started a few weeks ago (December 2022) and already includes scholars from countries around the world. (Both groups welcome new members.)
If this trend continues, as I expect it will, I think we will eventually see textbooks, courses, degree programs, and dedicated funding for singlehood studies. Academic organizations will include divisions devoted to singlehood. The American Psychological Association, for example, currently includes 56 divisions; the Society for Couple and Family Psychology is one of them, but there is no comparable society for single people.
Scholarly Books Relevant to Single People
Here are just a few of the books published since 2020 that give me hope that scholars are making progress in the study of single people. I’ll list the most recent first.
- Singular Selves: An Introduction to Singles Studies (forthcoming), edited by Ketaki Chowkhani and Craig Wynne.
- Moving Past Marriage: Why We Should Ditch Marital Privilege, Eschew Relationship-Status Discrimination, and Embrace Non-marital History (forthcoming), by Jaclyn Geller.
- The Love Jones Cohort: Single and Living Alone in the Black Middle Class (2023), by Kris Marsh.
- Single Lives: Modern Women in Literature, Culture, and Film (2022), edited by Katherine Fama and Jorie Lagerway.
- Being Single in India (2022), by Sarah Lamb.
- The Tenacity of the Couple-Norm (2021), by Sasha Roseneil, Isabel Crowhurst, Tone Hellesund, Ana Cristina Santos, and Mariya Stoilova
- At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life (2020), by Fenton Johnson
- (I’ll add my own here, too: Single at Heart, forthcoming.)
Popular books on singlehood are also proliferating. Many, though, fall short of an unapologetic embrace of single life.
Media Attention
Increasingly, single people are garnering attention in the media. Journalists are taking singles seriously in the first sense I described. But not always in the second. Sometimes those articles are marred by misleading claims and an attitude of pity. For example, take a look at a story published recently in the New York Times, “As Gen X and Boomers Age, They Confront Living Alone,” then read Lucas Bradley’s brilliant parody.
Single People Speaking for Themselves
It is great if single people are taken seriously by scholars and the media. In a way, though, it is even more heartening when single people stand up for themselves: when they form their own communities, create their own podcasts and videos, write their own books and blogs and newsletters and opinion pieces, and find ways to help one another. You can find many examples here, in collections curated to focus on positive, affirming takes on single life, instead of the more stereotypical obsessions with dating or trying to unsingle yourself.
Of all of the online communities, the Community of Single People stands out because so many of the members love being single and are not going to stand for being marginalized or pitied. I started the group in 2015, and it has grown by about a thousand members a year, now numbering more than 7,300 people from more than 100 nations.
Progress (or Lack of Progress) in Changing Laws and Policies
True confessions: this article started from a place of pessimism. It was December 13, and I watched wistfully as Vice President Kamala Harris and President Joe Biden celebrated the signing of the Respect for Marriage Act on the South Lawn of the White House. I just couldn’t imagine anything like that happening for single people anytime soon.
In the U.S., advocacy for single people, and significant changes in laws and policies, have lagged behind the progress made by other groups such as the LGBTQIA+ community. Professor Roseneil and her colleagues documented something similar in their study of European nations. Perhaps, though, as single people continue to grow in numbers and visibility, that will start to change. In the new year, I hope to write about signs of progress in other nations around the world.
[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
