[Bella’s intro: I am grateful to everyone who advocates for unmarried equality. Craig Wynne, who discussed his book, How to Be a Happy Bachelor, here, is one of those people. Better still, he teaches his students to recognize policies and practices that are unfair to single people and to do something about them. In this guest essay, he shares a particularly inspiring and insightful letter written by one of his students. Thank you, Craig, and thank you, Yohannes Tsigab!]
A College Writing Course on Singlism
By Craig Wynne
Over the past few years, I’ve integrated the theme of Singles Studies into my composition courses. Students have read a variety of materials from authors like Bella DePaulo, Elyakim Kislev, and Kinneret Lahad and written a variety of assignments in which they reflect on singlehood as pertains to their lives and society as a whole.
This semester, I taught a course called Foundational Writing in the Natural and Social Sciences at the University of the District of Columbia (UDC), and since Singles Studies is an interdisciplinary field that integrates heavily some of the social sciences, I figured DePaulo’s Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After, would be a natural fit for student reading.
Students’ eyes were opened with respect to how singlehood is perceived throughout the world. For the most part, they agreed that real estate agents providing housing to couples over singles is a form of discrimination. Some examples below:
- Danielle found it “insulting” that social security benefits can only be left to one’s spouse or immediate family members but not a sibling or friend, something I’ve been arguing for years.
- Yoni stated, “A lot of these books and ideas are written to promote marriage in the us because marriage is a business from their point of view.”
- Jessica gave a nice utopian scenario: “If the government did not give married people more benefits than single people then there wouldn’t be mythology or people debating on why you should or shouldn’t get married or if married people better than single people.”
For the major project, students needed to research an organization, write a letter to that organization, and advocate that a singlist policy be made more inclusive toward singles. While a letter may not seem all that challenging to write as opposed to a research paper, a lot went into the letter. I was quite happy to see a variety of ideas, such as reconsideration of college scholarship that are specifically geared toward married students (you have to be married to qualify!) and more equitable insurance premiums for singles, but one really stuck out to me. This letter was written by Yohannes Tsigab, a first-year psychology major at UDC:
Dear St. Francis Memorial Hospital,
First and foremost, I appreciate all the healthcare workers and the care for the patients at your institute. However, there needs to be a policy change regarding visitation hours that excludes close friends. Your restricted hours only let legal spouses and/or family visit patients, and that is not a fair system.
Some patients may be single or not have a close relationship with family; therefore they would rather have close friends visiting them. Some people prefer that their friends be close by instead of their family members due to personal reasons; by restricting these things, you are not accommodating for the best interest of the patients. Patients should be able to sign off on who they want to visit during restricted hours regardless of family/marriage status. The presence of close friends is essential for patient satisfaction and recovery. For instance, when I was in 6th grade, I had an eye accident and had to stay in the hospital for a few days after my surgery. It was a very tough time for me, and one day randomly, a close friend of mine visited me along with his mother. That made me very happy and made my recovery easier with their company. I was more receptive to my doctor and nurses because I was feeling at peace. I felt at ease since I had good people beside me through that hard time.
According to a study done by the NIH, patients showed much better recovery with their friends and family by their side(Rosland 2011 et al). They found that out of 439 patients, 78% of them said they were more motivated to follow the doctor’s advice with the company of their family/friends. 77% also said that it was helpful explaining their health or care to their friends/families. What we can take from this is that being close with friends/family during times of crisis offers immense mental stability in patients. Some patients view their friends as family, thus making them just as important in the context of helping patients.
Now you might say, “why can’t these close friends show up before restricted hours?” and to that, I say people have things they need to take care of in their lives, and sometimes that might mean having to visit during restricted hours. If the patient permits it, those selected people should be able to visit as long as it does not interfere with the patient’s recovery.
In addition to this, some patients have very limited time in this world, so these policies should be changed. A person unable to visit and say goodbye to his father due to COVID-19 restrictions, then later found out that his father passed away five days later (Hafner 2020). This shows that unless very much needed, restrictions shouldn’t be put on close friends/family to visit their sick loved ones, because it can cause unimaginable pain on their last days. Patients with only friends they consider family could also be victims of this, and it is just as painful for those people to go through such hardship.
I hope you consider all things and change your restricted hours visitors to include close friends and not only just family/legal spouses.
Sincerely,
Yohannes Tsigab
As Kislev found in his research for Happy Singlehood, singles tend to have larger networks of people than married folks because they devote their energy to developing those networks as opposed to one partner. For us, our friends are our family, so why can’t hospitals open up their policies to include friends? Particularly if the patient wants them there?
I learned a great deal about my students’ perceptions of singlehood throughout the semester. Most of them are in the traditional age range of college students (eighteen through twenty-two), which is refreshing, because they reflect the growing trend of young people who are embracing lifestyles that do not follow the traditional “escalator” model. If such alternatives can be integrated into students’ formal education, I’m on board to help!
About the Authors
Craig Wynne is a professor of English at the University of the District of Columbia. He has published several articles and essays in academic publications such as Journal of Creativity in Mental Health, Teaching English in the Two-Year College, and Revistas Feminismo. His work has also appeared in popular venues like Psychology Today and Writer’s Digest. He is also the author of the book, How to be a Happy Bachelor. You can see more of his work at thehappybachelor.org. He lives in Washington, DC with his cat, Chester.
Yohannes Tsigab is originally from Addis Ababa, Ethopia and emigrated to the United States at the age of 13. He resides in Washington, D.C. He is majoring in Psychological Sciences, and he enjoys producing music, working out, and photography in his leisure time. He is also a McKinley Technology High School 2020 graduate.
About Bella DePaulo
