Since Single at Heart: The Power, Freedom, and Heart-Filling Joy of Single Life was published on December 5, I’ve been asked hundreds of questions by readers, reporters, scholars, podcasters, and TV hosts. Most relevant to the concerns of people who care about fairness to single people was the question posed by sociologist Kris Marsh, author of The Love Jones Cohort: Single and Living Alone in the Black Middle Class, who was one of my conversation partners at a reading hosted by the Washington DC bookstore, Busboys & Poets. Professor Marsh asked what I would change if I could change just one thing about how singles are treated. Was there a particularly unfair policy, for example?
Because we had been talking about how singles are mistreated by the medical establishment, I turned the question over to my other conversation partner, Professor Joan DelFattore, who is the world’s expert on the topic. She said that she would expand the Family and Medical Leave Act. As it stands, employees in eligible workplaces can take leave to care for a parent, child, or spouse. However, single people, who do not have a spouse, cannot take time off to care for someone important to them such as a close friend or sibling, nor can people such as close friends or siblings take time off to care for them. (Take a look at this video from the event to hear Professor DelFattore’s other ideas.)
If I were to answer that question now, I would say that marital status should never be used to grant benefits and protections to married people while denying them to people who are not married. In a way, that’s cheating, because in the US, there are hundreds of laws would have to change instead of just one – that’s how extensively married people are advantaged over single people, in ways written right into federal laws.
In organizations such as Unmarried Equality, and online groups such as Fairness to Single People and the Community of Single People, the ways in which single people are stereotyped, stigmatized, marginalized, and targeted with discrimination (what I call singlism) are well-known. It has come as somewhat of a surprise, as I talk about Single at Heart with people outside of those communities, to discover how many have no idea of the big, important ways that single people are disadvantaged just because they are not legally married. (I discuss those in the last chapter of Single at Heart, about singlism and how to resist it.)
For example, the unfairness of Social Security, well-known to just about everyone in Unmarried Equality, came as a surprise to other readers of the book. They did not know that an unmarried employee can work side-by-side with a married employee, doing the same work (or better work!) for the same number of years, and yet, what happens with Social Security is very different. When the married employee dies, their benefits go to their spouse, and under certain conditions, to a whole array of ex-spouses. The unmarried employees’ benefits go back into the system. They can’t give them to anyone, and no one can give their benefits to them.
Decades ago, when I first started studying single people and their place in society, I would have given a different answer to Professor Marsh’s question. My introduction to singlism wasn’t by way of laws or policies – I was oblivious to them, too, at first. What I was noticing were the many ways single people were stereotyped, stigmatized, marginalized, pitied, or treated unfairly in everyday life, and that’s what I would have wanted to change. For example, in the workplace, single people are sometimes expected to cover holidays or get last dibs on vacation times, based on the degrading stereotype that, because they don’t have a spouse, they don’t have anyone and they don’t have a life. In their social lives, they are sometimes excluded by their friends who become romantically coupled or married, who then socialize primarily with other couples. Or the single people get demoted from dinner to lunch, or from grown-up movies at night to children’s birthday parties in the afternoon.
I still think that the singlism of everyday life is deeply significant. Even examples that would qualify as “merely” microaggressions can add up and inflict needless pain. My big-picture goal is to challenge all of the ways in which single people are treated unfairly, from the personal to the institutional and structural.
Singlism is also relevant to another question I was asked at the DC event, this time by Professor DelFattore. She invited me to talk about what’s wrong with claims that getting married will make you happier, healthier, and better off in all sorts of other ways. I described the methodological issues I’ve described so many times before – I like to call them “cheater techniques.”
I failed to mention another important point: Considering all the ways that married people are benefitted and protected and single people are not, people who marry should do a lot better, and yet typically they don’t. It is especially impressive when single people flourish because when they do, they are doing so despite all the ways they are disadvantaged. In my 2023 article in the Journal of Family Theory and Review, “Single and Flourishing,” I put it this way:
Theories of singlehood and interpretations of research findings should routinely acknowledge the systems of inequality that often privilege coupled people and disadvantage single people. What it takes to flourish is different for single people than for coupled people. Single people who live fulfilling and meaningful lives have often had to navigate a life path littered with impediments; on their way to the same levels of fulfillment and meaningfulness, coupled people have more often been celebrated, advantaged, and protected.
[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
