Single and Happy
It’s the norm, not the exception
I’m fifty-four years old and I have always been single. I love my single life. But for a long time I rarely said that out loud. I thought I was the only happy single person.
I didn’t love everything about my single life. I didn’t like that “poor thing” look I’d get when others first learned that I was single. I didn’t like their assumption that I must be miserable and lonely and pining for a partner.
There were other things I didn’t like that I thought I could pin on my single status, but I wasn’t really sure. For example, sometimes at work colleagues with partners would assume that I could cover the tasks that no one else wanted. Maybe they presumed that since I was single, I didn’t have a life and so had nothing better to do with my time. Socially, I was invited to lunch with my coupled colleagues during the week but not to their dinner and movie outings over the weekends.
Tentatively at first, I began asking other single people if they thought they were viewed and treated differently than coupled people just because they were single. The responses were overwhelming. It was time to proceed beyond anecdotes.
Years later after I had read hundreds of scientific studies about marital status, happiness, and discrimination, and after I conducted my own program of research, I realized that much of the conventional wisdom about people who are single was either grossly exaggerated or just plain wrong. The place of singles in society and the significance of getting married have changed dramatically over the past decades. But our views of single and married people have not yet caught up. I wrote about this in my book Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After. The subtitle captures what I learned about singles. Let me explain.
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