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True Majority asks activists to sign a letter to the governors that calls for marriage equality. The call is framed as marriage equality being bigger than all other issues: “Marriage equality comes down to human rights.” I took issue with that and wrote them the following:

Thank you for your actions regarding marriage equality. As a single by choice, I take issue, though, with your framing marriage equality as a human rights issue: what human rights are we exactly defending by asking for marriage equality? The right to discriminate against other forms of relationships? Marriage is an institution; not a human right. People have human rights simply by being human, not by their relationship status. By expanding who can marry, we are perpetuating the inherent discriminatory policies that are endowed on people because they “tie the knot.” As a single by choice, I find it frustrating that people ignore that many of the 1,100+ benefits have nothing to do with human rights or protecting anybody. They simply privilege those who are in a state-sanctioned relationship, aka marriage. This discriminates against all of us who are in relationships other than marriages.

While I think that everybody who wants to marry should have the right to do so, I do not appreciate that this private commitment comes with a huge package of rights and benefits that are not available outside of marriage. I would love to see True Majority fight against singlism (the discrimination of singles) and marital status discrimination in all forms. We should fight for human rights for all people, regardless of their marital status, relationship style, sexual orientation, race, or gender.

After I hit sent, it occurred to me that I failed to do some research. Maybe marriage is considered a human right. After all matrimania is so ingrained in our cultures… I decided to check the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations in 1948. And, indeed, Article 16 states:

(1) Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution.

(2) Marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses.

(3) The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.

Wow. Marriage is a human right? And the family is a natural group unit of society? Am I the only one who finds both of this disturbing codification of discrimination and cultural assumptions? What is this based on? Marriage is a historical construct, an institution, nothing natural (unlike reproduction or even our need for interpersonal connections, even that might not be completely natural, at least once we’re beyond infancy). I find it sad that it is codified as a human right like this. What about my right as a single person to be respected as a complete human being without having to be married (or coupled)? I guess we have more consciousness raising to do than I thought…

Aside from the presumption that family is the building block of society, there are two interesting angles that we can look at here: The right to marry and the rights married folks get. I think, looking at this way, it is clear that the right to marry is very basic: Everybody who wants to make the commitment that marriage entails, should be allowed to do so. However, this does not mean that these people should automatically receive benefits from the government, although that seems to be implied in the assumption that marriage is a human right. This second part - the rights married people receive - is what I take issue with.

(Please note that this post is a copy of the post on my main blog, which will replace this blog later this year).

Recently, I had the pleasure of meeting my pet dragons. It was a mixed pleasure, of course. Realizing what thoughts perpetuate my internalized singlism was somewhat frustrating (I thought I was over these!) but it was also good to see them clearly. After all, unidentified dragons are difficult to tame. “Dragons” are self-defeating thoughts that come up over and over again as repeating themes, sometimes with variations but usually easily identifiable on close inspection. Calling these thoughts dragons helps create enough distance to analyze them more carefully (although as Timothy Wilson points out that might be an uphill battle).

The dragons I identified are (notice that they are quite interrelated):

• I am not lovable.
• I am worthless without a partner and/or lots of friends.
• I am incomplete as a single person.
• There is a soul mate out there for me. I have to design my life so that I can find him.

These dragons are rather familiar to me and, I suspect, to many others as well. The difference now is that I realize how much they are driven by internalized singlism and our culture of coupledom. Essentially, these dragons are undermining my sense of self-worth and preventing me from fully accepting myself as a single person.

REBT offers some useful approaches for addressing these thoughts. The following dragon taming tools are adapted from Paul Hauck’s book Overcoming Jealousy and Possessiveness, two self-defeating emotions that stem from self-worth issues. Self-worth issues do not have to lead to full-blown neurotic jealousy to create problems, so they warrant taking a closer look. The idea behind REBT is that our emotional pain “comes from our own words, our thoughts, our self-talk” (46). We create the painful statements ourselves; the dragons are home-bread. Hauck continues:

Those painful statements can give you great emotional pain, such as feelings of depression, guilt, inferiority, anger, fear, or jealousy. [...] Thinking logically and rationally can protect you from any of those emotions every time you decide to think sensibly instead of hysterically.

Dragon Taming Tools

These tools can help us think logically and rationally whenever we have created painful statements and the dragons are causing mischief.

Dispute your beliefs that you are not lovable and thus worthless
While it is very nice to be loved, Hauck points out that as adults we can survive without love. It can be our preference to have people in our lives that love us. To avoid feeding the dragons, we need to take care not to turn this into a demand (”I must have love!”). Furthermore, nobody has the right to judge our worth, including ourselves. We are worthy simply by the fact that we have been born.

Learn never to blame, rate, or judge
Blame leads to anger either against ourselves or others. To avoid this destructive feeling - anger - we need to learn not to blame ourselves and not to blame others (50). Hauck gives these details:

By self-blame I mean rejecting faults in yourself and also rejecting yourself totally as a human being. That leads invariably to feelings of (1) guilt, (2) inferiority, and (3) depression.

Other blame occurs when you reject unacceptable behavior in others and then reject them as human beings. That act leads to feelings of (1) anger, (2) resentment, (3) hatred, and (4) often superiority and conceit.

To overcome this blaming-game, we can learn to not judge ourselves or others but rather judge only our actions (60). We might have done something bad (or self-defeating), yet this does not make us a bad person. Also, reminding ourselves of the following can help:

Everyone in the world has a perfect right to be wrong, stupid, inconsiderate, and imperfect. That’s not a nice way to be, but people have a right to be human. (49-50)

We all do things that we later regret. That’s unfortunate but it’s simply human. By stopping to beat up ourselves and others over this, we can move beyond self- and other-rating.

Start your life now and stop waiting for a soul mate
Modern society has created the myth of the soul mate. There is no perfect match out there, so move on and start enjoying your life - with or without a partner (and there’s no soul either: when you die, you’re dead, so enjoy life while you can!). This myth perpetuates the idea that we are incomplete without a partner, not a full adult. It also suggests that we cannot truly be happy unless we find “our other half.” What nonsense! (as Albert Ellis would probably say). Happiness requires work on our part, not a cure-all partner. To expect a magical change in our lives simply from one person is absurd and puts too much of a burden on that person. Kay Trimberger identified six building blocks of a happy life as a single (or for anybody, really). Leading a satisfying life can be a helpful anti-dote to the dragons.

The most important suggestion Hauck has, slightly adapted: We have the right - even the obligation - to accept ourselves despite all our dragons that have set up camp feeding us self-defeating thoughts. It will take some time and lots of thought disputing to tame those dragons and turn them into pets. They will still try to hijack our thinking, so we need to remain vigilant. The payoff is immense, though: self-acceptance is the foundation of a happy life.

(Please note that this post is a copy of the post on my main blog, which will replace this blog later this year).

Although I am excited about the California Supreme Court’s decision to override a ban on same-sex marriage, I continue to be leery about the preferential treatment bestowed upon people simply because they “tie the knot.” According to a compilation of the General Accounting Office, in the U.S. married couples get at least 1,400 rights and benefits that non-married people do not get (an updated version is available as a PDF). While some of these rights clearly intend to protect children (although my own experience with the divorce law make me sometimes doubt that), many of those rights are simply discriminatory. As a single person, my social security benefits are not paid beyond my death. If I were married, my surviving spouse gets those benefits. I could add a spouse to my health insurance but not a very close friend who has lost hers with her job (or never got any health insurance). Although it certainly simplifies things, it does not make sense to me why these rights are not easily available outside of marriage. Easily is the key here because at least some of these rights could probably recreated through complex contracts. So, why not create a simple legal vehicle that would be available to people in any relationship, be it as a couple or siblings or friends? Something like a union contract that two (or more) people could sign that conveys similar rights and benefits no matter who those people are would be much less discriminatory. A marriage could simply be the expression of a commitment between two people - no special rights and benefits are attached to it, except through the union contract that every married couple had to sign. This would uphold the rights and benefits for married people but would end the matrimonial discrimination of other relationships. It is time that we come up with alternatives to marriage rather than perpetuating a discriminating vehicle.

(Please note that this post is a copy of the post on my main blog).

Although I disagree with Robin Norwood’s diagnosis in Women Who Love Too Much, I think some of the behavioral patterns she is describing are real (even if she made up a lot of those case histories). We need to find a way of explaining the patterns that does not blame the victim but rather empowers them. Re-labeling co-dependency as “internalized oppression” might be counter-productive because it is such a broad idea and it might not be supported by evidence. I would like to propose a new hypothesis: internalized singlism and matrimania.

Bella DePaulo points out eloquently in her book Singled Out that we live in a society that stigmatizes singles (singlism) and elevates marriage to the must-have cure-all of all unhappiness (matrimania). Both of these ideas are also internalized. From a young age, especially women are bombarded with the idea that we can only prove our lovability through marriage. The ring on our finger shows the world: Look! I made it! Someone loves me! Girlfriends - we learn - are fine to have but they are expendable, yet, somehow will always be there. Once we found The One, we won’t need them anymore, he will meet our every need, share all our interests, and we’ll live happily ever after. Ideas like this make it difficult to leave a relationship because we would be marked as unlovable since we lost our proof. They make us desperate to find and stay in a relationship.

And, of course, biology plays into this, too. A lot. Reproduction is an important biological driver as a part of evolution. However, the nuclear family is not a biological need. The idea of separate spheres and its mutation to the relegation of the man to the breadwinner role and the woman to the safe haven of the home are not reflecting biological needs. They are social constructs (which are even reflected in the nomenclature for our species: every mammal is of the breast, the nurturing aspect; homo sapien reflects the (male) ability to reason, to be out in the world, distinguishing us from the other animals). The concept of the soul mate in marriage is a rather recent invention. So is the individual pursuit of happiness, which is an idea encouraged since the Enlightenment. The two have been very strongly linked: We now pursue happiness by finding a soul mate. This linkage is not surprising since the idea of a soul mate developed around the time of the Enlightenment. It might even have been a reaction to some people’s attempts to take the ideas of the Enlightenment to their logical consequences and do things like give women the right to vote. The idea of separate spheres sprang up and was quickly absorbed into culture, preventing any ideas of equality to take hold. Marriage changed from an almost purely economic institution to one based on love, which was best expressed if both partners were experts in their sphere. Only after the second world war did the breadwinner truly become the sole provider: it was now economically possible to support a family with one income. The cracks were, of course, starting to show and marriage changed again. Or did it? Marriage remains the institution that is most coveted and least questioned. It remains a rite of passage to adulthood. And we remain stuck with the idea that we are somehow incomplete as one. Even though we have broken down the walls between the separate spheres, two remains better than one. As social animals, we interact, of course. Social relationships are what made us human and they remain extremely important. They do not have to be confined to one person, though. We can move beyond matrimania and view all our relationships as important and worthy our attention.

Reading Stephanie Coontz’ Marriage, A History is a fascinating journey through time. Coontz’ main argument is that the shift from “yoke mates” to “soul mates” that started in the late 1700s contained the kernel for the demise of marriage. Her historical account also calls into question whether marriage itself is still serving a valuable purpose in our modern world.  It seems to me that it’s time to move beyond the idea of marriage. That seems to be the logical conclusion of the ideas of the Enlightenment and the shift toward the pursuit of individual happiness and equality between all people. It would also accept reality: marriage is an outmoded institution. The cultural trances that are keeping marriage alive are getting onto thinner and thinner ice. Back in college, I took a very interesting class on economics and women. One of the marriage “undermining” developments we discussed was women’s increasing labor force participation throughout the 20th century. Especially once we started to close the pay gap at least a little, women had the earnings to be able to stand on our own and leave dissatisfying marriages. And we did: the divorce rates increased.

Since the economic necessity for marriage is largely gone, the cultural trances have become more subtle, directly playing to the pursuit of happiness idea. We are bombarded with the messages that we would be happier in marriage, that our blood pressure would be lower (at least when we sleep), and that we’d be lonely and miserable if we’re single. Reality, as usual, is different than the cultural trances: Happiness and marriage are not linked and neither is blood pressure. More and more singles speak out that they’re perfectly happy with their lives and feel very fulfilled without a marital partner. That reality - there is happiness outside of intimate relationships - has helped me leave several frustrating and unhappy relationships. I am sure there are many others who made similar calls.  I suspect that it has raised our expectations but also lowered our tolerance for crap in relationships. At the same time, though, healthy singles are happy because their lives are grounded in community and connections with others, some more intimate than others (see Kay Trimberger’s analysis for more information). This seems to point to new ways of relating that could inform intimate relationships: away from the insane focus on the man-woman nucleus (or the homosexual equivalent) to the integration of such relationships into a bigger network of friendships and relationships - building a new form of community. Ironically, this might make those intimate relationships more stable because we no longer expect a “soul mate” who will meet our every need. Of course, it would redefine relationships - again - but hopefully in a more rewarding way than deluding ourselves about marriage.