SinglesByChoice.com

You’ve no doubt seen the headlines: Marriage keeps your blood pressure low. Well, at least when you’re happy in the marriage. Yet, even with that after-thought qualifier, the media got it wrong (again). Bella DePaulo took the time to actually read the original published article. Here are some of the things she found out:

• There were NO SIGNIFICANT DIFFERENCES in blood pressure [ when averaged across the 24 hours of the observational period] between the married people and the single people.
• There were NO SIGNIFICANT DIFFERENCES in blood pressure between the married people and the single people during waking hours.
• Married people look better than single people only if you compare reductions in blood pressure when the participants are unconscious [while sleeping].

I wonder what these married people dream about…

The other flaw with the media’s conclusion about this study is, as so often, their usage of a correlational study to explain causation: Even if married people had lower blood pressure than singles, that would not mean that one caused the other. As DePaulo points out, we cannot really scientifically study whether there is a causational effect because that would require an experiment with random assignment of people to the marital and single statuses, which would violate a boat-load of ethical standards. One possible way around this would be to look at longitudinal studies, which follow people for years, or even decades. No one has undertaken such a study about blood pressure yet, though the one study about marriage and happiness clearly disconfirmed the myth that married folks are happier than singles (a draft version of that study is available online).

I am also wondering what the effect of this type of media reporting has on our collective blood pressure. Like DePaulo, blatant singlism like this raises my blood pressure…

The assumption that we grow up only if we follow the culturally prescribed life path and get married in our 20s is pervasive. Bella DePaulo addresses this assumption as Myth #4 in her book “Singled Out.”  Karen Gail Lewis also touches on it when she proposes a new lifestyle model in her book “With or Without a Man.” The current model suggests that adulthood is reached when we get married. What happens if we never marry? Well, we never really become adults. The myth is also perpetuated by the idea that we grow the most when we are with another person. Being single is just so much easier than being in a relationship.

DePaulo eloquently debunks the myth by pointing out, among other things, how the current nuclear family structure has evolved into a sort of care insurance. If we’re married, we feel secure to expect that our partner will care for us if we were to get sick. It is a very unreliable insurance, of course (the divorce rate in couples affected by chronic illness is 75%), but the idea nevertheless undermines the larger community. Family comes first. If any time and money is left over, then, maybe friends can expect some help, and then the neighbors, though they probably come up short. As DePaulo puts it: “we have taken a small set of relationships that deserve to be treasured, and turned them into the only relationships worth valuing at all.” (Singled Out, p. 133). Instead she calls for valuing “our common humanity.”

Singles, on the other hand, if they want to be happy, have to rebuild the community (as Kay Trimberger points out in “The New Single Woman”). They are mature enough to realize that without a community, without many friends,  they might be in trouble if they were to get sick.

So, who is more mature? A married person who assumes that her/his partner is going to take care of them (when many call for a divorce at the sign of a protracted illness) or the single person who surrounds herself/himself with many friends? Maybe it’s my bias but I think community building is more mature than (naive) reliance on one person…

Singlism has been in the news quite a bit lately. Check out these articles:

• Being Single Isn’t What It’s Cracked Up to Be: The AARP chimes in
• Stop Singlism!: An article in Forbes
• The Unrecognized Stereotyping and Discrimination Against Singles: An article by Bella DePaulo and Wendy Morris

And the term made it into at least one online dictionary: The Double-Tongued Dictionary, which records undocumented or under-documented words from the fringes of English, with a focus on slang, jargon, and new words. It’s a start!

If you don’t feel like reading, you can listen to DePaulo here:

• Interview with Patt Morrison (it was on September 14, just search the page for “DePaulo”)
• Video clips about DePaulo and her research at Video Jug (note the box “Our Expert in…)

Please let us know if you run across any other articles by posting them in the comments (if you include more than 2 links, I will have to moderate your post, so it won’t show up right away). Also, please share your ideas for getting singlism into more dictionaries…

Bella DePaulo defines singlism in her groundbreaking book Singled Out as

People who do not have a serious coupled relationship are stereotyped, discriminated against, and treated dismissively. This stigmatizing of people who are single - whether divorced, widowed, or ever single - is the twenty-first century problem that has no name. (P. 2)

Singlism is pervasive: it is everywhere in our culture from attitudes toward single people to the tax code.

The flip-side of singlism is the glorification of marriage (or being coupled). DePaulo calls that matrimania (p. 10). Both are very much intertwined, if you are nothing without a partner, you instantly become someone when you are partnered.

As single people, we have to become aware of what I call internalized singlism: Our inner voices that tell us that there is something wrong with us because we are single. Since everybody around us seems to be coupled, since that seems to be the standard for being a mature adult, we must somehow repel potential partners and we certainly are not fully grown up. These are very deep seated myths that are a direct result of singlism and matrimania.

To counter these myths, reading DePaulo’s book is a good start. It will arm you with plenty of research that says that you’re not childish and that there’s nothing wrong with you. After that, it is time to move on to the positive. There are an increasing number of books available now that talk about how to live a single and happy life. Kay Trimberger presents stories of several single women in her book The New Single Woman. The book goes far beyond story-telling, though. She uses the experiences of these women and her own to distill six supports that lead to a satisfying single life:

1. Fulfilling work,
2. Connections to the next generation,
3. A home (though we don’t have to own a house)
4. Intimate relationships with a network of friends and extended family,
5. A community, and
6. Acceptance of our sexuality whether we have an active sex life or are celibate. (P. 65)

Using Trimberger’s research to craft supports for our single lives goes a long way toward overcoming internalized singlism. Finally, though, we will need to embrace the fact that there are (at least) two valid life paths: the Single Adulthood path and the Married Adulthood path, as Karen Gail Lewis suggests in With or Without a Man as I have already mentioned on our welcome page.

Armed with these three things - research refuting the myths, research showing how to build the supports, and a new life stage model - we can overcome internalized singlism and then fight singlism in the rest of society.