Chapter One

Singlism: The Twenty-First-Century Problem That Has No Name

I think married people should be treated fairly. They should not be stereotyped, stigmatized, discriminated against, or ignored. They deserve every bit as much respect as single people do.

I can imagine a world in which married people were not treated appropriately, and if that world ever materialized, I would protest. Here are a few examples of what I would find offensive:

• When you tell people you are married, they tilt their heads and say things like “aaaawww” or “don’t worry honey, your turn to divorce will come.”

• When you browse the bookstores, you see shelves bursting with titles such as If I’m So Wonderful, Why Am I Still Married and How to Ditch Your Husband After Age 35 Using What I Learned at Harvard Business School.

• Every time you get married, you feel obligated to give expensive presents to single people.

• When you travel with your spouse, you each have to pay more than when you travel alone.

• At work, the single people just assume that you can cover the holidays and all of the other inconvenient assignments; they figure that as a married person, you don’t have anything better to do.

• Single employees can add another adult to their health care plan; you can’t.

• When your single co-workers die, they can leave their Social Security benefits to the person who is most important to them; you are not allowed to leave yours to anyone – they just go back into the system.

• Candidates for public office boast about how much they value single people. Some even propose spending more than a billion dollars in federal funding to convince people to stay single, or to get divorced if they already made the mistake of marrying.

• Moreover, no one thinks there is anything wrong with any of this.

Married people do not have any of these experiences, of course, but single people do. People who do not have a serious coupled relationship (my definition – for now – of single people) are stereotyped, discriminated against, and treated dismissively. This stigmatizing of people who are single – whether divorced, widowed, or ever-single -- is the 21st century problem that has no name. I’ll call it singlism.