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In a trend that dates back for more than a decade, still another publication has declared, in a cover story, that single people have arrived. In 2003, in Business Week, the cover story was titled, "Unmarried America." In 2012, the Washington Post Magazine titled their cover story, "The single life." That same year, Boston Magazine used a title I particularly like, "Single by choice." (Do tell me about any others you know about.) Now in 2015, the Christian Science Monitor is jumping in with their cover story, "Singles nation: Why so many Americans are unmarried." Their tag line is, "Singles now outnumber married adults in the US. What's behind that social shift – and why it matters."
You might think that I would delight in all this high profile spotlight on the rise of single people – and I do. But I'd also like to take a closer look at what it means to call the U.S. a singles nation, and whether that's even true.
1. Are there more single adults or more married adults in the U.S.?
The hook for the latest cover story is the statistic showing that as of 2014, 50.2 percent of adults in the U.S. were not married. But that statistic counts everyone who is 16 or older. Much as I would like to declare single Americans the numerical winners, I think it is more reasonable to start counting at age 18, and by that standard, unmarried Americans are not quite half of all American adults.
Still, the more significant point stands: The number of adults in the U.S. who are not married (divorced or widowed or have always been single) is growing, and has been for decades. Whether single people are the majority depends on how you count, but they are a huge chunk of the population by any measure.
Yes, but…what about the arguments denying or minimizing the rise of single people?
America is in fact a nation in which single people are on the rise. But are we a nation at peace with that, and even proud of it? Hardly. You can see the fraught feelings in articles about the trend when reporters note the growing number of single people then immediately try to undercut that message.
Here are two of the popular "yes, but…" responses to the dramatic and undeniable increase in the number of Americans who are single:
#1 Yes, but…many of them are cohabiting. That's true. But let's look at the numbers. The most recent "Facts for Features" report from the Census Bureau, which counted single people starting at age 18, noted that there were 105 million unmarried Americans as of 2013. Of those, 14 million were cohabiting. That still leaves a whopping 91 million Americans who are not married and not part of an unmarried, cohabiting couple.
#2 Yes, but…most will get married eventually. This, too, is true. Most adults will get married eventually. Many will try it over and over again. The CSM story makes this point repeatedly (the point about getting married eventually – not the one about marrying again and again and again).
I think there are two more telling points about the argument that yes, they are single now, but just wait.
(a) The first was made only in passing in the CSM story in the words of Nika Beamon, who said, "you are going to be single for more of your life." That, I think, is the deeper truth. Americans now spend more years of their adult lives unmarried than married. That's been true for more than a decade.
(b) The tone of the claim that most people will eventually marry is, "don't worry, honey, your time will come." (Here, I'm not talking specifically about the CSM story but more generally.) What that misses entirely is that many people choose single life. For some, living single is the way they live their best, most meaningful, and most authentic life. I call those people single at heart.
#3 Yes, but…there is a big marital divide. "White, college-educated, affluent people" get married at higher rates than other people do. And for people in that group, who are better off economically, staying single can be an empowering choice, whereas it is just drudgery for people who are poor.
It is true that there is a socioeconomic divide when it comes to marriage. It is also true that single life is much more difficult when work is scarce and unfulfilling or wages are terrible. But again, discussions of the divide (not specifically the CSM one) too often talk about poor people as, well, those "poor things." The implication seems to be that only affluent people could ever actually want to be single. I bet plenty of poor people would love to be both affluent and single.
2. Who is the more powerful and more privileged group – single people or married people?
Numerically dominant groups often are the most powerful and privileged groups. Some of their power is ensconced in laws that are discriminatory. That's true of married people in the U.S.; more than 1,000 federal laws benefit and protect only those people who are legally married.
Privilege is something more. As women's studies scholar Peggy McIntosh explained, "some people benefit from unearned, and largely unacknowledged, advantages, even when those advantages are not discriminatory." In Truthout, Rachel Buddeberg and I explain the many ways married people are privileged in the marketplace, the workplace, politics, culture, the media, the law, in the social sciences, and, well, just about everywhere else. (For a checklist version, see "Check your marital privilege.")
America is saturated with matrimania, the over-the-top hyping of marriage and weddings and coupling. It is also a place of rampant singlism, the stereotyping, stigmatizing, and discrimination against people who are single. Tamp down the matrimania and the singlism, and then I'd say we are headed towards a true singles nation.
Single people have lots of potential power. In the political realm, for example, single women especially lean strongly Democrat. Yet neither Democrats nor Republicans do much to try to win the single vote; recently, one Presidential candidate even seemed to delight in shaming the single women who were also parents.
Single people have not done all that they should to claim their power. They vote at lower rates than married people do, and they have not mobilized effectively to challenge discriminatory laws. (I just wrote about what we need to do in my third monthly column at Unmarried Equality, "3 Roads to Social Justice – For Lasting Change, We Must Follow Them All.") We need to do a lot better.
3. Are scientific studies described accurately or are they, too, turned into stories about the Superior Married People?
One of my biggest disappointments in all of my years of studying and practicing single life is the way that science is trotted out to make the (bogus) case for the supposed superiority of married people. Reporters do this, but most embarrassingly, so do the social scientists themselves.
When reporter Stephanie Hanes gets close to the end of her lengthy cover story, she quotes me, but then adds, "But other scholars see deeper reasons for society’s continued reverence for matrimony. Marriage, numerous studies have found, increases health, longevity, quality of life, and wealth. Those people who describe themselves as being in “good” marriages are regularly found to be happier than the rest of the population. In the US, married couples, as a group, still provide the most durable family structure for children."
For the zillionth time, no. Getting married does not cause people to be healthier or happier or live longer or end up more connected to other people. (Wealth? Yes, because of discriminatory laws and practices. But if you get divorced…)
I've explained this in great detail many times. I've critiqued countless claims. I put my relevant writings all together in Marriage vs. Single Life: How Science and the Media Got It So Wrong. To make my arguments even more accessible, I pulled out the most powerful of the 41 chapters in that book and published it separately, along with an introduction, in The Science of Marriage: What We Know That Just Isn't So.
Here are some of the ways in which claims about the supposed benefits of getting married go terribly wrong.
#1 Typically, the studies compare the people who are currently married to people who are single. If the married people look better, then the scientists and reporters proclaim, "Look, married people win! If you get married, you will win, too!"
That is just so bogus. The people who are currently married are not all the people who ever did get married. Close to half of all people who get married go on to get divorced. Do you think they got divorced because marriage was making them so happy and so healthy? But never mind, the researchers simply take all of the divorced people out of the marriage group (again, almost half of the people who got married!), and stand by their claim that Marriage Wins.
Basically, they are taking out of the marriage group nearly half of the people who did get married – those who got married and hated it. So they are in effect saying, well, good marriages are good. (Look again at that quote from the article – it actually does say that. I had more to say about that claim here.) So what's the problem? They are comparing people who are happily married to all single people. They don't look at only those people who are happily single, as they do for the married group. It is like saying that new tech start-ups make tons of money, using a study in which only those start-ups that stayed in business are compared to all the others, leaving aside all the ones that were colossal failures.
#2 Even with that cheater technique of including in the married group only those people who stayed married, married people do not always do better in health or happiness or the rest, even though the huge unfair advantage they are given in those studies should nearly assure that they do. And on some measures, such as creating and maintaining connections with parents, siblings, friends, and neighbors, single people routinely fare better than married people do.
#3 Studies with better methodologies are less likely to find evidence that seems to suggest that getting married makes people happier or healthier or better off in any other psychological or emotional way. But no study (not even the best possible study) can ever show that getting married causes people to be happier or healthier or live longer. That's because we cannot randomly assign people to stay single or get married or get divorced or widowed. The people who get married are different people than those who stay single. People who marry choose to do so. Even if a great study were to show that people who get married (all of them, and not just those who stay married) become happier or healthier than they were when they were single, that still would not establish the point that if single people got married, they would be happier and healthier, too. Again, they are different people! If I were forced to get married (even to a wonderful person), I'll tell you this: I would not be happier or healthier. And regardless of the actual length of my life, it would seem a whole lot longer if I had to live it as a married person.
[Notes: (1) So, dear readers, you know how long I've been trying to make the point about what's wrong with the claim that getting married makes you happier and healthier and all the rest. Obviously, I'm not getting through. Any suggestions for how to do it more effectively? (2) The CSM article mentions the supposed coming together of the left and the right in the support of marriage. I critiqued that argument here. (3) CSM also mentions that kids are better off in two-parent families. My next collection of articles will be about family in the lives of singles, including a myth-debunking section on single parents and their children, and a section on family in the lives of singles with no children. (4) Elsewhere, I am taking on the claim that we single people with no kids are doomed to be 'elder orphans,' spending our later years rotting away in an institution where no one will visit us. (5) Many of my e-books are on sale this week.]
