About Those 8 Myths About Being Single

I knew something was up when I logged onto my email yesterday and found a series of messages about an article of mine that appeared on the home page at Yahoo: 8 myths about being single. Some emails were nice notes from readers (thanks, everyone!). Others wanted to know if I knew what I was talking about - and what they meant was, was I single myself? Still others also wanted to know if I knew what I was talking about - and what they meant was, did I know the research (because they had heard that all those myths were actually true)? That was fun - I love introducing new readers to my work. The thing was, though, I didn't remember writing an article for Yahoo about the myths about singles.

I checked out the article online, noticed the unlikely Match.com logo, and then I remembered. Years ago, I got a call from an editor at Happen Magazine (the Match.com magazine) who asked me if I would write about singles for them. I laughed out loud and asked if she realized what my message was, and that I write about every aspect of single life except dating. Happily, she said that she totally welcomed my positive and empowering message about singles.

So I wrote the story and sometime later it appeared online. It was edited, and the revisions were not cleared with me first. In a way, that was a relief. In the academic journals, many papers are massively revised, sometimes multiple times. There were, though, a few things you may have noticed that didn't sound like me.

One appeared in the very first paragraph. I would never describe single people as unattached. Singles often have deep attachments - just not to a spouse. There was also a contrast drawn between favoring solitude and having important people in your life. I think singles (and others, too) can appreciate both solitude and sociability. I know I do. Finally, I don't know why my affiliation got listed as UC Berkeley when I'm actually at UC Santa Barbara. Maybe that was because the Singles Studies website that Rachel Moran and Kay Trimberger and I developed is hosted by UC Berkeley. Or maybe it was just a random error.

Overall, though, I was delighted to have a myth-busting article about single life appear so prominently on the home page of Yahoo. And how fitting that it appeared during Singles Week.

Speaking of which, I obviously did not meet my goal of posting every day this week. There were a few topics I really wanted to get to, but I'll just keep them on my list for some future posts.

Since yesterday is one of the days I missed, I'll mention that the guest writer for the blog crawl was Melissa Malamut, and she was hosted at Kimberly Dawn Neumann's site. (You can find the complete schedule with all of the links over at Single Women Rule.) Today is the last day of the crawl. I have the honor of closing out the week with a guest post over at the blog of the Alternatives to Marriage Project. The title is, "Where's our singles movement?" Hope you have all had a great week.