Archives for 2016

Beyond the Nuclear Family: New Policies and Practices Are Needed for the Way We Live Now

We are living in a time of unprecedented possibilities for how to live. Nuclear family households may still be sentimental favorites in popular culture, but in real life, they are in the distinct minority. Fewer than 20 percent of all households in the U.S. are comprised solely of nuclear families. Instead, we have a proliferation […]

How the Washington Post (Almost) Published a Week of Respectful Articles about Unmarried Life

In the week leading up to Valentine’s Day, the “In Theory” blog at the Washington Post published a series on Singlehood in America. The editors initially invited six experts and scholars to contribute. The introductory article listed only those six. If only those people wrote for the series, it would have been one of the […]

Unmarried Status Is a Diversity Issue

Get married, have kids, stay married. That’s the script for how adult lives are supposed to unfold. Never mind that in the U.S., the script maps onto the real lives of fewer and fewer people all the time. Nearly half of all adults 18 and older are legally single, and growing numbers of them never […]