People who are married have access to many important federal benefits and protections that are not available to single people or the important people in their lives, such as a close friend or a special relative. Those advantages include economic ones, health-related ones, advantages relevant to children, and many others. The economic benefits include, among […]

In a just-published article about the experiences of people living alone during the pandemic, two sociologists documented experiences of being marginalized or isolated that are not often recognized by people who study loneliness. Some people are not suffering from loneliness in the way we typically understand it. They have the social relationships that they want. […]

There are many deeply meaningful reasons to love single life. But all single people in the U.S., regardless of how they feel about being single, are at a disadvantage in one important way – financially. The most obvious way single people lose out financially is if they live alone and don’t share any of their […]

“In the near future, American politics, both national and local, may turn on the degree to which people remain single, and also whether they decide to have children.”  That declaration appeared in an article by Joel Kotkin and Samuel J. Abrams, The Rise of the Single Woke (and Young, Democratic) Female, published in RealClear and […]

Getting single people and single life taken seriously should not be a hard sell. In the U.S., nearly half of all adults 18 and older are not married. On the average, Americans spend more years of their adult lives not married than married. This is not just an American or even a Western thing. The […]

Single people often get short shrift in a world obsessed with marriage and coupling, and at Unmarried Equality and elsewhere, I have often pointed out examples of singlism (the stereotyping, stigmatizing, and marginalizing of single people, and the discrimination against them). But just as important as all the ways in which single people are disadvantaged […]

Sometimes it is obvious when people are treating others unfairly. Some examples of discrimination are blatant. Consider this example that Wendy Morris and Stacey Sinclair and I tested in our study of housing discrimination. We told our participants that a landlord was choosing between two potential tenants, and both had steady jobs and were described […]

Tomorrow (September 18) is the first day of Unmarried and Single Americans Week, a time to keep in mind the ways in which single people contribute to society but are rarely recognized or rewarded the way married people are. Consider, for example, some workplace practices. Earlier this year, the boss of a UK company proudly […]

In everyday life, single people are often stereotyped and stigmatized in the conversations they have with other people. The kinds of things other people say to us, and about us, sometimes reveal that they think single life is something people are stuck with, and not something anyone would actually choose. The kinds of questions they […]

Seven years ago, in July of 2015, I started an online Facebook group, the Community of Single People, for people who want to discuss every aspect of living single except dating or trying to unsingle themselves. We talk about all sorts of things — our joys and accomplishments, our challenges and frustrations, our observations and our […]