Marrying a platonic friend for financial and practical benefits can be a deliciously subversive individual act, but for social justice writ large, we need more.
Journalists and Social Scientists Glorify Married People. Will We All Look Back in Shame?
May 23, 2016 by
It is open season on people who are not married. It always has been. Our lives are inferior, we are told, over and over again. What’s more, the reporters and moralizers and others telling us our lives are second rate claim to have the backing of science. Get married, they tell us, and we will […]
Why Is Marriage Still So Glorified When So Many People Are Not Married?
April 21, 2016 by
It is a paradox of contemporary life in the U.S. and in other nations around the world: More people than ever before are not married, and yet, in so many ways, marriage still rules. Marriage retains a special place in the cultural and legal landscape, and married couples are glorified and celebrated and rewarded simply […]
Here’s How to Write in Support of an Expanded Definition of Family
March 25, 2016 by
Do you want the people you care about to count, even if they are not related to you by marriage or blood? You can ask the Department of Labor to expand the definition of family as it applies to paid sick leave. Activists from “A Better Balance” and “Family Values @ Work” have prepared a […]
Beyond the Nuclear Family: New Policies and Practices Are Needed for the Way We Live Now
March 22, 2016 by
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
February 14, 2016 by
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
January 17, 2016 by
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 […]
Unmarried Americans as Home Buyers and Home Creators
December 21, 2015 by
Want to know who buys homes in the U.S. and why? If so, you will need to look way past people who are married, who are now just one of the many categories of people buying a home and making a home. In the most recent of their annual reports of home buyer profiles, the […]
The Right to Be Single
November 21, 2015 by
Now that all couples have a right to marry, can we now have a right to be single?
Nuclear Family Privilege: Naming It and Slaying It
October 12, 2015 by
Our organization is called Unmarried Equality for good reason. Those two words should go together. Only they don’t. If you are unmarried, you are unequal. Unequal under the law, unequal in the workplace, unequal in the marketplace, and unequal in everyday life.
