Big demographic changes in the US over the past half-century have changed the face of the nation. More people are living single – and staying single. Fewer people are having children, or they are having fewer children than the generations before them. That means that today’s adults are increasingly likely to have no spouse, no […]

I took my first steps toward studying singlehood, and not just practicing it, in 1992. I wasn’t surprised to find that single people were stereotyped and stigmatized in popular culture. I was dismayed that the same kinds of put-downs appeared even in prestigious nonacademic publications, such as the New Yorker and the New York Times. […]

As a single person who cares very much about the place of single people in society, I look longingly at other groups that have mounted successful social movements. Where is our Singles Pride movement? It turns out that there was such a thing in the US in the 1970s. A person who played a big […]

Unmarried Equality has had various names over the years, such as the American Association for Single People and the Alternatives to Marriage Project. One of the people who has been onboard and an active member across these various transitions is Jacklyn Geller. She has written for our newsletter back when we had such a publication […]

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 […]