Bella DePaulo (PhD, Harvard) has been single all her life. Don’t expect her to get all apologetic about it. She loves living single – well, except for all of the singlism and matrimania. In these 89 essays, she provides her unique take on friends and family, health and happiness, love and money, marriage and maturity, pets and vets, religion and politics. She also explains why so many of the relevant stories in the media are just plain wrong. Many of these essays originally appeared in Living Single, Dr. DePaulo’s popular blog for Psychology Today. Other writings were first published in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Forbes.com, the Huffington Post, and the New York Times. Bella DePaulo’s previous book was the groundbreaking “SINGLED OUT: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After” (St. Martin’s Press). She has also published extensively on the psychology of lying. Visit her website at www.BellaDePaulo.com.
The book has 18 sections:
The book has been selling steadily in print and as an ebook since it was published in 2009.
There are now fewer households consisting of mom, dad, and the kids than of people living solo. And here's my favorite statistic: Americans now spend more years of their adult lives unmarried than married.
What it means to be single has changed dramatically over the decades, especially for women. In 1956, when the age at which Americans first married was as young as it has ever been, and when nearly everyone married at some point in their lives, there was a big bright line separating married life from single life. There were fewer job opportunities for women than there are now, and especially fewer with decent pay. The Food and Drug Administration had not yet approved the pill as a safe form of birth control. Women who had sex or children outside of marriage were stigmatized, and the children of single mothers were not fully protected under the law. In the mid-20th century, the reproductive science that we now take for granted could only be imagined.
Today, many women are no longer tethered to men for economic life support. They can, if they have the resources and the inclination, have sex without having children, and children without having sex. Marriage is not essential to any of it. Increasingly, contemporary singles are no longer waiting to find The One before buying homes, traveling the world, or pursuing their passions.
Our perceptions of people who are single, though, have not kept up with their rapidly changing place in society. Stereotypes persist. As I discovered in my own studies, and while researching my book, Singled Out, there are important ways in which singles are stigmatized and marginalized. For example, in many workplaces, they receive less compensation than their married co-workers for doing the same job. (This is especially true for single men.) Singles also have fewer legal benefits and protections than married people do.
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French
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Already translated.
Translated by Louise Chaumont
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