Curious

A community of people who are curious to find out what others have already figured out // Curious is a new personal growth publication by The Startup (https://medium.com/swlh).

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People Get All Weird If You Tell Them You Chose to Be Single: Why?

Bella DePaulo
Curious
Published in
4 min readDec 21, 2020

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Photo by OSPAN ALI on Unsplash

In 2002, Time magazine published a cover story about women who were choosing to stay single and not have kids. I had not yet written my first book about single people, and I was still trying to understand the psychology of how single people are viewed. I was baffled by this letter to the editor that was written in response to the cover story:

“As long as women bounce around kidding themselves that life is full when alone, they are putting their hedonistic, selfish desires ahead of what’s best for children and society.”

The reader did not know the women in the Time story. He had no personal investment in them. What’s more, the women were not complaining about being single. They chose that! If they are happy with their life choices, then why was this random reader unhappy? So unhappy that he would sign his name to a letter in a magazine that, at the time, had a readership of about 4 million.

When I did write that book, Singled Out, I included an entire chapter about that matter, “To be or not to be single: Why does anyone care?”. Since then, science has marched on. Systematic research has shown that it is true — people…

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Curious
Curious

Published in Curious

A community of people who are curious to find out what others have already figured out // Curious is a new personal growth publication by The Startup (https://medium.com/swlh).

Bella DePaulo
Bella DePaulo

Written by Bella DePaulo

“America’s foremost thinker and writer on the single experience,” according to the Atlantic. SINGLE AT HEART book is a gold medal winner. www.belladepaulo.com