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People Get All Weird If You Tell Them You Chose to Be Single: Why?
Tell people how you feel and they will believe you — unless you are happily single
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…
