The Emotional Inequality of Single Life
Emotionally, singles are systematically disadvantaged, but they are advantaged too
In my previous post here at Medium, I documented many of the ways in which, in the U.S. and elsewhere, single people are systematically disadvantaged by laws and policies and practices that privilege married (or coupled) people and shortchange single people. Singlism also includes stereotypes about single people, deficit narratives of their lives, and the ways in which coupled people are valued and celebrated in everyday life, while single people are often devalued and marginalized.
In “Affective intensities of single life,” published in the journal Sociology, the Finnish scholars Marjo Kolehmainen, Annukka Lahti, and Anu Kinnunen argue that singlism shapes our emotional lives, and contributes to “affective inequalities and affective privileges.” Systemic biases make it more likely that single people will be disadvantaged emotionally and coupled people will be advantaged, and in some ways, that’s true. And yet, perhaps even more impressively, the reverse happens, too. There are considerable emotional advantages to single life, especially for people such as the single at heart who embrace what single life has to offer rather than focusing on becoming coupled.
