Abstract
This special issue has its roots in an article I read some years ago while preparing for a colleagues’ doctoral student’s candidacy exam. The article, published in Psychological Inquiry in 2005 and entitled “Singles in Society and in Science,” was written by Bella DePaulo and Wendy Morris. I had been practicing relationship science for nearly two decades at the time I read this article and was struck by the fact that the arguments I encountered there were arguments I had never encountered before in all my years of thinking about and reading about relationships and how and why they are important in people’s lives. Although the article makes a number of important claims, the key points I took away from it were that (1) the numbers of singles is rising in contemporary Western society and higher now perhaps than it has ever been before, (2) relationship science has privileged the study of relationships of married or otherwise partnered individuals over the relationships of those who are single or unpartnered, and (3) claims that marriage is good for people’s health and well-being have been overblown and misrepresent the true complexity inherent in the actual data or the validity of the research methods employed to support those claims. The latter two points in particular challenged my thinking in serious ways, particularly as I had been steeped in the belief—shared widely, I think, among those who study romantic relationships—that romantic relationships are of special significance in people’s lives and, for most of us, the most important and personally meaningful relationships in which we will ever be involved.
I did not have occasion to think much about this article in the next several years until a year and a half ago when, in my role as Associate Editor for Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, I was assigned a manuscript that compared single individuals to partnered individuals on various outcomes. That manuscript rekindled my memory for the DePaulo and Morris article and their various arguments about singlehood, so I invited Bella DePaulo to serve as one of the reviewers, assuming she would be much too busy to agree to do the review. Much to my surprise, she accepted the invitation almost immediately (a rare enough thing in the line of an Associate Editor’s work) and provided a detailed and trenchant review of the manuscript (not quite as rare, fortunately, but her review still stands out as among the best I have ever received).
At the conclusion of the review process, I e-mailed the decision letter to the reviewers as is normally done and took the time to send a separate thank you message to Bella for providing such a thoughtful review. In that e-mail, I asked her how widely she thought the ideas in the “Singles in Society and in Science” article had permeated the relationships literature. Her response corroborated my own impression that the article’s views have not (yet) had much visible impact on the field of relationship research and that there is much room for discussion of its ideas among relationship scholars (and elsewhere). The idea for this issue was born in the ensuing e-mail exchange.
This special issue and the four invited articles it contains are the fruit of my efforts to bring some of the ideas in the “Singles in Society and Science” article to a wider audience of relationship scholars than either Bella DePaulo or I believe they have reached to this point. It is my hope that these articles will invite reflection, encourage discussion and debate, promote further examination of existing work on the topics they address (and related topics), and stimulate new research. More generally, I hope that the ideas they contain will promote changes in thought and perspective that expand relationship scholars’ world views in ways that more fully recognize that there are many relationships worth exploring in our research, that the relationships of unpartnered individuals deserve our attention alongside the partnered relationships to which so many of us devote our research efforts, and that singlism—stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination toward single individuals—may pose a threat to the integrity of relationship science in much the same way as it poses a threat to equality and fairness in contemporary Western society. In my view, our field will be much enriched by engaging actively with the ideas discussed in the articles published here.
At the heart of DePaulo and Morris’s “Singles in Society and Science” article is a critique of a set of beliefs or assumptions that they label the “Ideology of Marriage and Family” (2005: p. 57). Focusing only on presumptions regarding marriage as they are reflected in this ideology, DePaulo and Morris argue that people in contemporary Western society take it for granted that (a) most people want to get married or otherwise engage in a long-term committed sexual partnership, (b) sexual partnerships are by far the most important and meaningful peer (i.e., non-intergenerational) relationships in people’s lives, and (c) those who lack such relationships are less happy, less important, and less “whole” than those who possess such relationships. The special issue begins with an article entitled “Why People Defend Relationship Ideology” in which social psychologist Martin Day summarizes the findings from a program of research in which he and his colleagues tested both system-level (based on Jost and Banaji’s 1994 system justification theory) and individual-level (i.e., relationship identity) mechanisms that explain the motivations that lie behind people’s defense of the kinds of assumptions inherent in the ideology of marriage and family or, as Day and colleagues frame it, committed relationship ideology. Day ends his article with a consideration of how committed relationship ideology may subtly influence relationship scholars’ research agendas and methods and some suggestions concerning how to reduce that influence in our future work.
The next article, by sociologists Natalia Sarkisian and Naomi Gerstel, addresses an assumption, inherent to the belief that married or partnered individuals are healthier and happier than their unpartnered counterparts, that singles are less socially integrated and therefore prone to experience greater loneliness than married persons. In “Does Singlehood Isolate or Integrate? Examining the Link between Marital Status and Ties to Kin, Friends, and Neighbors,” these authors challenge the viewpoint that marriage promotes more extensive connection with members of our social networks and broader communities. Based on analysis of large scale data sets, they replicate findings from previous research, which show that married individuals in fact maintain fewer social ties and lesser social involvement than single individuals do and show that this pattern of results cannot be explained by structural differences between those who are married and those who are single (e.g., life course characteristics and resources) and holds controlling for race, health, and other variables. They end their article with a discussion of the implications of these findings for people’s daily lives and for social policy.
Roona Simpson, sociologist and gender relations scholar, explores women’s experiences of singleness in the next article, “Singleness and Self-Identity: The Significance of Partnership Status in the Narratives of Never-Married Women.” Here, Simpson investigates singleness as an identity and the extent to which this identity, once viewed as anomalous and socially unacceptable, is now viewed as legitimate. She discusses conclusions drawn from the analysis of life history interviews with a sample of never-married British women, the results of which suggest that single women still encounter stereotypes that deem the pursuit of sexual/romantic partnerships with men to be an expected priority in women’s lives. Nevertheless, despite clear evidence that their lives deviate from this norm, the women in Simpson’s sample appeared able to resist (to varying degrees) the negative identity implications of the stereotypes and discrimination they have faced. This work challenges earlier findings that the single self-identity is necessarily and always experienced as a deficit identity and encourages relationship scholars to remember that the mere fact that a person is single does not necessarily mean that she (or he) feels the lack of a partnered relationship.
Finally, in “The “Problem With Single Women: Choice, Accountability and Social Change,” sociologist Shelley Budgeon considers how the ideology of marriage and family and heteronormative views of femininity constrain women’s choices among alternative identities and ways of enacting relationships. Budgeon is once again concerned with singlehood as a deficit identity but, in contrast to Simpson’s focus on individual single women’s experiences, this article focuses on choice—or the illusion of choice—at a broader societal and cultural level. Budgeon’s analysis reminds us that there are broader social forces at play that influence the extent to which people (most particularly women) have free choice in whether they seek sexual partnerships and in the form those partnerships take and that a complete understanding of women’s choices and efforts to expand the range of choices must take those broader factors into account.
In conclusion, I would like to thank Bella DePaulo for her support and assistance in identifying authors whose work on singlehood or the relational experiences of single persons might be suitable for inclusion in this special issue. The special issue would not exist without her invaluable contributions at several stages and I am indebted to her for her willingness to help a neophyte negotiate among the various topics and lines of investigation that deserved consideration for inclusion. I hope that this small collection of articles will make her proud and I hope it will be successful in fostering a broader awareness of and appreciation for the key arguments in the “Singles in Society and Science” article and for their implications for relationship research.