Blog
Getting Married and Getting More Money
I have spent a lot of time and effort debunking myths about marriage – for example, if you get married, you will be lastingly happier and healthier, live longer, have more and better sex, more interpersonal connections, and raise more successful children. (You can find links to all of the debunking here.) But there is one claim about marriage that I do not contest – if you get married, you probably will end up better off financially.
Getting Married and (Not) Getting Sex
If you get married, will you get more sex and better sex? So far as I know, a methodologically persuasive study has never been done. That would involve following people over time as they stayed single or got married or got unmarried, and seeing how their sexual behavior and sexual satisfaction changed (or didn’t change) with those transitions. All we have are studies that compare married and single people at one point in time. You can never know from those kinds of studies if any differences really are about being married vs. single or whether they are about any of the many other ways that married and single people differ other than in their marital status. With that qualification, here’s what we know.
Getting Married and (Not) Getting Healthy: What Decades of Research Really Shows
The assumption that if you get married, you will get healthier is so much a part of our conventional wisdom that it is rarely challenged. Back when I was just practicing single life and not studying it, I had no idea that the supposed truism was actually a myth. I figured that out fast, though, once I started going to the original research reports and scrutinizing them. I drew from what I had learned from decades of doing research and teaching graduate courses in research methods, but some of the mental errors in the claims about the research are so egregious that you should not need any formal training to realize how ridiculous they are.
How to Fend Against the Insults in Those ‘Why Are You Single’ Lists
There are a lot of “why are you single” lists popping up these days. I have mostly stopped clicking on the links. Maybe some of them are fine. Back when I used to look at them, though, far too often they came with an attitude that was insulting to single people – that all single people are single because there is something wrong with them and they need to be fixed. That’s an example of singlism and like all instances of that prejudice, it is unfair to single people. Only rarely did the authors ever concede that some people are single because that’s exactly what they want. Maybe they are even single-at-heart – not only do they like living single, but that’s how they lead their best, most meaningful, and most authentic lives.
Clicks for Causes, Amazon Associates, and a Tiny Bit of Easy Income
Here is an example of an Amazon Associates link:
http://www.amazon.com/Singlism-What-Why-Matters-Stop/dp/0615486789/?tag=wwwbelladepau-20
The brief version of this post: I’m an Amazon Associate and I make a tiny bit of money every time someone buys something on Amazon after clicking one of my links (such as this one: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0312340826/?tag=wwwbelladepau-20). You don’t even need to buy whatever product the link takes you to – anything on Amazon is fair game. But it doesn’t work for me! I can’t use my own links to get those rewards. But I do buy things from Amazon, and I would be happy to use other people’s links, or links associated with good causes, so that they can get a tiny bit of money each time I buy something. Anyone want to send me a link? I’ll also post links here that are relevant in any ways to enlightened views about single people.
Now here’s the more detailed version.
Print