Sorry to have been away from this blog for a while. I finally found someone who can deal with the various glitches here and make the whole site (not just the blog) work more efficiently. That’s what’s been happening in my absence. I hope you enjoy the new experience.
“All Things Single” readers, I’m blogging to you first. My new book, Singlism: What It Is, Why It Matterse, and How to Stop It – written together with 28 other contributors – is now available. You can get it here at Amazon, though as I write this, Amazon has not yet added the description of the book. (They build book pages one or two sections at a time.) You can also get the paperback here, at the book’s own page, where the description does show up.
Happy New Year, everyone. Sorry to have been out of touch but one of the things I love to do over the holidays is to leave my computer off for a while. At first, I feel like one of my limbs is missing, then I get used to it and kind of like it.
I also like to read fiction just for fun. I expected one of the books I read to have almost nothing to do with single life, but in it there was a great passage I want to share. It is from Ann Tyler’s Digging to America and the conversation is between two women living in the U.S. — Maryam, an Irnaian, and Kari, a woman from Turkey:
Having just finished a draft of a chapter on singles-friendly workplaces, I’m back to thinking about family in the lives of singles who have no children. Family, in the contemporary American imagination, is linked to a particular kind of household – a nuclear family household, symbolized by the private home with a white picket fence.
[This post is co-authored by Bella DePaulo and Rachel Buddeberg.]
Same-sex marriage is advocated as a basic human right. We applaud any expansion of human rights. Yet, as we’ve watched the debate over this issue unfold over the years, we have had some misgivings about the current approach: It seems too piecemeal. First some couples get admissions tickets to the legal benefits and protections of marriage, then the gates are opened to other kinds of couples. But why should a person have to be part of any kind of couple in order to qualify? One of us (Bella DePaulo) found some relevant arguments articulated by others and posted excerpts from them, and the other (Rachel Buddeberg) added many more. We decided to pool our efforts and continue searching.
Over at my Living Single blog at Psychology Today, I asked this question: The rise of the couple and demise of all the rest: How did this happen? In the comments section, readers engaged in a wonderfully thoughtful and substantive discussion. Several people described or asked about specific references (thanks!), so I thought I would share some highlights from my favorite one.
