Serious Illness? Why You May Need an Independent Board-Certified Patient Advocate. Guest Post by Ailene Gerhardt

by | Mar 26, 2019 | ALL THINGS SINGLE, health

[Bella’s intro: Soon after Joan DelFattore and I published an article, “How single people are shortchanged in the health care system,” at my “Living Single” blog at Psychology Today, I heard from Ailene Gerhardt, who described to me the importance of having a trained advocate on your side if a serious illness sucks you or someone you are caring for into the medical system vortex. I found what she had to say so compelling, I asked if she would share what she has learned with the readers of this blog. I am grateful to her for agreeing. If you have other questions after reading this, the information and links in the “About the Author” section at the end may help. You can also read more about health care and illness in the lives of single people here.]

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Older Single People: Here’s What We Know

by | Apr 23, 2017 | ALL THINGS SINGLE, happiness, health, How We Live Now, Matrimania, Single at different ages, singlism, Uncategorized

According to the prevailing cultural narratives, single people in later life have two big things going against them: They are single and they are old. Now focus on the older single women and you have the trifecta: They are single, they are old, and they are women! If conventional wisdom got its way, they would be doing terribly. But guess what? They are not. There are real challenges, for women and men, to aging in an ageist and singlist society. Considering what they are up against, it is remarkable how well older single people are doing.

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Lifelong Single People: Here’s What We Know

by | Apr 23, 2017 | ALL THINGS SINGLE, demographics, family, Friendship, happiness, health, Matrimania, Money, no kids, Uncategorized

The number of single people has been growing for more than a half-century. Of all Americans who are unmarried, the biggest proportion of them, by far, are people who have never been married. Yet not much research has focused specifically on this group. Maybe that’s in part because the percentage of people who stayed single all their life has, in the past, been fairly small. But that may be changing.

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Part 2: Getting Married Makes You Happier? Again, No

by | Jul 27, 2015 | ALL THINGS SINGLE, happiness, health, Singlism and matrimania, What the research really shows (media myths)

The_Science_of_Marri_Cover_for_Kindle, 2-28-15

[This post was originally published at Psychology Today. I just discovered that it disappeared! I have no idea why, but I thought I’d just republish it at my own site where I have control over what appears and disappears.]

In my previous post, I explained why no study has ever shown definitively that getting married causes people to become happier – and no study ever will. Here, I will critique the research (an unpublished working paper by Grover and Helliwell) that set off the latest round of matrimaniacal claims that we single people would be happier if only we would get married. The claims the authors are making are unapologetically causal: They think their research shows that getting married causes people to become happier. It doesn’t. The very premise of their claim (that married people are happier, and we just need to figure out if marriage is causing married people’s greater happiness) is undermined by some of their own findings – not that you would have read much about those results in any of the many media stories gleefully declaring a win for Team Marriage.

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Check Your Marital Privilege

by | Feb 14, 2015 | ALL THINGS SINGLE, demographics, family, Friendship, happiness, health, Matrimania, media, politics, singles in the military, singles rights and advocacy, singlism, Singlism and matrimania

checklist[This article is co-authored – in alphabetical order – by Lisa Arnold, Rachel Buddeberg, Christina Campbell, and Bella DePaulo. We are cross-posting it on all of our blogs.]

“White privilege” and “male privilege” are familiar concepts in our cultural conversations. There is, however, another vast swath of unearned privileges that have gone largely unrecognized, even though they unfairly advantage about half of the adult population in the United States. We’re talking about marital privileges. People who marry enjoy social, cultural, economic, and political advantages that single people do not, simply because they are married.

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