The widespread stereotyping and discrimination against people who are single has long gone unrecognized, unnamed, and unchallenged. I call it SINGLISM. I have done a lot of battling of singlism in my own writing, but now I have help from 28 other people who have contributed to my new book, “Singlism: What It Is, Why [...]

Have you heard of “The Council of Dads”? It is a concept, a set of friends, and the title of a new book by Bruce Feiler. The author, at age 43, was diagnosed with a rare and potentially deadly form of cancer. Wracked with worry that his twin daughters, then 3-years old, might grow up [...]

People who are single account for 45% of the population of Americans 18 and older – that’s 104 million women and men who are divorced, widowed, or have always been single. The numbers in the LGBT community are much smaller. Yet our cultural conversations about same sex issues are far more lively (and at times, [...]

The world seems besieged by a tsunami of traumas – earthquakes, flooding, oil spills, mining disasters, terrorist threats, and more. Individuals face their own disturbing life events that don’t make the nightly news – grim diagnoses, an accident resulting in severe disability, the death of a close friend or family member, even the sudden death [...]

The age at which men first marry (among those who do marry) has always been greater than the age at which women first marry. We can see this dating all the way back to 1890, the earliest year for which the Census Bureau provides data. (See the table below.) Perhaps even more interesting is another [...]

Except around April 15, the singles penalty I hear about most often has nothing to do with taxes. Instead, singles tell me about all the many ways they pay more per person than married people do for health insurance, club memberships, car insurance, professional membership fees, and of course, just about everything related to travel. [...]

Coming this Sunday to the New York Times Magazine (already available online here) is an article by Tara Parker-Pope titled, “Is marriage good for your health?” Compared to so much else that has been written on the topic, Parker-Pope advances the argument in a significant way with this statement: “The mere fact of being married, [...]

When I wrote the first draft of Singled Out, one of the sections I was most uncertain about was about taxes. Could it really be true, as I was discovering by running through all the calculations, that a single person (not living as part of a couple) ALWAYS paid more in income taxes on the [...]

Previously, I posed the question, “Are you single at heart?” I think there are lots of ways to tell, and I described some of them, including criteria based on scientific research as well as other indicators I surmised based on my own reading, experiences, and the many stories that other singles tell me. But how, [...]

In his column today, David Brooks asks whether winning an Academy Award is worth it, if it comes with a cheating husband, as it did for Sandra Bullock. I don’t care about that question, but I do want to underscore some Brooksian fallacies. They are not his alone, but he is giving them wings by [...]

I love the Huffington Post. I’ve been blogging there for years. But even at a progressive site such as that one, singlism still gets perpetrated. Take, for example, an essay that was just posted today. The blogger, author and journalist Michael Rowe, excoriates a certain tall, blond Republican woman over the course of more then [...]

To be single at heart, I think, means that you see yourself as single. Your life may or may not include the occasional romantic relationship, and you may or may not live alone or want to live alone, but you don’t aspire to live as part of a couple (married or otherwise) for the long term.