Or, how to make lemons out of lemonade.
In my last post, I described the results of a recently published study showing that long-term single people are not any more likely than coupled people to have issues with attachment. They are not more anxious about rejection or more avoidant of intimacy, and they have no fewer people in their lives who serve as safe havens and sources of support in times of duress. (For more about attachment theory, see this recent post by fellow PT blogger, Jay Belsky.)
I also said that the authors seemed to be resisting their own singles-friendly findings throughout their article, and promised to say more about that in this post.
I'm using my analysis of this particular article as an example of a bigger point about what is still happening in academic psychology, and of course, well beyond the gates of academe. Even among very smart and accomplished people (and one of the authors of the article is a leading researcher and theorist in the study of adult attachment), unwitting singlism runs rampant. We as a society simply have little practice thinking about single people as anything but flawed. I don't think that these researchers (or the many others who talk about singles in similar ways) mean to exclude positive perspectives on singles - my guess is that those ways of thinking just don't occur to them.
Think about the examples in this post as practice in decoding the puzzles of singlism. I hope that what you will get out of reading it is not just the aha! experience of seeing a solution but also a broadened way of thinking that carries over to new examples you notice in your own lives.
I'm offering my debunking of this article as an emotional and intellectual inoculation. Maybe the next time you are faced with singlism, you can recognize it for what it is - not a true statement of what's "wrong" with you as a single person, but a reflection of what the practitioners of singlism have not yet figured out.
How the Authors Fought Their Own Findings, as Rendered in a Series of Tongue-in-Cheek Paraphrases
My Playful Paraphrase #1.
Let's Start by Stipulating That Single People Can't Possibly Do Better Than Coupled People
When, in the beginning of their article, the authors spell out their expectations for how their results might turn out, they come up with three possible hypotheses: (1) single people are more avoidant in their attachment styles than coupled people are; (2) single people are more anxious in their attachments than coupled people are, maybe because "they have been rejected by relationship partners who would not accept their anxiety, clinginess, and intrusiveness;" and (3) single and coupled people are similar in their attachment experiences.
Recognize that it is a step forward for the authors to concede that maybe the singles will not look worse than the coupled people. But also notice what is missing. There is no acknowledgment whatsoever that single people could have more secure attachment styles than coupled people.
The results showed that attachment was the same for the singles and the couples; I'm not arguing with that. But when scientists generate hypotheses, they should be open to many possibilities. Maybe, for instance, singles would be more secure because they don't place all of their relationship eggs into the one soul-mate basket. Maybe their attachments are to friends, and there are fewer anxiety-creating jealousies in friendships. I'm not saying that's so - I'm saying that scientists are supposed to have open minds and at least consider the possibilities.
Also notice the implication that only single people, and not anyone currently coupled, could have had the experience of having been "rejected by relationship partners who would not accept their anxiety, clinginess, and intrusiveness." Because, you know, only single people are ever clingy.
My Playful Paraphrase #2.
Let's Treat Singlehood as a Disease
The authors' main question was whether single and coupled people differed in their attachment styles. But that was just part of their framework. They had a whole childhood-to-singlehood model worked out. First, they thought the single people would describe more screwed-up childhood relationships with their parents. Single people's messed-up childhoods would then result in insecure attachments (or maybe no adult attachment figures at all). Those insecure or missing attachments would then result in a life of long-term singlehood.
This strikes me as a disease model of singlehood. The authors are trying to explain singlehood in terms of what got screwed up in single people's lives. Of course, that falls apart when the key link just isn't there - singles do not have attachment issues.
My Playful Paraphrase #3.
Here Are Some Other Things Wrong with Single People. Let's Take Them Seriously Even Though They Do Not Explain What They Were Supposed to - and, Oh, Let's Ignore Other Studies with Different Findings
Because the authors expected single people to have screwed-up childhoods, they asked their participants about their childhoods. They also looked at other bad things that might be ascribed to single people, such as loneliness, depression, general anxiety (different from attachment anxiety), and sexual dissatisfaction. In the abstract (summary) of their article, they claim to have found that, sure enough, all of these things are more of a problem for single people than for coupled people.
I have two responses to this. (A) Really? Are you sure about that? And (B), Okay, so suppose you are right that singles are screwed up in all these ways. Then how come they are just fine when it comes to attachment?
(A) All those bad things about single people: Are they really true?
Let's start with the "troubled childhood" hypothesis. The authors included 9 measures of the participants' retrospective reports of their relationships with their mothers and fathers. (Actually, there were 11, but they only report the results of 9 of them.) On 7 of the 9 measures, the single and coupled participants score about the same. On the other two, the single people report more negative experiences.
I could say about this finding - as well as the main finding of no differences between singles and couples in attachment issues - that the sample was unrepresentative (the singles were recruited by newspaper ads and the couples were recommended by the singles) and so we need to be cautious. That's true, and maybe future studies will show that singles have less troubled childhoods than coupled people do (or even more troubled ones) or that singles really do have attachment issues.
I'm giving the authors a pass on that problem because (so far as I know) this is the first study of childhood experiences of single and coupled people, so even a flawed study adds something important to our knowledge base. Plus, it is quite a challenge to try to get a large representative sample of single and coupled people, or to study people over time as they become coupled. (The report of another study showing no differences in attachment between single and married people, mentioned in my previous post, adds a bit more credence to the attachment results of this study, but we still need to learn more.)
With regard to loneliness or depression or sexual satisfaction, though, the state of the literature is entirely different. For example, the authors noted that the singles in their convenience sample reported greater depression than the coupled people, but they do not mention these results from a longitudinal study out of Stanford: "Depression during adolescence was found to predict higher rates of marriage among younger women and subsequent marital dissatisfaction."
The authors reported that the singles in their convenience sample reporter less sexual satisfaction than the coupled people. But they did not mention the results of a nationally representative sample, in which the findings were not at all as straightforward as "married = sexually satisfied; single = sexually dissatisfied." (See Chapter 2 of Singled Out for an account of what the findings really did show.)
