After reading in the abstract that the singles were lonelier than the coupled people, I was surprised to find in the results section that on the standardized measure of loneliness, the UCLA Loneliness Scale, there was actually no significant difference between the singles and the couples. What's that about? In the face-to-face interviews, single people said the word "lonely" more often than coupled people did. I think that's why the authors declared them lonelier, even though the standardized instrument demurred.
I wonder whether the authors are familiar with studies showing extraordinarily low levels of loneliness among lifelong single women, at a time when they are expected to be most lonely - in later life (also described in Singled Out). They don't mention those studies.
(B) Suppose singles really are screwed up in all those ways. Then why are they doing just fine when it comes to attachment?
The main point of the study was to examine differences in attachment between single and coupled people. There were none. The other variables were supposed to help explain the process.
The authors did find, for example, that people who were more depressed (whether single or coupled) were more anxious about attachments. They also found that in their convenience sample, the singles were more depressed than the coupled people. So doesn't that raise another question: So why didn't the single people have more attachment issues than the coupled people?
Here's one possibility: Maybe in their quest to document a sequence of sad and bad life experiences resulting in a long-term single status, the authors neglected to consider or measure what might be good and meaningful and rewarding in the lives of people who are single. What are their passions? What do they care about? If you only look for bad things, that's all you are going to find.
Here's another possibility: The authors seemed to assume that the couples would do better on attachment because they were coupled and the singles were not. But maybe this "sugar and spice and everything nice" view of couples and their attachment styles was overly optimistic. Why not hypothesize that some coupled people cling to their partners because they are insecure, and that some single people are secure enough not to cave to the pressure to couple when they are perfectly happy with their single lives? I'm just asking.
I need to add a clarification here. I'm not saying that there are no single people who had screwed up childhoods and who therefore became insecure about attachments and therefore stayed single. There are about 93 million single people in the United States alone. Whatever your stereotypes about single people, there are going to be some out of the 93 million who fit them. What I am saying is that just because you know a screwed up single person, or just because you are a scholar who can come up with a reason to predict that singles might be screwed up, does not mean that, as a general rule, single people really are screwed up.
My Playful Paraphrase #4.
Sure, Our Study Says Nothing about Causality, But That's Just an Aside
When studies show that currently married people are less lonely or depressed or happier than currently single people, readers and journalists (and sometimes the researchers themselves) sometimes jump to the conclusion that the married people look better because they are married, and that if the single people would marry, then they would live happily ever after, too. As I've explained in previous posts (and in Chapter 2 of Singled Out), that's totally bogus. People who got married, hated it, and then divorced, are not included in the currently married group. You can't say that getting married makes people less lonely or depressed (or anything else) if you don't count all the people who got married and did not get any less lonely or depressed. That's just cheating.
The attachment hypothesis in the study I've been describing is different. There, attachment (and childhood experiences) are used to explain how people end up single. The ideal study, methodologically, is one that cannot be conducted: Randomly assign newborns to good or bad childhood experiences, then see if that predicts who ends up single or coupled. Short of that, longitudinal research (following lives over time) is the next best thing.
The authors acknowledge the causality issue in the last point of the last section of their paper, almost as an aside. But it is not an aside. It is critical. (I would say this even if all of the results had favored the single people; science first.)
My Playful Paraphrase #5.
How's This Suggestion for Future Research: Find Something Bad about Single People
Journal articles in psychology almost always include suggestions for further research. Think about this paragraph from the authors:
"Future studies should more directly examine the determinants of long-term singlehood because adult attachment measures did not indicate that a particular form of insecurity is largely responsible (although this may be due to the reluctance of extremely avoidant people to get involved in our study, which required self-selection rather than random sampling among all adults). The hints in the data that single people experienced more troubled childhood relationships with parents compared to coupled people suggest that some aspect of relationships with parents might be partially responsible for long-term singlehood in later life." They then go on to add that insights from future research "should prove useful for clinical work with single adults and for those adults' own self-understanding."
The authors wanted to know what was responsible for long-term singlehood. They guessed it was insecurity. It wasn't.
Now what? Now they try to salvage their insecurity hypothesis by suggesting that maybe the really screwed up single people did not sign up for their study. If they had, then single people would in fact have had insecure attachments, just like they expected.
It is fine for the authors to offer such a speculation, except for one thing: They do not apply the same standards to the coupled people. Apparently, it never occurred to them that maybe the really screwed up coupled people did not sign up for their study. This is not an even-handed inquiry. It is a "let's see if we can find something wrong with single people" study. (And still, singles' attachment looks just fine.)
Next, the authors move on to the "troubled childhood" hypothesis. See the previous sections for my comments on that.
My Playful Paraphrase #6.
Note to Single People - Get Help!
About those insights needed for "clinical work with single adults": I don't think anyone should be reluctant to get into therapy. Still, in a study in which single and coupled people were statistically indistinguishable in their attachments, why are the authors talking only about help for single people and not couples?
My Playful Paraphrase #7.
Bella's Book on Singles is Just a Bunch of Smiley-Faced Opinions
I admit my bias about this point. (I couldn't hide it if I wanted to.) I don't like the way the authors refer to my book, Singled Out. When they find something supposedly negative about single people, they say that their finding is "contrary to the tone" of my book. They refer to my "suggestions," but nowhere do they indicate that my book is based on data. I realize that many of the readers of this "Living Single" blog have read Singled Out, so you know what I'm saying. For others: Especially in chapter 2 (but also elsewhere), I describe studies of the implications of marital status, and explain in some detail what can and cannot be concluded from them. (The authors also belittle the importance of the prejudice and discrimination faced by single people - a topic I've addressed in other posts here.)
My Playful Paraphrase #8.
We Found that Singles Have Attachments; Now Let's Pretend They Don't
