Living Single

The truth about singles in our society.

Bella DePaulo is author of Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After. She teaches at UC Santa Barbara. See full bio

January 9, 2009, Relationships

No Attachment Issues Among Single People (Part II): How to Make Even Good Findings Sound Bad

Good findings about singles described as bad: Attachment example

Here are two sentences from the article. See if you can pick out the one word that suggests that the authors are fighting their own findings. (This may be too easy for "Living Single" readers but none of the authors or reviewers caught it.)

"as people pass through adolescence and enter early adulthood, many transfer their primary sense of attachment from parents to romantic or marital partners. But not everyone does this (and many who do later find themselves alone after a romantic relationship breakup, a divorce, or the loss of a partner to death)."

The word, of course, is "alone." The authors have shown in their very own study that single people are not alone. They are securely attached to friends, siblings, and others. But in the matrimaniacal world of contemporary relationship research, anyone who does not have a romantic partner is, by definition, alone.

Final Word

The authors expected to find something damning about long-term single people - that they have issues with attachment. Instead, they found no differences at all between the attachment styles of single and coupled people. Still, they never seriously entertained the possibility that their original model was wrong, and that perhaps for many people, living single is a meaningful, productive, healthy experience, filled with secure attachments to the important people in their lives.

It is not just the three authors of the article in question who seemed smitten by singlism and matrimania. Papers in peer-reviewed journals undergo rigorous assessment, typically by the journal editor and two or more additional scholars. The disease model of singlehood made it through all of those layers of scrutiny.