The first time I taught a course on singles ("Singles in Society"), all except one of the students were graduate students. The sole undergrad had a suggestion I loved - there should be an enlightened magazine for singles. Enlightened as in NOT about dating or make-up or becoming unsingle. Enlightened as in living single, fully and unapologetically.
Fast forward a decade, and we now have a magazine for singles, based out of Los Angeles, called Singular. (The picture alongside this post is the cover of the latest issue.) When an editor at Forbes magazine first perused a copy of the magazine, she wrote an article saying, basically, who needs it?
That set me off, and I wrote an impassioned response. Much to my surprise and delight, Forbes immediately agreed to publish it. That was back in December, but for contractual reasons, I could not republish it right away.
Now, happily, I can reproduce it far and wide. You can read it online here at the Singular web site and leave comments there as well as here if you like. (Singular City is the magazine's social networking and content site.)
Or, you can read it below. Then, share your thoughts. Do we need enlightened magazines for singles? If so, what should they look like and what should they include (and not include)? The content is most important but feel free to comment on style as well. For example, back when I had more money in my budget for magazines, I used to subscribe to the Nation. Now there's a magazine that never makes a splash or jumps out at you as you skim endless racks of magazines. It is printed on plain paper, not glossy, and not even very impressive paper. There is a way in which I kind of like that - it says, we are all about the content.
My Response to Forbes' Dismissal of Singular Magazine
(This article by Bella DePaulo was first published on Forbes.com on December 22, 2008.)
Death to Singular magazine! And deservedly so. That's not my opinion; it came from Forbes.com columnist Elisabeth Eaves, who asked, "Does the world really need a magazine for single people?"
As a lifelong single person, and an author and social scientist with expertise in singlehood, I was hoping for a different prediction. Still, I was intrigued by the arguments marshaled by Eaves to back her bet on Singular's premature demise. Here they are:
--Single people are just too broad a category. They are like people with brown hair. How do you market to people with brown hair?
--Unmarried Americans are a diverse group who share no interests, except, of course, mate hunting.
--Single people do not define themselves as single.
--Marital status doesn't stand still. Who's going to identify with that?
--Singlehood is "not a state people aspire to--not, at least, in the same way they desire to be stylish or wealthy." What's more, "there's no reason to aspire to singlehood, because it's easy to get there."
The 93 million Americans who are divorced, widowed or have always been single are an extraordinarily diverse group. Eaves is right about that. We are women and men of all ages, social and economic categories, races, religions, sexual orientations, living arrangements and, yes, hair colors. Officially, we have but one defining characteristic: We are not legally married.
Yet, in staking her claims that singles share only an interest in mate seeking and that singlehood is not something people aspire to, Eaves is already demonstrating that we singles actually do have some experiences in common. That is that we know what other people think of us: that no one would want to be what we are (single), and that what we long for, more than anything else, is to become unsingle.
Eaves' view is an accurate description of the conventional wisdom about singlehood. My colleagues and I have surveyed thousands of people; many of them see singles in much the same way she does. But they--and she--are wrong.
In a Pew survey, unmarried Americans were asked whether they were in a committed relationship and whether they were looking for a partner. Twenty-six percent said they already had a committed relationship. The biggest group, 55%, said they were not in such a relationship and that they were not looking for a partner. The category Eaves assumed to be the most commonplace--not in a relationship but looking for one--amounted to a skimpy 16%. (The other 3% did not answer.)
While the conventional wisdom insists that singles are yearning to escape their supposedly sorry state, we real single people are living our lives fully. We are buying homes and furnishing them (well, as much as anyone can these days), traveling, supporting ourselves and sometimes some children, tending to our friendships and kinships, and pursuing our passions. We're not putting our lives on hold, marking time until we find The One.
And why should we? Although it is true, as Eaves states, that marital status is something that can change, singlehood is not the transitional period it once was. In fact, Americans now spend more years of their adult lives unmarried than married. That means that it is marriage that is transitional--separating one state of singlehood from the next--and only for those who do marry.
We are living in interesting times, historically and sociologically. What it means to live single has changed dramatically over the last several decades, but our perceptions have not caught up.
The place of singles in today's society is similar to the place of women before the women's movement of the 1970s. Back then, most people either did not recognize, or did not question, the degree to which the male point of view was the standard in the workplace, the media, in popular culture and even in science. Studies of heart disease based solely on men, the pervasive use of male pronouns to refer to all people, the separate and unequal want ads for men and women, and all of the other now-familiar examples--well, at the time, that's just the way it was. The initial challenges to those practices rocked the nation. Some felt threatened by the challenges, others liberated and enlightened.
Now, it is singlism that seeps into the nooks and crevices and crannies of the contemporary landscape, unnoticed and unchallenged. Singlism (my term for the stereotyping and stigmatizing of people who are single) and matrimania (the over-the-top hyping of weddings and couples) make up our cultural wallpaper. That's just the way it is.
Millions of single people dine with friends, colleagues or family and pay their own way; still, ads routinely list prices "per couple." Greeting cards convey "our" condolences or birthday wishes. In many workplaces, married workers can add their spouse to their health care plan at a reduced rate; singles cannot add the most important person in their lives to their plans. Most soldiers are single, but in televised clips of returning warriors, it seems that most are rushing toward the open arms of a spouse. Promotional materials from retirement services are adorned with pictures of older couples walking hand in hand, when most women that age are single.
What's more, hardly anyone thinks there is anything wrong with any of this. We're all locked in the conventional marriage and nuclear family box. We've been there so long, with so few missives from beyond, that we don't even realize that we're trapped. We need a magazine for singles because it is time for some unconventional wisdom.
So what might such a magazine (or blog or Web site or any other media) look like?
