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

October 7, 2009, Social Life

It’s Not Just About Couples

Singles point out their unique expenses, and get noticed

Sometimes it really does happen - the point of view represented by millions of single people gets noticed and recognized. The New York Times article on "the high price of being a gay couple" generated an outpouring of opinions on the Times website, and around the web and the rest of the media. I wrote about it here in my last post, called "the high price of being single." The Week magazine covered the story about the Times story, and singled out three responses. Happily, one of them was the high price of being single. You can read about that and the other two they highlighted here.

There's more. The Times reporters picked out a few of the hundreds of comments on their website and responded to them personally. One was this contribution from "Sarah," a single woman. Her comment has been recommended by 33 readers (so far). Here it is, along with the reporter's response:

I'm a single woman and not likely to get married at this point for a variety of reasons. How about looking at the financial and emotional cost of being a single, childless woman in this society? Talk about discrimination and unfair tax burdens! (I have always wondered why people with kids pay LESS taxes when they way use MORE services than I do ... but that's for another comment board).

Ron Lieber
Your Money columnist
You're right. We should look at this. Stay tuned -- though the effort on gay couples took the better part of two months. We're lucky that we work for an employer that sees the value of taking a crack at this and our spending so much time on it.

I, for one, will surely stay tuned for this! Thanks to Sarah and to Ron Lieber for responding to her.