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The complaint about being a "second-class citizen" is arguably overused. But when it comes to being single, it is actually quite accurate. Single people in the U.S. are second-class citizens, including in more than 1,000 ways in federal laws. And that's just the most obvious, institutionalized example of the ways in which adults have no right to be single.
But they should.
They should have a right to be single that is equivalent to the right to be married.
I first wrote about this issue for Unmarried Equality, the group that advocates for justice for unmarried Americans. Thousands of people have read the article, so I thought I'd share it here.
Now that all couples have a right to marry, can we now have a right to be single?
But don't we have that already? Surely, no one is forcing single people to get married. But the right to be single is not equivalent to the right to be married. Single life does not come with the same benefits and protections as marriage, and it does not possess the same dignity.
Remember that flowery language in the landmark Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage (Obergefell v. Hodges)—the passages that glorified married people and demeaned the unmarried? The most egregious example was in Justice Anthony Kennedy's closing:
"No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than they once were…Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness…They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law."
The legal scholar Nan Hunter referred to that attitude when she argued that:
"A right to marry that is so central to personhood must entail a commensurate right not to marry."
Continuing, she added:
"Every important liberty is a Janus-like construct; absent extraordinary and urgent conditions, there are always two equal sides. One has the liberty to speak or not to speak. One has the right to bear or beget a child, or not. Americans can travel at will, but cannot be forcibly relocated. So too, not-marriage as a negative liberty right must be fundamental."
To live single, though, is to forfeit all of the rights and protections that are afforded to married people, including more than 1,000 of them just at the federal level.
Benefits and Protections: We Shouldn't Have to Marry to Get Them
When I discuss the many ways in which unmarried people are disadvantaged, sometimes in lawful institutionalization, some of the reactions I get are decidedly unsympathetic. "So what?" my detractors ask. Being single is not like being African-American or female or gay. If I want all the benefits of marriage, I can just get married.
That's not good enough.
A right to be single would mean that I did not have to marry in order to enjoy equal justice under the law. As Vivian Gornick pointed out, LGBT activism was not always so preoccupied with the right to marry:
"It was the hope of many of us—gays and straights alike—in the giddy-making '70s and '80s, that gays would fight to have extended to homosexual men and women the rights and benefits that all other citizens were receiving through marriage—without having to marry" [emphasis mine].
Beyond Married vs. Unmarried: What about the Right to Be Different?
In the U.S. and many other nations, single vs. married hardly encompasses the vast array of ways people live now. Unmarried adults may be solo singles or they may cohabit. Either way, they may be living on their own or with friends or family. Or they may be living in places of their own in intentional communities, such as co-housing communities. Married couples, too, may be living on their own (with or without children) or with friends or extended family or in self-conscious communities. Some married couples live apart from each other because they want to, and not just because far-flung jobs keep them separated. These and other configurations are forcing expansions and redefinitions of fundamental concepts such as home and family (as I explain in my book, How We Live Now: Redefining Home and Family in the 21st Century).
Hunter pointed out that South Africa is way ahead of the U.S. in recognizing and respecting the many ways we live now:
"The Constitutional Court of South Africa joined the right of same-sex couples to marry with a 'right to be different,' noting 'South Africa has a multitude of family formations that are evolving rapidly as our society develops, so that it is inappropriate to entrench any particular form as the only socially and legally acceptable one.'"
We have no comparable "right to be different" in the U.S.
Beyond the Legalities: The Right to Be Single in Everyday Life
The word "socially" in the quote about South Africa is significant. It expands rights way beyond legal ones and suggests that different ways of living should be equally acceptable in our everyday lives. The pervasiveness of singlism (stereotyping, stigmatizing, and discrimination against people who are single) illustrates just how far we are from attaining that ideal.
If unmarried Americans really were on an equal footing with married Americans in everyday life, then they would be treated in comparable ways. In fact, fair treatment would be so self-evidently appropriate that it would happen automatically and unselfconsciously.
But it doesn't. Unmarried Americans, for example, often hear questions such as, "So when are you going to get married" or, "Why are you still single?" when the comparable questions towards married people would appear unspeakably rude—"So when are you going to get divorced?" or, "Why are you still married?" Other examples come from the workplace. There are sometimes expectations for single people to cover for married people who want to leave early, take the vacation times or travel assignments that no one else wants, or come in on the holidays—all on the condescending assumption that they don't have anyone to be with, that they don't have a life.
My colleagues and I once tried to enumerate the many ways that married people enjoy unearned privileges just because they are married. We shared this list, but it is, of course, woefully incomplete.
To those who say that all of this is inconsequential and we single people should just shrug it off, I say this: why don't we turn the tables and offer all the same privileges only to those people who are legally single? Would that be okay?
Is the Real Issue Moral Superiority?
I've long thought that for people standing at the doors of the Married Couples Club with their arms crossed, vowing not to let anyone else in, the most fundamental issue was actually not access to legal benefits and protections. Many could probably admit to sharing the material rewards linked to official marriage. They may even be willing to budge a bit on their inclination to stereotype people who are not married as miserable or lonely or self-centered or broken. Perhaps they would acknowledge that some of their best friends are unmarried—and also happy and healthy. The line in the sand, though, is moral superiority: Many (though certainly not all) married people, and many who are single but who hope to marry, simply do not want to concede the moral high ground.
Until the moral worthiness of unmarried adults is so obvious that it is part of our conventional wisdom, we will not have a real right to be single in America.
- This article is cross-posted from Unmarried Equality.
- Thanks to Vicki Larson for the heads-up about Nan Hunter's article.
