Rachel’s Musings

With the holidays upon us once again, I am faced with the annual question: what do I offer my coupled, family-committed friends? Should I offer them a replacement spouse/partner so that they can take the long weekend off to contemplate in solitude? So that they can join the scores of us singles who use these times to renew and refresh because we do not have the obligation to rush from one partner’s family’s house to the other? I feel so sorry for my poor coupled friends! As if the holidays aren’t stressful enough – now they have to do everything in duplicate. It is so draining to have to go to the dinner with family instead of kicking back with a pizza and watching old movies. A house filled with noisy kids and adults getting drunk can really depress that holiday spirit. My heartfelt condolences to all those who cannot just stroll through the woods enjoying the wonders of solitude.

So, around this time of year, I approach my coupled friends and tell them: “You poor soul, it must be so hard to be coupled around this time of year. You not only have to put up with your own family’s holiday frenzy but, no, that’s not enough, your partner’s family piles on the demands and stresses. I am sorry that you can’t just do what you want to and sleep all day!” How often I glean a shimmer of a tear in their eyes when they recover from the shock that I – the single person – am so lucky. They quickly swallow down the jealousy and pretend that I am really the poor slop. But I know better than that: All the attempts to make me feel lonely are just weak cover-ups of their need for solitude. They could not possibly admit that what they want more than anything else is hide from the masses and have a carefree holiday. And, yes, they won’t admit that they are jealous of my freedom!

This week’s Too Much includes an in depth look at a new meta-analysis about the impact of a society’s income inequality on that society’s citizen’s health. It’s a puzzle that apparently epidemiologists have been working on for a while but it was fairly recently brought to the forefront again when a comparison between the US and European countries showed that the US fares worse even though we spend a lot more on health care (I’ll see if I can dig up that article again…). Nothing seemed to explain the discrepancy, though, it’s obvious that the reporting ignored consistent findings that showed that the income gap seems to be a strong contender. According to the new meta-analysis:

The results suggest a modest adverse effect of income inequality on health, although the population impact might be larger if the association is truly causal. The results also support the threshold effect hypothesis, which posits the existence of a threshold of income inequality beyond which adverse impacts on health begin to emerge.

The US has clearly passed that threshold. Most of the extra mortality occurs in the US, the country with the widest income gap. How much of an impact?

Of the deaths the new BMJ study ties to inequality, almost 900,000 came in the United States.

Too Much last week asked a leading U.S. epidemiologist, Dr. Stephen Bezruchka of the University of Washington School of the Public Health, to place that calculation in perspective.

“We can say,” he noted, “that one in four deaths can be attributed to our high rates of income inequality.”

That’s about three times the number of deaths attributed to smoking… An editorial in the British Medical Journal gives more background.

I just sold my bed. A queen-size bed that no longer fits my down-sized lifestyle. I want smaller, thank you, easier to move. But I am noticing that it’s rather emotional to let go of this stuff like a bed! I’ve shared many a night with that bed, after all. It was a strange contraption – a combination of a fancy Natura bed and a huge mattress on top. The frame has been with me for a decade or so. The mattress only a few years. All of it come with stories, though. After all, two boyfriends have shared that bed with me at some point. And I felt the discovery of the luxurious freedom of choosing to be single in it. Of course, my letting go of it also symbolizes all the other changes going on in my life: Moving from being a single mother to having an empty nest. Exploring a new direction of my work life. Selling the bed crystallizes all this: My life will not be the same going forward. It is a loss and it is a new beginning. Fortunately, I already know that I can sleep well in my new bed: A simple full-size futon couch. Life goes on. In fact, it might even get better without all the old baggage!

In a previous post, I remarked that choosing to be single feels like a rather uppity thing to do. I promised to explain.

According to the Urban Dictionary “uppity” means (ignore the other two definitions!):

Taking liberties or assuming airs beyond one’s place in a social hierarchy. Assuming equality with someone higher up the social ladder.

As a single person, I am at the bottom of the social hierarchy. The hierarchy that starts with singles, then unmarried couples, then married couples. I am supposed to move up to the top by marrying someone. Instead, I dare to choose to be single and demand that I am equal to married folks. I want the hierarchy demolished but I am expected, socially, to respect it. And on top of that, I am not sad about my single status and don’t do anything to change it. In fact, I am happily single and would like to stay this way (both happy and single ).

Now, I also commented that this is uppity even for a feminist. Although many feminists have questioned marriage, a lot of them don’t. In fact, there are feminists who marry (amongst them Gloria Steinem). Feminism can incorporate marriage as a possibility by working toward egalitarian marriages. Something I find actually rather appalling. So, my choice to be single implies my critique of marriage as an outmoded, patriarchal institution that I don’t want to be a part of (well, not again, since I’ve been married before). Instead of attempting to create egalitarian marriages, my choice is to demand we find different ways of relating to each other, where relationshipse go beyond the dyadic. Thus, it is also demanding equality in the male-female hierarchy but also a call for questioning more than the equality of pay, for example, or equal access to everything, though this is also extremely important.