Rachel's Musings » Singles By Choice

Many Voices, One Question: Should the Government Privilege Married People?

Rachel — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 16:39:47 +0000

[This post is co-authored by Bella DePaulo and Rachel Buddeberg.]

Same-sex marriage is advocated as a basic human right. We applaud any expansion of human rights. Yet, as we’ve watched the debate over this issue unfold over the years, we have had some misgivings about the current approach: It seems too piecemeal. First some couples get admissions tickets to the legal benefits and protections of marriage, then the gates are opened to other kinds of couples. But why should a person have to be part of any kind of couple in order to qualify? One of us (Bella DePaulo) found some relevant arguments articulated by others and posted excerpts from them, and the other (Rachel Buddeberg) added many more. We decided to pool our efforts and continue searching.

We were intrigued by the number and diversity of people who have made relevant statements on the role of government in marriage. We’ve collected some of them here. (Further suggestions are welcome.) The people (and groups) we have quoted have cast their arguments in terms of getting beyond marriage or conjugality, or privatizing marriage, or abolishing marriage, or maintaining the separation of church and state. The authors include libertarians, liberals, and conservatives; people from various religious perspectives; gay rights activists and people hostile toward the GLBT community; people taking a marketplace perspective as their starting point and others starting from a concern with basic human dignities and needs.

There are important distinctions in the arguments that have been advanced. For example, some simply suggest replacing marriage with civil unions – civil contracts for all couples. That option, though, would continue to privilege conjugal couples. A more inclusive possibility is to open the civil contract to any two people, whether friends, relatives, or conjugal couples. Again, though, people would qualify for protections only by way of their link to another person (or persons, in some versions). Even broader is an approach that regards every individual as equally deserving of fundamental protections.

Take the Family and Medical Leave Act as an example and consider its relevance to people in the same generation ( i.e., setting aside parents and children). If you are seriously ill, your spouse can take time off from work to care for you under the Act. If the conjugal criterion were set aside, then people could also qualify to take leave to care for, say, a sibling or a friend with whom they had a civil contract. With the broader approach, any person could take leave to care for any other person in need (within the usual stipulations, such as the 12 week limit). Within a given workplace, every employee would have the same opportunity to give or receive care under the Act, regardless of their relationship status.

Here are some of the statements we found, arranged under these headings:

1. Statements from formal groups
2. Arguments from book-length discussions
3. Contributions from anthologies
4. Arguments from academic journals
5. Arguments from religious perspectives
6. Articles from political publications
7. A sampling of other arguments online

Check out the list – and add to it if you know about more voices – at Bella DePaulo’s blog.

Lenses: What We See as Important

Rachel — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 03:42:03 +0000

Today, I received a fact sheet from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, an organization I support and respect. The fact sheet is called “More Men to Benefit from Expanded Coverage Under Healthcare Reform.” Because of my training and experience in data analysis, the first thing I looked at was Table 1. And I was puzzled. There didn’t seem to be a big difference between men and women. The big difference that jumped out at me was between married and single people of either gender. The table contains raw numbers (use the link to the PDF above to see it). I don’t find raw numbers particularly useful when trying to determine patterns. A large number out of a slightly larger number is different from a large number out of a huge number – proportions matter. So I converted the table into percentages.

The percent of males without insurance ranges from 40% in the 65+ population to 58% in the 18-25 age range. Yes, that is a disconcerting difference since males are roughly 50% of the population. However compare that with the single population: 47% to 100% of the uninsured are single, depending on age group whereas they make up 1% to 26% of the population! That’s a huge difference – at least 40 percentage points. So, why doesn’t the headline read “more singles to benefit”? The IWPR fact sheet does report on this larger gap, too, but it doesn’t make the headline despite the so much larger gap!

Home Ownership

Rachel — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 21:20:49 +0000

Listening to Picturing a Meltdown, an interview with two of the authors of a comic-style book explaining what led to our economic crisis, I realized that in addition to marriage as the foundation of society, there is another myth that claims to be oh, so important to our freedom: Home ownership. It has a lot of similarities and it is tied very strongly to marriage and the nuclear family. Just like marriage, home ownership is seen as a status symbol: I own a home, therefore I am an adult. It is the next step in our becoming adults, right after marriage (or maybe slightly before). Home ownership is supported by the government through large tax-breaks that those of us who rent don’t get. Yet, just like marriage, it has devastating consequences to our society and looking at those, it is mind-boggling why any society would support it. And I am not even talking about Marxian arguments against ownership. Home ownership is behind urban sprawl. It is behind long commutes and too little time in the home or with that spouse and those children that are supposedly signs of our adulthood. It is behind isolation. In short, it is behind the destruction of our environment and the decrease of social capital (no, not as the only thing but certainly an important factor). And home ownership is at the center of the economic collapse (together with greed). Just like in the case of marriage, though, those negative consequences are swept under the rug. Instead we portray people who don’t buy homes as immature, not really part of society, economically disadvantaged, and/or afraid of commitment (notice the similarities to singlism!). We are stigmatized instead of those who want their own large home (with a large garage for the large car). Instead of encouraging such short-sightedness, a government that is interested in the long-term well-being of its citizens would support different ways of living – living with a smaller foot-print. It would encourage employers to offer jobs closer to home so that people could walk or bike to work instead of wasting hours during commutes. Of course, that presumes that we start thinking about the long-term consequences of our actions and not (only) about our short-term gain.

Singlism in Prop 8 Attack

Rachel — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 19:41:43 +0000

Despite the matrimania reflected in the fight for marriage equality, I celebrated the ruling against prop 8. I think everybody should have the right to refuse to get married – and we only have that right if we can legally marry. Plus, I don’t like it when religious groups impose their morality on the rest of us, which is what Prop 8 does. But I was struck by the singlism in the comments by David Boies, one of the attorneys arguing against Prop 8, on the Rachel Maddow show (You can also watch the video of the interview here.):

We said at the beginning that we would establish three things: that marriage is a fundamental right, and that depriving gays and lesbians the right to marry harm them and harm their children, and that depriving gays and lesbians the right to marry could not help heterosexual marriage at all.

Not being married harms us, a claim based on the false belief that marriage makes us happier, healthier, and wealthier. And children growing up within single parent families are harmed – actually, children are harmed in any family other than that headed by a married couple. Both of these claims are false and singlist perpetuating stereotypes against singles. I find it frustrating that the attorneys could not find arguments for same-sex marriage that do not require put downs of singles, including the conjuring up of incorrect “evidence.” If they had not been driven by matrimania, they could have utilized the strongest argument for marriage equality: Not providing protection in case of divorce is unjust. But that would require admitting to the reality that marriages do not last forever, which contradicts the matrimanic assumption that marriage leads to infinite bliss.

Update: Here is a great post by Bella DePaulo making similar points in much more detail.

Earn Money for Meddling

Rachel — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 18:16:57 +0000

Now you can meddle in your single friends’ lives and earn money for doing so! Check out MatchCrew! Take a look at that website and notice how they are redefining meeting people (the only person you’re really interested in meeting is The One) and relationships (well, we know that one already: It’s only seepy relationship that counts).

Do you enjoy helping your friends meet new people?
We believe the desire to find the right partner in life is at the core of every person’s happiness, and it is a noble cause to help others to try and achieve that dream.

Yes, I enjoy helping friends meet new people! But apparently that doesn’t count if I don’t intend to help my friends meet the “right partner.” Just another friend isn’t what contributes to their happiness… This is just another way that we are taught that the only way to be happy is coupled.

And even worse:

[S]ingles that are striving to achieve the dream we all have – to find the one person we can’t live without.

No, that is not my dream! My dream is to create a job for myself that is meaningful while being connected with other people I care about and who care about me.

Of course, there’s also the obligatory self-justification:

I believe that matchmaking is a noble profession, because it gives you the opportunity to help people find personal happiness in a way that not everyone gets to experience in life. What we’re doing together, in our own small way, is revolutionary.

Revolutionary? Since when does supporting the status quo constitute a revolution?!? You are not “causing a complete or dramatic change” by institutionalizing meddling. Matchmakers have existed for a long, long time – and, yes, even those who got paid for it. Remember Yente?

I wonder what would happen if we use this tool for building relationships – you know, the kind where two or more people relate to each other, be it as friends, acquaintances or, yes, seepies…

Diversify!

Rachel — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 01:58:35 +0000

The permaculture principle 10, as listed by David Holmgren, states “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” It might be the most applicable one to our relationships as well as our economies. It calls for diversity. How about a diversity of friends! If we focus all of our energy on one person and put all of our relational eggs in one basket, we might end up feeling rather lonely. Many of us who have been in seepy relationships know how alone one can be in those… It pays to have lots of relationships, intimate and otherwise. Close friends can help us sort out our life path. Acquaintances can be fun to hang out or watch a movie with. Why would anybody but their eggs in one basket? Because that’s the cultural messages we’re getting: You have to find The One and then you’ll do everything with him/her. It’s almost as if the ideas from agriculture have filtered into the rest of culture: Monogamy is the monoculture (huge fields of the same crop) of relationships. Maybe it’s time to diversify! That doesn’t necessarily mean polygamy. My parents have a pretty strong marriage and one of the things that seems to keep it strong is that they have a diverse set of friends – each has their own and some are in common. And such a diversified approach would probably help us all by increasing the social capital associated with involvement in civic groups since research points to marriage as a time and energy-sapper.