.png)
Smug and married? You need to think again, says single academic Dr Bella DePaulo. We want your tax breaks not your pity, she tells Hilary Rose
DePaulo is an academic whose life’s work is changing the way we think about singleness, starting with the idea that it’s sad. For the single at heart, she argues, being single isn’t just their relationship status, it’s their identity. And while they might resent some of the perks that society bestows on couples, they very much don’t want your pity.
“Single life is not a lesser life,” DePaulo explains over Zoom from her home near Montecito, California. “For people who are single at heart, single life is their best, most meaningful, fulfilling and joyful life.”
“Some people are better suited to being single. People take it as scientifically established fact that if you get married you’ll be happier and healthier but, actually, there are now dozens of studies which find that married people end up being about as happy or unhappy as they were when they were single.”
This matters, DePaulo believes, not just because society “fetishises” marriage and romance but because it diminishes, if not demonises, singleness: on screen, single women are sad or dangerous. Single men can be perceived as loners who sit in their parents’ basement playing video games. Humans have evolved to be social animals but you can be a social animal, she points out, with your friends and relatives. Evolution isn’t about wedding rings, she says, though she is not anti-marriage, far from it. Whatever floats your boat. What frustrates her is the unfairness and statutory discrimination faced by the single, or as she puts it: “Giving people special privileges and rewards and perks just because they’re married.” In America, she says there are “hundreds” of federal laws benefiting married couples. In Britain being married can have positive implications on tax, savings, pensions and private healthcare, where spouses can sometimes share provision but friends or parents can not. You could argue that married couples get those breaks because they’re deemed to be the bedrock of civil society, so worth encouraging. She disagrees.
“What would happen if we reversed everything and gave all those benefits to single people? What would happen if single people were the ones that get the tax breaks and married people pay supplements for vacation packages or insurance. Take everything and flip it and see who would be doing better and whose kids would be doing better. There’s a whole system of inequality.”
I want to preface this by saying being single is morally neutral and I have no qualms with people who want to be. But it's kind of dense to suggest that there aren't obvious reasons that systems want people to be married, like increasing the likelihood of having kids, and reducing the odds of folks quitting a job without a new one secured. People aren't magically better at knowing how to be happy when they hop into relationships than they can intuit outside of them, so it's easily apparent that marriage doesn't immediately and universally lend itself to happiness.
Some restructuring would be nice, though. It would combat the housing crisis in my area at least to choose to live with other folks, so I would love to see tax breaks for cohabitation. A lot of the difficulty with marital versus single benefits with friends and family could be improved. But some of the benefits are because of a clear present trust implicit to the concept of marrying someone, which make it difficult for non-legally bound folks.