I'm fifty-four years old and I have always been single. I love my single
life. But for a long time I rarely said that out loud. I thought I was the
only happy single person.
I didn't love everything about my single life. I didn't like that "poor
thing" look I'd get when others first learned that I was single. I didn't
like their assumption that I must be miserable and lonely and pining for a
partner.

There were other things I didn't like that I thought I could pin on my
single status, but I wasn't really sure. For example, sometimes at work
colleagues with partners would assume that I could cover the tasks that no
one else wanted. Maybe they presumed that since I was single, I didn't have
a life and so had nothing better to do with my time. Socially, I was invited
to lunch with my coupled colleagues during the week but not to their dinner
and movie outings over the weekends.

Tentatively at first, I began asking other single people if they thought
they were viewed and treated differently than coupled people just because
they were single. The responses were overwhelming. It was time to proceed
beyond anecdotes.

Years later after I had read hundreds of scientific studies about marital
status, happiness, and discrimination, and after I conducted my own program
of research, I realized that much of the conventional wisdom about people
who are single was either grossly exaggerated or just plain wrong. The place
of singles in society and the significance of getting married have changed
dramatically over the past decades. But our views of single and married
people have not yet caught up. I wrote about this in my book Singled Out:
How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live
Happily Ever After. The subtitle captures what I learned about singles. Let
me explain.

After collecting stories of singlehood, informally, from hundreds of others,
I began conducting systematic research. My colleague Wendy Morris and I
first studied perceptions of people who are single and married. We
approached this work in a number of ways. In one set of studies, for
instance, we created profiles of married and single people that were exactly
the same (in terms of the person's age, hometown, interests, employment, and
so forth) except for their marital status. In one experiment after another,
we found that the single people were viewed more negatively than the married
people. For example, they were seen as unhappy, lonely, and self-centered
compared to their married counterparts. (The one exception is that single
people were consistently viewed as more independent than married people.)

We looked up federal statutes and found more than a thousand instances in
which official marriage was linked to federal protections and benefits. We
found discrimination against singles in the workplace and the marketplace.
We then did research of our own on discrimination and found that realtors
(and other people we asked) would prefer to rent to married couples than to
single women, single men, unmarried couples, or a pair of friends -- even
when they all had equally positive references and ability to pay. They even
preferred the married couple to the unmarried couple when the unmarried
couple had been together six years, compared to only six months for the
married couple.

The story that was taking shape in my mind was becoming clear. Single people
are not as happy as married people in part because they are targets of
stereotyping and discrimination.

At first I did not doubt that getting married made people happier. I saw
indications of that in headlines and book titles. In fact, the assumption
had become so much a part of conventional wisdom that some began to build
other arguments on that foundation. In an op-ed in The New York Times, for
instance, Jonathan Rauch argued that gay men and lesbians should be allowed
to marry because social science research shows that marriage makes people
happier.

When I set out to study the research on marital status and happiness, I
thought I was looking for nuances -- are there some people who benefit from
marriage even more than others? I was amazed by what I found.

In the typical study people in different categories are asked to rate their
happiness, perhaps on a 1 to 4 scale, with 4 indicating "very happy". The
categories usually include people who are single (and always have been),
currently married, divorced, or widowed. Here are the results of one such
study by Walter R. Gove and Hee-Choon Shin published in 1989; the numbers
are the average happiness ratings of 2,200 Americans in the four groups:

3.3 currently married

3.2 single

2.9 divorced

2.9 widowed

The first thing to notice is that all four groups are on the happy end of
the scale. They are all closer to calling themselves a 3 in happiness (the
scale point that has the label "pretty happy") than to any other label.
Second, the differences between the groups are not impressive, and the
smallest difference is between those who are currently married and those who
have always been single.

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