the high cost of being single

[hitchhiker]

https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22788620/single-living-alone-cost

The celebrated single life is, in truth, incredibly narrow. For women, you have to be 1) actively and successfully in search of partnership; 2) unspeakably wealthy and above scrutiny; and/or 3) a self-sacrificing mother. “Confirmed” bachelors can sometimes get a pass so long as they don’t move back in with their parents; so do the elderly, the widowed (but only for a brief window of time), and the very young. Other single and solo-living people are still stigmatized in various and overlapping ways, depending on their age, class, race, and sexual identity. We don’t call single or unmarried people spinsters, deviants, or social problems anymore, at least not explicitly. But that underlying hostility to single and solo-living people? It’s everywhere.

Comments

[ororo]

Yeah, noticed that.

[minoanmiss]

ahahahha I needed this reminder today.

[rezendi]

I'm kind of baffled by this. "Many household costs are amortized across the number of people in the household" does not equate to "society discriminates against single people." Not all inequalities imply discriminatory unfairness. Housing is out of reach of many and there are many, many, many coupled people who make (much) less than the six-figure salaries of the single people in this story whose inability to buy a house is portrayed as a direct effect of society being, quote, "structurally antagonistic" towards single people. I am thoroughly unconvinced.

[rezendi]

Like, even the article's own links on how "the tax code is written to benefit married people" links to ... articles about tax credits / benefits for children, not married couples! This is a bad piece.

[rezendi]

I will however note that it links to an actually good piece, from some years ago, that doesn't interpret every financial difficulty in the world as evidence of active discrimination against single people, and focuses on the things which actually do disproportionately benefit married people: https://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/01/the-high-price-of-being-single-in-america/267043/ whereas the Vox piece muddies the water so thoroughly it's just a mess. (The Atlantic article makes it clear that a lot of these negative factors apply to single women but not so much to single men, who seem to actually financially benefit in some areas from being single; they write that off as "We can't say why the disparities exist between unmarried men and women.")

[hitchhiker]

the article did ramble a bit, but i think it also made some good points. e.g housing is out of reach across the board, but the overall supply does tend to favour a double-income nuclear family. i agree that the atlantic article was a lot more focused and coherent in the things it did cover, but the vox piece was trying to make a larger point about the structural assumption that you are living with a partner in a long-term relationship, which i think is fairly valid.

to me the key point was that if the country wants to acknowledge and support the fact that a large part of the adult population is single-by-default, it needs to have proactive tax and public benefit policies for single people.

[pauamma]

Not living in the US and not a woman, so a large share of that article has no bearing on my situation, but "“Confirmed” bachelors can sometimes get a pass so long as they don’t move back in with their parents; so do the elderly, the widowed (but only for a brief window of time), and the very young." This. (For extra make-people-look-at-you-funny credit, check both "widowed" and "divorced" for marital status on a new-hire personnel form.)

[freyjaw]

It's not fair nor right. Sigh.

[amaebi]

And the repair/maintenance/delivery worlds are set up for households with an adult whose time is completely flexible.

[cjsmith]

Yes, this assumption is nearly universal and not often examined.