Why is it that people think there’s something wrong with you if you choose to be single?
All thanks to Dr. Bella DePaulo for coining the term and diligently researching the phenomenon.
I always knew that it was a thing, but could not quite put it into words. Encountering her research was truly a light-bulb-switching-on-over-my-head moment.
All bolded emphases in the quotes below are mine.
“By definition, singlism is what single people experience. It is the stereotyping, stigmatizing, and discrimination against people who are single. Although people who are married may feel that they are marginalized, that feeling is not an example of singlism. Furthermore, any bias experienced by married people is simply not the equivalent of the prejudice and discrimination against single people.” …
“[My] fellow contributors and I document the ways in which singles are targets of stereotyping, stigmatizing, or discrimination in domains such as politics, religion, the workplace, the marketplace, college teaching and research, the media, advertising, and everyday life.” …
“In study after study, we found that perceptions of single people are overwhelmingly more negative than perceptions of married or coupled people. That’s true even when we create brief biographical sketches of people who are sometimes said to be single and sometimes married but are described identically in every other way. The single people are viewed more harshly and more stereotypically than the married people.
Studies of perceptions of single people have been conducted in other countries as well. Again and again, single people are stereotyped. A particularly compelling set of studies assessed actual differences between single and coupled people, as well as perceptions of differences. The perceptions were pervasive, with singles getting derogated (relative to couples), but the actual differences were few and far between.”
So, if you’ve encountered this, know for a fact that it’s not just a form of personal prejudice. It’s also structural inequality that’s taught and practiced socially plus written into law.
AAAtheist 