Who are the people who are important to you now? That was the key question that motivated a significant study of the personal communities of people in contemporary Britain.

Think about the question as it applies to your life. The people can be from any categories — family, friends, spouse/partner, coworkers, neighbors, and so forth. You get to define what “important” means.

Using a series of concentric circles (like the ones in the illustration), put yourself in the innermost circle, then put the people who are the very most important to you in that same inner circle. Add more people…

Some single people have been having a hard time during the pandemic. I get that. But I also became frustrated with the stories in the media that seemed to suggest that all single people have felt devastated during the past year. So I set out to collect other kinds of pandemic stories and write a few of my own (here and here).

When I asked single people to share their stories with me, they were very generous, often responding in great detail. I’m relating just snippets of what 18 people told me — enough, I hope, to give you a…

All around the world, more and more people are living outside of conventional coupled life. How is that working out for them?

In an important new book, The Tenacity of the Couple-Norm, five scholars researched four very different European nations in some depth. Sasha Roseneil, Isabel Crowhurst, Tone Hellesund, Ana Cristina Santos, and Mariya Stoilova studied laws and policies relevant to coupling in each nation, and how they changed over time. They also looked at the role of social movements in effecting social change. …

In Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After, I opened one of the chapters by describing a series on relationships that was published by the Chicago Tribune:

“The relationship partners who were interviewed described how they met, what they valued about each other, and what sealed the relationship. They said the predictable things: “We fell in love.” “We are planning a future together.” “We use the exact same expressions, sighs, and body language without realizing it, often at the same time.” Many experts were consulted. Some of their observations were predictable, too…

If you are single, you have probably gotten that “aaaww, poor thing” look more than a few times. You can judge for yourself how that feels. For me, it feels maddeningly condescending and wildly inappropriate, since I don’t feel sorry for myself for being single. I love living single — even during a pandemic. But even if you don’t, I’m guessing you don’t love being pitied.

What I want to pose here is a different question: What does it mean about the coupled person who is pitying you? …

Stephanie Rosenbloom writes beautifully and lovingly about the time we spend alone. I’ve been wanting to discuss her work here at Medium for some time, but have put it off, since her focus is on travel, and we haven’t gotten to do much of that during the pandemic.

But now we can almost see a time when it may seem safe again. In a New York Times article in February, Rosenbloom made an interesting prediction about that, after consulting with social scientists. She suggested that, as we begin traveling again, “even modest, less costly vacations will give us extreme pleasure.”

…

Suppose you were bicycling along the side of a road, and a distracted driver barreled into you, sending you careening down a hill, with bones snapping and a wrist severed along the way. You are experiencing a level of pain you never even knew was possible. The crash scene is so horrifying that all the vehicles and personnel associated with fatalities are sent your way. Do you keep trying to breathe, trying to hold onto life? What if you knew that multiple surgeries and painful, relentless rehabilitation was in your future, and that you would never be the same again…

I hear this all the time: “Being single is better than being in a bad relationship” (or a bad marriage). There are other versions, too, such as, “It is better to be single than to wish you were.” Sometimes I read those platitudes in the media and sometimes people say them to me, knowing that I am one who lives my single life fully, joyfully, and unapologetically.

I don’t like those sentiments and I wish people would stop expressing them.

My problem is not that I think the statements are inaccurate. It is true that being single is better than…