Structural Singlism: The Unfair Treatment Experienced by Every Person Who Is Single

Many examples of singlism are embedded in laws, policies, and practices

Photo by Andy Feliciotti on Unsplash

In everyday life, single people are often stereotyped and stigmatized in the conversations they have with other people. The kinds of things other people say to us, and about us, sometimes reveal that they think single life is something people are stuck with, and not something anyone would actually choose. The kinds of questions they ask suggest that to them, there is nothing more interesting or more important than single people’s attempts to unsingle themselves. Hence all the interest in whether we are “seeing anyone” and the disappointing lack of interest in all the people and things we really do care about. These everyday slights are among the microaggressions of single life. You can think of it as the small stuff, except that it adds up, and is not really small in its pernicious effects.

When I mention singlism (the stereotyping, stigmatizing, and marginalizing of single people, and the discrimination against them) to a group of people, there is almost always someone who insists that they have never experienced singlism. When it comes to the ways in which single people are pitied or subtly put down in everyday interactions, it is possible that some single people just don’t experience that. I wish it were true that no single person ever experienced that. Sadly, I think we are a long way from that ideal state, though I do think we are making progress.

Singlism, though, includes big, systematic, structural, institutional ways in which single people are unfairly disadvantaged and coupled people are advantaged. That’s the kind of singlism that is built right into laws, policies, practices, and customs. It is not the kind of singlism you can shrug off, claiming you’ve never experienced it. If you are a single person living in a place such as the U.S. in which many laws only benefit people who are legally married, those laws turn you into a second-class citizen, and short of getting the laws changed, you are part of the disadvantaged class.

In the next section, I will describe just a few examples of the structural singlism that disadvantages single people in a variety of domains. In each…