Saturday 3 March 2012

Single Supplement in the Washington Post

Ick! Singles' supplements. Usually this means you pay more on trips. But today it means some interesting articles about long-term Singles in the Washington Post.

For those inclined to feel gloomy, I will note that the high percentage of unmarried adults includes a heck of lot of teenagers, divorced people, widowed people and presumably also male and female religious, and priests. It also includes people who have had long-term extramarital relationships that ended without legal ado.

I think it a bad idea to lump together virgins and/or never-married, the divorced and the widowed as "Singles", since all these groups have different experiences and issues. And different writers about the Single Life are going to have different attitudes on the topic stemming from their own histories. For example, one fact I can bring to the discussion is that being Single is better than being married to the wrong guy, or being the wrong girl yourself.

(I will now reflect on the insanity of having married a 23 year old/married when I was a very immature 25 year old. Insanity! Craziness! Never mind him: I was soooo the wrong girl, as the Tribunal--which got only my and my witnesses' testimony--pointed out in rather bald and crushing terms.)

But the article does cover some of the different groups of Singles, and very importantly it talks both to Searching Singles and to Serious Singles. The Serious Singles are very happy being Single; it is the Searching Singles, of course, who have the harder lot.

Great thanks to Lauren, who sent the main article in. Read the supplementary articles, too, as they are very interesting.

1 comment:

Sundancer said...

I find it interesting that the only single male featured in the article says his tolerance for a partner's quirks has lowered over time, and when comes home from work he doesn't want to "deal with more people". Very different from the women's viewpoints.
My female friends have a theory that the longer you let a bachelor stay that way, the less likely he is to want to let a women change up his comfortable life. This is their explanation for why they get asked on dates more often by younger men than by older.