Why do so many people defend marriage like it is sacred – even when the data does not back it up. In this provocative episode, Peter McGraw talks to Martin Day about his paper on people’s committed relationship ideology – the belief system that says romantic partnership is the key to happiness, status, and success. With special guest co-host Iris Schneider, they explore how these beliefs are less about love and more about control and comfort in a chaotic world.
—
Listen to Episode #248 here
Defending Relationship Ideology
Welcome back. We’re here to talk about the relationship escalator, a concept familiar to the solo community. It’s that predictable, prescribed series of life steps: date, sex, move in, marry, perhaps have kids, and hopefully, grow old together. It’s deeply embedded in the culture. It’s high in status, and it’s often unquestioned.
This conversation is about helping people name the forces they’re up against. We’re going to talk to someone who studies what happens when we question the relationship escalator. There are tons of subtle family pressures, pointed judgment, and a daily drip of cultural expectation, whether it be on Spotify, rom-coms, or reaching back and reading Pride and Prejudice.
To do that, we’re joined by a social psychologist and associate professor at Memorial University of Newfoundland. He studies how we rationalize the status quo and what drives our beliefs about relationships, fairness, and social systems. We’re here to discuss his excellent paper, a solo-authored paper, Why People Defend Relationship Ideology. Please welcome Martin, aka Marty Day.
Thank you very much for having me. I’m excited to be here.
That’s great. We are joined by a special guest co-host, a fellow behavioral scientist, a friend, and a bold voice in the solo movement. Frequent readers will know her from the waiting episodes, singles thriving or coping, and a version of Truth or Truth. Welcome back, Iris Schneider.
Thank you. It’s so great to be back.
Understanding Committed Relationship Ideology
Marty, you open this paper with something a little unexpected. It doesn’t start with a normal, dry opening of a typical academic paper. You talk about the royal wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton. I don’t even know if they’re still together, but in any case, you start with that. That’s not exactly a dry academic move. Why did you choose that story and the collective fascination with marriage in general and then these royal weddings, specifically?
It’s an interesting question about why that was chosen. Ultimately, it was summing up a key part of what was studied and reviewed in this paper, relating to people’s beliefs regarding committed relationships. The other backstory is that when this research was done, it was a big event at that time. Coming from Canada, which is a commonwealth country, there are what they call royal fascinators here. People are interested in this marriage.
It was the big news of 2011. I don’t know what else happened that year, but this was one of them. I thought it was a cheeky take on why they may have gotten together and gotten married to fit the fairy tale ideas that people have of committed relationships and marriage. In this case, highlighting how people associate marriage with well-being and increased happiness. That’s one reason maybe they get married.
Iris, are you into these royal wedding things?
No, I don’t even get invited to weddings, let alone royal weddings.
Congratulations.
I save a lot of money.
I’d be surprised if you were. This is a prominent example of a stage in the relationship escalator. You use the term committed relationship ideology, which is a mouthful and very academic. What do you mean by that? For those unfamiliar with that term, which is everyone in the world, what do you mean by that?
This is a term created by Bella DePaulo and Wendy Morris. It’s referring to the set of beliefs that people have in our culture and Western culture that most people want to get married, that romantic relationships are the most important adult relationship above other relationships like friendships, family relationships, and so on, and that people in relationships are viewed as better in many ways and more valued than single people, which would be an alternative. That’s what they’re trying to capture by this term. These sets of beliefs are represented by those kinds of ideas.
It’s a goal that people have, and then it’s a set of values associated with it. It is something you ought to do. You’re going to be better off doing it. Hence, why you ought to do it.
There’s a lot baked in there. For sure, there’s this idea of a prescribed life path. It’s the social norms and prescriptive things that we should be doing. That’s part of it as well.
Why does this belief system matter so much?
Why this initially caught my attention and how it was described in a paper by DePailo and Morris is that they suggested this might provide some insight into the stereotyping of singles and discrimination against singles and what they coined as singleism. They suggested this might be a guiding belief system that may help shed some light on that pattern that we see, where people more or less openly diminish people who are single and elevate those who are in committed relationships. That’s one insight into that pattern that we see.
It’s certainly celebrated. This is the whole point of weddings. When you think about it, to have this style of relationship, you don’t need a big fancy wedding, but it is so much part of it. This is not just something that you pursue and that allegedly makes your life better, but it is also not just privately celebrated, but publicly celebrated, especially in an Instagram age. The whole process from the asking stage, the engagement stage, all the way up through a honeymoon, and then a yearly celebration of anniversaries. We’re all reminded of how great this relationship is, regardless of how great it might be.
We’re talking about these things, but these are things everyone knows. They just happen to be described in this way. This is not news to anyone; these beliefs we have about these relationships. It’s widely expected. It’s common knowledge. That’s where the interesting part comes in. They’re not questioned. We assume this is the way things are and the way they should be. They seem to affect how we evaluate people and value them more or less, like singles and people in relationships. We don’t question it or blink an eye, even in some cases. Some people vary in that, but that’s this overall pattern.
It’s different from other cases of, let’s say, stereotyping and discrimination. Usually, we recognize that as, “That is not a good thing. We should not be doing that. I shouldn’t do that. Others shouldn’t do that.” Here, you don’t see that same level of questioning or scrutiny that you find. You can see many examples of it. I’m sure you’ve covered this on your show and have other examples. That’s a part of intriguing part, at least, that led me to do more research in this area, and maybe for others as well. Why aren’t we questioning these sets of beliefs? I don’t know if this is interesting or not.
How this came about was that a supervisor, when I was in graduate school, classically put this paper down on my desk. It was Bella DePaulo and Wendy Morris’ paper on this unrecognized stereotyping and prejudice against singles. He said, “You might find this interesting,” and I did. Once you start learning about this set of beliefs and these examples of discrimination and prejudice against single people, it’s hard to unsee, and you start noticing it in your life.
My own little take on that at the time was that I was living in graduate housing. I was very fortunate to have graduate housing, but it was a townhouse with four other single individuals and grad students. It was a dormitory style. It had basic accommodations, which were satisfactory unless you have a comparison situation, which we did, which was across the way, where all the couples lived. They had nicer townhouses.
Rather than four people to a basic building, it was nicer. There were two people. They had extra rooms. They get entertained. We paid more for rent for whatever reason than they did. Part of the idea was that they had families, but most of them didn’t have kids at that time. It was, to me, an example that no one was questioning this either. It was like, “People in relationships get a better situation.” We were subsidizing them. That is one example of how you start seeing it all around you. It raises the question of why we are allowing this to perpetuate these potentially unfair situations.
No more.
Return To Traditional Relationship Practices
Your paper is almost ten years old. It was pretty groundbreaking then and now as well. It’s also taking on a whole new relevance when you think about the trends in return to traditional relationship values. I’m wondering how you see developments in, for instance, the incel space and traditional masculinity versus trad wife culture. How do you see that in relation to this system justification and relationship ideology that you put forth in your paper?
That’s a good question, and I wish I had updated data to answer that with. I’m loosely familiar with these things, so I don’t know the exact trend. I can speculate, though. I don’t have a good ear to the ground in these things, I suppose. My ear to the ground is when I’m playing with my two young kids on the ground, and we’re rolling around. That’s where my mind space is.
I’m aware of these things, like trad wife. There are these influencers who are maybe gaining traction. There does seem to be a return to some of these more traditional family and/or relationship values, the idea that people should be having more children, and so on. That’s an interesting thing happening. My insight is that that’s happening amongst some groups or some areas of society, so that’s something.
In other areas, we’re seeing opposite patterns in some ways. We’re seeing more gender equality in terms of roles, relationships, child-rearing, or what have you. We’re also seeing a less judgmental view on whether you’re in a relationship or not, whether you’re in a single relationship, or how you might want to live that relationship, and this you-to-you mentality. Both things may be happening.
This research that we did a while ago, how does that change? I don’t know for sure, but one possibility is that it might still be happening amongst certain segments of the population more so than others. Others may not be showing this defensive pattern in committed relationships. They may not be subscribing to these unquestionably, as maybe they were in the past. Maybe other groups are increasing their tendency to do that.
It’s a very interesting movement. For me, to the degree that we acknowledge more ways in which people can live their lives, that must be so disturbing for some people, and the threat that they polarize or become quite extreme in completely the other side. To me, it seems like some sort of desperation because people feel like they are losing control.
For instance, the percentage of young men who say that feminism has gone too far is rising. In your paper, you also discuss that this is more important for men than for women because they benefit from keeping the system in place. It is so interesting how current events in the world make people so disturbed that they feel that they have to push everybody back into this type of relationship ideology, claiming that it’s harmful for everybody else if they don’t.
Exploring The System Justification Theory
Marty, before you react to this, because I want to talk about this underlying notion of system justification and dive into the gender differences, I want to do a moment of editorializing. We have so many new readers after the TED Talk. This relationship that we’re talking about is rather narrow. It’s a rather limited relationship when you think about it. It has very strict rules that might not work well for everyone.
The big one is that our royal couple is expected to have consistent and continuous romantic and sexual exclusivity. This is a closed relationship. They’re meant to be together forever in these kinds of ways, and to not do that is grounds for divorce, typically. One of the best grounds for divorce is cheating. They’re expected to merge their lives. They become completely intertwined socially and financially. They logistically take on the same lifestyle and share homes. I don’t know how it works with the royals, but they share bank accounts, typically, and calendars. They might even have their own email address that they have together. It’s a merged life.
To your point, one of the major elements is this notion of hierarchy. This relationship becomes the most important relationship in their life, at least adult-to-adult. If they have kids, that changes. Suddenly, Kate’s friend of 30 years gets pushed to the side because of this new man, or vice versa. It’s supposed to matter more than friends, family, community, and sometimes even yourself. You’re supposed to put this other person first.
These rules are modeled by other people living in this relationship. It’s why the Princess Di divorce was as big a deal or bigger than the actual wedding. You’re judged negatively. It’s confusing if you don’t want to follow these rules. As you’ve already pointed out, there’s discrimination. If you wanted to have a platonic partnership in graduate school, you would not have been eligible for family housing. It hurts people materially, but it also hurts them psychologically because they’re not as valued there. I wanted to point this out. The work that you’re doing, looking at what I call the relationship escalator, a term that Amy Garrin coined, you draw on system justification theory, which is another academic mouthful. What is that concept, and how did you test it?
Maybe I’ll start with basic motivations. We have our own self-interest. We have self-motivations. We might do things because of the groups we’re part of. Another provocative idea that’s been put forward is that we are also motivated on behalf of the systems we belong to. An easy example would be for society. We might be motivated to, for example, go along with the conditions of society to defend them, even. That’s the idea behind system justification. We have this other system motivation.
Part of the reason we might have that, which has been suggested, is that we might defend societal arrangements and so on the status quo because it can protect us from the psychological discomfort that might occur if we were to acknowledge or be aware that there are disorderly, chaotic things going on and injustice. What if there wasn’t merit in society if things were more illegitimate and so on? If we recognize those things, they can threaten us psychologically.
By having this motivation, it can help shield us against experiencing those kinds of threats. We’re driven to avoid that. We might be motivated instead to defend the system and societal conditions, even though we know they’re imperfect. We know there are problems and so on, but overall, things are fair, just, legitimate, and orderly, so we are willing to put up with things and go along with them. That’s this notion of system justification.
Part of the reason I started applying that idea was that I was doing research with Aaron Kay, who did research with John Jost and some of the people who theorized system justification. We started to think that maybe this might provide some insight into why people are doing this, why people are not recognizing this pattern where they’re valuing people in committed relationships and devaluing people who are single, why this is going unrecognized, and what could possibly explain this. That was the reason why we started looking into it.
For example, why could these things be connected? If people might be willing to go along with the system and defend it, they might do it because it provides us control, predictability, certainty, and order. Committed relationships might do that, too. Certainly, believing in some of the aspects of committed relationships might provide that. That sounds very much like your escalator idea. It’s this predictable life path. It gives you a sense of control and predictability, and it reduces uncertainty.
These are the psychological things that we find very important. You might think of one analogy. We have this either cup or shot glass, if you will, of psychological comfort that we need a certain level of control and orderliness, and we want to maintain that cup full. We might believe in things to help maintain that. If they come under threat, we will do things to defend them to fill that cup of psychological structure, control, and certainty.
Marriage: An Invention For The Good Of Society
I have to say this. It’s difficult to examine this issue without exposing the tension between the group and the individual. To Iris’ point, this rise of the trad wife phenomenon is often justified as we need to get back to the family unit because we’re not having enough kids, and we’re going to have a population collapse. The first thing that’s fallacious about that is that this so-called population collapse is not going to happen for thousands of years. It’s not like it’s imminent. It’s making some bold predictions about the future.
Many years ago, we were worried about the opposite problem. We were so sure back then that there was a population bomb. Now, we’re worried about population collapse. That’s my Slate editorializing here. These calls about how this is for the good of society are oftentimes like it’s good for the world, in a sense. This has been happening for a long time.
Throughout history, there have been bachelor taxes that have been leveled against single men of a certain age. If you were a single man and you hit 25, you were seen as a threat to society because marrying men was good for them. It tamed the wild beast that was out there. Single men had to pay more taxes. Even the games that men played, like billiards and things like that, were taxed at a higher rate to try to exert force. In this case, monetary force, not just social control, is used to get men to couple up. This is in line with the notion that there is a system, and the system is good.
Where we’re about to go with this question is that I believe that, in many ways, this system is good. I know this because, although I think it has outlived a bit of its usefulness, the escalator in general and marriage in particular were invented for the good of society. It started as a business arrangement as we became agrarians. There was nothing quite like this when we were hunter-gatherers, so we had to create this very specific relationship and then exert massive force to get people to stay in it. Painful divorce laws are an example. It was seen on balance as good for society, creating stability, control, and so on.
The problem is that it’s not good for everyone, and it’s not good at all stages of life. This narrow set of rules doesn’t always fit people. People might want to be non-exclusive. People may not want to merge their lives. People might want to keep their friendships or their familial relationships as their most important, or they don’t want to have a most important relationship. They want a flat hierarchy, etc. That’s where the discomfort happens.
It’s very interesting that you mentioned this economic system because that was also a thought when reading your paper. There is a system, and the system has benefits. Therefore, we must adhere to this kind of ideology. What I find fascinating is that people somehow internalize economic incentives to mean that something is better also in other dimensions, that it’s their own true value. They start to believe so much that there is something inherently good about something that was a practical approach to organizing society, but they believe that it is some emotional value or some inherent human value attached to what was implemented as a way to structure society. That is interesting.
For instance, many societies incentivize marriage, having children, and living together as a couple, but these are economic incentives because governments want to reward certain behaviors and discourage other behaviors. That in itself doesn’t have a positive or a negative valence, but people believe it does. Just because you’re getting a tax break doesn’t make you better than me. Just because the government wants to steer your behavior doesn’t make your life more valuable than mine with my preferences. That’s very interesting.
Are Married People Happier?
I would add that. This is not even just economic stuff. There are 1,000-plus laws, regulations, and benefits that married people have in the United States over singles. Also, there’s this pervasive belief, not supported by the data, that you’re going to be happier. That is perpetuated in the media. People believe it. It feels self-fulfilling, in a sense.
As I mentioned earlier in the Instagram age, everybody is showing the good. They’re not showing the bad. When it does make them happier, they’re very loud about it. When it’s not making them happier, they’re quiet about it. Anybody who has looked hard at the data, especially longitudinal data, finds that the set point theory is much better. You have a boost of happiness around that wedding, and then you go back to where you were. Some people are happier, and some people are less happy, but it averages out there. To add to your point, Iris, you also believe that this is going to be a blissful world. Unfortunately, a lot of people feel overpromised and underdelivered.
It reminds me of this famous paper that’s decades old. It’s called Telling More Than You Know. It’s about how people justify their choices, even when they don’t have a good reason. It’s not the exact study that was in the paper, but the example I use when I lecture on this topic is that people were shown four identical pairs of socks, and they generally preferred socks on the right side of the table. The socks were all identical, but when you ask them, “Why did you pick this pair of socks?” they would say, “This sock is of better quality. It feels better. The material is nicer. The colors are brighter.”
People come up with why they do what they do. When it comes to committed relationships, people operate very strongly on, “I ought to do it. It has to be so. This is the right path to go.” It’s not because they believe that it will make them happier. That comes after adhering to a certain norm. You ought to do it. Everybody’s doing it, so probably there must be a reason.
Somehow, the belief that you must be happier comes from the fact that we feel like everybody has to do it. When you ask people, “Why would you want to live together then?” They’re like, “That’s what people do. After being together for one and a half years, you live together.” You ask, “Why?” They’re like, “It’s what people do.” You’re like, “Why?” They’re like, “It probably has some merits. Otherwise, why would everybody do this?” It perpetuates itself without real thought into the individual’s preferences and what would make them personally happy.
Putting Relationships Ideals Under Threat
It doesn’t help when you don’t have an option. It doesn’t feel like there’s another option. To your point, Marty, we’re seeing more and more conversations of this, frankly, statistical rise in singles. You look around and see other people doing it. I want to say you tested this idea of system justification in a clever way. You expose people to data that threatens relationship ideals. Talk about that. What did you find?
We went to see if there was a causal role of the system motive in people’s defense of relationship beliefs. It was an experimental design. We had some people exposed to a threat to the system. The idea was that if you were to deprive people of water, they would become thirstier. If you deprive them of food, they will become hungrier. If you threaten the system, exposing them to systematic discrimination amongst a group of people or something like that, then that can theoretically activate this motive. It would make it more salient to them and increase that drive to the system-level motivation.
That’s what we did in a study. We had some people affirm their system or have it threatened, which should activate their system justification motive. We then exposed them to a definitional research that was all created by us. We followed people over time, people in committed relationships and singles, and altered how the research concluded and ended.
We had these findings supposedly, where the people in relationships were much happier, more stable, and so on, compared to single people. There were all these benefits consistent with this escalator idea. Alternatively, people in other conditions in the study were exposed to more or less the conclusion that being in a relationship isn’t that much different than being single. There aren’t any special benefits.
There was a mild tweak where we said it seemed like there’s a slight effect where people in relationships might be a little less happy, which we would say is not a big difference. That was it. We didn’t threaten it so much or say they’re terrible. They’re the same as singles. That was what we construed as the threat. People’s system motive was active or not. They read this research that either threatened or didn’t threaten relationship beliefs. What we found was that when you’re exposed to these threats to relationship beliefs, you criticize that research a lot more. We gave them the opportunity to say, “What’d you think of this research?”
In that case, people wrote criticisms, saying, “This study was poorly done. That sample size wasn’t big enough,” and so on. We counted those up, and those were our indicators of people defending these sets of beliefs. They were trying to defend these relationship beliefs that they perhaps held. They did that more so when their system motivation was active and less so when it was not active.
They did it in general.
People were defending it across the board, but we saw the biggest differences, depending on whether they were motivated to do so or not.
Regardless of their own relationship status.
You’re right. That was across all this research, where it didn’t matter whether people were single or in relationships themselves. That’s the same kind of pattern you see with stereotyping, too, or these other outcomes where even single people will stereotype people who are single and so on. We found that as well.
You also found this gender effect that Iris referred to earlier.
Yeah. We weren’t predicting. What happened is we ran the study, and it didn’t work. We analyzed the results and were like, “This didn’t come out like we predicted. There’s no interaction, or it didn’t show this pattern until we started including gender in the model. What we saw was this pattern that I described, but it was for men. It wasn’t showing that pattern for women.
We ran the study again in very similar ways, more or less, and found the same pattern again. We started to think, “There’s something here.” We kept using that. We adjusted the model to consider that in the future. We consistently kept finding it. Men were showing this pattern that suggests that system-level motivation is one reason, giving some insight into when they might be more likely to defend these relationship beliefs. There are psychological concerns at that level, whereas women weren’t showing that pattern.
Do you have an explanation for why that is the case?
That’s a great question. It does beg that. We have some insight, but I won’t say it’s 100%. This was post hoc. We tried to look at it in other ways. One part insight was when we looked at some archival data. We turned to this large existing data set of 33 countries and over 30,000 people and tried to see if this pattern would emerge as well there. Do we see this association where people are defending both the system and committed relationships or the institution of marriage?
We do find that connection for men more strongly than for women, but it was only in certain contexts in parts of the world and countries that, in particular, were showing greater levels of gender equality. Let’s say, more women in parliament and more equality between men and women in those countries. There is an index indicating that. We find that pattern in those countries with greater gender equality and not much at all in these other countries where there are more traditional differences between men and women, for example.
In other words, what we found were these advantages that men have. Men, generally, compared to women, will have more advantages in society. Everyone, as men, can benefit more from the way things are set up. We are more advantaged and privileged. Other perspectives, such as social elements, would argue that because these advantaged men are more supportive, these systems were more motivated to maintain them. That’s seemingly the same pattern we found here. When these societal conditions are under threat, that is when women are gaining. This is more threatening to men. That’s when we see this pattern particularly emerge where men are defending marriage more in relation to their thoughts of their system motivations.
Different Benefits Of Marriage To Men And Women
I was thinking about an explanation as you were talking. I was also thinking about how marriage, in particular, benefits men and women differently. In a very traditional society with very gender-specific roles in terms of men and women, men would probably have more economic opportunities than women do and would benefit from marriage because they are taken care of. Women benefit from marriage because they’re taken care of in the economic sense. They have access to resources.
In societies where there’s more gender equality, women also have access to economic opportunities, which makes marriage for them no longer beneficial because that was not what they were getting out of it in the first place. The benefit for men still remains, and they are losing that benefit where they had a support system at home that allowed them to thrive economically. I can see why marriage doesn’t have a lot of benefits for women as soon as they have access to their own economic resources. I’m grossly generalizing, but that’s how I was thinking about it.
There’s evidence for this, Iris. The number one reason for the rise of singles has been the economic and educational empowerment of women. It has simply allowed them to have a choice when they didn’t have a choice before. Originally, they didn’t have a choice because they were property. The act of walking the bride down the aisle from her father was giving her away as property to be the responsibility and the property of her husband.
With the rise of love marriages, women still needed marriage in many ways to get out of their familial home. They had no other way to earn a living, so they needed to go from their father’s care to their husband’s care. To be able to opt out of that allows some women to opt out of relationships and marriage more generally.
We go backwards and think about the perspective that marriage wasn’t invented for the good of the individual but rather for the good of society, at least on balance. For example, exclusivity and monogamy are good for men. What happens in non-monogamous cultures is that you end up having a group of men whom no one wants to have sex with. As a result of that, that’s not good for society, and it’s not good for the men because the average man cares very much about having sex.
When you have a society where almost everyone gets married, does so early, and is romantically and sexually exclusive, you end up getting a pairing-up process. What was funny about the invention of divorce and divorce laws is that they were invented and made painful for the men because it was a belief that men would take off. They would leave these women stranded with their babies, take off, and be gone, so you had to make divorce punitive.
Fast forward to now, 80% of divorces are initiated by women. Men don’t want to get divorced, generally. Further evidence that the economic stuff matters is that the rate goes up to 90% for educated women. The more choices you have, the more likely, as a woman, you are to get to divorce. Some of this, to add to our hypothesis, is simply that men are less well-equipped to deal with a single life than women. They’re less good at getting sex than women in a non-monogamous world, because for the average guy, no one wants to have sex with them.
Also, they’re not as good at social connections, caregiving, and all of those kinds of things. We know this because when men and women get divorced, men do much worse. They make worse choices. They tend not to have rich social connections and so on. I want to add a little bit to this bit of hypothesizing we have as to why men are much more likely to justify this system in your research.
That’s interesting. Maybe this would be a digression, but it’s interesting to think about where this might go or how this might change over time. There are many interesting things about what you said, too, or both of you. You’re describing these outcomes, like men are not very good at these things. Why are men being socialized that way, not to maintain friendships or build these social connections? It’s interesting to see the pattern, but why is society either condoning this or encouraging this? Why is it set up that way? It’s interesting.
One sad thing is that, as far as I see what’s happening in the world, and I’m not an expert on the topic, there are these statistics that come from dating apps where 5% of the men get all the likes from the women, and there’s a huge swath of men who cannot get dates. They swipe on everybody, and they cannot get dates. That’s very frustrating.
What is sad is that men in large parts of the world, for instance, in the US, are told, “If you have a stable job, you’re not in jail, and you’re not addicted to drugs, why should you not have a relationship?” The story is that a man needs to provide. People feel like they check that box, but they’re like, “Why am I not being rewarded for that behavior with a woman?” That is the frustration that many young men have.
They’re like, “I’m doing everything a man is supposed to do. I have a job. I have a car. My hair is cut and I brush my teeth, but it doesn’t translate into attracting women.” Why? It’s because women have their own car and their own jobs, and they brush their own teeth. Something else has to be brought to the table. That’s something that apparently many men are not socialized to do in a way. This is selling men a false picture of what it takes to be a whole person, in a way. This is tragic and potentially dangerous.
Men’s current state of unpopularity is not helping this. Their suffering is not as valued. I want to push back on something you said, Marty. I do recognize that the patriarchy benefits men, but it also costs them quite a lot. It’s not universally better to be a man. We know this in part because if it were universally better to be a man, men would be opting out of marriage.
The thing I always point to is the age gap. Men have 5.9 fewer years on this planet for a variety of reasons, and there’s no conversation around that. They suffer from loneliness, alcoholism, and suicide. They’re more likely to be incarcerated, homeless, etc. To your point, Iris, we’re not having these deep conversations about this evolved manhood and the expectations beyond. When everybody was coupled up, having a job and a car, brushing your teeth, and combing your hair was all you needed. People are like, “I need to do this thing. Let me find my best match, so to speak.” We also didn’t have Bumble and Tinder back then, either.
This is something that’s been starting to recur in the show as I’ve turned my attention to it. I appreciate you bringing this up, because getting men to evolve beyond the material appeal into a world where women don’t need the material quite as much is going to be an important thing, if you do want to accomplish this important stage in most people’s lives, which is having this style of relationship.
I’d agree. A refined comment would be that men’s advantages would be regarding power and status, but not necessarily well-being, length of life, or all these other things. That’s a good point to make, for sure.
Anecdotes And Commentary From The Solo Community
I want to wrap up here. I have some reader anecdotes and commentary, and I want to read a few of these off and get both of your reactions to them. Where the rubber meets the road with regard to this research is not when married people are talking to married people or partnered people are talking to partnered people. It’s when partnered people are talking to single people and treating single people in particular types of ways. There is this weird reversal where single people have to defend their choices or their situation. Some people choose to be single, and for other people, it’s forced upon them, to Iris’s point. You swipe, you try, you do all the things, and you can’t make it happen.
One reader says, “I live solo and feel no need to defend it, but when someone I care about is struggling with dating, I might gently suggest that being solo can be a pretty good life.” Another person wrote, “Funny how I often get asked for relationship advice from partnered people. Maybe I’m seen as a neutral outsider.” Another person wrote, “I was excelling at work. A mentor praised me and then said that if I found a partner, I’d enjoy life more and do better work. I was shocked and didn’t know how to respond.” You’re seeing the full gamut here.
It’s an interesting exercise if you were to switch the default. The default is to be in a relationship and get married. What if that’s not? What if we flipped that default, and you get to see all the other sides of things and get to defend it? It’s an interesting thought exercise.
I have another one. Iris, I want to hear your reaction to this. These are from the solo community, which people can sign up for free at PeterMcGraw.org/solo. This woman writes, “Too many stories of singleism to count, from doctors telling me I’d make a great mom to people assuming my chronic illness would be easier to manage with a partner. I push back hard. I proudly say I’m solo on purpose, and I correct marriage stats when people misrepresent them. I defend my lifestyle, and I defend other solos, too.”
What I think is interesting, in general, beyond solo and non-solo, and maybe this is system justification, is that people are so scared to admit that there are multiple ways of doing things. People say, “You can live only this type of life. You have to be partnered. You have to do this.” Even within that choice, there is a very small margin within which you have to move.
For instance, one of my dear people in my life had a relationship for more than twenty years. Unfortunately, her partner passed away. They lived together in one house, but the house was split up into two apartments. She lived downstairs, and he lived upstairs. They visited each other, but they also had their own thing, where he would be playing his drums in his room, and she would be reading.
They had their own kitchens, their own bathrooms, and their own bedrooms. That was a very solid, committed, monogamous twenty-year relationship, but it didn’t fit the bill because it didn’t have this merging of lives. People still judge them negatively for this, whereas I think, “That is a wonderful way to design your relationship in a way that meets the needs of both individuals.”
I’m always amazed that some people are like, “You can only be happy in an academic career that looks like this. If not, everything is lost. You can only be happy if you partner up. If not, everything is lost.” Whereas there are multiple realities that are possible that you can explore, even sequentially. Sometimes, you’re solo. Sometimes, you’re not. It opens your world to many different experiences.
To me, it’s striking how averse people are to considering alternatives because then, you create a win-win. You’re like, “It doesn’t matter what I do. There could be happiness at the end of any type of path.” Instead, people are like, “It’s a zero-sum. If I don’t pick this, I’ll be unhappy.” It’s striking. I don’t know what you could say or what would be a retort in which you could open up people’s minds to that possibility, instead of having to defend your own choice.
Different Ways To Live A Remarkable Life
I want to queue up a question for Marty based on this observation. I like to say there is no one remarkable life. There are remarkable lives. Moreover, there are different remarkable lives within a life. There are different paths. I don’t know the answer to this. I often talk about how some people like Italian food and some people like Indian food. You don’t bother fighting to try to convince someone that Indian is better than Italian or vice versa. You recognize that your preference is your preference when it comes to that.
When it comes to this, there are people in my life, despite years of being a fierce advocate for singles, who deep down believe that I would truly be happier if I could meet my person. They secretly hold up hope that I will come to some conclusion and then disavow all of this work that exists. Marty, I’m curious from your perspective, as we start to wrap here, if you were to give people some advice. They have that Aunt Sally type that I talk about, who is very opinionated and cares about you, but believes you would be much better off. What do you say to Aunt Sally to help her see that she is a system justificator, or however you would turn this into a noun?
That’s a fascinating question, which I’m not sure I know the answer to. You’d probably want to know why. What is driving that kind of pressure from that individual? Is it societal? Is it something about themselves? It would be trying to affirm them in some way and make them feel better about themselves, their relationship, their identity, and so on, which might assuage the pressure that they were placing on you. That would be one possibility. You’re trying to elevate them in some way. It would also maybe redirect the focus from being on you. That’s it. That’s not a great answer, but that’s some thought.
Related to this other idea that we’re talking about is this notion that you talked about, too. This prescription is for this narrow relationship, a very specified version of it. It’s something we know, and it’s predictable. It’s well-known. We’re not great at coming up with alternatives. That ties into this system motivation idea. We go along with societal conditions. What’s the alternative? If you had to come up with something else instead of democracy, nothing comes to mind. They’re extremes, but we don’t want to do those. We don’t want radical change.
Being in a committed relationship or marriage compared to being single or some other thing. That’s not easy for us to imagine what that life is like. That’s an exciting part of it. There are so many possible ways to flourish, but there’s not one way. You’re not getting the psychological benefits of certainty, predictability, and so on. You’re like, “ I’m not sure. What is that path? It’s unknown.” That’s the struggle here. If you can come up with those and offer those to people, that could help them with that as well. You do have a path that’s good and fulfilling.
Hearing you talk about it, I realize that I have an exploration mindset. Many different paths, for me, are interesting. Sequential lives within a life, to me, is interesting. For many people, many options are daunting. Knowing that there are so many ways that you could go may be paralyzing. They’re like, “I want to be told what I need to do here and which boxes I need to check in order to be happy.” That’s the predictability. I can see that.
Maybe one way to do it is to try and put people into an exploration mindset, however you would do that, once they’re trying to get you to walk that path. Aunt Sally, the example that you gave, reminded me of this Dutch saying, which is probably also a saying in other languages. It’s that shared suffering is half the suffering. I feel that’s sometimes why people are so adamant to get you on board with how they live, because they’re living through something difficult, so at least you are also not happy. Maybe that is one.
Iris, you’ve said this before on the show. You like this idea.
The other idea, as a social psychologist, is cognitive dissonance. It’s like, “I invested 30 years of my life in this project, so this must be a good project. You are showing me that I could have these solo holidays to Hawaii. That creates a huge conflict, so I must defend the choice that I made.”
This reminds me of talking to academics. There are three professors here. You ask an academic about the job, and they’re like, “It’s the best job in the world.” You listen to them, and they complain all the time about it. What you realize is that they have no other options. They just have to be academics. There’s nothing else they can do.
You can always start a podcast. Come on.
That’s right. First of all, for the reader who finds these answers not desirable, which I can understand because there are no good answers for this at the moment, you don’t have to defend anything. It’s not your responsibility to defend your choices. It’s not your responsibility to change what other people think. The work on stereotyping and prejudice reveals this.
If you are an underrepresented group, you’re constantly being bombarded with stereotypes and prejudice. It can be exhausting to fight it all the time, to have to reeducate people, and to do all these kinds of things. I have friends who are Black, gay, or whatnot. They’re like, “You think what you need to think. It’s not my responsibility to fix the world.”
The other one, and this would benefit me, is that you could give Aunt Sally my book and ask her to read it. She can learn a little bit about the invention of marriage and how cultural norms are designed to get people to behave in certain ways. She can read the 25-plus love letters from solos who are living remarkable lives and living their best lives as single people. It may get her thinking a little bit differently, or at least get her to understand your perspective.
Episode Wrap-up And Closing Words
There is one last thing I want to do with the two of you, reflecting on this conversation. Is there a takeaway or something that you think a solo reader could walk away with practically from this academic work? One of the problems that we have as academics is translating this work into actionable or practical benefits to society.
Maybe one thing to remember is that when people approach you with negative judgments about your solo status, your choices, or your lifestyle, and this goes for many situations, it’s not you. It’s them. They’re trying to tell themselves something. That is good to remember. It’s applicable to many situations where you think you’re in a conversation, but somebody’s talking to themselves.
On the point of Aunt Sally, and maybe your friends as well, Peter, remember that even though it might feel a little bit offensive when people say, “I hope you meet your person,” or why you would be so much happier, these people believe that. It also shows they want you to be happy. They have no idea what makes you happy, apparently, but from a compassionate approach, at least they want you to be happy in a way that they think would work. I don’t know if that’s of any comfort, but maybe Aunt Sally can get a small break.
It’s well-intentioned most of the time.
I agree with that, too. I think it is a good intention. That’s probably the positive angle here. When people do say things like this, it gives more insight into them than about you. It’s an interesting exercise to speculate, “Why do you think they’re doing this? What could be causing it for them?” Maybe it’s an insecurity that they have, or maybe they’re going along mindlessly with these social norms. That can be an interesting process rather than taking it to heart. Sometimes, it’s an innocent, unconscious process. Maybe that’s what you’re seeing.
I’ll close with this from a fellow academic, Kris Marsh, who has appeared on the show. She has a genius way to deal with these kinds of situations. She simply says, “Why do you say that?” It has this amazing, disarming element because it turns it back to people and forces them to justify their justifications. Sometimes, they realize that they don’t have very good reasons for saying that.
She says, “Why do you say that?” They say some stuff, and she’s like, “Why do you say that?” It turns it around. A lot of them eventually are like, “Forget it. Don’t worry about it,” because they’re having to do some heavy lifting in a way they’re not because they’re mostly speaking platitudes. They’re repeating this thing that’s out there. I’ll offer that one up as the last one.
As a slightly funny anecdote to that, I have a three-year-old daughter, and she does this to me every day. She’s like, “Why?” and she wins. Eventually, it’s me saying, “I don’t know,” every time. It’s very effective.
Pretend you’re three years old. Iris, it’s great to see you. I always appreciate your contributions to the solo movement. Marty, thank you for joining us and sharing this work. You spent a lot of years puzzling over these things and navigating peer review. You did this on your own. You did it solo, which is unusual.
That’s great.
To clarify, there were other coauthors in other parts of this research.
For some reason, I thought it was just you. I’ll get that fixed.
The review paper was written by me.
The review paper was by you. You have a review paper about this. I’m not completely off. That’s highly unusual. Thank you for sharing your perspective and joining us.
It’s so exciting to be here. There was very interesting, thought-provoking stuff. There are lots of exciting things to think about, so thank you.
Cheers.
Important Links
- Martin Day
- Dr. Iris. K. Schneider
- Waiting – Part 1
- Waiting – Part 2
- Are You Thriving Or Coping?
- Truth or Truth with Iris Schneider
- Why People Defend Relationship Ideology
- A ‘Family Of One’ With Kris Marsh
- Pride and Prejudice
About Martin Day
Martin V. Day is a social psychologist and Associate Professor at Memorial University of Newfoundland. His research explores how people rationalize the status quo, with a focus on system justification, moral judgment, and relationship beliefs. His work sheds light on why we cling to cultural ideologies—even when they don’t serve us.
About Iris Schneider
Iris Schneider is a Professor of Social Psychology at the Technical University Dresden. She studies ambivalence and difficulty in decision-making and judgment.