It’s 11/11—Singles’ Day—and we’re celebrating Solo style. First, Bella DePaulo returns to talk about her new book Single at Heart, why solo diners are more influential than you think, and what it really means to thrive alone. Then, Christina Campbell (aka CC) joins to unveil the Singles Bill of Rights—a bold call for equality in a world built for two. Onwards!
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Listen to Episode #254 here
Single at Heart, Singles Bill of Rights, and Singles’ Day
Welcome back. Before we get to this important, excellent episode. I’ve been thinking about an offering for the Solo community, ways to help you live more remarkably. I’m exploring a personal finance workshop for singles, group coaching, or one-on-one solo coaching, perhaps even a relationship design workshop. It’s not about finding a partner per se, but about designing the kinds of connections that actually fit your life. These will be paid experiences, and I would love your input as I consider which of them to pursue. If one or more have an interest, let me know. It will help me decide. To do so, please join the Solo community. Sign up for the newsletter or shoot me an email. All of these options are available at PeterMcGraw.org/solo or on the contact form of my web page. Thanks so much, and let’s get started.
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Welcome back. This episode drops on Singles Day 11/11, a date that began as a tongue-in-cheek counter to Valentine’s Day among students at Nanjing University in China. The four ones in 11/11 represent bare sticks. A playful symbol for single individuals. What started as a celebration of solo status has exploded into the world’s largest shopping event. Proof that single people are not just thriving. They’re a global force economically.
I read about this in an essay for the conversation, arguing that given the rise of singles, it’s just a matter of time before Singles Day comes to America and the West, more generally. We will address singles in commerce in this episode, so let’s get started. My first guest is returning to the podcast to talk about a new endeavor related to the Solo Movement, the Singles Bill of Rights, a manifesto and policy blueprint demanding equal rights protections and recognition for single people in a world built for two. You will remember her as a guest co-host for the Unmarried Equality episode and the Self-Contained episode. Please welcome back Christina Campbell, AKA CC.
Thanks, Peter. It’s really nice to be back talking to you again.
Catching Up With Bella DePaulo
It is. It has been too long. We’re going to talk about the Singles Bill of Rights, but first, I want to catch up with a previous guest who has appeared on the most popular episode of Solo, One Is a Whole Number: The Science of Singlehood. No one has done more to bust myths of singlehood and advocate for them than her. Frankly, I could not have launched the solo project without her decades of previous work. Please welcome back Bella DePaulo.
Thank you for that wonderful introduction. I didn’t know that it was the most popular episode. It’s great to hear, and thank you for welcoming me back.
My pleasure. It does help that it is episode number two. It’s a very early start. Now, it’s over 250 episodes ago. It’s long overdue to have you back. I think the best place to start is what has changed in your world in the last years. How does it feel to be re-entering this conversation now with your latest book, Single at Heart?
It has been exciting. I think single people are finally having their moment, especially single people who like being single and are not about to apologize for that. There have been more and more single people all around the world. Even people who eventually marry are getting to it at later and later ages. There are also more singles advocacy groups. More scholars are identifying as scholars of single life, and there are more happily single people who are finding each other and realizing that there are more of us than anyone ever imagined.
My Single at Heart book is a validation and celebration of that. That’s the good part. Now, the sore of that part is that whenever a devalued group starts to make progress, there is backlash. People are threatened by that. What we have now is a very active, well-funded pro-marriage right-wing group of organizations, a whole series of organizations that advocate for marriage very strongly. I call them marriage supremacists.
They publish books with very subtle titles, such as Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families and Save Civilization. That’s what we single people are up against, and they’re taken very seriously. That’s frustrating. On the other hand, it means we are hitting a nerve. We are getting noticed. We’re doing something important enough to make the marriage people feel threatened, and that’s a good thing.
I certainly have seen this rise, especially the book that you mentioned. I guess that’s inevitable. That’s your argument. Wait until the Singles Bill of Rights hits, and we’re going down. A lot of PR, and perhaps a bit more backlash.
Christina had better brace herself.
Life Of Being Single At Heart
I want to talk about this term, single at heart. This is something that you have spearheaded. How do you go about defining someone single at heart? For people who read the book, what is the big takeaway?
Let me tell you what the single at heart means, first of all. For people who are single at heart, and of course, I’m one of them, single life is our best life. It’s our most meaningful, fulfilling, and psychologically rich life. It’s also our most authentic life. Single is who we are. We are happy and flourishing because we are single, not in spite of it. The risk to us is not what we would miss if we did not put a romantic partner at the center of our lives, but what we would miss if we did.
This is obviously the culmination of many books here. What is the new concept of this? Is this the idea that there is a personality trait?
I’ve been writing about single people who are flourishing for a long time. What I’m saying in this book is that people who are single cannot just be happy and flourishing, but they can actually be doing better than if they were in a romantic couple. I bring the goods to show that. It’s also a more personal book than my first book, which was Singled Out: How Singles are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After.
In this recent book, Single at Heart: The Power, Freedom, and Heart-Filling Joy of Single Life, I tell more of my own story and stories of lots of people who are single at heart, mostly in Western countries, but also around the world. You can see from their stories what it is that makes their life so fulfilling as single people. Single Out, my first book, was published many years ago. In those years, there has been so much more research.
What I put together in this book, I could point to research backing up my claims. For example, there’s a very compelling chapter in Single at Heart about later life. It shows that, contrary to all stereotypes, once single people get older, they get happier and happier, and that the people who are single at heart are especially likely to be flourishing. They are less likely to be lonely.
They’re more likely to have maintained their ties with the important people in their lives, whereas the people who got married and then put their friends on the back burner are more vulnerable. Single people learn how to do all sorts of things for themselves, so that they learn how to find people to help them. Whereas in a marriage cohabiting situation, you count on your partner to do their unfair share of the work, and then you either never learn how to do those things or you’re out of practice.
Christina, do you think of yourself as single at heart?
I think in the past. I had been. One day, maybe.
Just May.
Thank you.
For the audience, they are probably familiar with this, but I have this categorization of Someday Singles, a couple who ride the relationship escalator; the Just May Singles, who would like to, but life is okay if it doesn’t happen; and the No Way Singles, which probably has the most overlap between the single at heart folks. They’re not looking for a relationship at the moment or perhaps forever, and then of course, our very spicy New Way Singles who are bending and breaking the rules of the relationship escalator. CC, you were saying.
I think in the past, I was a Just May, where if I met someone amazing, sure. Why not? No big deal. Now, I am a No Way. Actually, in the past, I used to be a Just May, but I also was a New Way because I thought if I could be in a relationship with someone living across the street from me or in the next house over, that would be interesting. I would have maintained a lot of my freedom, but have someone right there. Now, I’m definitely a No Way. There’s absolutely no way I’m ever getting married. I’m not even remotely interested in any romantic relationship. A lot of single people may not want to get married, but they are interested in that relationship.
Did something switch? Is there a moment in time when you became single at heart, or did you recognize your single at heartness?
Maybe it was after my last relationship, and I was unhappy with the judgment I used for being with that person. I thought the benefits that I gained from being with that person were so small in comparison to what I lost, just like what Bella was talking about. That was the point where I switched over. I remember when I kicked him out of the house, he left his keys on the table. I came in and I saw the keys. I felt very sad for about 60 seconds, and then I was like, “Whoo. The house was mine,” and there was no going back from there. I was like, “I am definitely single at heart now and forever.”
How Solo Consumers Are Shaping The Market
That’s great. One of the things that singles do, especially those who are single at heart, is they do things alone a lot. Not that they are lonely. Not that they’re disconnected, but they have more solitude out there. Bella, you wrote about some emerging research around these solo consumers. People who do things alone in public, who dine solo, who go to the museum. It is something I do quite often. I’m a member of a couple of museums. I stop in, I walk, I sit, and I journal. I was going to the movies alone. I love going to the movies alone. This research finds that these people who do things alone, who are these solo consumers, can be quite influential in the marketplace. It sounds fascinating. What did the study find?
This is part of a whole program of research by Rebecca Ratner and her colleagues. In this series of studies, they went into TripAdvisor and looked at more than 14,000 recommendations or reviews of places to dine and the museums. They found that the reviews that were posted by people who had the experience alone, so they were dining alone or they went to the museum alone, those reviews were trusted more than the reviews of people who had dined or gone to a museum with other people. They were seen as more helpful. They got more thumbs-up ratings.
There was another study they did where they showed people Facebook posts about a movie they had just seen. The post was saying how much they liked it. The poster mentioned either that they had seen it alone or that they were with other people. In that experiment, the people in the experiment were asked which movie trailer they would like to see: the one from the person who recommended the movie after going by themselves, or the one who recommended the movie after going with somebody else. They wanted to watch the trailer of the movie recommended by the person who saw it alone.
Why is that?
What they find is that people think that someone who is out alone, dining alone, going to a movie alone, or to a museum is more genuinely interested in the movie or the event. They aren’t just going because some other person wants to, and they’re going along. Another thing they found is that people believe that solo consumers are more focused on the quality of their experience.
Rather than getting dragged along, the consumption experience is secondary to the time they’re spending with a date, with a partner, etc. What I like about this study is that it makes sense when you hear it, but it’s not something that you feel like you already know, if that makes sense.
Yeah, I love studies like that, but I’m always on the lookout for positive studies about single people. I would have never thought to do this one.
To me, there are some pretty obvious real-world implications. If you’re in a business and you’ve learned about this, what are the things that you would suggest that the business do differently?
Restaurant owners, businesses, and all the rest should treat solo consumers as the valuable customers that they are catered to. Treat them as special. Remember that their reviews of your place of business are going to be more influential, so treat them that way. It can be small things like when you’re about to seat someone who is in a restaurant. Don’t say like, “Just one?” Don’t hide them in the back of the restaurant, near the swinging door, near the kitchen, or something like that. Give them good service and attention, and hope that they like your place because it will matter.
I’ve been leaning into this topic myself, especially given my job as a business school professor. This article, which comes out on Singles Day, is about the rise of the single consumer and how so many Western businesses are completely asleep at the wheel about this. Their assumptions are sometimes wrong. There’s a Japanese ramen restaurant, very common in Japan, but there are even American locations that are focused on solo diners. One of the things that is different about solo diners than parties of two or more is that you actually turn tables faster. Solos actually spend less time in the restaurant.
That’s a great point.
It’s because they’re just eating. They’re not talking, lounging, hanging out, and all those kinds of things. The thought is I’d rather serve two people rather than one because I get double the amount of food and drink, except when you create space for solo diners, you can serve more of them over time than groups.
Also, that argument about wanting two people at the table or more only holds true if your restaurant is fully booked all the time.
That’s right. I think that you’re seeing this in Asia. They are at the forefront of this, somewhat ironically. Asia, as you know, is having this rise of singles for a variety of reasons. These Asian businesses have single-seat karaoke, and there are Cinemas that are designed for solo movie watchers. There are obviously changes in housing, for example, like these mini mansions. These are very small footprint apartments. Again, these are starting to come to the United States, but I think that the United States and Europe are lagging behind and missing out on a lot of opportunities, especially around doing things alone in public.
How Society Is Discouraging Solo Life
I want to talk to you a little bit about where you are in life. You’ve been doing this for more than two decades. Many years ago, you published your first book. You got an early start. You’ve written about it. You’ve researched. You’ve spoken. You got TED Talks. You’re in the media about single life, and especially rambusting these myths. I agree with you. I’ve only been doing this for a little more than a few years. I feel the same way.
Now, there are books and there are podcasts, and there are more news articles around this. When I first started, I wondered if I was too early. You must have thought this for years. Your dream of seeing singles achieve equal status in the world must have felt out of reach for a long time. How are you feeling about it now?
Mostly optimistic with a big caveat. As more people are staying single, as you said, there are books, podcasts, articles in the media, and many more that are defying the stereotypes. Not just the old, “Oh, those poor things.” We have more singles advocacy groups. That’s a good thing. Of course, we’re out of a very scary time in the United States with our political situation, all in on traditional marriage and children. They actually have floated ideas for rewarding places that have greater rates of marriage and child rearing.
That’s all discouraging, but there are some optimistic things, too. For example, remember when, during the campaign, JD Vance made this snide comment about childless cat women and how they had nothing to live for, and some other ridiculous thing. He was trying to shame us. I don’t have a cat, but I consider myself an honorary cat owner with no kids. He was trying to shame us. Instead, what happened was that childless cat ladies came forth and declared themselves that. Other people joined in, the childless dog lovers. Everybody wanted a piece of this action, and then there was a merchandising spree where there were t-shirts, hats, and mugs.
What that said to me is it’s not going to be so easy to shame us anymore. There’s a group of single people, and even people who aren’t single are not having it with these ridiculous “You’re a childless cat lady.” We are proud of being single. If we’re not a single person, we’re proud of people who are identifying and embracing their single lives. That’s a whole new thing.
Another thing that I found disheartening is that I think single people who like being single have been put on the defensive for so long. I think that science shows that if you get married, you get happier, which is not true. They’ve been made to question themselves. What I do in Single at Heart is talk about what’s so joyful and fulfilling about being single, the freedom, the solitude that we crave instead of fear, being the captains of our own life ships, and all the rest of it.
The day before Single at Heart was published, I published an essay in the HuffPost saying, “I live alone my whole life. Here’s what people get wrong.” I talked about what it is I find so fulfilling about single life. I immediately started getting personal emails, social media messages, and then I eventually got snail mail cards, all from people saying, “Thank you. I have never felt so validated before.” That essay went viral.
It shows that there’s this craving out there where single people who like being single are still wondering, “If I don’t want to be romantically coupled, does that mean there’s something wrong with me?” I actually have people who have written to me, emails from out of the blue, people I don’t know who say, “I love being single. I like having time to myself. I like having control over my money. I like being able to attend to as many people as I want without making someone above all the rest,” then they’ll say, “Do you think that means there’s something wrong with me?”
That is astonishing because they have what everybody wants, a life that they love, but because it’s a single life, they are doubting themselves. They’re thinking, “Maybe there’s something wrong with me because I’m happy being single.” Hearing a different story about that, and that you should feel proud of yourself, was welcoming.
I am of the mind that you are not going to hold this back. There is no going back to 1960, when almost everyone got married and did so at age 21. You’re going to ignore the amount of incentives or shaming. CC, you co-authored this essay that documented the great cost of being single. I still like to say that single living is luxury living. It is costly to live on your own. You can’t share expenses. The world is not built for you. There aren’t a thousand laws and regulations benefiting you in the same way that married people are, yet people still do it. The rational thing, if you cared about costs, would be for you to do it. Adding additional incentives or additional costs is not going to stop this flood.
I think that’s true.
Unpacking The Singles Bill Of Rights
One piece of evidence of this change is the Singles Bill of Rights that CC and others have been working on. It’s fascinating.
It is such great work, such important work. Thank you so much for doing it.
Thank you.
Talk to us about this. For most in our audience, this is new information. This has been happening in the background for a while. Why was it important to frame this as a Bill of Rights, rather than a policy brief or an advocacy paper? Why this particular form?
Before I answer that, I want to say that I didn’t actually conceive of the Bill of Rights. It was conceived by Tracy Houston, whom Peter knows from the Solo community. She enlisted Madeleine Crown, who was also very active in the Solo community. They are the ones who initially conceived it. The reason they framed it as a Bill of Rights is that the rhetoric of rights is powerful.
If you’re talking to the people who are your allies, or your haters, or people who have never thought about marital status discrimination, using that wording has a little bit more drama. I think you need a little bit of drama to open people’s eyes up to the problem of singlism because singlism is so entrenched, insidious, and hard for a lot of people to see.
Coming out and saying, “Look, we have rights,” is a way of counteracting the hiddenness of singlism. It’s also a way, as Bella talked about, of validating single people’s experiences. In this case, not necessarily validating them being proud and happy being single, but validating the negative experiences that they’ve lived. The Singles Bill of Rights talks explicitly about laws in the United States that caused financial and healthcare harm to single people because those laws privileged married people.
What’s an example of that?
There are so many. If you want to know in real detail about these, you can read the Singles Bill of Rights. You can also read Bella’s book, Singled Out, the one we are talking about. Social Security laws, tax laws, gift taxes, and retirement account laws are some of the hardcore ones, but they’re everywhere. The medical world discriminates against single people, and the insurance world. Insurance isn’t allowed to charge single people more and more. They used to be, but they don’t need more. Because health insurance is tied to spouses, that gives married people a lot of benefits that single people don’t have. They end up paying more for their health insurance.
The Social Security one is very compelling. Two people, one single, one married, pay into Social Security their whole lives. They pay the same amount of money into Social Security. They both die on the same day. One of them gets to continue their benefit for their spouse. The single one is not able to designate a beneficiary. You can’t give it to your sister. You can’t give it to your platonic partner. You can’t give it to charity. There’s no other mechanism there. Only a spouse can get that benefit.
No one can give their benefits to a single person.
That’s right.
There was a study published showing that because married people can access either their own benefits or both through their partners, if their partners are higher, that married people, on average, get $1,000 a month more in Social Security benefits than people who have never been married. It’s not only that, but also single men are paid less than married men, even if they have the same qualifications. This lifelong singlism or discrimination against single people shows up in later life when you literally pay for it.
As you were saying, when I die, my Social Security benefits as a lifelong single person go back into the system, and they support somebody else’s spouse or even their ex or their series of exes. If you have been married to someone for at least ten years and you get divorced, under certain circumstances, you can still tap into your ex’s Social Security benefits.
Is that right? I didn’t know that. To CC, one element of the Singles Bill of Rights that we are trying to bring attention to is how US law treats the nuclear family as the basic unit of society. It’s not the individual. Not a family of one, but a family of two or more. What does the world look like if we flip that, and we end up having a family of one?
My great dream is to create policies where every single person has the right to designate a friend or an important person in their life so that they can receive equal benefits to what a spouse would receive. I could choose a person who is important in my life to receive Social Security, for instance. I could choose a person who is important in my life that I would like to pass money along to as an untaxed gift, as the amount of money I can give as a single person is currently limited. If I were married, I could pass a whole bunch more money to my spouse without being taxed.
Ideally, we would change laws so that the spousal relationship is either irrelevant across the spectrum of our legislation, or single people have the option to choose a particular friend who would receive certain sets of benefits.
It is interesting. We’re not creating a new society. If you were creating a new society, then you would make the individual the basic unit, and then a married couple would be just two individuals. Because a married couple was considered an individual, the solution is this idea of designating a “partner.” Maybe romantic, maybe non-romantic. Maybe a friend, maybe a sibling. It could be a friend, family, etc., in this way, in order to create equal benefits. It’s an interesting thought experiment that if you’re going to start a new nation, what would you do versus trying to adjust an existing nation?
We have to proceed with the adjustment phase, and the hope is that as we make those adjustments, people become more aware of what kind of discrimination there is, and then more changes will happen. Eventually, we’ll get to the point where most of our legislation is focused on the individual. We do have to start as if it’s an adjustment as opposed to being like, “Now we’re going to regard individuals as the baseline,” because that won’t happen.
Achieving Equilibrium Between Married And Singles
I have one question, and Bella, I know you’re a psychologist, but you’ve thought so deeply about this topic. What I don’t know is where the equilibrium point falls. In the United States right now, it’s about 50/50 married-unmarried adults. At some point, you could imagine that married people become a minority, perhaps even a small minority. Where does it level off? At that point, voting power shifts. At some point, politicians are going to wake up. This is something you talked a lot about. I see your posts on X when you respond to a politician who talks about families. They’re like, “Our families.”
Working families, like two-year-olds are great workers.
That’s right. You’re like, “What about us singles?” What I don’t know, and I don’t know when or how, is where this equilibrium will lie. You could imagine it gets so skewed that, not in the near future, but in the distant future, there could be a rather major revamp.
There could be, but it’s so hard to predict. In the 1950s, when practically everyone in the United States got married, no matter their sexual orientation or identity, if you weren’t heterosexual, you just faked it. I thought then that was going to continue. No one was seeing it for what it was, which was the exception, not the rule. When more people started staying single and getting divorced, that was not anticipated, so I’m not going to make any prediction.
That’s well said. We know that point in time in history was a bit of a pinnacle. You go back in history. Obviously, if you go back far enough in human history, no one got married because there was no such thing as marriage. People partnered in various ways. The invention of marriage is rather recent in human history. Even with the invention of marriage, it’s not like everybody was married.
Ideal Legal Reforms For Singles
The example I used in my book Solo is the game of life. The original game of life was not structured when it got revamped in the 1960s, which was this very clear path that everybody followed. That involved stopping and adding a pink or blue peg to your car for your spouse, and then adding more pink or blue pegs to your car for children, and then getting to retirement. That was part of that cultural phenomenon. It is interesting that as we have changed, these things should shift again. CC, if you and the single Bill of Rights crowd wave a wand and pass one legal reform starting tomorrow, what would it be?
I can’t answer for Tracy and Madeleine, but they would probably agree with me. I’m going to cheat. I’m going to combine the two. I would say uncoupling health insurance benefits from marriage and uncoupling disability benefits from marriage. Those would be my preferred changes. For health insurance, even though I believe it’s no longer legal for health insurance companies to charge singles, more singles still pay more for health insurance because they can’t piggyback on their spouse’s policy.
They may lose out on jobs because they can’t get rid of their health insurance, and coast on their spouse’s plan. They get dinged in all sorts of ways that are not related to direct charges, but more to their circumstances of whether they’re married or not. I would like to do that. I would like to untie disability benefits from marriage.
This person who worked on the SBR with us, Jill Summerville, had a good quote about how disabled people are impacted by marriage privilege. I’ll read it to you. “Any cultural or legal biases that privileged marriage in building a support network, or honoring an existing support network, disproportionately affect disabled people because they are less likely, than able-bodied people, to be married, and they are more likely to have permanent or recurring lifelong medical needs.”
The reason I chose disability benefits as one of the first magic changes I would make with my wand is that I am passionate about the intersectionality of singlism and how we’re discriminating against half the adult population of the United States. We are hitting people who are part of marginalized demographics, like disabled people, people of color, LGBTQ+, etc. We’re hitting them doubly hard.
Starting with disability benefits would be a good way to start to dismantle some of that intersectionality impact that singlism causes when it’s combined with other isms. Addressing singlism is a good way to hit back against the unfair treatment of minorities and marginalized people. People are already seeing the financial impacts and other impacts of racism, ageism, and discrimination based on sexual orientation. If they are also single and they’re seeing the financial impacts of being single as well, that’s a double whammy. Addressing singlism is a good way to support people who are marginalized in other ways. As an advocacy community, we need to lean into the intersectionality of it.
That’s a great point.
Bella, if I gave you the wand, or if CC passes the wand to you. How would you wave it in terms of thinking about the Singles Bill of Rights?
There are so many things.
I know, but just one.
I’m going to do two, sorry. I take what CC said and take it to the next level, and totally separate benefits and protections from legal marital status. It doesn’t matter. It’s anything, healthcare, disability, taking personal leave, medical leave, or grief. In everything, take marital status out of it. That’s an example on that side.
There are big things to talk about, but one of the things that’s close to my heart is all the cultural and personal issues. I would like us to get to the point where no single person is ever again put on the defensive for being single. No more asking, “Why are you single,” or even worse, “Why are you still single?” If it’s not clear what’s wrong with questions like that or any question you might want to entertain, I have a suggestion. I give lots of examples in my Single at Heart book. That’s to flip the script. Imagine asking a married person, “Why are you married? Why is a nice, beautiful, smart, and engaging person like you still married?”
I like friends to be more highly valued and not just dismissed as friends. There was this famous Bridget Jones quip that maybe some people still remember. She used to call married people smug married. I would like married people not to be so smug anymore. That’s not a put-down. I don’t want anything bad to happen to them, but I don’t think anyone should feel like they are superior because they’re married or in a romantic relationship. I want people who are single to not just feel happy, but to embrace their single lives, to be proud of feeling single. Those are my big ones. I consider them one big point with lots of subpoints. Let’s stop this, “You poor thing. You’re single,” and switch to, “It’s so great.”
One of the things that stood out to me is that no one is making the argument, and I actually don’t think that you ever make the argument, Bella, that being single is better than being married. It’s just better for some people. It’s better at some points in time.
That’s important because people who write about singles, write books, and try to be all careful not to offend anyone, they’ll say, “Single and married is the same thing. There are pluses and minuses to everything.” Okay, but the point is that for some people, being single is better. It is your place of flourishing. It’s your place of authenticity. We should not shy away from saying that. The reverse is true too. For some people, being married or in a romantic couple is their best life, but everybody assumes that, so nobody needs to write a book about that. It’s the assumption or the conventional wisdom. I want to put into play unconventional wisdom.
Single People Do Not Have Unhealthy Lifestyles
Thank you. I want to pivot back to health care discrimination. CC, you mentioned that at the outset. This is something that the bill documents. Single people are less likely to get transplants. They’re less taken seriously by doctors. There’s a bunch of evidence that Bella has talked about out there in the research. What’s going on with this medical bias, and how does the bill address it?
Bella has written about this. Dr. Joan DelFattore has written about this as well. There are a lot of studies that erroneously say that single people have more unhealthy lifestyles or are less healthy than they would be if they got married. The studies have been shown to have been poorly designed or inaccurate. It’s not true that singles would be healthier if they were married, but because of this propaganda, a lot of healthcare providers and workers assume that single people’s lives are harder, or that they have no support systems, or that they’re not as valuable as married patients. That’s where you get this tendency for doctors to be less likely to give transplant permission to patients or more aggressive treatment.
That is so important. Joan DelFattore’s work is life-saving in that doctors understand that single people often do have support systems. They might have more robust support systems than someone who is relying almost exclusively on a spouse. She’s writing a book now. When that comes out, that’s going to be important.
The SBR doesn’t really address this issue as much as it flags it. It says it exists, gives references for the statistics, and the quotes. For instance, Joan DelFattore says that physicians will withhold treatment because they assume the patient’s “lack of fighting spirit.” The SBR flags these facts, flags these quotes, gives references for them, and basically provides a concise collection of factoids for people to go to if they want to talk to their representatives or talk to their doctor about, “Look, there’s this pervasive discrimination against single people. Here are the facts.” The SBR provides that context and helps people spread awareness. It does offer some solutions, but mostly the solutions are more like, as Bella talked about, we need to separate all the benefits from marriage. They need to be completely separate institutions.
One of the things about the SBR that I think is very exciting is that it’s so PR worthy. It’s one of those topics that journalists are going to latch onto. I think it will. It’s so juicy as a potential topic, especially as you two are pointing out at this juncture in time, when there’s a bit of backlash, where there’s more awareness. In that way, I think it’s going to draw a lot of attention to this movement.
As you’re saying, CC, the people who read it are going to give them the facts. It’s basically an abstract of a lot of Bella’s work and other people’s work in terms of busting myths and raising awareness there. I see it as a win-win. Even if it doesn’t have an immediate impact on policy, if you’re wand doesn’t work, it’s still going to bring light to this issue.
I’ve had the same experience, Bella. People send me messages saying they feel seen. They thought they were the only ones. They thought that there was something wrong with them. It breaks my heart. I was one of those people. I thought there was something wrong with me for not wanting or being able to have this particular style of relationship. The more people who can feel that way and embrace their singlehood and open up a path to living their best life, is very exciting.
What’s also interesting is that there will be people who will rise, sending messages on social media or maybe emails, whatever. It feels bad at the moment, but that means they’re hearing it. Even though they’re reacting negatively, that means it made an impression. Somewhere down the line, they might actually come to see the point and embrace it even if they’re not doing it at the moment.
I’m glad you said that. I have to say that my experience has been almost overwhelmingly positive. I don’t get that much outside. Occasionally, people from the community will beat me up a little bit about something, but outside, there’s less so. One of the things that I like to say is even if you are in the happiest marriage in the world and you’re living your absolute best life, someone important to you is single. Maybe you have a parent who is widowed or divorced, a sister or brother who is single at heart, or you have a child who is single, a co-worker, or a dear friend. It’s so pervasive now that it’s almost impossible for someone not to know at least one person who has experienced stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination in this way.
Hating On Women Who Choose Singlehood
Can I circle back to how Bella had a bunch of haters, and Peter happened to say, “I haven’t had that much hate?” That speaks to what we were talking earlier about the intersectionality of singlism. Bella is a woman, and Peter is not. As a woman myself who used to be pretty active on the interwebs, there’s a lot of hate out there for women who talk about what we talked about.
The spinster-bachelor difference is very much the case, the two versions of singlehood. That is very true that women feel the brunt of their singleness more so than men do in terms of outside perception. Thank you for bringing that up.
You don’t get single women being accused of being serial killers, so there’s that.
That’s one benefit.
In the last chapter of my Single at Heart book, I open it with one of these nasty messages I got. Here it is. “Hi, Bella. I just want to let you know that single people are inferior in every way. They are worthless, useless, lazy, and stupid. There’s nothing I hate like single people. Anyone single is completely defective. Otherwise, someone would love them. Bella, I know you found some micro-macro aggressions there, but I want you to use all of your Harvard skills to understand that it’s entirely your fault. You’re single, therefore you suck. You suck because you’re single. Say it out loud. You are nothing, worthless.”
Oh my goodness. I shouldn’t be laughing at that, but it’s so absurd.
Where did that person write you from?
An email address with a name, whatever.
That might be a little bit of dull protest, too much. I’m sorry you received that.
In a way, it’s interesting because next in that chapter, I talk about what this all means, and how interesting it is that the single people who are most likely to be disparaged are the ones who are happy. If you’re a single person and you say, “I wish I were married. I wish I were going to meet someone. There must be something wrong with me,” you’ll get sympathy.
That’s a good point.
For us who are happily single, we are threatening the prevailing worldview. We’re threatening the ideologies that people are invested in. They want to believe that if they get married, they are superior to single people, and that only married people know true happiness.
They want to believe they made the right decision for themselves.
Many do, and some don’t. This is the nature of life and the nature of relationships. I had an episode on Friend Breakups. Even friendships can end.
Yeah. That can be devastating. Yet they aren’t taking it seriously romantically.
What’s Next For The Singles Bill Of Rights
It’s true. You and a friend of twenty years broke up. You don’t get the same sympathy if you and your spouse break up. What’s next for the Single Bill of Rights, CC?
It’s going to be a living document. We’re going to post it on the website of a reinvigorated nonprofit that advocates for singles’ rights called Singles Equality. The website is going to be SinglesEquality.com. Singles Equality evolved from Unmarried Equality, which Peter and I talked about on a previous podcast with CEO Gordon Morris. That non-profit has essentially sponsored the Bill of Rights. We’re posting it on SinglesEquality.com. It’s going to be a living document, as I said. We’ll be soliciting information from readers and the general public.
When we wrote the SBR, Bella gave us a lot of feedback. A lot of smart people in the singles advocacy community gave us a lot of help with composing it. We’re going to continue to solicit advice from them, but also from readers of the website. It’s going to be one of many resources eventually that are going to be on SinglesEquality.com. Our resource list is not super updated right now, but it is going to get there eventually.
Singles Equality is also going to try to get more into advocacy, and try to flag laws and policies that are either being developed, challenged or that don’t exist and need to, and try to get the public to be aware of those issues so that the public can engage with their legislators and other policy makers who have more power and knowledge than we do about the nitty-gritty of changing laws.
The board of Singles Equality is looking for volunteers, and they’re also specifically looking for a treasurer. If you have any interest in that, please contact SinglesEquality.com. The email address is UE@unmarried.org. That email address is a holdover from when the organization was known as Unmarried Equality, now Singles Equality.
I’ll make a very clear call, which is that if we have someone who works as a publicist or who works in PR, talk about a ripe opportunity to exercise your muscles as a publicist. This movement is not well-funded. There aren’t think tanks. They’re not foundations that are giving money for this to the degree that Bella had mentioned.
There will be one in 2026.
That’s what I wanted to bring up, but the marriage advocates have deeper pockets.
They’ve been in this game for years and years, if not decades.
Empowering Single People And Making Their Lives Better
The SBR folks have volunteered their time. A lot of this work is done as charity and through volunteerism, so a call for a publicist out there. This is a perfect way to talk about your new project or your new endeavor, Bella.
I have had this fantasy for years and years of wanting to support anyone who wants to empower single people and make their lives better. It could be things like writing fiction, TV scripts, movies, or plays featuring single people who are flourishing and who are not looking to unsingle themselves. It could be people who want to educate or raise awareness about issues like tax equality or whether single people’s needs are being overlooked, for example, our food banks, focusing on families and ignoring single people, things like that.
In any way people can imagine improving the lives of single people, I would love to support them, but it was a fantasy because I didn’t have any money. Recently, a friend left me what I consider a big amount of money, though nothing in comparison to what the right-wing marriage supremacists have. I am using it to create the foundation for the empowerment of single people. It’s a charitable organization, a 501(c)(3).
I won’t be able to fund direct advocacy or lobbying, but all the other educational and awareness-raising kinds of programs will be a possibility. It’s in the works now, and it should be up and running in 2026. This has been a dream come true. What I thought would happen is I would never be able to do it in my lifetime, but if I had any money left and I died, that could go to the foundation, but now I get to see it in my lifetime. It’s very exciting.
That’s very exciting. If you think about advocacy, the model of advocacy that I talk about is there’s like the first level, which is you just live your best life as a single person, and people see it. It matters. Someone says, “I had an aunt. She never married, she was so much fun, she did all these things, she traveled the world, and she adopted a child. She did all this stuff, and it changed my view and showed me that there was a different path.”
The next level is I simply tell two friends who tell two friends, “There’s this book, Singled Out. There’s this book, Single at Heart. There’s this Singles Bill of Rights. I think you should read it. There’s this podcast. I think you would like it.” It’s that kind of level. The next level is trying to address society in a broader way, perhaps through institutions or otherwise. For example, we spent a lot of time talking about politics, laws, and policies that businesses have around employment, laws, regulations, and politics, which the Singles Bill of Rights is focused on.
The other thing that I’ve been turning my attention to is commerce. In the world, in America in particular, businesses change culture. At one point in time, LGBTQ+ people were completely ignored by businesses. They weren’t shown in advertising, and they weren’t services and products created for their specific needs. Suddenly, they’re like, “This is a group that’s being ignored. There’s money to be made, and thus, you have this shift in culture. You mentioned the third one, which is the media, television, film, music, how singles are being portrayed, and how marriage is being portrayed. That, again, affects culture.
Episode Wrap-Up And Closing Words
It’s part of the reason that I enjoy Casablanca so much. I forgot what year that was. Let’s say 1960 or something like that, or ‘50s something, black and white. Spoiler alert, you know the movie ends with the protagonist choosing a friendship over a relationship. It blew my mind that a wonderful movie did that. We had more movies about friends. We had more movies about singles who were thriving rather than this very stereotyped version. Even Bridget Jones has this very stereotyped version of the someday single who is really struggling. These are small steps, but they are steps in the right direction. I love that we’re able to celebrate Singles Day with this conversation.
Thank you for doing this.
It’s my pleasure. As I said at the outset, Bella, your work has been so essential to this movement. I don’t know if we could do it without you.
Thank you. I love hearing that.
CC, you were so early to this also. I appreciate you and the team’s work on the Singles Bill of Rights. As I said, I think it could be explosive in terms of gaining attention and liberating people from the feeling that there’s something wrong with them. This is a psychological battle that we are fighting fundamentally.
It is. I wanted to have all of the factoids I was accumulating in my head from reading Bella’s book many years ago. I wanted them all in one place so that I could refer to them and have them at my fingertips. When Tracy suggested the Bill of Rights, I thought that was where we could consolidate all the Bella factoids. It’s not just Bella. There are a lot of other people who contributed, but of course, hers provides the most substantive template for the SBR.
Thank you both. This has been wonderful.
It has been fun. I enjoyed it.
I look forward to seeing what the next five years will deliver.
Thanks, Peter.
Cheers.
Important Links
- Christina Campbell’s website
- Bella DePaulo’s website
- Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families and Save Civilization
- Singled Out: How Singles are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After
- Single at Heart: The Power, Freedom, and Heart-Filling Joy of Single Life
- I’ve lived alone my whole life. Here’s what people get wrong
- The High Price of Being Single in America
- Today’s Secret Influencers: People Going Solo in Public Life
- Singles Equality
- Peter McGraw’s website
- Solo
- Self-Contained
- One Is a Whole Number: The Science of Singlehood
- Friend Breakups
- Unmarried Equality
About Bella DePaulo
Bella DePaulo, PhD, is the leading expert on single life and has been described by The Atlantic as “America’s foremost thinker and writer on the single experience.” Dr. DePaulo coined the term “single at heart.”
Her TEDx talk, “What no one ever told you about people who are single,” has been viewed more than 1.7 million times. In addition to writing Single at Heart, she is the author of Singled Out and How We Live Now, among other titles; has written the “Living Single” blog for Psychology Today since 2008; and has been published by the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time magazine, The Atlantic, and many other outlets.
She has appeared on shows including The Today Show, CNN American Morning, CBS This Morning, and Good Morning America. She has been interviewed on NPR many times, as well as on podcasts by CNN, The Atlantic, and many others.
About Christina Campbell
Christina Campbell co-founded the singles’ advocacy blog Onely.org, long before singles’ rights were cool. Her essays about marital status discrimination have appeared in The Atlantic and elsewhere. Her extended essay And Sarah His Wife, about mental health, misogyny, and colonial America, won the Michigan Writers Chapbook Contest.
An excerpt from her memoir about invisible illness was a finalist for Craft’s Creative Nonfiction Award, and she is currently seeking representation. She lives in Northern Virginia with her infrared sauna and two semi-geriatric cats.