The Unmarried Penalty:
Many Ways to Lose Out

 

Comedian Bill Maher
speaks up for singles

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
 


May 1, 2005
 

Singled out: unmarried people often face stigma

By Mark de la Vina
San Jose Mercury News
 

Forget the happy-go-lucky lives of singles so giddily depicted in TV shows like ``Sex and the City'' or the latest Drew Barrymore movie. Unmarried Americans don't always have it so good.

There are 86 million of them in the United States and they probably pay more for insurance, are more likely to get stuck working weekends and can't get their parents to take them seriously.

Singles contribute the same amount to Social Security as married Americans, but they often receive fewer benefits. There's also the stigma that many of them endure, a generalization that anyone unmarried and 30 or older is:

A. a loser

B. an old maid

C. suffering from unresolved sexual issues

D. selfish

E. commitment phobic

The notion that people live solo or remain unmarried by choice and that a couple can be happy without wedding bands is regularly dismissed.

``There's a belief that something is wrong with you if you are not married by a certain age,'' says Thomas F. Coleman, executive director of Unmarried America, a Los Angeles-based information service and online library for unmarried and single Americans.

Though mainstream culture has always had its fixation with young, attractive, single adults -- ``Friends,'' anyone? -- the implicit message to the unmarried is that unless you're itching to pair up, you're somehow incomplete. The producers of the perennial TV hit reinforced the point by ultimately marrying off most of the cast.

In 2003, 49.6 percent of all U.S. households were headed by unmarried people, according to the American Community Survey, a part of the U.S. Census Bureau. Of all unmarried, co-habitating people in the country in 2000, 40 percent were raising children, according to the Census Bureau. It's not many fewer than the 45 percent of married couples who reported to the bureau they were raising children.

Outspoken comedian Bill Maher, best known for his political barbs, says single Americans are second-class citizens who are seen as somehow deficient because they've never been married.

In ``Bridget Jones's Diary,'' Helen Fielding created the central character, an outspoken single woman looking for love, as someone who weathers the condescension of her already-hitched pals, a.k.a. the ``smug marrieds.''

Stephanie Coontz, the director of research and public education for the Council on Contemporary Families, says Americans are ambivalent about singles. On the one hand, our culture of youth embraces the notion of a carefree, unencumbered singles lifestyle. But it holds firmly that it ultimately must conclude with a happy, romantic-comedy-style ending. The persistent belief is that two adults become whole only after they pair off.

``The assumption is that married couples are all doing it right,'' says Coontz, ``when there are, in fact, plenty of irresponsible married couples and plenty of single people doing it right.''

Insurance companies, going by actuarial tables, classify unmarried drivers as high risk, so they charge singles as much as 25 percent higher premiums than married motorists, according to Unmarried America.

Cheryl Francia, 37, a divorced receptionist from San Lorenzo who works in Fremont, says that when she became single 10 years ago, she was stunned to learn that her change in marital status boosted her insurance rates by $300 a year.

``That's not right,'' says Francia. ``I'm a single mom struggling. I should be getting a break instead of the married couple, who has two incomes compared to my one.''

That provides little solace for adult singles who must run a nasty gauntlet of wedding-obsessed relatives reminding them that they're not getting any younger.

Randy Herrera, a divorced computer component buyer from San Jose, deals with such scrutiny from relatives and from women assessing his potential as a mate.

``Women will ask if I've ever been married,'' say Herrera, 39. ``I'll say yes, that I was divorced three years ago. Then they'll ask why I haven't remarried yet. If I hadn't ever been married, they would think even less of me.''

Stigma isn't the worst of it for unmarried Americans, says Marshall Miller, co-founder of Alternatives to Marriage Project, an Albany, N.Y.-based national advocacy group for unmarried people he co-founded in 1998 with his female partner, Dorian Solot.

The two, committed but not married, were told by a prospective landlord that they could rent the apartment only if they were married.

At the same time, Marshall and Solot were aware of a case in Rhode Island where a man was denied custody of a child whom he helped raise. Though the man and the child's mother were a couple, and both wanted to continue rearing the child, a judge said he would deny him joint custody with the woman until they were married.

``It didn't surprise us that something like this could happen,'' Miller says, ``but what shocked us was that there was no advocacy organization to say that this is ridiculous, that this is not in the best interest of the family.''

As a result, the two founded the Alternatives to Marriage Project, which now has a membership of 8,000 households.

Miller says that just as women eventually gained suffrage and rights that seemed unimaginable to their grandmothers, unmarried Americans are in the position to make their own strides.

``We need a similar social-change movement with single and unmarried people,'' he says. ``There are so many things that we can fix if we just put our minds to it.''