Bella DePaulo Quotes

What happy and successful single people are threatening is not the institution of marriage but the cultural consensus on its special value. Same-sex marriage does not threaten the institution of marriage, either. The sticking point (or at least one of them) is that large numbers of Americans remain unconvinced that gay men and lesbians are the moral equivalent of straight people. To them, keeping marriage pure and sacred means keeping same-sex partners out.

In one of the buildings where April lived, the girls befriended the kids who lived upstairs. "At first it was nice; but other times, it just felt like every time we got home, they were knocking on the door. And it stopped having that sort of safe-haven feeling to it.

the way coupling is envisioned in contemporary American society is not universal, it is not timeless, and it is not human nature. Instead, the reigning American worldview may well represent one of the narrowest construals of intimacy ever imagined. Where once the tendrils of love and affection reached out to family, friends, and community, reached back to ancestors, and reached up to the heavens, now they surround and squeeze just one other person - sometimes to the point of asphyxiation.

There is another reason ever-single women fare even better than previously married women in later life. They mastered the single life long ago. From structuring social events in a culture that caters to couples, to figuring out how to work and get all the tasks of everyday life accomplished when there may or may not be others readily available to do their unfair share, always-single women have been there, done that. It is not a new or daunting challenge.

They are people who always dream of living in a particular way, in some far-off gauzy future, and then one day, decided to stop fantasizing and start living the dream. They are people who dared to become the future by living in ways that seem startling even to a nation high on creativity. And there are people whose acts of bravery were to embrace old-fashioned lifespaces fully, joyfully, and unapologetically.

Dr. Hervey Cleckley wrote in The Mask of Sanity

The freedom to be single, to create a path through life that does not look like everyone else's, can be unsettling to people who feel more secure with fewer choices.

Most married people can expect a specific other person to be there for them in a way that a single person typically cannot. Does that make married people more mature than single people?

Married people are on training wheels. Singles are riding the bikes for grown-ups.

Lethal Predators: Psychopathic, Sadistic, and Sane" in Profilers: Leading Investigators Take You inside the Criminal Mind, 2004.

As much as I find the soulmate concept sappy and silly, I also understand its appeal. The soulmate promises an all-in-one solution. Find that one perfect person and you have - for starters - your best friend, your sexual partner, your comforter and caretaker, your cheerleader, your escort to every social function, your consultant on matters large and small, and the one and only teammate you will ever need in home management, money management, and vacation planning. And that list doesn't even include any of the potential coparenting possibilities. The soulmate mythology is the ultimate seduction: Find that one right person and all of your wishes will come true.

Ever since Aristotle described three different kinds of friends - friends of utility, of pleasure, and of virtue - we have known that a set of friends can be a diverse lot. We can have friends we only see at basketball games or book club, friends we see nearly every day at work, and friends who are our confidants. Specialization is fine - we do not expect to like all of our friends in the same way or for the same reasons. At

Home, to many of the people I interviewed, is a good, comfortable feeling about the place where they live, and a sense that their place is going to be theirs for a while....Home is any place, any experience that feeds his soul "in some positive way".

Writing often in the pages of the New York Times, Allison Arieff is a powerful spokesperson. "Bring back the sidewalk!" she urged in one of her articles, explaining: "Community is born from social routine - running into neighbors at the mailbox or while walking down the street. Design for these serendipitous encounters."8

Moreover, the mythology may be mucking things up even while your partnership is alive and thriving. It is not wise to relegate all the other important kinds of people - close friends, valued colleagues, mentors, and kin - to the dustbin of human relationships. Ironically, it is also unfair to the one relationship partner who is mythologized. No mere mortal should be expected to fulfill every need, wish, whim, and dream of another human.

The other side of mental blanketing - the buffing and puffing up of marriage to keep it seeming shiny and magical - is up against a formidable fact. Statistically speaking, the act of marrying is banal. Even though many Americans wait longer than ever to marry, and often do not stay long in the marriages they do enter, most Americans - close to 90 percent - still do marry at some point in their lives. Some try it over and over again. Marrying, then, does not make people special; it makes them conventional.