Single By Choice
DePaulo may be leading the crusade to rethink singledom, but she’s not alone. The Alternatives to Marriage Project (AtMP), a national group that started in Boston, also advocates for people who live outside of traditional marriage. “I would like to see government get out of the business of regulating relationships,” says AtMP board member Tom Amoroso, an emergency physician who lives in Medford. “Right now the government decides whether you have a relationship and if it’s good enough to get legal rights. There’s a lot of stuff that’s given to people that are married solely because they’re married. It’s become enshrined in the tax code.” (Amoroso, for his part, is in what’s known as a polyamorous relationship, but according to the IRS, he’s single.)
Boston College’s Sarkisian agrees, and points out that many European countries have “decoupled” their benefits, allowing people to share their benefit and retirement plans with friends, siblings, or parents. And the U.S. remains one of the few nations that still allows the filing of joint tax returns. “Why is it that you have to be in a monogamous sexual relationship to get benefits?” Sarkisian asks. “There are multiple benefits that are connected to marriage that don’t really have to be.”
Of course, to get these rights and benefits, more single Americans need to stand up and ask for them. But a major hindrance, as Bostic discovered, is that single people often don’t want to identify themselves that way. “Neither individuals nor societies see living alone as a goal or an endpoint,” Klinenberg writes in Going Solo, “which is why social movements to promote the interests of singletons are so difficult to organize.”
ON EASTER SUNDAY several years ago, Terri Trespicio was in Natick celebrating the holiday with her family when she decided she needed to have a discussion. She, her two younger sisters, and her mom and dad were all slouched on the living room couches after dinner when she broached the subject: “I feel that I should just say it,” she told them. “There’s a good chance that I’m going to be a single person for the rest of my life. I hope that you’re okay with that.”
Trespicio, an occasional contributor to this magazine, says the idea that she would marry someone she loved has never crossed her mind. She dates regularly, relies on a huge circle of friends, and has her dream job hosting a daily SiriusXM radio show called Whole Living. She doesn’t believe that marriage is in the cards for her, but feels that she can have a stable, healthy life without a lifelong partner. “At 38, I feel more powerful and sexier and in control than I’ve ever felt,” she says. “My life is going to be what I make of it, regardless of whether I meet someone or not.”
Trespicio’s family has been supportive. “A person creates their happiness,” her mother says. “It’s not something imposed on you from the outside.”
Then again, happiness is often considered a benefit of marriage, and many studies affirm that married people are happier, healthier, and wealthier than the unmarried. But after drilling down into those surveys, some researchers have recently been questioning their findings. For one thing, they found that divorced people — who have removed themselves from their unhappy marriages — weren’t included. “Marriage, or at least good marriages with little conflict, protects individuals from everything from cavities to murder and suicide,” Gerstel and Sarkisian write in Nuclear Family Values. But in truth, “only marriages with low levels of conflict offer health benefits. In contrast, bad marriages are hazardous to mental and physical health, increasing suicide, stress, cancer, and blood pressure.”
