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You could almost hear the hysterical squeaking from the ``defenders of marriage'' following this month's news about a Census Bureau report showing that married couples in American households have fallen into the minority. Granted, it's a very slight minority, at 49.7 percent, but it's hard evidence that if you are single you are definitely not alone.
What's significant here is not that marriage is on the wane. Statistics show that most people will marry at some point in their lives, so the institution is certainly not endangered. But what is endangered, thankfully, is the notion that being single means you're not part of the American mainstream.
Taken seriously
E. Kay Trimberger, whose book ``The New Single Woman'' was published last year, is happy to see her prediction come true. In her position as professor emerita of women's studies at Sonoma State University and a visiting scholar at UC-Berkeley's Institute for the Study of Social Change, she has been studying this cultural shift. The Census Bureau report was validation.
``This reinforces my view that we have to start taking single people seriously,'' she said. ``We shouldn't look at these statistics as the decline of marriage or some terrible catastrophe, just that a lot of people are finding other ways to live.
``Being single hasn't really been investigated other than as being problematic or deviant. That's just not realistic.''
Given the increasing number of young adults who are delaying marriage, the divorce rates and the aging patterns of Baby Boomers, it's likely that many of us will find ourselves married and single for long stretches. That means it's high time we stopped operating on the ``Bridget Jones'' theory that being unmarried is an unfortunate disease.
Political ramifications
Now that being single is the new normal, there is economic and political clout that comes along with it. Chris Desser and Page Gardner, directors of Women's Voices Women Vote, a non-partisan voter participation project, have spent the past several years journeying into the ``marriage gap'' to reach out to the 22 million single women who are eligible to vote but don't because they don't think politicians understand or care about their lives.
Desser, who is based in San Francisco, greeted news of the Census Bureau report on marriage with a loud ``Hallelujah!''
``For so long we've been hearing this message that married people are the backbone of the country,'' she said. ``The implication is that single people are our downfall, and this is just not true. It's not an accurate picture of the way people live today.'' (By the way, both she and Gardner are married.)
Politicians and policy makers will be forced to realize that the way we think about everything from health insurance to flexible work hours must change to accommodate the surge of singles, especially single women with children.
But maybe the most important change in thinking about unmarried people is understanding that in this society, being single does not mean being solitary. There's evidence that single people tend to be even more involved in their communities because they serve as extended families.
``We'd know more about this if we had more research about how single people live,'' Trimberger said. ``There are tons of books about marriage, but there's very little on being single, other than how not to stay that way. We have to investigate what makes single life satisfying.''
Meanwhile, it's time for non-voting single women to claim their clout and start acting like part of a majority.
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