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I was talking to my friend Jeff at the coffee shop the other day when he began bemoaning the fact that women were starting to look at him sideways whenever he told them he had never been married.
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"Well, I'm 40 now," he said. "And when they hear that I'm that old and don't have at least one marriage under my belt they immediately assume I'm either gay or some kind of player or, I don't know, a pedophile."
"Or the Unabomber," I said, trying to be helpful.
"Exactly," he said. "I don't know if I'm supposed to lie and tell them that I'm divorced, or tell the truth and hope for the best, or what."
Frankly, I didn't know what to suggest. I've heard single women dissect the 40-year-old bachelor before and he was pretty spot-on. They assume the guy's a commitment-phobic player, upgrading girlfriends as often as he does his cell phone, or that he's living in his mother's basement and the only "serious relationship" he's had in years (or maybe ever) is with the voice of "Halo."
Of course, the 40-year-old "spinster" doesn't have it much better. According to popular mythology, she's either perpetually on the prowl or she's so desperate to meet, mate and procreate that her biological clock is starting to sound like Big Ben. Or she has 37 cats, some of which wear bonnets for special occasions.
But are these people truly representative of what's out there?
Not really, says Bella DePaulo, author of "Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized and Ignored and Still Live Happily Ever After." Instead, they're just part of the grand pantheon of singles stereotypes that our couple-crazed society has perpetuated over the years.According to DePaulo, the most popular myth surrounding single men is that "without the civilizing hand of a woman, they will run amok with slovenliness, horniness and criminality." And if they're not sloppy and out of control, well, then they're "soft and mushy mama's boys -- fastidious, frivolous and gay."
Single women, on the other hand, either are highly promiscuous or else they "never get any." Plus they're all selfish, miserable and lonely, and their lives are completely dominated by their never-ending quest to find a man.
Is it just me, or does that pretty much sum up most of reality TV?
DePaulo, a social psychologist who has done her research (the book is packed with scientific studies and some pretty hilarious examples from the popular media), calls this kind of thinking "singlism" and suggests one reason it's so prevalent now is because marriage is no longer the big enchilada it once was (according to an October 2006 U.S. census report, singles are officially the majority these days).
"More and more people are marrying later and staying single longer and I think that at some sort of cultural level there's a real anxiety about this," she says. "We have this ideology of marriage and family that is unquestioned, that says getting married and staying married and having kids is the right way to lead your life, the moral way to lead your life. And if you don't do that, there's something wrong with you."
See cats in bonnets, above.
Thanks to this all-consuming preoccupation with coupling -- DePaulo calls it "matrimania," -- many of us don't even flinch when our happily married friends offer to have us over for dinner "just as soon as you find someone special." (Can you imagine what would happen if we threw the same invite their way? "Yes, and as soon as you get that divorce, you're welcome to come over to my place, too!")
Nor do we bat an eye when our family starts in on us about our selfishness or immaturity, or assumes that despite everything that points to the contrary (a fulfilling job, a slew of friends, the occasional Friday night flirtation), we're obviously leading a sad, lonely existence.
Instead, some of us actually buy into the mythology, making fun of our pitiful love lives and pathetic "Law and Order" habit like some insecure girl who starts making self-deprecating remarks about her weight before anyone else can beat her to the punch. We'll underplay our accomplishments (buying a home, starting a business, traveling the world) because we've learned that solo successes seldom "count" (at least not compared to, say, the potty-training triumphs of our married friends' toddlers).
In fact, we'll be told so often (and so assuredly) that our single life is somehow second best that a handful of us actually will start to believe it, embracing society's stereotypes of the sad-sack, skittish single the same way a victim of Stockholm syndrome embraces the ideology of his captor.
As a result, we'll start to look sideways at other singles -- and at ourselves -- assuming there's something intrinsically wrong with anyone who's never once visited that magical land of milk and honey I'm home.
But I'm not worried. And I don't think my buddy Jeff should be either. Because books like "Singled Out" -- not to mention those ever-growing singles statistics -- give me hope that a sea change is coming. In fact, it may be here already.
"A couple of years ago, I would have assumed that if a 40-year-old guy had never been married it was because he was chronically messy or had a cheating problem or narcolepsy or something," a girlfriend told me the other night. "But these days I find it kind of refreshing. Like a clean slate. After all, I've never been married and I don't have any of those problems."
Music to my ears, folks. In fact, I may even hear a wedding march.
By DIANE MAPES
SPECIAL TO THE P-I
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