Unmarried Americans: National Singles Day

Today (September 23, 2017) is National Singles Day

This whole week has been National Singles Week

Unmarried Americans:

See CNN Opinion: How Unmarried Americans Are Changing Everything 

comprise more than 45% of the adult population in the United States.

They head more than 47% of our households,

and make up fully half of our workforce.

Married American adults include only the currently married and remarried.

Unmarried American adults include the never married, the separated, divorced, widowed. 

Cohabiting people are sometimes identified through the household question(s).

The CNN opinion article includes the usual arguments in favor of marriage, and the newer arguments in favor of the single life. I am interested in neither for two reasons:

1. The people making the arguments are usually trying to sell a product.

2. The data supporting the arguments are highly suspect. The fact that people who are married for a long time are happy, healthy, wealthy, etc. says little about the institution of marriage. These people are both self selected and selected by others, and data is rarely presented about those who divorce or die. One can construction a equally glowing picture of the never married single life by studying aged women religious. Again a both self-selected and other selected group, and little data on those who left or died.

Marital Status (like age, sex, household status, income, etc.) is a fundamental social status question.  We think about ourselves, others, society, religion and politics in these terms. Society is undergoing profound changes that can only be understood if we use these categories well. 

Conceptualizing Marital Status

The statistics on marital status have changed because people are living longer.

Pledging "until death do us part" at age 18 means not age 50, or 60, or 70, but perhaps 80, 90, or 100.

Longer life spans mean that a single marriage can begin later, and the death of one spouse means the other will be unmarried longer unless they remarry. So while some marriages may be longer, the percentage of adulthood spent in marriage would decline if people only married once.

Besides long life spans we now have the pill, and easily divorce so we have more serial monogamy (which is also called serial polygamy particularly by those who oppose it). The pill has made monogamous relationship without marriage easier. Divorces add more unmarried years to the lifetime mix. Simply put there are many more ways and opportunities to be unmarried.

When I was under 40, I easily thought of myself as single and unmarried. Single signified that one was young, a valued attribute. In academia there were many single people, including graduate students and junior faculty. 

Around age 40 I migrated to the mental health system, immediately becoming a senior manager. Most of my  colleagues and the CEO were also in their forties and most of them were married. Many of the people I supervised were younger and single.

I also become a member of a mostly voluntary parish staff all of who were over forty, and most of whom were married. So all the people I identified with professionally were older and family people. I no longer identified with young unmarried people.

My parents retired about this time, and so I spent much more time with them. So I began to think of myself as a family person rather than a single person because most of all the people in my work, parish, and neighborhood were married family people. A few might be divorced, or widowed but few were never married singles. So "single" fell aside with "young" as a self-identifier.

However there was another term rather than single that I had long identified with, namely "solitary."  My interest in religious life as an undergraduate had led me to study its historical origins. Early Christianity valued single women (widows and virgins) and single men (monozontes) before it valued monasticism in both its anchoretic and communal forms.

Single women could most easily withdraw from marriage (and normal social responsibilities) by withdrawing into the inner rooms of a household.    Men however had to give up their property in order to withdraw from normal social responsibilities. That produced the attractiveness of a solitary desert location. In the Life of Anthony he is inspired to follow Christ by giving all his money to the poor (except for a dowry to establish a convent for his sister).

When men went to the desert they did not wander around, but chose a specific site for their cell, essentially they became a single person household with what we would call "the smallest footprint" on the environment. The fact that these were regarded as single person households is evident from the great value attached to staying in one's cell, and by the obligation of providing hospitality to visitors. 

Most church meetings in the first and second century took place in households (i.e. they were household churches). Research is now indicating that people were slow to abandon household churches for public meetings. There was simply not enough room for them in the cathedrals and basilicas, even including unroofed shrines to martyrs on the outskirts of the cities. A lot of activity such as prayer and teaching occurred in the homes of the wealthy, often under the control of women.

Early Christianity provides many household models that supported unmarried men and women. Eventually religious as well as the clergy became far more regulated and separated from the laity.

Catholicism should not be stuck with the model of romantic nuclear family married life that dominated life in recent centuries. It was clear to me immediately after the Council that we were not going to renew religious life until we rediscovered unmarried life as a Christian social status.