On Monday October 17 at 2 pm, I’m giving a talk on singles at Loyola University in Chicago. It is open to the public. Here are the details.
My Next Talk about Singles
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Category Archives: Workplace
Fantasies about Supporting Single People and Singles Advocacy
Writing about singles has been an enormously meaningful experience, but it has not been a lucrative one. I’ve had fantasies about making a mint on Singled Out or Singlism or from blogging. Not gonna happen.
What I fantasized about is not stuff like buying a yacht or traveling around the world. What I really wish I could do is support single people and singles activism and advocacy. So here I’d like to share some of my starry-eyed ideas that will never come to fruition from my meager royalties or paychecks. I hope you will add some of your own.
SINGLISM Is Published!
“All Things Single” readers, I’m blogging to you first. My new book, Singlism: What It Is, Why It Matterse, and How to Stop It – written together with 28 other contributors – is now available. You can get it here at Amazon, though as I write this, Amazon has not yet added the description of the book. (They build book pages one or two sections at a time.) You can also get the paperback here, at the book’s own page, where the description does show up.
Barbara Walters Schools Piers Morgan on His Dopey, Intrusive, Matrimaniacal Questions
Barbara Walters and her daughter
On February 2, as the protests on the streets of Egypt were riveting the nation and the world, Piers Morgan found time to ask Barbara Walters about the men in her life. (He means the conjugal kind, of course.)
A Pioneering Woman Whose Husband Got the First Paragraph of Her Obituary
When I started high school in 1967, the principal was a no-nonsense woman named Eugenia DeFazio. Mrs. DeFazio, as we all called her, had already been the principal for 7 years at that point. I think she knew every last student who walked the Dunmore High School hallways until the day she retired at age 67. She had high standards and she enforced them. I admired that, and I admired her.
Sweating the Small Stuff: Micro-Inequities and Micro-Affirmations
In my writing about singles, I’ve often pointed to the big ways that singles are targets of discrimination. Singles are discriminated against in the housing market, in ways that are blatant and yet not recognized as wrong. They pay more than their share in taxes. Single men are paid less than comparably-accomplished married men, and both single men and single women have less access to benefits such as health insurance. That’s unequal compensation for the same work. There are more than 1,000 federal laws that benefit married people. And that’s just the beginning. (Other examples are in Chapter 12 of Singled Out.)
This Married Man Described His Working Relationship as His Greatest Love Affair
As I’ve been working with Wendy Casper on our chapter about singles-friendly workplaces and reading relevant papers, I keep coming across the phrase “work-life balance.” I do realize that for lots of people, work is something that needs to be ‘balanced’ with the rest of life. Still, an uncritical use of the concept seems to neglect something significant: There are some fortunate people who love their work. They see their work as part of their lives, not something to be set against everything else they enjoy.
The Added Price of Single Life?
A recent report suggests that the added cost of living solo, compared to living with a spouse or partner, is $388,059 over the course of a lifetime. The study was conducted in the UK. The economic disparity was calculated based on these considerations: