While browsing around the Psychology Today website today, I came across a profound interview by Bella DePaulo on her “Living Single” blog. In the entry, DePaulo, a Harvard-educated social psychologist who authored Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After, speaks with her friend E. Kay Trimberger (author of The New Single Woman) about the implications of being single in different cultures, focusing primarily on women in India since Trimberger has spent considerable time researching there.
Early in the discussion, Trimberger describes three major “cultural factors” that she says make it “easier to be single in India”. First, singledom doesn’t have the negative connotation it does in many Western cultures; celibacy is regarded positively. Next, she says, arranged marriages, which predominate in India, take the woman’s “worthiness” out of the equation. That is, if a woman remains unmarried, there could be many factors at play: not enough dowry on the part of her family, trouble finding a good match, and so on. In the U.S., however, we still tend to view older singles, particularly women, with suspicion, assuming there must be something fundamentally wrong with the person.
Trimberger’s third cultural factor, and the one I find most interesting and relevant to the life experiences of Western readers of this blog, is, as she puts it, “the cultural imperative in the U.S. that being coupled is essential to human happiness.” Take a moment to really consider this. As a culture, we have fantastically unrealistic expectations about our relationships, as any fairy tale or breathless tabloid wedding account will show you. Haven’t you been socialized from day one, either outright or more implicitly, to pity singles older than their late twenties, operating under the assumption that all of them would rather be married and were simply unlucky in love or not desirable enough? When was the last time you read a fairy tale whose plot ventured beyond “…And they lived happily ever after?” The message implicit in these endings is simple: finding and landing a life partner is the tough part, and married life is nothing but sunshine and blue skies, with nary a screaming baby or round of marriage counseling on the horizon. Trimberger elaborates:
Marriage in India is more highly valued, but its purpose is family ties, not coupled happiness. Compatibility between spouses is not linked to finding a soul mate, but is seen as the result of patient work, along with family support. As a result, single women in India are not pitied because they are not coupled.
To illustrate the implications, let me quote from a one of India’s feminist intellectuals, Urvashi Butalia, a publisher who founded the feminist press Kali for Women. She says, “Oddly enough, the first time I really became conscious of my singleness was in, of all places, England. . . . [I found myself] in a culture that so privileges relationships, especially heterosexual one, that if you are not in one (and even if you have been in one that may have broken up you are expected to jump into another almost immediately), there has to be something wrong with you. So I was always the odd one out, the one without the man, the one to be felt sorry for. And it always bewildered me, because I did not feel sorry for myself, so why did they? It wasn’t a nice feeling.”
I spent a semester abroad in the predominantly Hindu nation of Nepal, India’s neighbor to the north, and noticed many of the points Trimberger makes firsthand. Perhaps the biggest difference I observed between married life in Nepal and in the States was the amount of time people seemed to feel obligated to spend with their spouses. In the U.S., we expect our significant others to fulfill our every need: spouse, confidant, lover, friend. Couples hang out as couples; the rare pairs who maintain separate apartments or bicoastal marriages are met with pity or disbelief. Conversely, in Nepal, I noticed much more separation between people’s married lives and their circles of friends; women spent time with other women, men spent time with other men. The undercurrent of desperation and possessiveness apparent in so many of our romantic relationships here in the West was, for the most part, noticeably absent.
Whether you’re single or coupled, I hope you’ll spend some time considering the questions raised by the work of singles researchers like Kay Trimberger and Bella DePaulo. What did your parents and society as a whole teach you about singledom and marriage? How does this affect your relationships, and/or your contentment as a single person?
Related Links:
Dr. DePaulo’s website
Dr. Trimberger’s website
The Singles Studies Annotated Bibliography, The Institute for the Study of Social Change, UC Berkeley
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3 Comments to
“Cultural Attitudes Toward Singles”
i feel older single woman are ostracized in certain social situations (like country club membership) in america and briton because married women feel that they might poach their men.
in a culture of arranged marriages like india, those dynamics might be diminished. if single women are happier in india, it is because they are better integrated into that society.
nevertheless one might cast doubt that indian women have the same freedoms as american women. it is one modality to be a free american woman and go to india. it is perhaps another to expect ordinary indian woman to achieve anything outside of their gender determined roles in labor and society in india.
I don’t see this as an argument for arranged marriages btw. if you want to see the cultural excesses of arranged marriages i highly recommend renting the indo-canadian film “water” which was a major undertaking to produce with respect to a strong hindu backlash against the project which delayed its completion for a few years and had to be shot in sri lanka under a fake working title to protect the filmmakers.
try to imagine a conversation with the child widow character in this film who might be forced into prostitution with brahmins about the advantages of being single in india.
I don’t know if this is because I have Native American roots, but I am a single woman who is very happy to be single right now. Life and my career just isn’t allowing for me to pursue such as relationship at this time. But I don’t “throw my hand” at the fact that I’d like it to happy one day.
I think the U.S. has such an emphasis on power, prestige, socializing, being an extrovert (which I’m not), and “living it up” so much so that to retreat into your own home/life with a quiet atmosphere and a single life sounds boring, like you don’t have a life, and you need to get one. 
This couldn’t be furthest from the truth.
I applaud such countries as India where single individuals are happy to be single and don’t feel that nonsensical need, that is, the need encouraged by society to be in a relationship. If you’re lonely, that’s a different story. But to pursue a relationship or companionship because that’s what “everyone is doing these days” is nonsensical.
Being single and happy should be encouraged!
I am a Indian..and having lived in India for 21 years and USA for 3 years..
Marriage is a duty in India.Celibacy is celebrated only for monks or if you are part of a cult.
It is almost impossible to be a single women in India.I do agree that,in India marriage has a broader concept which includes family. But the implications and the arguments/genralizations
presented by both the authors are false.They should go back to India and stay for a longer time ,spend more time with poor Indian women..then they can be entitled to write articles on marriage/single’s scene in India…
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Last reviewed: By John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on 15 Oct 2008
