For years, I have been arguing that romantic plots – on television, in the movies, in novels, and in the stories we like to tell about our real lives – have become obligatory. Story lines that bring two people together in romantic bliss have become all too predictable. That makes for boring story-telling. Even more importantly, it muddies our imaginations, making us sluggish in our thinking and unnecessarily limited in the ways we plan, live, and fantasize about our lives.

Every so often, a politician suggests that we should save money by shredding the Census Bureau. That would be such a bad idea! There is so much we need to know about the demographic face of the nation and how it is changing. Here, I will highlight American motherhood, and how it has been changing over the past half-century.

You probably don’t need a scientific study to tell you that having a demanding, critical spouse or family member is not good for your mental health. Nonetheless, there have been studies just like that; they show that the short-term implications of negative relationships are bad. What is new about a just-published study is that it documented effects that were still evident a decade later.

[Bella’s intro: One of the great joys of blogging is the development of a community of readers who go beyond the posts and discuss the issues among themselves in the Comments sections. One of the most reliable and insightful contributors to those discussions is a person who would like to be known only as “Alan.” When he emailed some ideas recently, I asked if he would like to write about them in a guest post. I was delighted when he agreed. Thank-you, Alan, for this guest post and for all that you have contributed over the years to the discussions of the issues raised in this blog and other single-life blogs.]

In 1897, the French sociologist Emile Durkheim published a theory of suicide that is still being tested to this day. In trying to understand why people might kill themselves, it is easy to jump straight to psychological explanations – for example, perhaps they were suffering from severe psychopathology. Durkheim, though, was a sociologist, not a psychologist, and the factors he deemed significant were societal ones.

One of the most important predictors of whether people will commit suicide, Durkheim thought, was the degree to which they were integrated into society: those who are more integrated will be less likely to kill themselves.

Anyone can offer advice for living the good life – no qualifications are necessary – and many people do. Those who have gotten the most attention lately include Sheryl Sandburg with her book, Lean In, the haughty Princeton mother telling the undergraduate women at her alma mater to grab a Princeton man while the grabbing is good, Ann Marie Slaughter telling women they actually can’t have it all, and now Elsa Walsh in the Washington Post, telling women to settle for a good-enough life.

What is striking about all of these offerings is just how stunningly limited the components of a good life seem to be, in the eyes of these self-appointed sages. The conversation is all about three domains: work, marriage, and children.

I’m not against taxes. There is so much that can be done with taxes that individuals could never accomplish on their own. Taxes are good for education, health, safety, safety nets, infrastructure, communications, transportation, and much more.

What I am against is the unfair and disproportionate taxation of single people. Today, I am joining with dozens of bloggers to dispel the misconception that single people do not pay their fair share. In fact, as the Onely bloggers showed in their article in the Atlantic (discussed here and here), the cost of single life can be staggering. Singles pay the price not just in income taxes, but in at least 18 additional ways.

For well over a decade, I have been scrutinizing studies of the link between getting married and getting happy. With every new published study or review article, it becomes increasingly clear that the conventional wisdom – that getting married means getting happier – is just plain wrong.

The quality of the studies has been improving. Instead of just comparing people of different marital statuses at one point in time, we now have studies that follow people over many years of their adult lives as they get married or get divorced or widowed or stay single. They are asked repeatedly about their happiness (or life satisfaction). A review of 18 such studies showed quite compellingly that people who get married do not get happier.

The more problematic studies (comparing married and unmarried people at one point in time) continue to pile up, and they also fail to make the case that single people are miserable, and by marrying, they become blissful. They could not possibly show that, for methodological reasons.

Stories with titles such as “10 things never to say to singles” always catch my eye. The latest was originally written for Women’s Day and reposted on Shine at Yahoo. It was offered as a bit of advice to people tempted to offer their unsolicited suggestions to their single friends.

First, I’ll list the 10 things, without any of the commentary from the article, so you can generate your own critique.

I’m all for the arc of the moral universe bending toward justice. Society should constantly move toward greater inclusiveness and more fairness. The current debates that have reached the Supreme Court, though, ask a question that is too narrow and too timid. We should not be asking, “Why should you have to be a particular kind of couple – one man and one woman – in order to qualify for all of the benefits, protections, and privileges of marriage (as well as the official designation)?” Instead, we should be asking, “Why should you have to be any kind of couple at all?”