Have you ever noticed that fully-grown single people sometimes get treated as if they are not fully adult? Their coupled friends invite them to lunch (if that) instead of dinner, to their children’s birthday parties but not to movies on Saturday night with the grown-ups. When traveling, singles get the back seat of the car, and when they arrive, they get to sleep on the couch in the living room instead of in a room with a door that shuts.

I’m not saying everyone treats single people that way, of course, but I am quite sure that single people get the children’s treatment far more often than coupled people do.

I wrote a lot about this in Singled Out. I thought I had heard just about every variation on the theme. Thanks to the Motherlode blog at the New York Times, I just learned about a new example. The post was written by Robin Marantz Henig, whose work I really like, and her daughter, Samantha Henig, whose work I am just getting to know, but already like it.

Recently I saw the movie, The Five-Year Engagement. I know, I should have known better. It was pretty funny at times, but honestly, with all the talent and creativity on offer, does Hollywood really have to produce the exact same ending every single time?

I hadn’t read anything about the movie before I went, so I was surprised to discover that my very own field of social psychology had a role. Emily Blunt, playing Violet, heads to the University of Michigan to join a lab group that apparently designs experiments by generating totally silly ideas that have no relationship whatsoever to psychological theory or anything else. All a big game. Also, there is no script for the experiment. The professor and the various students mill around behind the one-way mirror taunting one another about who is going to go into the room with the participants and actually run the study.

I cringed all the way through those scenes.

Contemporary society is full of matrimania – the over-the-top hyping of marriage, couples and weddings. There is so much marketing of romantic love, and celebration of marriage-minded lovers, that it can be difficult for people who are single at heart to realize that single life really is the most meaningful and authentic life for them. Doesn’t everyone really want to be married?

When I study single life, I do it from the perspective of a social psychologist – that’s my training. I also read a lot from sociology and women’s studies, and learn a great deal from those disciplines.

Anthropology may not seem like the obvious place to look for insights about singles in the U.S., but to anthropologist Leanna Wolfe, some of the practices of single women in Los Angeles did seem like odd rituals: Going to workshops to learn how to please a man? Transforming your body with fad diets and surgery, and your mind with therapy? What’s all that about?

In 2009, before I was blogging here at PsychCentral, a reader of another blog asked me to address the topic of asexuality. The post I wrote, “Asexuals: Who are they and why are they important?,” immediately became one of my most popular articles, garnering tens of thousands of page views in short order.

I first learned about the Asexual Visibility and Education Network (AVEN) while researching that blog post. Because I reviewed some of the basics back then, I’ll just share the opening sentences of the overview at AVEN before moving on:

“An asexual is someone who does not experience sexual attraction. Unlike celibacy, which people choose, asexuality is an intrinsic part of who we are. Asexuality does not make our lives any worse or any better, we just face a different set of challenges than most sexual people. There is considerable diversity among the asexual community; each asexual person experiences things like relationships, attraction, and arousal somewhat differently.”

The new point I want to make here is how far the asexuality movement has come in just a few years. Dave Jay, who founded AVEN, has made the rounds in the media, from MTV to The View. He has been taken seriously in more intellectual venues as well. Just recently, the Atlantic magazine published, “Life without sex: The third phase of the asexuality movement.”

Third phase? Hey, wait, what were the first two?

In my previous post, I reviewed the methods and results of a series of studies that have been in the media lately. The authors claim to have shown that when men are scarce, single women – especially the unattractive ones – lose confidence in their ability to land a man and therefore pursue careers instead.

In this post, I’ll tell you what the authors said about their own research, then point to a few ways that the results have been represented in the media. I’ll end with a link to my own critique.

Usually, I’m proud to be a social psychologist. It is a great field. Today, though, I am ashamed. The most prestigious journal for the publication of empirical research on social psychology just published a paper addressing a question about the sex ratio and women’s career choices: “Does a scarcity of men lead women to choose briefcase over baby?”

I bet you can guess what their answer is – Yes.

It gets worse. There are particular women who are especially likely to pursue a career when there is a scarcity of men – those with “low mate-value.” Can you decode that evolutionary-psychology-speak? You don’t have to. The authors translate for you: “higher mate-value women (e.g., women who are more physically attractive).”

My objection is not that the authors conducted the research, offered their evolutionary psychology interpretation, and published the results in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. It is that they did so little of what is typically mandatory in the very best academic writings: (1) seriously consider alternative interpretations, and (2) acknowledge the major limitations of your work.

Much as Americans cherish rugged individualists in movies and novels and the lore of the pioneers, it has been a different story when it comes to everyday people living ordinary lives. Real people who live alone, and people who are single (regardless of whether they live on their own), are more often suspected than celebrated.

When I was researching Singled Out, I found that one of the most dogged myths about single people is that they are selfish and self-centered. It’s not true – that’s why I call it a myth – but it persists. How could single people, or solo dwellers, know how to sustain any kind of a relationship? How could they feel anything but loneliness? That’s the old story.

Happily, a new perspective is emerging.

Think about your own marital and parental status – say, single with no kids – and imagine writing 20 life lessons for people who share your status. Make your lessons raw, honest, funny, and brief. That’s what Eleanore Wells did in her new book, The Spinsterlicious Life: 20 Life Lessons for Living Happily Single and Childfree.

I am also single and have no kids, yet many of my own 20 life lessons would be different from Eleanore Wells’s. (Not that I’ve actually managed to spell mine out.) That’s the joy of these kinds of imaginative exercises – there are so many ways of being single with no kids (or married with kids, or any other combination).

Eleanore Wells has always been single and she is absolutely not “looking.” Apparently, she never has been. I got a kick out of this reaction of hers that she described, because it is so unexpected (by conventional standards) but I could also totally relate to it:

I have long been intrigued by the finding that people who are single are in some ways even more connected to their communities than are people who are married. So when I learned that the eminent personality and social psychologist Mark Snyder was coming to town to give a talk, I was there.

Mark Snyder has spent more than a decade studying the psychology of volunteering. I learned so much from his talk.  I want to share what, to me, was his most intriguing discovery.

Volunteering takes lots of different forms, from the Big-Brother/Big-Sister programs to caring for people who need help to reading to kids to passing out flyers for your favorite candidate or cause and so much more. There is a paradox to volunteering, as Snyder noted at the outset of his talk. Volunteering takes time, it takes you away from other things you could be doing instead, sometimes there are hassles involved and even emotional costs; there can even be financial costs.

On top of all that, you don’t get paid. And yet, Americans do volunteer, in very high numbers. Perhaps as many as 43% do something that counts as volunteering.

So why do they do it? What motivates volunteers to do what they do, despite the costs involved and the absence of any financial reward?

When I do research on single life, I sometimes ask large numbers of people to report on their experiences using rating scales that I provide, then I analyze the results statistically. Sometimes, though, I want to hear from single people directly, in their own words.

When Wendy Morris did her doctoral dissertation on stigma awareness among single people, she used a variety of methodologies across the four studies she conducted. As part of one of those studies, she asked 38 single adults (including widowed, divorced and always single) to describe a time when they had been treated a particular way because they were single. The participants ranged in age from 30 to 73 and included whites, African-Americans, and people of mixed races.

Here are some examples of the experiences the participants shared: