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.

One of the articles I wrote for this blog that really seemed to resonate with readers was “What’s really difficult about turning 30: It’s harder to make friends.” The topic of making friends is one that I seem to cycle back to on a semi-regular basis, often because readers ask me to talk about it. (Some of my previous posts are here, here, here, here, and here.)

Someone who has been thinking, writing, and talking about friendship for quite some time is Irene Levine, sometimes known as The Friendship Doctor. Recently, Dr. Levine shared with Marlo Thomas her “12 tips for making new friends at any age.” You can click on the link to read all of them. Here, I want to share a few of my favorites.

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.

Follow the money. That’s what we are told to do when we want to know what’s really going on. As wedding and prom season approaches, let’s look at the money trail of those events.

Suppose you are simply going to attend a wedding this year. What will that cost you? Business Insider claims the average is $539, up an astounding 59% in just one year. You will probably spend more than $100 just on gifts. Often hotel stays are involved, as well as transportation costs. Don’t forget the price of dining during your travels. Then there are the clothes, shoes, and bling.

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.]

When looking for a job, some people have a goal that is especially important to them – making as much money as possible. Suppose you found that one particular group of people generally ranked that goal as more important than another group did. How would you interpret that finding?

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.

In matrimaniacal societies, in which much of social life is organized around couples, people who are single can feel excluded. Getting ostracized can be especially painful when the people who are excluding you were once your friends – the people with whom you socialized routinely.

There is research showing that as people become more serious about a romantic relationship, they spend more time with each other and they sideline their friends. In the jargon, that’s called “dyadic withdrawal.” I think there is another dynamic, too, though the definitive research has yet to be done: Coupled people spend more time not only with each other but also with other couples; at the same time, they marginalize their single friends.

I wonder about the psychology of this process. Do new couples happily join in with the other couples, proud to be part of the Married Couples Club and to leave their single friends behind? Or do they want to include their single friends, at least at first, but get pressured to exclude them by other couples who want to socialize only with other couples?