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?

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.

Some of the ways that married and single people are treated differently are economic ones. In ways big and small – many of which are written right into American laws – married people are rewarded financially simply for being married. On April 15, I will have more to say about that. Today, I want to share the results of a new study.

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.

[Bella’s intro: When I learned about Heather Steil’s writings about her experiences as a single woman in the Foreign Service, I immediately wanted to share her thoughts with Single-at-Heart readers. I was delighted when Heather agreed to write this guest post from Kabul, Afghanistan. Thank-you, Heather!]

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?”

In 2011, a group of authors analyzed the results of 18 long-term studies of the implications of getting married for happiness. They wanted to know whether getting married makes people lastingly happier. The answer was no.

I described those findings in detail here, so I’ll just offer a brief overview before telling you about how social scientists tried to salvage the case for marriage in a subsequent paper.

I can’t seem to turn on the television, open a magazine or a newspaper, or peruse a blog without finding a discussion of Sheryl Sandberg’s new book, Lean in: Women, work, and the will to lead.

In the New York Times, Anne-Marie Slaughter (who whipped up plenty of controversy herself by arguing in an Atlantic cover story that women can’t have it all) described Sandberg’s message to women as:

“…believe in yourself, give it your all, “lean in” and “don’t leave before you leave” — which is to say, don’t doubt your ability to combine work and family and thus edge yourself out of plum assignments before you even have a baby.”

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Perhaps you know of that dreaded penalty on people who travel solo called the “single supplement.” A person traveling on their own is charged about twice as much – sometimes even more than that – for a hotel room or tour or cruise.

It makes some sort of sense for travel companies focusing solely on short-term profits. They want to get as much for a room from one person as they could if two people shared it. But of course, solo travelers are not too happy with it. As the number of single people (and non-single people who sometimes travel on their own) continues to grow, the travel industry is beginning to realize that they had better pay attention and do something to appeal to the solo traveler.