How Did The Demise of the Rest Happen?

What do you think that couples have ascended to a spot of ascendancy in American society now more than at previous times? It looks like that there’s an unbelievable emphasis on being single as something that should be fixed. At the same time, conservative social research focuses on proving that couples are psychologically and developmentally superior to singles. In American society generally, lots of people appear to value a variety of lifestyles. But there is this enormous market devoted to fixing singles, including books and articles and television shows and workshops.

Before I began learning singles and their space in the world, everything I believed was what I saw and heard all around me. Obviously, partners reigned supreme. The coupled connection was the largest celebrated of them all. Everything of the other ties that have the possibility to create our life significant bonds with close associates, relatives, mentors, spiritual beings, ancestors, community, and even, to some degree, the association between a parent and kids were deemed smaller and fewer worthy.

The reign of the couple is both an inside and an outside phenomenon. The view from outside of the couple is the revering one I just described. Within the couple, many practice what I’ve called “intensive coupling” – the two people look to one another to be their everything, to fill all of their needs, to create all of their dreams come true.

Toward the end of the first chapter of Singled Out, when I summed up what I had learned about how couples have been regarded at other times and in other places.

“The way that coupling is envisioned in contemporary American society is not universal, it is not timeless, and it is not human nature. Instead, the reigning American worldview may well represent one of the narrowest construals of intimacy ever imagined. Where once the tendrils of love and affection reached out to family, friends, and community, reached back to ancestors, and reached up to the heavens, now they surround and squeeze just one other person – sometimes to the point of asphyxiation.”

The question I did not answer, and still do not know how to answer, is why. How and why have couples ascended to a place of dominance in contemporary American society, leaving a lot of other important relationships and life pursuits devalued, dismissed, and neglected?

Usually, when I ask a question in the title of my posts, I intend to answer it. Not this time. I’m asking the question because I don’t know the answer and I’d like to. So if you know something, please share. If you know social historians who may be willing to weigh in, please spread the word.

I’ve been thinking about this recently because I was on a radio show in which the host asked me a relevant question. Actually, I only thought he was asking me about the rise of the couple. After the show was over, I realized he was asking me about the history of marriage. I see that as a different (though related) question. Much has been written about the ways in which marriage has changed over time. In Marriage, a History, for example, Stephanie Coontz has reminded us that love has not always been the basis for marriage -in fact, in historical terms, that’s a relatively recent development. Elizabeth Abbott, in A History of Marriage (I discussed it here), enlightens us about the changing place of race, money, children, and sexual orientation in the history of marriage, and even includes a separate chapter on singles. All that is interesting and important, but leaves my key question mostly unanswered.

Sadly, there is a very thoughtful and accomplished author who came close to addressing my question, but got talked out of it. In the acknowledgments section of her book, A History of the Wife, Marilyn Yalom said, “I am grateful to Basic Books editor Joanne Miller,for suggesting that I focus on the wife, rather than on the couple, as originally intended.”

Shortly after that radio show aired, I heard from Laurie, a Living Single reader who was thinking examples of the same questions on why Americans are so obsessed with coupling. So thanks, Laurie, for encouraging me to keep thinking.

I believe that a rise in the push toward fixing singles for profit has contributed to the feeling of partners having ascended to a spot of ascendancy. And the very idea of ascendancy, why would one even have to dominate another? It looks like a product of conservative communal science, the determination to prove that one group of people is happier, healthier, and better than another. There are now all sorts of competition that did not exist years ago between social groups, couples and singles, parents and the childfree, working mothers and stay at home mothers. There doesn’t appear to be an end to the types of social competition that exist.

Copyright by Lucy who likes shopping online, going fishing, often searches pink coach purse and fashion things on the Internet.