5/18/2017 Marriage should not come with any social benefits or privileges | Aeon Ideas

Marriage should not come with any

social benets or privileges
Vicki Larson

A previously unknown species single people has recently been discovered. First,
there was Eric Klinenbergs book Going Solo: e Extraordinary Rise and Surprising
Appeal of Living Alone (2012), followed by Kate Bolicks Spinster: Making a Life of
Ones Own (2015) around the time that e Washington Post started a column about
the single life called Solo-ish. en came Rebecca Traisters All the Single Ladies:
Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation (2016). Single people are
getting harder and harder to ignore, wrote Jesse Singal in New York magazine last
year. In fact, single women were predicted to be the most powerful voter demographic
in the recent presidential election in the United States. ( ere doesnt seem to be the
same attention paid to single men.)

It seems, then, that single people have nally arrived, poised to take their rightful
place alongside married couples when it comes to status, power and respect. Except
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for one thing: single people still dont have access to the legal benets and protections
the government grants to those who get married. In the US, there are more than
1,100 laws <http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-04-353R> beneting married
couples, and thats just at the federal level; many states oer perks and protections as
well.

Spouses in the US can pass on Medicare, as well as Social Security, disability, veterans
and military benets. ey can get health insurance through a spouses employer;
receive discounted rates for homeowners, auto and other types of insurance; make
medical decisions for each other as well as funeral arrangements; and take family
leave to care for an ill spouse, or bereavement leave if a spouse dies.

ese privileges are unavailable to the unmarried in the US, yet most single people
would benet if they were. After all, singles are rarely all alone. ey have parents,
siblings and other relatives, they have close friends and, often, lovers. Why should
they be denied the right to pass on their Social Security benets to them when they
die, instead of having their money absorbed back into the system? Why should they
be denied paid time o work to care for them?

Considering that there are more than 124 million single Americans, by choice or
chance outnumbering those who have tied the knot it no longer makes sense to
have the government reward people for their romantic decisions. And, as Klinenberg
notes, its not just a phenomenon in the US. e rise of people who identify as single
is occurring across the globe, from India to China to Brazil to Scandinavia. In
Stockholm, more than 50 per cent of all homes are one-person households a
shocking statistic according to Klinenberg, but a statistic he predicts is here to stay,
despite the long history of seeing single people as lesser.

Historically, men who didnt marry were considered immature playboys; women who
remained single were sad, lonely spinsters. In both cases, their sexuality was suspect.
Even today, when people have more freedom than ever to shape their lives, singles,
especially women,
<http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0192513X10392537> are
scrutinised, as any single person who has stayed with family for the holidays only to
be barraged with questions about his or her love lifeknows all too well.

e idea that everyone aspires to a romantic relationship or should is what the

philosopher Elizabeth Brake in her book Minimizing Marriage (2012) calls

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amatonormativity, and its harmful to those on a dierent path. Having the

government shut them out of certain protections is punishing. is is similar to what
the social scientist and singles advocate Bella DePaulo calls singlism the policy of
making singles pay more than couples for their basic needs.

Part of the problem is that there is no one type of single person. Singles include the
never-married, the divorced and the widowed; the young and the old; hetero and
LGBT; rich and poor; black, white and Asian, and every other possibility of race,
ethnicity, gender, age and sexual orientation. Plus, many see the single life as a
transitory phase, assuming that singles want to marry at some point. Some do, but
others dont. e bigger question is: why should it matter?

Granting benets to married people made sense at one point, says the historian
Stephanie Coontz, author of Marriage, a History (2005). In the mid-20th century, she
writes, governments looked to marriage licences as a way to distribute resources to
dependents, enacting the Social Security Act of 1935 to give married couples more
benets and the right to pass them on to spouses.

Every country, every nation, every state has found it useful to give certain benets
and protections to married people, Coontz tells me from her Washington state home.
To entice someone to give up earnings to take care of the home and children, she
and it has overwhelmingly been women would need to be protected. ere were
incentives to get married as well as obligations.

After the Second World War, there were numerous incentives that encouraged people
to embrace male breadwinning and female homemaking, and in 1948 the US income
tax code was changed to favour that model. Of course, in those days it was expected
that everyone would marry and would want to marry and that women would
remain at home. But that isnt quite the reality any more, even though 69 per cent
<http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/03/07/6-new-ndings-about-
millennials/> of millennials (people born between 1982 and 2000) say that theyd like
to marry one day.

Today, the male breadwinner and female homemaker model is hardly the norm; 46
per cent <http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2015/11/04/raising-kids-and-running-a-
household-how-working-parents-share-the-load/> of US families include parents who
both work full-time. In Canada, its 69 per cent <http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/11-
630-x/11-630-x2016005-eng.htm> and in Australia its 58 per cent

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<https://www.canstar.com.au/income-tax/female-breadwinners/> . is makes it
harder to defend using marriage licences as a way to funnel benets to people. Isnt it
time to give singles the same perks and protections to which married couples are
privy?

For Coontz, its a no-brainer: Its absolutely overdue. Keeping the system as it is
might appease the moralists among us, she noted in 2007 in an opinion piece for e
New York Times, but it doesnt serve the public interest of helping individuals meet
their care-giving commitments. Even if men and women dont have children of their
own and many married couples nowadays choose to be childfree almost everyone
has someone who will likely need to be looked after at some point, from a parent to a
close friend. e law professor Martha Albertson Fineman argues in her book e
Autonomy Myth (2004) that the government should stop privileging married couples,
and oer the same perks and protections to anyone in a caregiving role. e law
professor Vivian E Hamilton makes a similar argument in her paper
<http://scholarship.law.wm.edu/facpubs/183/> Mistaking Marriage for Social
Policy (2004).

Earlier this year, womens marches took place all across the globe. While these
millions of men, women and children marched for dierent reasons, the
overwhelming message was that womens rights are basic human rights.

Can the same be said of single peoples rights? Of course. So will there be a unied,
orchestrated eort to strip the benets and protections that apply just to the married
and give them to every individual, married or not?

Im not optimistic, DePaulo says. Advocacy groups never seem to get any traction or
any signicant funding. One issue is that marital status, unlike race or gender or
sexual orientation, is changeable. And changing entrenched programmes such as
Social Security is likely to face huge resistance <http://www.essaydocs.org/the-
family-in-social-security-entrenched-norms-and-prospects-f.html> from those who
wish to maintain traditional values.

Yes, creating a movement around ones single status would be challenging. But
reframing the conversation to become one that addresses basic human rights is much
more unifying and doable.

REPUBLISH

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aeon.co 16 May, 2017

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