Single occupant =/= not married

For all the talk of how wonderful marriage or living together is, no one really champions the freedom of living single.

Gay people wanting to be married must be encouraging singlehood. Or something.

Next thing you know, single people will want the right to be married, too...

Social disabilities, we're #1!!!!

I wonder if/how those rates compare with rates of depression. Do people who live with groups of other people (family, most likely, but not just a spouse) have lower rates of depression than people who live alone?

I wonder this for two reasons: I’ve heard that Americans have higher rates of depression than other countries and now we learn that we live alone more often than not. (And we evolved as group-dwellers, it is generally believed/understood.)

And the other reason is personal nonsense that no one would care to have to read about…

Once again, suddenlyorcas makes no fucking sense at all. I don't know why that surprises me.

The bright side is that single occupant households have a very low rate of domestic violence.

#2 - No one really champions giving us tax breaks or any of the other perks of married life. It's time for a political movement that will fight for the rights of singles!

Sort of shows how often marriage in the past has been based on desperation. Jane Austen novels are fun to read, but they look different when you realize that a lot of those marriage-seeking gals aren't just looking for their One True Love, they're looking to escape a future of hopeless poverty.

That 8% diff between Seattle & Portland is married guys on the downlow.

Call those of us who live alone what you want but being naked any time you like rocks!

@9- I'd personally like to see a single's pride parade along with those tax breaks. It's amazing how a group that is soon to become a majority can still be so clearly considered an underclass - socially, institutionally and financially.

There actually is a singles rights movement, but it's very small and doesn't get much attention. The problem is, a large percentage of people who are single don't really want to be, feel bad about it, and would jump at the chance to leave the ranks!

@12: If you can't be naked in your home with your partner any time you want, you are, as they say on the innertubes, doin' it wrong.

That is nothing new or interesting about Seattle having a higher percentage of singles than Portland. It's been that way for years. What actually is interesting is that Atlanta is suddenly the second highest. It's been DC, Seattle, and SF for a long time -- when did Atlanta become number 2, and why?

@6 We also have higher rates of mental health workers and campaigns to encourage people to be open about their mental health issues. It could be like autism where the actual rates are not increasing, or higher than other places, but just that we screen people more thoroughly and classify a wider ranger of people as having it.

"Until recently, no culture in human history had sustained large numbers of people in places of their own. "

But then no culture has really had the ability to do so until recently either. It takes a fair bit of resources and technology to provide large numbers of people with their own self contained dwelling.

@20 Great point.

@16 I've never been married, but I've also rarely lived alone.

Multiple occupancy does not equate to married / partnered (just as single occupancy doesn't equate to single relationship status), and I doubt my housemates wanna see my hairy arse wandering round the shared living areas.

The really interesting question is; if we're such social animals, why do we (given the financial means) choose to live alone in such numbers?

18, but this trend started in the 60s, LONG before same sex marriage was even considered, so you can't blame the gays. Gay marriage will have no impact on straight people's marriage plans.

There is no same sex marriage in Japan, yet they have one of the lowest marriage, and procreation rates.

@18 - Nothing in that statistic suggests that more children are being raised out of wedlock. It's just as likely that, in addition to fewer people getting married, fewer, also, are breeding.

Since there's no intrinsic value to making more, this strikes me as fairly value neutral (and I say so as a happily married man).

@19 - And?

@25 They are always living in the past. That Is why they will never be the future, no matter how they try.

Since gay marriage was legalized 8 years ago in Massachusetts, the divorce rate dropped to pre-WWII rates.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bruce-wils…

25/29, One could just as easily (more easily really, since that was legalized about the same time this trend started happening) say that legalizing interracial marriage has led to the decline in marriage. Should we have not allowed that? Unless you have data that supports your assertions, you're just making uneducated statements.

We don't withhold equal rights because of baseless statements, or even on the possibility that something might happen. I.E. All the baseless claims of all the horrible things that would happen if the races were allowed to mingle.

@22,

Because living with other people is a massive pain in the ass. It's fantastic IF you find someone you can get along with, who's about on the same page as you regarding noise, cleanliness, and household responsibilities, but a fucking nightmare if there are too many differences. Even in my best roommate situations, I sometimes still got sick of seeing them every damn day.

Since the number of people in "your household" is defined by you + your spouse + any dependents, the "single household" category actually includes any long-term cohabiting couples who are neither married nor have children. I suspect that the increase in the percentage of "single households," particularly in urban areas, has more to do with young couples waiting longer to get married/have children than it does with an actual increase in people living alone.

@22 I wonder if safety has anything to do with it. (Pre)Historically, humans had to band together for food and safety (among other reasons), and now our immediate safety and food supplies aren’t utterly dependent upon living in the same structure with other people. So without the survival imperative, we’ve come to appreciate mid-day nakedness, the occasional pile of laundry and the benefit of watching whatever the hell we want when we want …or something like that.

@34 don't forget the impact the Duggars and their friends' families have on the numbers. With twenty people on average in those homes, it tends to skew the average a bit.

38, Marriage rates dropped much more in states like Texas, and Tennessee, two very homophobic states. Teen pregnancy and unwed births are also higher in those states. It seems that gay marriage slowed the decline in Mass compared to the moral and upright south.

@32 -

The percent of adults married drops by a THIRD and you can't infer that fewer children live in married households?

I can infer a lot; inference, however, is a terrible process for discerning truth. At best, one can derive a hypothesis therefrom. To hold this inference as a statement of fact assumes more than I'm willing to take as axiomatic. Isn't it possible, even likely, that in addition to not marrying, a fair number of these people aren't breeding?

I can say that, despite being married, the majority of people I know are single and live alone, or dating but maintaining individual residences. Anecdote is no better, but also no worse, a mean for discerning truth than inference.

the Qunited States of Gommorica will not produce enough children to sustain its population.

Perhaps not at current rates. What is the objective value of maintaining current rate of population? Most population of organisms wax and wane, and the human is no more objectively valuable (given that there may well be no such thing as objective value to begin with) a species than a termite or a virus. I mean, I may value humans more (termites don't buy tickets to my shows or cook me breakfast), but I'm still not sure why I should lobby for new ones. After all, they keep making new ones even without encouragement.

As to the "And?", I admit to not having read the post @17 to which @19 responded. So where I previously wondered what the significance of homosexuals living singly was, I now wonder how one comes to infer that homosexuals--who aren't around in any higher numbers now than at any time during our lives, who exist in the same numbers in repressive nations like Saudi Arabia and progressive ones like Sweden or the Netherlands--are responsible for the value neutral phenomenon of singles living in Atlanta.

you are a tedious little bitch, aren't you.....

Only in that I bother responding to ubiquitous, bed-wetting trolls.

@27 -

However, I think most experts agree that the proportion of children being raised by single mothers is far higher today than it was in 1959.

Sure, I'll buy that. This doesn't strike me as being related--at least in terms of causation--to an increase in the number of single people. Would you or would you not imagine that most people uninterested in marriage are also uninterested in children? Our undocumented troll appears to be conflating separate phenomena.

42, but states like Texas and Tenn marriage rates have declined more, while their divorce rates are higher.

Marriage Troll –
Doesn't the phrase "living alone" mean that there are no children in the home, since that would be living with another human? Or are they referring only to adults? Are children not people after all?

How you managed to drag single parenting into this is a credit to your trollness. Well done.

@18 - "Married two parent households provide the best environment to raise children into functional contributing adults." 

 Actually, there is significant evidence that two-adult-only households lead to more neuroses in children.  The strongest, most functional & resilient children are raised in multiple (3 or greater) adult living situations.  Kind of like the real traditional family: extended families living in the same compound or neighborhood.  

 The nuclear family is an aberration in human history, and has existed for a very short amount of time.

Seems like such a waste. If all the single folks just got a roommate, we could be using 84 million fewer refrigerators in the US. Plus, there could be more cuddling and less energy wasted on heat.

No, not polygamy, you nitwit.

@49: I second this. Conservatives who think that the 50s image of marriage and family was some stable golden age do not know history. As well as the availability on contraceptive methods (not as good as today, of course) for long before 1959. There is scholarship that dates American promiscuity to after WWII, before the pill. And tracking it before the 19th century would involve a time machine.

@60 - But the question asked in @17 was why Atlanta had experienced a sudden surge. Gays have always gathered in urban centers, and Atlanta has already been one for some time. What's changed in that city?

Aside from that, you're still assuming facts not in evidence. Yes, homosexuals are less likely to be married (particularly when they can't marry in most states), and will tend to contribute to higher numbers of single people. And urban areas tend to attract larger gay communities than rural areas. But a statistical change of this magnitude suggests that a growing number of heterosexuals are remaining single, broadly speaking. In the narrower matter of Atlanta . . . well, I don't know. I'm happy to admit I have no answer to the question you failed to answer.

To be considered tedious bitchood squared by a cowardly, unregistered troll hardly passes as insult.

I love how the Conservatives want to blame this on the gays.

I can't tell you the number of successful, attractive women I know who choose to live alone in condos, houses, apts etc. Some guy needs to be *really* amazing for them to be willing to give up all that freedom. They're not willing to cook, clean up after, and wash the nasty drawers of some dude unless he's really, really worth it. And guess what? There's not exactly a ton of men out there these days who are really, really worth it. Women aren't desperate for a financial lifeboat anymore and the stigma of singlehood is gone so there's no stopping them. Marriage & kids are now a lifestyle choice for those that find that sort of lifestyle appealing. Get used to the new situation, Fundys, it ain't going away any time soon.

@63

And how do you explain Denver, Cleveland, New Orleans, etc?

Idiot.

I think you hit an important nail on the head, 64. It's not about teh gheys. In fact, percentage-wise, more of my gay friends are married or in LTRs than my straight friends (writing from DC, in case you forgot).

As others have pointed out, this isn't a one-dimensional trend. It's not so much that people in these cities are OPPOSED to marriage, they just get married later than people in small-town America. Why? Many reasons. First, it takes a lot of education to make it in these cities. So, if you're not "starting out" until 25-30 because of pursuing higher education, it only makes sense that you won't get married until 32-40. You need some time to live your life, find a compatible partner, date, etc. If you start that path in high school, then it makes sense that you'll be married by 21-25. If you move from your hometown to your college town, then to your grad school town, and then to your career town, and maybe once more pursuing opportunity, and your compatible mates are doing the same thing, you're just not going to settle down that young, even though the elapsed time from "being an independent person" to "settling down" is similar. And while I DO see a lot of pre-marital cohabitation, it's the healthy kind, on a path to marriage, as a way to make sure that the other person is compatible in every way (better broken up than divorced, better childless than with children in the matrix), versus the home- and bed- and babydaddy-hopping I see from my less-successful friends who stayed in their hometowns. Add in the demographics of big cities (skewed younger), and it LOOKS like people are shunning marriage, when they're really just getting a later start and making sure it's right. If we instead looked at metropolitan statistical areas (many people move to the 'burbs when they get married) and set an age (like they do for college degrees, like % of people married by 35) AND factored into the divorce rates, we'd likely see that these cities foster healthy, stable relationships (like the troll's stat that the marriage rate fell but the number of married people increased substantially...so fewer people getting married among a young educated demographic mix, but FAR fewer of those married people getting divorced).

But another important part of that is what 64 says...women now have a choice. Fortunately, the results I have seen from this are men stepping up to be the man that a woman wants. Living independently is GOOD for men. They learn to wash their own nasty drawers and cook their own meals and keep their own home and maybe even decorate a little, and they can appreciate a woman who just resets the breaker or recaulks the window or jumps the car when it's necessary. And that's why marriages in these cities happen later but last longer. Neither men nor women "settle." Sure, there's still the inevitable give-and-take of relationships, but there's a much more honest conversation about what each brings to the table and how the labor will be divided. And that's nothing but good...for men, women, and, for most of them (most people still have kids of their own), their eventual kids. I love when my younger male friends ooh and ahh over my kitchen or washer/dryer...they've become domesticated...and when they go ga-ga for successful women...they've learned to value what each person brings to the table in a holistic way. Good stuff.

Good Evening Charles,
Yeah, I found that data interesting too.That is pretty high.especially vis-a-vis 1960.
Given that I am on my own as well that makes me in numbered company. I reckon there may be a myriad of reasons for this phenomenon. But, one comes to mind immediately, what % of adults did co-habitat (married etc.) PRIOR to living alone and what were their reasons for leaving that arrangement? Maybe, many were quite unhappy with it.

I have a saying "Better to be unhappily single than to be unhappily married". Not that I'm unhappy but possibly many are.
.

@63 - Conversing with me is a privilege I don't wish to extend to you much longer. @17's assertion was this:

That is nothing new or interesting about Seattle having a higher percentage of singles than Portland. It's been that way for years. What actually is interesting is that Atlanta is suddenly the second highest. It's been DC, Seattle, and SF for a long time -- when did Atlanta become number 2, and why?

(emphasis mine)
What's being pointed out is that Atlanta's rank has jumped; to miss this required either actual or affected density, and not on my part. Whether the assertion is true or not, I cannot say (and frankly don't care; despite being happily married, I don't see any value shift one way or another if people are marrying less or breeding less). If avocado has any more time to waste on someone of your disposition and aptitude, I invite him/her to take this up with you.

@68

So people who don't make the same lifestyle choices as you do, you wish death upon. I bet you're a serious "Christian" too. Wow, what a huge bag of issues and dysfunction you are. Have fun being you! Best of luck, from all of us!

It's going to be funny when these Fundies get old and realize their kids and grandkids are actually leaving them to stew in their own crap bags, opting instead to live in lovely cities, making lovely lives for themselves, far FAR away from the fuckface bigots they are so blessed to be related to. Really, there's nothing better than a hateful old 'neck, except a hateful old 'neck who shits themselves and wants to come live with you.