Think for a moment or two, and you can probably come up with the names of GLBT advocacy groups, and even the names of leaders who pursue same-sex marriage rights and broader social justice on behalf of the GLBT community. But if, for example, same-sex marriage became legal nationwide, that...

The Shriver Report Serves Up Compulsory Marriage and Mothering. That was the claim I made in my previous post. The report, I argued, seemed simply to assume that just about every woman wants to marry and have children and just about every woman does. It then puts those women...

As I was writing Singled Out and mocking couples who take those sappy love songs seriously, I occasionally stopped to wonder whether I was unfairly caricaturing them. "You are my everything." "I just want to be your everything." Does anyone really buy that?

Turns out, the answer is yes....

Recently, a reporter from the Daily Mail discovered my new book, Behind the Door of Deceit: Understanding the Biggest Liars in Our Lives, and got in touch about an interview. She had a hunch, she said, that relationships need a dash of deceit to survive. When she said relationships,...

When marriage is our primary financial fix, justice is denied.

Did you see the recent New York Times story titled, "The high price of being a gay couple"? The article describes, in detail, many ways in which gay couples are financially disadvantaged compared to married heterosexual couples. For example,...

It is so not 1950 anymore! Singles don't have to wait until marriage to have houses, sex, children, travel experiences, or furniture from actual stores. In fact, they don't have to marry at all. And they can choose to skip over or around any or all of the steps and...

Time magazine called Vicki "The Woman Who Saved Ted." Reporter Karen Tumulty said that "Ted Kennedy was redeemed in his third act, and that redemption couldn't have happened without Vicki...Giving his heart one more chance was probably the best decision Ted Kennedy ever made." A story in the New...

Mark Sanford. John Ensign. Newt Gingrich. Silvio Berlusconi. Bill Clinton. John Edwards. James McGreevey. Rudy Giuliani... They are a diverse cast of characters, all tied together by their affairs and their lies about them. They may never tell us the unvarnished truth about what they were thinking (or not thinking)...

New York Times reporter John Tierney recently described a study that supposedly showed that "single women are particularly drawn to other people's partners." The main point of this post is to shoot down the interpretation he offers of the results, which is dripping with singlism and - more importantly...

The New York Times has just published a piece on that same marriage and health study that Newsweek discussed so misleadingly. Sadly, this piece isn't what it should be either. I am especially disappointed with this one because I've read some of the reporter's previous work and liked...

A new day has dawned, and with it another study of marriage misrepresented in the media. As always, the inaccuracies are in one direction only -- implying that getting married results in better outcomes than it actually does. I've been at this for a while, and I have yet to...

It was past midnight on Inauguration Day, after the balls and all of the other events had ended. It had been an exhilarating and exhausting day. Michelle and the kids headed to bed. Barack Obama, the new president, was still up. Right there with him were the people who for...

Previously, I started to describe the historic changes that are occurring around the way we think about marriage and single life. The first set of transformative changes, discussed in my last post, focus on marriage itself. How important is it to your life experiences whether you ever marry and...

I think this is a moment in social history that scholars and critics will be analyzing long into the future. There's a lot of matrimania going on -- the over-the-top hyping of weddings and marriage. But as I argued in Singled Out, I suspect that's not a sign of...

There's a lot not to like in the cover story for Time written by the smugly-married Caitlin Flanagan. There is, for example, the predictable singlism (Mark Sanford's soulmate is not just a single woman but an "emotionally needy single woman," because really, what other kind could there be), the...

The Atlantic magazine has peddled its share of misguided matrimania and scolding of singles - both mothers and others - but not this month. Just look at this tease for a story by Sandra Tsing Loh: "The author is ending her marriage. Isn't it time you...

When I first started blogging - more than a year ago at Psychology Today, and three years ago here at the Huffington Post -- I never imagined that it would become one of my favorite things to do. But I do (mostly) love it. Let me count the...

One of my collaborators in the study of people who are single and the place of friendship in their lives and all of our lives is a law professor, Rachel Moran. So as soon as I heard that Sonia Sotomayor was Obama's Supreme Court nominee, I...

Count me among the multitudes of the charmed. I, too, loved the story of the woman who walked on stage to the sound of snickering, only to shock and wow them all with the sound of her music. I heart Susan Boyle.

I've also been intrigued by the...

Have you seen the "Gathering Storm" ad? It is the latest from the anti-gay marriage machine. Set against a gray, lightening-pocked, ominous background, it begins with the words: "There's a storm gathering. The clouds are dark and the winds are strong and I am afraid." It continues with one...