單身對于女性來說，不再是一種自憐或是令人惋惜的生活狀態，而是一種自主選擇、可以承擔的生活方式。獨身其實是復雜世界的第N+1種選擇，并無褒貶可言，它只是一種客觀存在。單身女性可以在同住的朋友身上找到親人的感覺，而兩個從未謀面的單身媽媽也可以成為彼此支撐的力量。對于婚姻改變人生這一說法，心理學家貝拉?迪波洛的開放性見解值得我們辯證地去思考。

By Regan Penaluna 柒月 選注

Bella DePaulo never fantasized about a dream wedding or being a bridesmaid. Instead, she saw herself as “single at heart,” pursuing intellectual refinement, friendship, and solitude as a young psychologist. Still, she had internalized the popular idea that married people were happier and healthier than the unmarried, and took her own pleasant experience to be exceptional. That is, until she looked into it, and found the claims about the “transformative power of marriage” to be, she says, either “grossly exaggerated or totally untrue.” From then on, she’s focused on how singles actually live.

Now at the University of California, Santa Barbara, DePaulo has written widely about how marriage and the nuclear family are making way for other social arrangements. She’s not fooled by shows such as The Bachelor or romantic comedies that end with a storybook wedding proposal. Those narratives exist, she says, “not because we as a society are so secure about the place of marriage in our lives, but because we’re so insecure.”

At least one cause of that insecurity is the empowerment of single women, which she writes about in her book, Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After. In this article, DePaulo discusses how single women are transforming social and political life, how they’re settling down, and what that says about living happily.

Could the end of traditional marriage and nuclear families be a good thing?

I think it is a tremendously positive thing. Once upon a time, just about everyone in the United States thought that they needed to squeeze themselves into the heterosexual nuclear family box, even if they weren’t heterosexual or weren’t interested in getting married or had no interest in raising kids. Now, people can create the lives and the families that allow them to live their best, most authentic, and most meaningful lives. They can choose to put friends at the center of their lives. Or they can assemble their very own combination of friends and family to be the social convoys that sail beside them as they navigate their lives. They can have kids in their lives without having children of their own. They can live under the same roof with friends or families or children or any combination. They can live in a place of their own, but within an intentional community, such as a co-housing community. They can share a duplex with a friend or relative, so that they have their own space while also having someone else they care about just steps away. Or they can live entirely on their own. The possibilities are endless.

What determines how a single woman chooses her living arrangement?

It depends on life stage, but it also just varies by preference. Some people like me really like having their own space, so love living alone. But there are other single people who really like being with other people a lot of the time, so they might want to live under same roof, like a Golden Girls kind of thing. Also, single mothers are great at finding innovative ways of living as single parents. One of the people I interviewed, Carmel Sullivan, was devastated after her divorce. She felt so lonely. And then she put out an ad saying that she wanted to share a place with another single mother and her kids, to help each other raise the kids and have friendship. She got all the responses and ended up starting this online platform called CoAbode, where single mothers can find other single parents to share a home with. When I talked to Carmel a few years ago, she already had 70,000 single mothers signed up.

Is having more living arrangements to choose from fundamental to happiness?

Yes, I think it really is. And that is really what is so different about the way we’re living now is that we have more options than ever before to choose the life we want. Of course we are constrained by whatever resources and money we have, but I found in writing my book How We Live Now, that even people who were very constrained in their finances could still find a very satisfying life to live.

A number of books have recently come out touting single women, such as Kate Bolick’s Spinster, and Rebecca Traister’s All the Single Ladies. How will single women shape the future of society?

Their impact on politics could, in theory, be tremendous. By staying single when marriage is still idealized, single women are already pushing back against conventional expectations and constraints, creating 21st-century connections and intimacies beyond the old nuclear family model. They vote overwhelmingly democratic. So the democrats should be beating down their door, promising to wash their cars, watch their kids. But they don’t vote typically in the same proportions that married people do. I think they’ve been so left out of the process by the way politicians talk about single women, the way they leave them out of the conversation when they talk about families. As a single woman, I want a choice about which role I want to fulfill. If I had to be a wife, I would go stark raving mad. So having a role can be very important, but we don’t all fit into the same roles.

Vocabulary

1. fantasize: 幻想，想象。

2. refinement: 精進；solitude: 獨處，獨居。

3. internalize: 使（感情、態度、信仰等）成為思想的一部分，使內在化。

4. transformative: 變革性的；grossly: 很，非常；exaggerated: 夸張的。

5. nuclear family: 核心家庭，指由夫妻及其未成年或未婚子女組成的家庭；make way for: 給……讓路，騰出地方。

6. The Bachelor: 《單身漢》，美國交友約會真人秀，每季都會有一位單身漢和多位單身女性進行浪漫約會，最終從中選擇一位作為妻子人選。

7. narrative: 故事，這里指童話故事里宣揚的美滿婚姻；secure: 自信的，有把握的。

8. empowerment: 增加自主權，掌握自身命運；stereotype: 對……產生成見，把……模式化；stigmatize: 使感到羞恥，被安上罪名。

9. heterosexual: 異性戀的。

10. authentic: 真實的，可靠的。

11. 或者他們可以把自己的朋友和家人聚在一起，在未來的人生路上為自己保駕護航。assemble: 召集，聚集；convoy: 護航，護衛隊。

12. intentional community: 理念社區；co-housing: 共同住宅，理念社區的一種類型，由私人住宅及廣大的共用空間組成，居住者們共同規劃和管理，并保持頻繁的交流與互動。《紐約周刊》曾這樣描述這一理念：“能讓人們擁有自己的溫暖窩，但不會和外界疏離，不會感到在冰冷的城市中迷失。”

13. duplex: 復式公寓。

14. life stage: 人生階段。

15. Golden Girls: 指1985年制作的系列美劇《黃金女郎》（The Golden Girls），講述了幾位已到古稀之齡的女士同住一個屋檐下的故事。

16. devastated: 崩潰的，傷心欲絕的。

17. constrained: 受約束的，被壓抑的。

18. tout: 吹捧，吹噓；spinster: 未婚女子，老姑娘。

19. 當婚姻仍被理想化時，單身女性已經開始通過獨自生活的方式向傳統的期望和約束做出反擊，在舊式核心家庭之外建立起21世紀的新型人際和親密關系。

20. 她們普遍支持民主黨。overwhelming: 壓倒性地。（美國的女性選民中，高知女性和未婚女性尤愛民主黨。前者作為性別歧視的受害者，喜歡民主黨平等和進步的政策；而后者包括大量的單身母親，由于經濟方面的原因，依賴于民主黨所支持的社會福利政策。）

21. beat down one’s door: 砸破門，指蜂擁而至。

22. 但一般來說，他們參與選舉投票的人數比例卻沒有已婚人士多。

23. 我覺得她們（單身女性）在選舉投票過程中之所以不被重視，是因為政客們談論她們的方式，即在談論家庭時忽略了這部分人群。

24. stark raving mad: 完全瘋狂的。

（來源：英語學習雜志 編輯：董靜）