Dear Friends at this Wonderful Miracles Forum,,


Please do read excerpts from a book by a recovering friend,,
very valuable consideringbhow singles are usualy singled out for rebuke,,, 
and to break the falsehood that "GOOD RECOVERY" must include a relationship !!


I'm fifty-four years old and I have always been single. I love my
single life. But for a long time I rarely said that out loud. I
thought I was the only happy single person.

I didn't love everything about my single life. I didn't like
that "poor thing" look I'd get when others first learned that I was
single. I didn't like their assumption that I must be miserable and
lonely and pining for a partner.

There were other things I didn't like that I thought I could pin on
my single status, but I wasn't really sure. For example, sometimes at
work colleagues with partners would assume that I could cover the
tasks that no one else wanted. Maybe they presumed that since I was
single, I didn't have a life and so had nothing better to do with my
time. Socially, I was invited to lunch with my coupled colleagues
during the week but not to their dinner and movie outings over the
weekends.

Tentatively at first, I began asking other single people if they
thought they were viewed and treated differently than coupled people
just because they were single. The responses were overwhelming. It
was time to proceed beyond anecdotes.

Years later after I had read hundreds of scientific studies about
marital status, happiness, and discrimination, and after I conducted
my own program of research, I realized that much of the conventional
wisdom about people who are single was either grossly exaggerated or
just plain wrong. The place of singles in society and the
significance of getting married have changed dramatically over the
past decades. But our views of single and married people have not yet
caught up. I wrote about this in my book Singled Out: How Singles Are
Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever
After. The subtitle captures what I learned about singles. Let me
explain.

After collecting stories of singlehood, informally, from hundreds of
others, I began conducting systematic research. My colleague Wendy
Morris and I first studied perceptions of people who are single and
married. We approached this work in a number of ways. In one set of
studies, for instance, we created profiles of married and single
people that were exactly the same (in terms of the person's age,
hometown, interests, employment, and so forth) except for their
marital status. In one experiment after another, we found that the
single people were viewed more negatively than the married people.
For example, they were seen as unhappy, lonely, and self-centered
compared to their married counterparts. (The one exception is that
single people were consistently viewed as more independent than
married people.)

We looked up federal statutes and found more than a thousand
instances in which official marriage was linked to federal
protections and benefits. We found discrimination against singles in
the workplace and the marketplace. We then did research of our own on
discrimination and found that realtors (and other people we asked)
would prefer to rent to married couples than to single women, single
men, unmarried couples, or a pair of friends -- even when they all
had equally positive references and ability to pay. They even
preferred the married couple to the unmarried couple when the
unmarried couple had been together six years, compared to only six
months for the married couple.

The story that was taking shape in my mind was becoming clear. Single
people are not as happy as married people in part because they are
targets of stereotyping and discrimination.

At first I did not doubt that getting married made people happier. I
saw indications of that in headlines and book titles. In fact, the
assumption had become so much a part of conventional wisdom that some
began to build other arguments on that foundation. In an op-ed in The
New York Times, for instance, Jonathan Rauch argued that gay men and
lesbians should be allowed to marry because social science research
shows that marriage makes people happier.

When I set out to study the research on marital status and happiness,
I thought I was looking for nuances -- are there some people who
benefit from marriage even more than others? I was amazed by what I
found.

In the typical study people in different categories are asked to rate
their happiness, perhaps on a 1 to 4 scale, with 4 indicating "very
happy". The categories usually include people who are single (and
always have been), currently married, divorced, or widowed. Here are
the results of one such study by Walter R. Gove and Hee-Choon Shin
published in 1989; the numbers are the average happiness ratings of
2,200 Americans in the four groups:

3.3 currently married

3.2 single

2.9 divorced

2.9 widowed

The first thing to notice is that all four groups are on the happy
end of the scale. They are all closer to calling themselves a 3 in
happiness (the scale point that has the label "pretty happy") than to
any other label. Second, the differences between the groups are not
impressive, and the smallest difference is between those who are
currently married and those who have always been single.

I'm mentioning this particular study because it is based on a
nationally representative sample and because it is often cited by
scholars who claim that getting married makes people happier. They
look at numbers like these and say, "Look, the married people are
happier than all of the unmarried people." But even if the
differences were much greater than they actually are, we still could
not say for sure that getting married is what made the married people
happier. Maybe they were already happier when they were single, and
getting married didn't change anything. Also, why not compare all of
the people who had ever been married to the people who had never been
married? In that comparison, the people who had ever experienced
marriage would have an average happiness rating of about 3.0, lower
than the 3.2 of the people who had always been single.

A better answer to the question of whether getting married makes
people happier would come from studying people over the course of
their lives, to see whether people who get married become happier
than they were before. Professor Richard Lucas of Michigan State
University has been analyzing data from just such a study. Thousands
of Germans have been asked about their happiness once a year, every
year, starting at age sixteen. The study has been ongoing for more
than eighteen years. Lucas followed people who got married and stayed
married over the course of the study, people who stayed single the
entire time, and people who married and then became divorced or
widowed.

Consistent with the study I described previously (in which people
were asked about their happiness just once), both the married and the
single people were solidly on the happy end of the scale. In this
type of study it is possible to look back at the people who got
married and stayed married to see how happy they were when they were
single.

On the average, people who stayed single the whole time had a
happiness rating of 7.0. (In this study, people rated their happiness
on a scale ranging from 0 to 10.) On the other hand, married people
had a happiness rating of 7.2 when they were single. What happened
once they married? Around the year of the wedding, they enjoyed a
brief blip in happiness. On the average, they became about .25 points
happier than they were before. But after that honeymoon period was
over, they went back to being as happy or as unhappy as they had been
when they were single. So getting married did not transform them from
miserable single people into blissfully wedded couples!

Moreover, the small increment in happiness around the time of the
wedding occurred only for those who got married and stayed married.
Those who would eventually divorce became slightly less happy as the
time of the wedding approached.

So single people typically are happy, and getting married does not
make people lastingly happier, even for those who get married and
stay married. How can this be? Single people do not have the
official, legal coupled status that is so celebrated in our society --
and many are not part of any couple, formal or informal, same-sex or
different-sex. Plus, they are targets of stereotyping and
discrimination. Why aren't they miserable and lonely?

The ways we have come to talk about people who are single is
misleading. We often say, for example, that they are "alone" and that
they "don't have anyone". In fact, though, single people (perhaps
especially single women) are likely to have whole networks of
important people in their lives. They often have friendships that
have outlasted many marriages. They have not invested all of their
emotional and interpersonal capital into just one person.

Decades ago there was a big bright line separating married life from
single life -- a line that was especially daunting to women. Singles
often felt that they could not have sex or children outside of
marriage without experiencing stigma and shame. The Food and Drug
Administration did not approve the pill until 1960. Before then,
having sex entailed a greater risk of pregnancy. Now women can have
sex without having children, and because of advances in medical
reproductive science, they can have children without having sex.
Marriage is no longer essential to any of it.

Even though women are still sometimes paid less than men for the same
work, there are more jobs and better jobs open to women than there
were decades ago. That means that women are no longer tethered to
husbands for economic life support. Many can support themselves and
even some children on their own paychecks.

There is a remarkable new demographic reality: Americans now spend
more years of their adult lives unmarried than married. There are
currently fewer households comprised of mom, dad, and the kids than
of single people living solo.

Increasingly, people who are single are living their lives fully.
Those who have the resources to do so are buying homes, traveling the
world, and pursuing their passions. Their lives are meaningful -- and
yes, they are happy.

Next time you are about to condemn a sigle person you know,, please stop,, dont !!
Hugs
Raman an addict
clean and serene in NA Worldwide !