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My favorite listicle – and also my nomination for the saddest and most discouraging one – has been making the rounds lately. Shani Silver’s 10 things NOT to say to your single friends started out at xoJane and was picked up by Alternet and probably lots of other places as well.

Here are some examples of Silver’s 10 things never to say to your single friends (you can read all 10 here):

• “Want me to fix you up with the one single guy I know?”
• “Oh, sorry. Dinner is just couples tonight.”
• “Are you seeing anybody?”
• “OMG I’m SO excited to be single now! Let’s go out!”

What I like about Silver’s never-say-this list is that the suggestions are so on target. I also like what she has to say about most of them. For example, about the “are you seeing anybody question,” she uses the flip-the-script strategy that I so often recommend. That is, if you are wondering whether something is an appropriate thing to say, imagine saying a parallel thing to a married person. Here’s how Silver puts it:

“You’re asking me about my love life. I’m SO not asking about yours. What if I started a conversation with, ‘How happy is your marriage these days?’ Awkward. There is more to me than my singleness, and far more to talk about. Let’s start there.

“My job is pretty cool, wanna talk about it? I have an awesome hobby writing for xoJane these days, want me to tell you about it? I’m obsessed with Momofuku Noodle bar, wanna go?…”

About the friend who wants to hang out with Silver now that the friend is single, Silver asks:

“Why is it now more okay [to hang out together] than it was before? Why am I in a different bucket than your couple-y friends? I don’t appreciate 2^d class friend status…”

Although I appreciate Silver’s smart consciousness-raising, I find it sad and discouraging that these kinds of singlist assumptions and behaviors are still rampant and need to be called out. When I wrote about many of these same varieties of obnoxiousness in Singled Out, I hoped that such awkward, insensitive, and inappropriate ways of interacting with single people would peter out. I even hoped that people who continued to say such dopey things would get put on the spot about it, the way people often do when they say racist or sexist things.

But no. People persist in offering to “fix up” single people, as if they were broken. They continue to tell their single friends that they are not welcome to dinner because the dinner is only for couples. I really don’t get that one – how are they not mortified to say a thing like that? (Actually, I do get it, but just thinking about it is sad.) The one about how coupled people deign to socialize with you only once they become uncoupled (or, in another variation, when their partner is away or uninterested in a particular movie) has offended me all my life.

On the bright side, I do think things will change. As more people such as Shani Silver write articles like hers – which get picked up and passed around – ways of thinking will ultimately change, too. It will take too long and it will never be perfect (we can tell that from all of the still-ongoing racism and sexism), but it will get better. Just about every year, there are more and more single people, and we’re just not going to take it anymore.

Do you have a favorite “never-say-this” suggestion to add to the list?

 

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And they are apparently too stupid to realize how easy it is to ensure they are called out for their bad behavior.

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Bella DePaulo (Ph.D., Harvard; Visiting Professor, UC Santa Barbara), an expert on single life, is the author of several books, including “Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After” and “Singlism: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How to Stop It.” Dr. DePaulo has discussed singles and single life on radio and television, including NPR and CNN, and her work has been described in newspapers such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and USA Today, and magazines such as Time, Atlantic, the Week, More, the Nation, Business Week, AARP Magazine, and Newsweek. Visit her website at www.BellaDePaulo.com.

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    Last reviewed: 28 Dec 2013