Despite society’s near-pathological “matrimania,” some people are defying convention by choosing to remain defiantly single — and loving it.

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MODERN LOVE: Being single doesn’t mean having to say you’re sorry

Dan Brooks is a great guy. A 31-year-old senior programmer at a small web design studio, he’s smart, gregarious, and self-deprecatingly funny. Brooks likes his job and has an active social life, but like many people in their early thirties, he’s reminded daily of a personal, seemingly unchangeable reality that will continue to set him apart from many of his friends: he’s single.

When reached at his Burnaby office on a Thursday afternoon, Brooks has just finished another typical lunch hour with his co-workers, all in their twenties and thirties. Their meals have been lovingly prepared for them by spouses or significant others, and Brooks has once again been left to navigate the nearby shopping mall food court by himself. As the single black sheep in an office full of connubial bliss, Brooks’ co-workers are constantly trying to set him up and otherwise badgering him about being single — they’ve even gone so far as to chip in for an online dating membership, signing him up in secret. “My co-workers are probably rougher on me than most of my other friends,” he admits. “It’s kind of weird, coming to work and having to defend myself in that way.”

While Brooks knows the light-hearted ribbing at work is well-intentioned and largely harmless, increasingly he finds himself to be the odd one out among friends and colleagues. “We talk about spouses a lot around the office. They’re such a big part of our culture, that me not having one is so foreign to them,” he says, laughing. “They’re like, ‘How can you survive?’ I guess my perspective is I’m a lot more independent. I rely on my friends, where they rely on their spouses.”

Forming a family bond with friends instead of blood relatives or lovers is a reality for many people of all ages and personal backgrounds. But being single, or worse yet, choosing to stay unmarried is often considered an unfortunate predicament in the eyes of mass culture.

A growing community of singles’ advocates, academics, and researchers has been exploring the sometimes problematic influence of marriage on society and individuals for the past decade. Author of 2006’s Singled Out: How Singles are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After, Bella DePaulo is a leading scholar of what she calls “singleism,” discrimination against singles. DePaulo holds a Ph.D. in psychology from Harvard, is a regular contributor to online politics and lifestyle website Huffington Post, and runs the "Living Single" blog for Psychology Today. Reached by phone in California, where she works as a professor at UC Santa Barbara, DePaulo sounds cheerfully optimistic about marriage’s diminishing hold on society.

“You have what I call matrimania — this over-the-top celebration of marriage and coupling and weddings. I think the reason that’s happening is not because our society is so secure about the place of marriage, but because it’s so insecure,” she says. “It used to be that if you wanted to have sex without being stigmatized, if you wanted to have kids, if you were a woman and wanted to have economic security — all those things were dependent on marriage. And now women can pick up the cheque at work and the sperm at the bank!”

The most prevalent concerns DePaulo hears from her single readers and colleagues are similar to Brooks’ situation at work. “The main complaints are that people in the workplace, colleagues — unfortunately, even bosses — think that if you’re single, you don’t have a life,” she says. “So all the married and coupled people can have first picks on vacation time, they get to leave work early for whatever excuse.”

Workplace discrimination on the basis of marital status is one of many policy-related issues explored by the Alternatives to Marriage Project (AtMP), a nationwide American organization based in Brooklyn, New York. AtMP advocates for equality and fairness for unmarried people, including those who are single, choose not to marry, cannot marry, or are in same-sex partnerships. Nicky Grist has worked as AtMP’s executive director since 2005 (she became involved with the group after stumbling upon its website, Unmarried.org, while trying to answer questions in her personal life about her marital status). “There’s no other organization out there doing this work,” Grist says, “even though the issues we work on are incredibly mainstream.”

Like DePaulo and Brooks, Grist points to the workplace as ground-zero for marital status discrimination. “People who would never dream of commenting on many other aspects of somebody’s life feel perfectly fine commenting on their marital status,” she says.

Grist feels the notion of marriage as the ideal way for adults to live is fading, which bodes well for a more equal future for singles and unmarried couples. Even so, the influence of marriage in pop culture and mainstream society is huge, and that won’t change quickly. “It makes perfect sense that people who want the world to feel ordered and consistent and safe will continue to promote the idea of marriage as one of the things that creates that order and safety, whether or not it’s true for people,” Grist says. “Marriage is an institution, a social institution, a legal institution. And these create comfort for a lot of people.”

Back in Vancouver, people like Brooks continue to be prodded by well-meaning co-workers and relatives about the importance of pairing up. While he continues to go on casual dates (independent of the defunct online dating profile set up by his coworkers), he’s loath to talk about them with friends or relatives because they’re not committed — and therefore acceptable — relationships. “My parents, they definitely want grandchildren. I’m an only child,” he says. “I always just tell them, ‘You should have had more children and increased your odds!’”