married

How living in the city, or on the West Coast may hurt your chances of being happy.

Eric Klinenberg, an NYU sociologist, is the author of Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone. Here, he explains why women are better at living alone than men, the social pressures to shack up, and why everyone should live alone at some point in their lives.

My husband and I lived together for five years before we got married on one hot, sunny August day. And now that we’ve been married for 11 years, I look back and think of that time in our lives as almost a different period. Such different memories, different experiences, different problems. Back then we were still establishing our careers for example and saving desperately for a house. We were more flush with both cash and time.

Is our culture predisposed to celebrate and reward married people over singles? According to a recent post on the NY Times health blog Well there’s a growing concern among social scientists that singles are getting a raw deal in a number of areas; an inequity, which, in the interest of social parity, needs to change.

Should Sesame Street’s Bert and Ernie declare they’re gay and get married? That’s what an online petition on the activist website Change.org would like to see happen.