How Mental Blanketing Makes Marriage Seem Magical and Sows Doubt in Single People

Mental blanketing is the relentless glorifying of marriage and shaming of single people. New research suggests that many single people aren’t buying it.

Marriage is over — it will never matter again the way it once did. I already made that case previously. Now I’m on to a different question. How does marriage maintain its luster? Why does it still seem magical to so many? Why do even sensible and secure single people sometimes wonder what they are missing?

Mental Blanketing

There is a powerful and far-reaching process that makes marriage seem magical and sows doubt in single people. I described it in the introduction to Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After:

There is a way. It is the most powerful way of them all. It can leap over legislation, step on science, and turn its back on the most sparkling opportunities in public and professional life. It is called mental blanketing. It is like mind control, only without the conspiratorial undertones.

At a time when marriage is so inessential, mental blanketing aims to create the unshakable belief in an entire populace that marriage is exactly what it is not: utterly and uniquely transformational. Marriage, according to the mythology generated by mental blanketing, transforms the immature single person into a mature spouse. It creates a sense of commitment, sacrifice, and selflessness where there was none before. It is the one true place where intimacy and loyalty can be nurtured and sustained. It transforms a serious sexual partnership from a try-out to the real thing. Before, you hoped you were each other’s everything; now you really are. Marriage delivers as its ultimate reward the most sought-after American prize: happiness. Not just garden-variety happiness, but deep and meaningful well-being. A sense of fulfillment that a single person cannot even fathom. Marry, the mythology promises, and you will never be lonely again.

The mythology is fueled by fear and yearning. Yearning for the riches that await you on the other side of the marital divide; fear of what will become of you if you never get there. Fear and yearning, singlism and matrimania, singles and marrieds. There are always two sides, a push and a pull. That’s what makes the mythology so powerful.

The mythology faces a daunting challenge, though: It is pure poppycock. Every inch of it is either grossly exaggerated or just plain wrong. The science is wrong, the public policy is wrong, our beliefs are woefully wrong. Mental blanketing needs to work relentlessly to keep such inconvenient truths under wraps. Both sides of the scam need constant attention. On the side of singlism, every sliver of the single life that might prove validating or rewarding must be diminished or dismissed. On the side of matrimania, marriage must be unstintingly extolled, so that it maintains its mythical place as a magical and transforming experience.

Mental blanketing trivializes the lives of singles by providing ready-made rebuttals for any claims that singles might make for the value of their lives. Do singles have close friends who are deeply important to them? They are “just” friends. Do they have a sex life? Then they are sluts or horn dogs. But what about the singles who obviously are not promiscuous? Tsk, tsk. What a shame that they aren’t getting any. Are singles devoted to their jobs? They are just compensating for not having a spouse, the only object of devotion that is meaningful and real. Do singles have lots of interests? Actually, they don’t. All they are interested in is just one thing. As soon as they snag their soulmate, they will quit the ski club. Are singles happy? They just think they are. Without a soulmate, they could never know true happiness.

Still not convinced? Fine. Singles can have their so-called happiness and friends and relationships and career and passions and peace and solitude and maybe they can even be selfless and loyal and mature. They will still die alone.

Singlism is absolutist, contradictory, and utterly unforgiving. In the way that it blankets the entirety of a person’s life until it snuffs it all out, it is worse than some of the other isms. Take sexism, for example. Some women really do believe that a woman’s place is in the home, and that her highest calling is to her husband and children. For those women and for all of the other men and women who believe in such a worldview, women can earn full faith and credit for their lives. They can be attentive and devoted wives, loving and giving mothers, selfless keepers of the hearth and home. They can feel complete, fulfilled, and worthy, and they can be recognized as such by all who believe as they do.

Singlism holds out no such place for people who are single. Short of becoming someone like the Pope, there is no way to be a good or worthy single person, and there will not be until all of the pernicious myths are busted. In the meantime, to be valued, you have to be married.

The other side of mental blanketing — the buffing and puffing up of marriage to keep it seeming shiny and magical — is up against a formidable fact. Statistically speaking, the act of marrying is banal. Even though many Americans wait longer than ever to marry, and often do not stay long in the marriages they do enter, most Americans — close to 90% — still do marry at some point in their lives. Some try it over and over again. Marrying, then, does not make people special; it makes them conventional.

How can something so ordinary be made to appear extraordinary? Turn on the television, and watch show after show just pile it on. Start with the obvious — the reality programs such as The Bachelor, The Bachelorette, Joe Millionaire, Average Joe, and all of the increasingly smarmy sequels. With castles and hot tubs, champagne and limousines, they put lipstick on the pig of public humiliation. What’s a little groveling when the prize is a shot at marriage.

In other genres such as dramas and comedies, characters and plot lines twist and turn through one season after another, until they all finally come together, in the denouement, at the altar. It is as if the creative community can imagine no more thrilling way to end a series than with a wedding.

Some shows seem to promise an absorbing alternative to matrimania, but ultimately, they, too, give it up for marriage. In Friends, the show that was supposed to be about, well, friends, all but one of the stars had landed a soulmate by the finale. Even Sex and the City, the blockbuster hit which began with four smart, sassy singles taking the city of New York (and much of the rest of the country) by storm, ended with four cooing couples.

The funny pages, at their best, should be able to stand back and mock all this fetishizing of marriage and coupling with wry humor. But instead, they have leapt aboard. Cathy, the decades-long singleton, has married dorky, clueless Irving, the pathetic punch line of years of bad jokes. Now, though, creator Cathy Guisewite paints the couple as hopelessly in love, the pride of all of their parents and pets. Asked by Newsweek why she had married off her protagonist, Guisewite paid tribute to her own soulmate: “I’ve been married for six years, and I can’t write about dating without feeling like I’m cheating on my husband.”

Book publishers, too, are waving the white veil. One reporter who looked into the contemporary publishing scene concluded that “dating advice books just keep coming to the shelves. [They] do not have to be written by experts, they don’t have to contain any new information — and the advice doesn’t have to work!”

In the advertising world, blushing brides have been used to sell cereal and soft drinks; ice cream, chocolate, and cheese; dentistry, headache medication, eye drops, and body lotion; cars, clothes, shoes, credit cards, and lottery tickets; beer, cigarettes, and wine coolers; hotels, real estate, life insurance, and financial institutions. These were not celebrity brides, but the ordinary variety. All brides, it seems, are magical, and a sprinkle of their fairy dust is sufficient to seal the good fate of just about any product.

Many Single People Are No Longer Feeling the Pressure or They Are Just Ignoring It

Mental blanketing is so pervasive and so relentless that it should be hard not to feel the pressure to couple up. But new research from the Pew Research Center suggests that many single people just aren’t feeling it.

The single people in the survey were 4,860 adults in the U.S., 18 and older, who were not married, not living with a romantic partner, and not in a committed romantic relationship. Asked how much pressure they felt from society to be in a committed romantic relationship, a striking majority, 62%, said not too much or none at all. The other 38% felt some pressure or a lot of pressure.

% who feel pressure from society to be in a committed romantic relationship

53% ages 18–29

42% ages 30–49

32% ages 50–64

21% ages 65+

Age mattered. Unsurprisingly, the younger adults felt the more pressure. In the youngest group (ages 18–29), more than half, 53%, felt pressured by society to be in a serious romantic relationship. That percentage dropped to 42% for those who crossed over into their 30s (ages 30–49), and it declined even more, to 32%, for those who reached the age of 50 (ages 50–64).

The oldest single people were practically impervious. Only about 2 out of every 10 of them (21%) said they felt some or a lot of pressure to be in a serious romantic relationship.

Perhaps the most heartening finding was that the pressure didn’t matter. As Pew research associate Anna Brown noted:

“Those who feel pressure are no more likely than those who don’t to say they are looking for a relationship or dates, or that they are currently online dating, even after taking demographic differences into account.”

And, as I discussed elsewhere, the results of the Pew survey also showed that half of all single people have no interest in a serious romantic relationship, and they are not even interested in dating.

Society is throwing everything it has at single people and many of them are just shrugging it all off.

[Want to learn more? Take a look at this collection of articles on all sorts of topics relevant to single life. Watch my TEDX talk, “What no one ever told you about people who are single.” Check out my website. Disclosure: Links to books may include affiliate links.]