Bella DePaulo, “Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After”:

A few years ago I showed an earlier version of this chapter to a single woman I'll call Jennifer. She was not impressed. "I had a lot of trouble reading your draft," she said, "because I believe, as I think 99.9 percent of the people on the planet do, that it is human nature to find another person. There is an emotional and physical intimacy that one will never find as a single person."

I think Jennifer was describing two deeply significant beliefs: (1) Physical and emotional intimacy has always and everywhere been the foundation for marriage, and (2) people who do not find such intimacy in marriage do not find it anywhere.

These are powerful statements—and, among those who internalize them, quite damning of single people. Jennifer seemed to regard the sentiments as universal and timeless truths—facts of human nature. I think many other people do, too. That makes the set of beliefs even more formidable.

But are our contemporary ideas about relationships and intimacy really so timeless? Let's start by looking at love.

"For most of Western history until the eighteenth-century," the authors of Love and Sex attest, "love was not expected to end well." Instead, "passion was assumed to end in shame, humiliation, dishonor, suicide, and ruin in almost every early society."

Added social historian Stephanie Coontz, in Marriage, a History, "Certainly, people fell in love during those thousands of years, sometimes even with their own spouses. But marriage was not fundamentally about love." If you wanted to build something that would last, like a marriage, you would know better than to try to base it on romantic love.

Here, again from Coontz, are a few of the considerations that served as grounds for marriage throughout the ages, when love was not the answer:

In the Stone Age, "marriage spoke to the needs of the larger group. It converted strangers into relatives and extended cooperative relations beyond the immediate family or small band by creating far-flung networks of in-laws."

In civilizations that had become more stratified, "propertied families consolidated wealth, merged resources, forged political alliances, and concluded peace treaties by strategically marrying off their sons and daughters."

"The concerns of commoners were more immediate: 'Can I marry someone whose fields are next to mine?'; 'Will my prospective mate meet the approval of the neighbors and relatives on whom I depend?'; 'Would these particular in-laws be a help to our family or a hindrance?' "

By the late eighteenth century, our pet theory about marriage—that it should be based on love—was beginning to take hold.

To Americans today, it seems self-evident that sex is at the heart of marriage, that it brings fulfillment to the marriage and to life, and that it opens the door to a kind of intimacy that, as Jennifer said, "one will never find as a single person." These bedrock beliefs, though, far from having grown out of the stuff of human nature, are in fact rather contemporary points of view.