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

One time when I was traveling, I struck up a conversation with a woman who was recently widowed. I asked her if she saw her coupled friends any more or less than she had before her husband died. She said she was "really lucky" because her coupled friends still included her.

It seems to me that therapists should be attuned to intimations that their single clients are selling themselves short in the dignity department in their interactions with couples. So it was with great interest that I read a book by two clinicians, Being Single in a Couple's World. I was especially intrigued by the story they told about Adam, a client who had recently divorced.

Adam and his ex-wife had a cabin they rented for a month every year, and two other couples always joined them for the last week and split the cost. There were only two bedrooms, so each night one of the couples slept in the living room. The first year after his divorce, Adam decided he would rent the cabin again and continue the tradition of inviting the same couples to join him for a week.

On the day his friends were due to arrive, Adam had gone to work and got back to the cabin after his friends had settled in. Adam was delighted to see his friends. He was a little less thrilled, though, when he noticed the neat pile of clothes in a corner of the living room. They were his. The couples had moved them from his bedroom, figuring that "since Adam was alone he wouldn't need his own bedroom and could sleep in the living room. This would give the two couples more privacy."

Adam told his friends how he felt: He was dismayed at finding that his friends had decided to move him to the living room without asking him what he thought of the idea. Sheepishly, his friends headed to the pile of clothes to begin to move them back to Adam's room. Adam stopped them, explaining that what he wanted was to be included in the decision process. Finally, they talked it through and Adam ended up expressing his willingness to stay in the living room.

That could have been the happy ending—Adam got to express his opinion just like the other adults. But there was more. At the end of the week, the couples asked Adam what he thought of the idea of splitting the expenses five ways, instead of continuing the three-way split that had been their tradition when Adam was coupled, too. Adam happily agreed. As Adam recounted the story in therapy, his last line was a proud one, "You gotta love friends like that!" In describing that ending, the therapists seemed proud, too.

By now it may not surprise you that I am going to reprise my role as the skunk at the garden party. (And I wonder why I'm not always invited to these parties.) "You gotta love friends like that"? Huh? Why is Adam giving his friends extra credit for not treating him unfairly? He sounds to me like the woman I met in my travels who felt lucky that her lifelong friends did not ostracize her after her husband died. And why didn't the therapists, who were writing a book on singles in a coupled world, recognize that by feeling grateful for being treated fairly, Adam was perpetuating the cult of the couple?

It was as if Adam agreed that his coupled friends were more special and more worthy than he, simply because they were coupled and he was not.

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