{"id":3810,"date":"2012-11-30T11:08:38","date_gmt":"2012-11-30T16:08:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/citings\/?p=3810"},"modified":"2012-11-30T12:33:28","modified_gmt":"2012-11-30T17:33:28","slug":"savage-love-social-science","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/2012\/11\/30\/savage-love-social-science\/","title":{"rendered":"Savage Love, Social Science"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Well, you don’t see that every day—or even every week in columnist Dan Savage’s nationally-syndicated “Savage Love.” But this week, if you happened to flip through your local alternative paper or visit\u00a0The Onion’s AV Club online<\/a>, you might have spotted the ever-elusive social scientist lurking in the often thought-provoking, sometimes lurid, and generally entertaining and thoughtful column. That’s right, Eric Klinenberg<\/a>, NYU sociologist and author of Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone<\/em>, is called in to reassure a reader who simply doesn’t feel like coupling up.<\/p>\n

When Klinenberg began his research for this book, he told NPR affiliate KALW San Francisco<\/a> earlier this year, he thought it was going to be a story of sadness. Lonely elderly people dying alone in heatwaves, young people failing to launch, etc. But instead, as he tells Savage, “…young adults have been the fastest growing group of American singletons. They’re delaying marriage and spending more years single. Moreover, they increasingly recognize the fact that over their long lives, they’re likely to cycle in and out of different situations: alone, together; alone, together.” Klinenberg advises the letter writer to remain open to any of those possibilities, but demand respect for his current choice to remain single, pointing out that his findings show, “People who live alone tend to be\u00a0more<\/em> social than people who are married… So much for the myth of selfish singles!”<\/p>\n

Klinenberg closes rhetorically, “We’ve come a long way in our attitudes about sex and relationships. Now that living alone is more common than living with a spouse and two children, isn’t it time we learned to respect the choice to go solo, too?” For the sake of the not-so-lonely letter-writer, we certainly hope so.<\/p>\n

For more on Klinenberg’s research, be sure to check out our Office Hours interview<\/a> with him about\u00a0Going Solo<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Well, you don’t see that every day—or even every week in columnist Dan Savage’s nationally-syndicated “Savage Love.” But this week, if you happened to flip through your local alternative paper or visit\u00a0The Onion’s AV Club online, you might have spotted the ever-elusive social scientist lurking in the often thought-provoking, sometimes lurid, and generally entertaining and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":495,"featured_media":3811,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[39074],"tags":[17274,9975,70,17273,14564,320],"class_list":["post-3810","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sightings","tag-advice","tag-dan-savage","tag-family","tag-going-solo","tag-klinenberg","tag-marriage"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/files\/2012\/11\/Going-Solo.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3810","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/495"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3810"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3810\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3817,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3810\/revisions\/3817"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3811"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3810"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3810"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3810"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}