All the single people

Being single has never seemed so now. It's one of the cultural staples of our time: if the trendy magazine topic is to be followed, and if the studies are to be believed, than more people are single than ever. Fewer people are getting married, and those who do are doing it later. So why, then, is it still portrayed as being a wholly undesirable situation? Michael Cobb, the author of a new book on the subject, was asked about what he views as the conundrum of singleness:

[T]he loneliest I have ever felt is with this other person I am with. And that’s not supposed to be the case. Intimacies are always kind of like that. You think, “This is supposed to alleviate me from all this sadness and loneliness, and yet it’s just intensifying these feelings — but the single must have it much worse.” I feel like a lot of that bad effect is just projected onto single people, and that condition is rendered pathetic and sad and depressing. This is why it doesn’t have a language of its own because the language of singleness is really the language of couples who are pitying single people.