Do single people get a raw deal?

Analysis

BBC

Government, Politics, News

4.6 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 26 June 2023

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Single people make up a large proportion of the population in Britain. People are marrying later and less, getting divorced more often, and living longer. Although not all people who live alone are single, the growth of one-person households now outstrips the rise in the UK population - and is projected to continue.

And yet life in Britain often seems ill-suited to their needs. Being single is expensive and modern dating can be brutal. The idea that being in a couple provides greater happiness and fulfillment still has a tight grip on our collective psyche. So is it right to say that singles get discriminated against? And are there ways we might re-imagine life in Britain so that singles get a fairer deal? Producer: Ant Adeane Editor: Clare Fordham Sound Engineer: Kelly Young Production Coordinators: Maria Ogundele and Sabine Schereck Contributors: Amy Key - Poet and Author of Arrangements in Blue: Notes of Love and Making a Life Sarah Harper - Professor of Gerontology at the University of Oxford Emma John - Journalist and Author of Self Contained: Scenes from a Single Life Ben Arogundade - Author of My Terrifying, Shocking, Humiliating, Amazing Adventure in Online Dating Elyakim Kislev - Professor of Public Policy and Government at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and author of numerous books about single life Sasha Roseneil - Sociologist and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sussex

Transcript

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0:00.0	Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know.
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0:41.0	Thank you for listening to this edition of Analysis, the
0:43.8	podcast that looks at the ideas behind the news. I'm Antidine and in this
0:47.8	episode I ask why society seems to be stacked against single people.
0:56.0	Um, hello, I'm Amy Key. I pitched an essay about Joni Mitchell.
1:01.0	It was August 2019, and poet Amy Key was writing about her relationship to
1:06.3	Joni Mitchell's album Blue. And as she worked on the essay, submerged unsaid things about her own life began to surface.
1:16.7	And I kept coming back to this idea of love being absent from my life, romantic love specifically. It was the kind of pain and
1:25.8	stigma of romantic love not being a big part of my life for so long. There was a
1:32.2	real like tender spot in the writing of that essay.
1:36.0	Published online in 2020, it soon went viral.
1:40.0	I got such a huge response from people who I feel like had been really needing someone to talk about the experience of living without romantic love over an extended period and kind of
1:56.2	coming out of the shadows and talking about the pain of that but also the ambivalent
2:00.8	feelings that are connected to it.
	...

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