练习双语：单身女性如何改变社会.docx

练习双语：单身女性如何改变社会单身对于女性来说，不再是一种自怜或是令人惋惜的生活状态，而是一种自主选择、可以承担的生活方式。独身其实是复杂世界的第N+1种选择，并无褒贬可言，它只是一种客观存在。单身女性可以在同住的朋友身上找到亲人的感觉，而两个从未谋面的单身妈妈也可以成为彼此支撑的力量。对于婚姻改变人生这一说法，心理学家贝拉迪波洛的开放性见解值得我们辩证地去思考。By Regan Penaluna 柒月选注Bella DePaulo never fantasized about a dream wedding or being a bridesmaid. Instead, shesaw herself as z,single at heart/ pursuing intellectual refinement, friendship, and solitude as ayoung psychologist. Still, she had internalized the popular idea that married people were happierand healthier than the unmarried, and took her own pleasant experience to be exceptional. Thatis, until she looked into it, and found the claims about the "/transformative power of marriage” tobe, she says, either "grossly exaggerated or totally untrue/ From then on, she,s focused on howsingles actually live.Now at the University of California, Santa Barbara, DePaulo has written widely about howmarriage and the nuclear family are making way for other social arrangements. She,s not fooledby shows such as The Bachelor or romantic comedies that end with a storybook weddingproposal. Those narratives exist, she says, zznot because we as a society are so secure about theplace of marriage in our lives, but because we,re so insecure/At least one cause of that insecurity is the empowerment of single women, which she writesabout in her book, Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and StillLive Happily Ever After. In this article, DePaulo discusses how single women are transformingsocial and political life, how they're settling down, and what that says about living happily.Could the end of traditional marriage and nuclear families be a good thing?I think it is a tremendously positive thing. Once upon a time, just about everyone in theUnited States thought that they needed to squeeze themselves into the heterosexual nuclearfamily box, even if they weren't heterosexual or weren't interested in getting married or had nointerest in raising kids. Now, people can create the lives and the families that allow them to livetheir best, most authentic, and most meaningful lives. They can choose to put friends at thecenter of their lives. Or they can assemble their very own combination of friends and family to bethe social convoys that sail beside them as they navigate their lives. They can have kids in theirlives without having children of their own. They can live under the same roof with friends orfamilies or children or any combination. They can live in a place of their own, but within anintentional community, such as a co-housing community. They can share a duplex with a friend orrelative, so that they have their own space while also having someone else they care about juststeps away. Or they can live entirely on their own. The possibilities are endless.What determines how a single woman chooses her living arrangement?It depends on life stage, but it also just varies by preference. Some people like me really likehaving their own space, so love living alone. But there are other single people who really likebeing with other people a lot of the time, so they might want to live under same roof, like aGolden Girls kind of thing. Also, single mothers are great at finding innovative ways of living assingle parents. One of the people I interviewed, Carmel Sullivan, was devastated after her divorce.She felt so lonely. And then she put out an ad saying that she wanted to share a place withanother single mother and her kids, to help each other raise the kids and have friendship. She gotall the responses and ended up starting this online platform called CoAbode, where singlemothers can find other single parents to share a home with. When I talked to Carmel a few yearsago, she already had 70,000 single mothers signed up.Is having more living arrangements to choose from fundamental to happiness?Yes, I think it really is. And that is really what is so different about the way we,re living now isthat we have more options than ever before to choose the life we want. Of course we areconstrained by whatever resources and money we have, but I found in writing my book How WeLive Now, that even people who were very constrained in their finances could still find a verysatisfying life to live.A number of books have recently come out touting single women, such as Kate Bolick,sSpinster, and Rebecca Traister,s All the Single Ladies. How will single women shape the future ofsociety?Their impact on politics could, in theory, be tremendous. By staying single when marriage isstill idealized, single women are already pushing back against conventional expectations andconstraints, creating 21st-century connections and intimacies beyond the old nuclear familymodel. They vote overwhelmingly democratic. So the democrats should be beating down theirdoor, promising to wash their cars, watch their kids. But they don't vote typically in th