Good morning, peeps, and welcome to wok F Daily with Me your Girl Daniel Moody pre recording from the Home Bunker. Folks, I'm very excited to be taking some much needed time off from all of my shows. As you know, I host three of them, with WOKF being my flagship show. And I love this show because I get to bring on guests that may not quite squarely fit inside of politics, but nonetheless we're able to have conversations that connect politics
to our daily lives, to our emotions. And I think that that is the thing when people say ridiculous comments like you know, I'm not into politics, or you know I'm not about politics, like I'm not a political person, it's just like are you breathing? Are you paying attention? Because everything in your life is actually controlled by politics and by policy, so it would behoove you to pay attention to the ways in which you are either treated fairly or unfaie justly or unjustly based on those things.
And so this conversation fantastic which is coming up with doctor Bella de Paulo. She is the author of the book Single at Heart, The Power Freedom and Heart Feeling Joy of Single life, and she is a leading expert on single life and has given a TED talk that has garnered over one and a half million views, and she speaks to millions of people.
Across the globe who are.
Drawn to the single life, and she has been doing case studies on this work for quite some time. In my conversation with doctor Depollo, I was shocked to learn some things about the way that single people are kind of treated and discarded in this country. And you know, she opened my eyes to so many things. But also we had a conversation steeped in the politics of single theom right, the decision that a lot of people are
making younger generations. That one it isn't just about the fact that they can't afford to get married, or afford to leave home or any of those things. Not looking at the choice to be singled through an economic lens,
but actually looking at it through a political one. And there are a lot of great reasons why people are choosing not to get married, or maybe get married later in life, or stay single, as doctor Depollo has And so it was a really interesting conversation about shifting again expanding and shifting our perspective to you know, move beyond what we've been force fed as like the natural way,
you know, the natural course of life. You're a single, you go to school or you go into a vocation, you meet somebody young, you get married, you start having kids, you buy a car, you buy a house, you go into debt. You know, you raise those kids to the best of your ability, and the cycle continues, and there's a lot of disruption, and I think that that is why, you know, and we talk about this in this episode, why the right wing is pushing their forced labor agenda.
Why they are you know, terrified of critical thinking because guess what that provides freedom and liberation to think and do and move and act differently, and that's absolutely what they don't want. So we get into a really incredible conversation that I hope all of you will enjoy. And whether you were married, you were single, you were divorced or widowed, I think that this is an extraordinary conversation about the possibility of what it means to center joy
in our lives in a different way. Again, her book is Single at Heart, The Power Freedom and Heart Feeling Joy of single Life. Coming up next, my conversation with social scientist doctor Bella de Polo.
Folks, I am.
Very excited to welcome to wok F Daily for the very first time doctor Bella de Polo, who is the author of the book Single at Heart, The Power Freedom and Heart Feeling Joy of Single Life and is a renowned speaker whose ted talk has garnered now one point seven million views in talking about what it means to be single. The I guess the I like to say the lies we've all been told about the benefits of marriage. So, uh, doctor Depaula, Well, I just want to start off with
thank you in all honesty. You know, folks that listen to this show know I was married for god fifteen years and I'm divorced now and I'm also queer. But when I was, you know, reading and listening to your talk, you know, I was one of those people that was
on the front line fighting for marriage equality. Why because of the fifteen hundred plus rights that you get through the federal government if in fact you are married, and so marriage equality and fighting for marriage for me was so important and is still important because I feel that you should have the right to love and marry who you choose. But when you started to get into the
economics of it and the politics of it. You realize just how advantaged married people were versus single, which is why the fight for marriage equality wasn't just about the recognition of same sex relationships. It was also about government recognition. Our friends and families if you were, you know, privileged enough, had already accepted you, loved you and appreciated you, and so did your God. But the government, however, did not.
So I just want to talk about, you know, the thoughts, your thoughts initially around kind of the politics around being married versus single in the United States.
Yes, thank you for having me on and thank you for that question. Those benefits and protections that you mentioned, so many of them, they are available only to people who are legally married. So of course that was one of the motivations for all the effort that went into the legalization of same sex marriage. But where does that leave single people of any orientation or identity or status. They are still left out of all those benefits and protections. And I think that no one should have to get
married to be treated as a full fledged citizen. And you know, these benefits are they're really big things. So thakful I as a lifelong single person, no kids. I might pay into Social Security just like a colleague who is married and works the same number of hours the same number of years, maybe I even do better work. But when my colleague dies, their benefits go to their spouse, and, under certain conditions, to a whole series of ex spouses,
whereas mine go back into the system. I can't give my social Security that I contributed to every year my working life to anyone, and no one could give their benefits to me.
Wow.
See, so here we go with the bells. I did not know that I had. I had no idea that you weren't able to dictate. Like when people pass away and you have money in a bank account, it goes to your next of kin. My assumption was that the same was true for your social security.
No.
Wow, okay, okay, So you know, talk to me about your decision and wasn't an active decision to be single, to be a lifelong single person.
Well, you know, I never wanted to be married, but it seemed like everyone else did, or they at least wanted to be romantically coupled, and so for a long time I thought, well, wanting to get married or to coupled, it was kind of like getting bitten by a bug, and it was a little slow, and I just hadn't gotten bitten yet and I don't have like one clear
aha moment. But over time, I think really in my thirties or late thirties, I started realizing, so, you are never going to be bitten, You're going to always love being single. And once I realized that, it was really transformative because then I wasn't holding back in any way, thinking well, maybe my life is going to change. So I bought a house and I decided to, you know, do what I wanted with my career and where I lived, and it was just joyful. And I also invested in
becoming a scholar of single life. I used to have expertise in the psychology of lying and detecting lives, which is.
Which would also be elpful nowadays, right.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I actually published something in the Washington Post about Trump's lies very early on, which was wildly successful or you know, popular, and of course invited lots of hate mail from from the MAGA types, so that was interesting. But I mean my work on singles I'm just passionate about. So it's it's different.
You know, you were in a different generation right where I think that and as am I I think that, you know, older generations were all about get married, have a baby, get the house, get the quote unquote American dream. Yes, my parents are I guess boomers. I guess would be yeah, they're they're boomers, so they're that. It is it is the same generation. It is you know dictated to you. There was never you know, you had a couple of shows that I can think of that celebrated single women.
You know or you know, Kate Nelly were the divorce best friends that lived together in the eighties and were raising their kids together. But there were no reinforcements truly about a single dum being an opportunity. It was always like, if you're single, there's something wrong, and I'll say there's something wrong with you. But if you are divorced, it's like, oh, you were chosen at one time, right and some but
something went something went awry, so you're still okay. There's like this skeptic like, why do you like I think that it has changed over generations, the skepticism towards people who choose single dumb, But what do you make of how we progressed in this idea or evolved over generations.
Yeah, you know what, I was born in nineteen fifty three. I'm seventy and nineteen fifty was the year of when people got married in the US at the youngest rate, at youngest age going all the way back to eighteen ninety, so women were on the average twenty years old when they first married, which means just crazy for them, were teenagers crazy. Yeah, so that's a whole different thing. And of course the divorce rate was low. So back then it was like divorce was oh, she's a divorce and
it was considered shameful. Now it's like you said, you know, if your divorced, well, at least somebody loved you once.
I mean, that's you know what I'm saying.
That's like, that's the psychology around it, right.
Right, And what I'm trying to do is reverse or challenge all of that. And I'm trying to say that if you're single, especially if you're single at heart. And let me just take a second and say what I mean that people who are single at heart want to be single, They want to stay single. They are flourishing and happy because they are single, not in spite of it. And so they are living their most meaningful, fulfilling, psychologically rich and authentic lives. Okay, where was I before when.
I'm talking about the generation all shift about being single.
Yeah, So what I'm trying to say is that for people who are single at heart, single life isn't limiting. It throws the doors wide open to a big, bigger, more expansive life. So for single people, people who are single at heart, you know, love can mean romantic love, but it's not stuck in that box. I mean love can mean the love of your close friends, your mentors, your pets, spiritual figures. It's just a big, wide, open,
open armed concept. Same thing for family. Family can mean the way we usually think of it, but it also can mean the people you choose as family. Intimacy can mean sexual intimacy, but it can also mean emotional intimacy. And people who are single at heart.
Have skills and attitudes that serve them well and that are less often honed by people who are inconventional coupled relationships.
So, for example, one of the stereotypes about single people is that they're lonely. Well, in fact, people who are single at heart love their solitude. They want time to themselves. It, you know, it is something that helps them flourish and relax and be more creative and more insightful about themselves. And if you are comfortable with time to yourself, that's a great protection against loneliness. So rather than being especially
susceptible to it, we are especially protected against it. And that's not that we all want to spend all of our time alone. And I like to say that people who are single, instead of having the one, we have the ones. So we tend to the people in our lives who matter whoever they may be, without needing to worry that a romantic partner wants all that time and attention to themselves.
Fair you know, in your Ted talk they did back in twenty seventeen that has now garnered over a million views, you put up a chart, and you'd put up a chart where you showed what the perception was from college students, right, yeah, Yeah, the perception that college students had on what they believed their happiness level would be if they remain single versus married, And you put up their idea first on both levels
and then the reality. Yeah, and I thought it was really funny and I'll you know, I want you to tell the listeners like what the difference was, because I thought that it was really telling, and I want to I want to ask you a question after you do you explain the charge?
Yeah? Sure, so my colleague Wendy Morrison, I asked, I think it was like seven hundred and sixty college students. How happy do you think you would be if you got married? And how happy do you think you would be if you stayed single? Well, the marriage, they rated themselves about as happy as they.
Could pressibly be.
And then for the sing if they stayed single, they thought they would be miserable. Well, there are studies of tens of thousands of people who are followed for more than twenty years over the course of their adult life, so we know who stays sing, who stays happy or not, and it turns out that they're very The lines of
the degrees of happiness are very similar. In fact, if you follow people who get married and see how happy they were before and after, well, as they approach the time of their wedding, you know, the early years they're marriage, they get a little bit happier. You know, they get this big party and it's all so exciting and then they go back to being as happier, as unhappy as they were before they got married, and that brief honeymoon effect we like to call it, where they know they're
on their honeymoon and they're really happy. That the only people who get that are the people who get married and stay married. They are average. The people who are headed toward divorce are already getting a little less happy as the day of their wedding approaches, rather than getting happier.
Yeah, I just I thought it was so interesting because again, your perception versus like the reality is all skewed based on how you're socialized, right, the kind of films your family like, your schooling, your friends, your colleagues, all of these things that contribute to your perception of what your happiness could possibly be like. If we didn't have an entire industry, right, and this goes back to the politics and the capitalism and greed and the wedding industrial complex
and all of these things. If we didn't have an entire system that was driving people towards this way and said you could be happy regardless, and if you had the same you know, you saw two sides of the same. I don't think that their perception would have been so down in the dumps. I think it would be like, well, I could be equally happy being single and fulfilled, and I could also be fulfilled and happy if I got married.
And so I find it really interesting, and I wonder the follow up question that I have for you is reports are saying that Generation Z right and millennials who have just about turn forty and then Generation Z coming behind them, are less likely to get married than their parents and their grandparents.
Work.
Now, the lens that people are reporting this through is largely through economics. They don't have the money to get married. They don't have the money to leave home and start off lives like the boomers did at twenty getting married, and homes are cheap and cars are cheap and all of these things. What do you make of it?
Though?
Through your lens? Is it that they have seen divorces? You know, their grandparents divorced, their parents divorced, Like, what do you make of the idea that we may have you know, I'll talk about the other politics around it. A generation of young folks who decide that like, yeah, this is not it for.
Me, right, thank you for asking that there are so many articles and opinion pieces about this, and it's all about the barriers. No, they don't have the money, or maybe they're running away from it because because their parents were divorced or all that kind of stuff. What's missing is the attraction of single life, the powerful rewards and
freedom and heart feeling joy of single life. And one thing that's happening going back to what I said earlier about the age at which people first marry, so now it's up to about thirty for men and twenty eight for women. So that means that for men, half of all men who marry for the first time are older
than thirty. Well, they've had a whole decade almost that men in past generations did not have to spend time being single, and maybe they, you know, they get a taste of the freedom of it, the joy of it, the power of it. And so for me, what I like to look at are the are what's positive about single life. And that's a whole different frame than the way everything is framed now, which is everyone wants to get married, and if they don't, what's standing in their way?
And I want to change that and say, you know, some people lived their best, most fulfilling meaningful and psychologically rich lives by being single, and if they got me, the risk to them is not what they would lose if they never put a romantic partner at the center of their lives, but what they would lose if they did.
See And that's that's the perspective that I think that people are truly afraid to delve into. And I'll take a stab and a spin at what I believe the politics of this moment that we are seeing and how it plays out in what in single, dumb versus married. You know, you can look at the economic trajectory of women after Roe v.
Wade.
Right, the ability to.
Go into the workplace, the ability to decide when and if and how you wanted to have a family gave women the independence that they did.
Not have pre ro v. Wade.
Well, when conservatives are now looking at this and they're not thinking to themselves, well, how do we make marriage and couple them and all of these things more attractive so people want to procreate, They're like, no, we'll just take the right away altogether, and we'll force it right. We'll force you into these situations that then require women to stay home, which we saw during COVID right where people had to quit their jobs because they had to
care for their kids. And it's like this kind of dragging people back to this pre Roe v. Wade error, which again was never about the celebration of independence. It was about restriction, right.
Yes, And I think what you're saying is true of lots of other things that are going on politically, And I think that what when you say, have this very way, but also you have all this celebration of marriage and two parent families. There was a book that came out recently about you know, two parent families are better. You know, psuchodop get used to it. And I think a lot of this it's it's not because we're all so secure about the place of marriage in our lives. It's because
we're so insecure. And I think what's happening is that single people have been making progress clearly in their numbers, and that is threatening to people who don't want that to happen. And so what we're seeing now is backlash. It's just like Susan Faludi famously described in her book called Backlash, that when women started making progress, that's when Dyro was all is pushback, and you know, no, women can't can't be exact great and they have to stay
in their place. And don't you want to be a nice housewife and not have ambitions?
And I mean, and I think that what's interesting here too is that over the past, you know, five decades, you know, during the passage of Roll V. Wade, the independence of women, women being able to secure their own financial future. Because what people forget is that women weren't able to get credit cards until nineteen seventy four without the signage of their fathers or their husbands, right, so
there was no financial freedom. And I think that when we look at how now women, people of color, those that were marginalized can actually flourish without having to bind themselves to another person to keep their heads above water. And you see these options, I think that that's what's driving the numbers. It isn't about the obstacles to marriage. But it's just like, wait, you mean that, I don't have to have kids, I don't have to be married. I can have I can be economically stable, I can
do these things. I can travel, I can you know, take on second, third, fourth careers because I'm not I'm not anchored to said person. Said thing or what have you. Like, My life isn't about compromising so much with another person. It's about what do I want right and and like you said, centering yourself as opposed to centering a spouse right.
And living authentically because of it.
Yeah, final question for you, what are your hopes for single people in the future? Right like reading your book, listening to your TED talks, knowing that like I see more best solo travel for women, best solo you know, so I see more of these things now in the last several years than I ever had before. What are your hopes for how we think about singleness in the future.
I hope we understand that single life can be not only just as good as coupled life, but for some people, it's their best life, and that single people, even if they would want to be coupled, should still live their single years joyfully, unapologetically and fully.
I love it so much. I think it's amazing. You know, doctor Bella Apollo, I really hope that you'll join us again.
Up, folks.
The book is Single at Heart, the power, freedom and heart filling joy of single life. And I would encourage everyone to check out the TED talk that now has over a million views. Really appreciate you making the time.
Thank you. This was fun.
That is it for me to day.
Dear friends on Woke a f as always power to the people and to all the people power, get woke and stay woke as fuck.