Marriage

Holidays are great for celebrating, but they can also remind us of what's missing in our lives. Especially when we visit our families. Aunt Barbara might like to ask too many personal questions, while Uncle Stan usually makes some comment about how nobody's getting any younger.

Instead of letting yourself get upset, or worse, anticipating problems before they happen, take a step back. And then take a deep breath. After all, Thanksgiving is about getting together with family and sharing a meal. It doesn't mean you are obligated to be with your family all weekend, subjected to their scrutiny. After all, you're a single, independent person, with the freedom to do what you want!

Here's what you can do for yourself this Thanksgiving:

Break from tradition. Do you travel to visit family every year for the holidays? Maybe it's time you took a year off and celebrated with friends instead. You might feel obligated to fly or drive to visit parents every year, but it's not necessarily the way you want to spend the holiday. So why not try something different? Invite friends over to your place for a pot luck. Mix it up.

Go out for a drink after dinner. There's no reason to hang out with your family all night, so why not round up a few friends and head to a local bar to share drinks, or to a movie theatre to see a new release? Have something to look forward to.

Set aside time for yourself. Your family might have your weekend scheduled full of events, but let them know ahead of time you won't be attending everything. Make a point to book a spa appointment, lunch with a friend, or even just time at a coffee shop to read your favorite book. Make time for yourself over the weekend. It's important.

Stand your ground. Friends and family don't always respect boundaries and may ask questions or put you on the spot regarding your single status. Instead of making excuses or trying to find a way out of the conversation, respond firmly but positively. After all, being single doesn't mean your life is "less than" anyone else's. In fact, you're probably more social than all of them. Let them know you're enjoying yourself and your freedom, and that you're taking your time. If that feels false, then change the subject to talk about other things in your life - like your career, your friends, or your plans to move to a new home. There's more to any life than finding a partner.

Have fun. Yes, it is possible to have fun at Thanksgiving dinner this year. Relax and remind yourself to count your blessings (that's what the holiday is for)! You have people in your life who love you.

Steve Harvey has been dishing out dating advice to women quite successfully over the years, because he knows what it was like to be a man playing around without really wanting to commit. His book Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man, was a best-seller among the hundreds of dating advice books to hit the market. Now, he’s teamed up with Match.com to create a dating site called “Delightful” that competes directly with marriage-minded sites like eHarmony.

"Women want to date with the goal that it turns into a relationship," Harvey told The Chicago Tribune in a recent article. "It kind of breaks my heart when I have women on my show who've been on 50, 100 dates. Something's not right if you have to go out with 100 people."

This comment made me wonder - has Steve Harvey actually tried online dating? Tinder? Most of us have been on at least 50 dates, if not more. I don’t think there’s something wrong with people dating in those numbers, because there are so many opportunities now to meet people.

But I do agree that most daters don’t really invest in getting to know the person sitting in front of them on any given date. There are too many options to be that committal, so they typically move fast. Steve Harvey’s comment rings true when we consider how much time we invest with such little return. I write about this in my book Date Expectations.

Website Delightful aims to change those statistics, with a little help from Harvey. Sam Yagan, CEO of the Match Group, said in a statement, "To take [Steve’s] power and his outlook on relationships and his views on love and combine that with the technology and algorithms that we know to work creates a powerful new category." In other words, the celebrity factor is key in the marketing of the new site.

Others have tried this before. Take the host of The Bachelor Chris Harrison, who last year launched a video-based dating app called At First Sight, hoping to capitalize on his celebrity. It hasn’t quite taken off like Tinder, despite its appealing premise of seeing a short video of potential dates, rather than just viewing photos.

Harvey and Match expect their approach to be different. After all, Harvey is a dating advice coach with his own TV show, and has helped many women find lasting relationships. He is an expert, not just a celebrity.

"We're going to help women get themselves out of the hunting game," Harvey said. "And we're going to make a concerted effort to get men on here who are looking more seriously for a relationship instead of just dating a lot of people."

As for how they will compete with successful marriage-minded sites like eHarmony, Yagan is a little unclear. Instead, he compares Delightful to OkCupid and Tinder, which are known more for their hook-up appeal, saying that at the end of the day when people want relationships, they will look to Delightful instead.

Wondering if you should try online dating? Before you craft your profile, a new study by Michigan State University and Stanford found that people who met online weren’t as likely to stay together for the long-haul as those couples who met offline.

As it turns out, online dating sites who have been touting their matching success rates may not be telling the whole story. Many couples have successfully gotten together thanks to online dating, but that doesn’t mean they have lasted. The separation and divorce rates for folks who paired up online was much higher than for those who met their partners offline in more traditional ways.

According to the report, 8% of married couples who met their spouses online reported to have ended their marriage in separation or divorce, compared to approximately 2% of married couples who met their spouses offline. And compared to 23% couples who had met offline, 32% of couples who had met online had broken up in the following year of the survey.

The times, they are a-changin’. In fact, they’re more than changing. They’re completely transforming. Evolving, even.

According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the majority of American adults are now single. This is the first time single adults have outnumbered married adults since 1976, when the BLS started keeping track in the first place.

Back in August, there were 124.6 million single Americans – a number that counts for 50.2% of the 16-and-over US population. 0.2% may not seem like a big number, but it's statistically relevant and, more importantly, it's socially relevant.

Eric Klinenberg, an NYU sociology professor who researches marriage trends, told the New York Post he believes that margin will remain the same for the foreseeable future, but that change is still afoot. “I don’t expect the proportion of singles to go much higher, but it could go up a bit more,” he said. “Marriage rates are going down all over the developed world as people experiment with new ways to organize their lives and their relationships.”

That, in turn, could have social, political, and economic ripple effects. On the whole, single Americans prefer to rent housing rather than purchase it. They're also less likely to have children. Trends like these, and others in a similar vein, mean major changes in spending are probably on the way. A third of young adults still live with their parents, and even those who don't are concerned they can't afford to participate in marriage and other aspects of the American dream like generations before. Maybe the dream itself will change.

Of course, it's important to note that "single" in this context simply means "not married." Plenty of folks in that 16-and-over category are probably casually coupled up or settled into serious, long-term partnerships. “Just because people are not getting married doesn’t mean they’re not partnering and cohabitating,” said Karen Guzzo, a sociology professor at Bowling Green State University, to the Post.

And it seems that even though marriage rates have plummeted, plenty of young people still hope to get hitched. According to Gallup survey data, only 9% of Americans in the 18 to 34 age range say they both have never been married and do not ever want to marry. 54% of Americans are currently married and 21% of those who have never been married say they want to tie the knot someday.

In the meantime, those 21% can join the 9% in celebrating National Unmarried and Single Americans Week – because yes, that's a real thing.

Ashley Madison, the infamous dating website that makes its revenue from matching married people looking for affairs, has now admitted to spying on its own users.

A recent study published by the company was gathered from emails the sites’ users sent to each other under what they assumed was a condition of anonymity. According to a recent article in Time Magazine, Eric Anderson, a professor at the University of Winchester in England who conducted the study, claims that “women who seek extra-marital affairs usually still love their husbands and are cheating instead of divorcing, because they need more passion.”

“It is very clear that our model of having sex and love with just one other person for life has failed— and it has failed massively,” Anderson tells Time.

As it turns out, Ashlay Madison seems to have commissioned this study to boost its membership numbers - that is, to prove that almost every person in a monogomous relationship is looking to cheat, (and therefore should join their website). But for those who join the site on a strict condition of anonymity because they don’t want their partners to find out, this study is a direct infringement on their right to privacy.

So Ashley Madison is now in a tricky spot. Has it alienated its members, since now they know their emails are no longer strictly confidential, but subject to studies and read by a third party? Perhaps it was in the fine print when they joined the site, as most dating sites collect user information for the purposes of research. But most don’t analyze individual emails being sent back and forth between individual users.

As Time Magazine also points out, because of the nature of the dating site, and the fact that most of its members are being dishonest or lying by the mere fact that they are using the site for an extramarital affair, it calls into question the integrity of the data itself. Who knows what is true and what isn’t in each email? Who can say that anyone on the site is honest in any email they send to another site user?

According to Anderson, his data “included profile information that the women supplied when they signed up for the site (information not made available to other Ashley Madison users),” as well as information other users could see. “We also acquired all private message conversations that [users] had with men on the website for one month,” Anderson told Time.

The results of the study are still somewhat questionable. Anderson claims that in our sexualized culture, married folks could feel as if they are missing out when they are only having sex with one partner.

While this might be true for the users of Ashley Madison, it doesn't mean that it's applicable to the majority of married couples in the U.S.

A few years ago, I was at an amusement park with friends when one of them shyly handed me his camera.

“Do you think you could take a few pictures of me today?” Kent asked. “I’m making a profile for an online dating site and I don’t really have any pictures of me. Especially ones that aren’t posed in some way.”

Happy to oblige, I did my best to grab good candid shots of Kent. Everything was quiet for some months, until I ran into him one morning, positively giddy.

“I just had the best first date!” he said excitedly.

“It’s ten in the morning! That must have been some first date!” I said, raising my eyebrows.

“No, no, the date didn’t start last night,” he said, blushing. “It was a breakfast date! She works nights, so this was the fastest way to actually meet in person.”

“Ooh,” I said, intrigued. “So you met her through your dating site?”

“Yep,” he said. “She moved here two years ago and only lives ten minutes away, but thanks to our jobs our chances of running into each other are practically zilch. And since we’re on opposite sleep schedules, it’s been pretty nerve-wracking writing her and then waiting a minimum of eight hours for a response. But still, that’s better than never having met her at all.”

“Well, it’s great that she seems so wonderful, but will you ever get to spend time together with such opposite schedules?”

“She’s going to get moved to a different position at the end of the year,” Kent said. “It won’t be forever. And - this may sound cheesy, but - even if it’s more work finding time to meet, she really seems worth it.”

Last month, Kent and his wonderful first date were married. Her inconvenient schedule was indeed not for forever - but hopefully her romance with Kent will be.

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