解析单身大数据！

单身逐渐成为一种普遍的生活选择，

越来越多的人愿意享受单身带来的自由时光，结婚意愿越来越低，

这样的现象不具有地域性，在世界范围内都越来越普遍。

Think about your household’s monthly expenses. There are the big-ticket items — your rent or mortgage, your health care, maybe a student loan. Then there’s the smaller stuff: the utility bills; the internet and phone bills; Netflix, Hulu, and all your other streaming subscriptions. If you drive a car, there’s gas and insurance. If you take the subway, there’s a public transit pass. You pay for food, and household items like toilet paper and garbage bags and light bulbs.

想想你的家庭每月的开支。有诸如租金、抵押贷款、医疗保健，也许还有学生贷款这样的大项支出：也有水电费、互联网和电话账单、Netflix、Hulu和其他流媒体订阅费这样的小项开支，如果你开车，就会有汽油和保险费，如果你坐地铁，就有公共交通费，还有食物、卫生纸、垃圾袋、灯泡等家用物品花销。

Now imagine paying for all those things completely on your own.

If you live by yourself ,this is your life. All the expenses of existing in society, on one set of shoulders.

现在想象一下，完全由你自己为这些东西买单。

When we talk about all the ways it’s become harder and harder for people to find solid financial footing in the middle class, we have to talk about how our society is still set up in a way that makes it much easier for single people to fall through the cracks.

当我们谈论中产阶级越来越难有坚实的金融基础时，我们必须讨论社会建制是如何让单身人士更容易崩溃的。

01 单身：一种昂贵的选择

First, we need to define a clunky but essential. Single or solo-living people may or may not be partnered with someone in the long or short term, and they may or may not be parents, but they all live and bear the responsibility for their bills alone. Some are retired; some are widowed or divorced; some are in long-distance relationships that require two households. Some have lived alone, purposely or regretfully, their entire lives.

首先，我们需要定义一个浅显但很重要的术语。单身或独自生活的人可能会有长期或短期伴侣，他们可能已经为人父母，但他们都独自生活，并独立承担生活开销。有些人退休了，有些人丧偶或离婚；有些人异地恋，需要兼顾两个家庭。有些人独自生活，一生孤独。

There are so many routes to and reasons for arriving at the single or solo-living life, and more people are living it than ever before: As of 2021, 28 percent of Americans live alone. Back in 1960, it was just 13 percent; by 1980, it was 23 percent. Overall, 31 percent of US adults identify today as single, defined as not married or living with a partner.

实现单身的途径和原因很多，现在单身的人也越来越多：截至2021年，独自生活的美国人达到28%。早在1960年只有13%；到1980年达到了23%。总的来说，目前在定义为未结婚或与伴侣生活在一起的关系中，有31%的美国成年人处于单身状态。

The celebrated single life is, in truth, incredibly narrow. Single and solo-living people are stigmatized in various and overlapping ways, depending on their age, class, race, and sexual identity. We don’t call single or unmarried people spinsters, deviants, or social problems anymore, at least not explicitly. But that underlying hostility to single and solo-living people? It’s everywhere.

事实上，普遍意义上所说的单身生活是极其狭隘的。单身人士仍旧以各种大同小异的方式在年龄、阶级、种族和性别身份等方面被污名化。我们不再把单身或未婚的人称为老处女、异类或问题人群，至少不会放在明面上说。但是这种对单身和独自生活的人的潜在敌意到处都是。

However, American society is structurally antagonistic toward single and solo-living people. Some of this isn’t deliberate, as households cost a baseline amount of money to maintain, and that amount is lessened when the burden is shared by more than one person. There are other forms of antagonism, too, deeply embedded in the infrastructure of everyday life. Even as more couples than ever “cohabitate” without being married, so many of the structural privileges of partnership still revolve around the institution of marriage. (The US Census still conceives of the status of “single” as anyone who is not, at present, married.)

然而，美国社会在结构上与单身人士是相对抗的。这是必然性的，因为家庭维持需要一笔基本数额的钱，当负担由不止一个人分担时，这个数额就会减少。还有其他形式的对抗，也深深扎根于日常生活中。越来越多人婚前“同居”，但是伴侣关系的许多结构性特权仍然是围绕婚姻制度展开的。（美国人口普查认为，“单身”是指目前没有结婚的人。）

Back in 2013, Lisa Arnold and Christina Campbell persuasively laid out the high costs of being single in the Atlantic. Using various calculations based on housing, health care, taxes, and Social Security income, they estimated that an unmarried woman, making around $40,000 in 2010, could pay almost $500,000 more over her lifetime than a married woman. An unmarried woman making $80,000 could pay more than $1 million. That’s a very expensive life choice.

早在2013年，丽莎·阿诺德和克里斯蒂娜·坎贝尔就阐述了在大西洋单身的高昂代价。他们根据对住房、医疗保健、税收和社保收入的各种计算，估计2010年收入约4万美元的未婚女性一生中要比已婚女性多支付近50万美元。一个年收入8万美元的未婚女性要多支付超100万美元。选择单身的代价是高昂的。

Do married men earn more because they’re married? Or do people who earn more get married more often? That’s a difficult question, but it’s worthwhile to parse who, exactly, is getting married and staying that way. There’s a popular conception that the divorce rate is actually decreasing.

已婚男人会因为结婚而赚得更多吗？还是赚得更多的人结婚更频繁？这是一个很难的问题，但值得分析一下到底那种人愿意结婚并维持婚姻状态。有一个普遍的认知是：离婚率正在下降。

While this statistic is true in the aggregate, it obscures significant trends, particularly with education levels. (Among other factors: Same-sex marriage has not been legal long enough to directly compare broader trends.) A 2015 Pew report estimated that women with a bachelor’s degree have a 78 percent chance of their marriage lasting 20 years or longer; for women with some college, the number drops to 48 percent, and 40 percent for women who’ve completed high school or less.

虽然这一统计数据总体上正确，但它掩盖了在教育水平方面的重要趋势。（还有其他因素：同性婚姻的合法时间还不够长，无法直接得出更清晰的趋势。）2015年皮尤的一份报告估计，拥有学士学位的女性中78%可以将婚姻持续20年甚至更久；对于一些专科学历的女性，这个数据下降到48%；对于高中或更低学历的女性，只有40%可以将婚姻维持20年以上。

The more education you have, the more likely you are to make more money; the more money you make, the more likely you are to be able to patch over some of the potholes that can doom a marriage. In 2015, 25 percent of low-income adults between the ages of 18 and 55 were married, compared with 39 percent of lower-middle-class adults and 56 percent of families making above median income.

你接受的教育越多，就越有可能赚越多的钱；你赚的钱越多，你的婚姻就会更稳定。2015年，18岁至55岁已婚成年人中，低收入人群只占25%，而中下层人群占39%，收入高于中位数的家庭占56%。

And then there are the thousands of people who would like to be married but can’t afford to be because additional income from a spouse would result in taking away the disability, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or child support benefits that make life sustainable. For them, marriage might be financially stabilizing down the line but not stabilizing enough to make up for the loss of other safety nets in the short term.

还有成千上万的人想结婚，但负担不起，因为配偶的额外收入会导致他们无法拿到维持基本生活的残疾、补充营养援助计划或儿童抚养福利。对他们来说，婚姻可能会获得相对稳定的经济状况，但在短期内不足以弥补其他稳定经济补贴的损失。

Some single people love being single; some are fairly ambivalent about it; others despise it. If we want to start thinking about how to make it easier for single people to find life-stability, we have to start to understand single life as something that’s not just thinkable, not just survivable, but actually desirable.

有些单身人士喜欢单身；有些人对此相当矛盾；有些人则鄙视单身。如果我们想开始思考如何更容易让单身人士生活稳定，我们就必须把单身生活理解为一种不止是可以想见、可以维持的状态，而是真正令人欢喜的状态。