Don'tgetmarried.com

At don’tgetmarried.com, we believe that many people are more naturally suited to the single life and the idea should not been seen as strange, or weird or unbalanced. We also believe that many people who choose marriage do so for all the wrong reasons, and would be better off investigating the rewards and challenges of the single life before assuming that a marriage or a "relationship" will make them happy. But most of all we are dedicated to encouraging, supporting and restoring the ideal of the single life as the best way to reform society, restore civilization and bring about widespread happiness.

We do not believe living the single life is for everyone. Obviously the species has to be reproduced. Most people are probably best suited to having a family and raising kids. But we do believe that being single has been unfairly and wrongly disparaged as something strange, weird, even destructive of society.

We are told that married people are happier and more successful. Superficially this may be true. But most marriages end in divorce, most parents do not know how to raise children, many families live under a crushing burden of debt, taxation and worry. This may be because people have never learned how to live alone and they think that living with others can make them happy. If you have never learned how to be happy while being alone with your own thoughts and feelings, then living with others will not likely fill the void.

We are not advocating divorce. We are suggesting that you consider the path of the single life from the very start, for the right reasons, and in an intelligent, disciplined way that is fulfilling to you but will also transform society. And if you find yourself single after having been married, we want to encourage you to consider the option of staying single – how you can make it a fulfilling, rewarding and positive way of living.

Our basic premise is that society today is based on a fundamental flaw that is leading to profound unhappiness. The flaw is the unstated but omnipresent assumption that there is something wrong with being alone, being by yourself, not being in a "relationship," not being economically productive enough, not being part of a group or identified with a cause.

There is broad dissatisfaction with what most people refer to as "modern life." Some people call it the "rat race." Despite widespread prosperity there are tangible signs that prosperity alone has not worked. Conflict, wars, drug abuse, suicide all exist at alarming rates. Meanwhile, there are the typical stories in the media about the destructive "loner" who shoots up a school or a post office or kills his parents. None of this makes any sense when you stop to consider that for most of human history, the single man or woman, the contemplative, the loner, has been held up as the highest ideal.

At times, popular mythology has supported this. The loner, the contemplative or the adventurer, from Moby Dick‘s Ishmael to The Lone Ranger, is often held up in literature and popular entertainment as a hero. More often the loner or the contemplative is someone who is out of place, misunderstood, manipulated by others, taken advantage of and abused. Saul Bellow understood this problem and wrote about it artfully in More Die of Heartbreak.

When we look at classical heroes, many of them lived outside the conventions of marriage and family and society. They were outsiders who upset conventions, made people mad, and were even persecuted, simply because they scorned being part of the mainstream.

Jesus certainly comes to mind as the most influential single person in history.

This is not specifically a religious site. We welcome religious perspectives but we would prefer to learn from your personal experience instead of being told what we should believe. We are interested in whatever simple truths you have learned by living the single life.

We do not wish to romanticize the single life. We accept the fact that it can be a burden. But we believe that for many people it can and should be a better way of life. It may even be the ideal way of life.

This is not a site conducive to "free love" concepts. There are plenty of those already. By living the single life, we assume that means for the most part a life that is not complicated by sex. And that may be the core of the problem. With the overpowering influence of sex in the media, many people are led to feel bad about themselves or feel guilty if they are not part of the sexual revolution. Perhaps the greatest freedom is to be free from the pressure to have sex or to perform sexually or to feel that without sex you cannot be happy and fulfilled.

So let’s hear from you. Pro and con. But please, no profanity or name calling. We reserve the right to edit content or refuse submissions.

Let the revolution begin!

Sincerely, Your editor

August 3, 2001