Queering Singlehood

In U.S. culture, singlehood is assumed to be a temporary status. Lifelong singlehood is assumed to be a failure, an undesirable outcome, a guaranteed sentence to loneliness.

From where I stand as a queer sociologist, I think those assumptions tell us more about our society than they tell us about anything inherent to singlehood.

For the past few weeks, my Asexuality and Aromanticism class has been focusing on norms around romance. We’ve considered how our culture’s strong social conditioning to pursue romantic relationships can make it difficult for us to identify our own desires. We’ve also discussed how aromanticism can help us expand our understanding and experience of love.

Last week we turned our attention to singlehood.

I encouraged my class to interrogate our society’s assumptions about singlehood (that being single is undesirable, a failure, a recipe for isolation) and flip them around. What do these assumptions tell us about U.S. relational norms?

First, we can see that these assumptions situate romantic partnerships as the only type of relationships that can ensure you’re not “alone.” Why else would single people face the question of whether they’re afraid to be—and to die—alone?

There’s a pretty obvious absurdity to the assumption that to be single means to be alone. After all, being single doesn’t mean you don’t have friendships, family (chosen or otherwise), or other intimate relationships in your life.

Nonetheless, this idea of singlehood equating with isolation suggests that we’re culturally discouraged from being emotionally vulnerable and mutually supportive in relationships other than our romantic partnerships. It’s assumed we’d feel alone if we’re single because it’s also assumed that only a romantic partnership could provide emotional intimacy, stability, mutual growth, an investment in one another’s future, etc.

In other words, when we look more carefully at the cultural idealization of romantic love, we see that it comes at the cost of other ways of relating.

Queering Singlehood

For class this week, we read Erin Lavender-Stott’s piece “Queering Singlehood: Examining the intersection of sexuality and relationship status from a queer lens.” The article pushes us to take singlehood seriously as a site of critical inquiry—and to consider what we might gain by reading singlehood through a queer lens.

Here, it’s helpful to remind ourselves of what it means to adopt a “queer lens.” In this context, it’s useful to think of queerness less as a shorthand for LGBTQIA+ identities and more as a political/cultural orientation that is resistant to systems of normativity—and particularly those related to gender and sexuality.

We’re often encouraged to think of “normativity” as synonymous with “heteronormativity.” But I think it’s more productive to think of heteronormativity as one (important) element of sexual/gender normativity, with other components including cisnormativity, allonormativity, mononormativity, amatonormativity, etc.

For now, I want to focus on amatonormativity, a term coined by philosopher Elizabeth Brake to describe the sociocultural assumption that everyone prospers with an exclusive romantic relationship. It’s highly resonant with the idea of compulsory romance, which gets at the same general idea. Being in and pursuing romantic partnership is part of the web of gender/sexual normativity.

This brings us back to Lavender-Stott’s argument around queering singlehood. Lavender-Stott invites us to look at singlehood not as a residual or “waiting for a partner” state, but as a place where the normativities that shape relationships — heterosexuality, coupling, marriage — are named, centered, and undone. Drawing on queer theory, her argument isn’t just that single people can be happy or that LGBTQIA+ people and single people share histories; it’s that both categories disrupt the frameworks society (and most social scientists) uses to define relational worth.

To be clear, this doesn’t mean that we should understand all single people as queer. Rather, it’s a push to see compulsory romance/amatonormativty as playing a central role in structuring our society. Looking more closely at singlehood—and dropping the assumption that being single is inherently undesirable—helps us see that singlehood is a positionality that can trouble those normative structures. “Queering singlehood” simply means taking that positionality seriously.

Tracked Toward Romance

Thinking about singlehood this way also shows us how society places us on an expected relationship track: single → coupled → married → procreative family. (Those familiar with the concept of the “relationship escalator” may find that coming to mind right now.) Queering singlehood decenters that track and instead lets singlehood be a relational identity with its own contours, pressures, pleasures, and politics.

The relationship escalator is the societal, default, and linear progression of romantic, monogamous, and sexually exclusive relationships.

What’s so refreshing and unsettling about queering singlehood is that it simultaneously rejects two damaging approaches:

1. Deficit models that see single people as incomplete or waiting for a “real” relationship. Unfortunately, this remains the (often unstated) assumption in most social science focused on studying the family and other intimate relationships.

2. Pollyanna-ish celebratory models that force a positive spin on being single without interrogating how norms make coupling the yardstick of value.

By queering singlehood, we see the norms at stake. When singlehood is understood through the lens of queer theory, it reveals the assumptions embedded in how we conceptualize intimacy, desire, partnership, and futurity.

A student asked: “So is being single inherently queer?” My answer: It can be, but not always. Queerness—as we discussed—isn’t an identity tag in this analytic sense; it’s a way of seeing that disrupts categories and hierarchies. Queering singlehood doesn’t mean every single person is queer; it means singlehood can function as a site of critique on the structures that make certain relationships normative and others marginal.

Why This Matters for Relationship Science — and for Us

It’s easy to treat singlehood as a demographic category. But if we take Lavender-Stott seriously, singlehood becomes a conceptual lever that pries open the assumptions underlying all relational science. Instead of starting with the assumption that couples define relational health, we can ask: What structures privilege coupling? Who benefits from those structures—and who is consigned to the margins because of them?

The classroom moment that mattered most was when students began to map these questions onto their own lives — not in terms of “I want to be single or I don’t,” but how their desires, anxieties, relational practices, and language were shaped by norms they hadn’t quite seen before.

Queering singlehood isn’t just an academic exercise; it’s a revelation of the norms that shape all of us—single or partnered, queer or straight, asexual or allosexual.

This is Part 5 of a multipart series, where we follow along each week with the Asexuality and Aromanticism Studies course I’m teaching this semester (one of the first times such a course has been offered anywhere). You can find the first post in that series here.

Canton Winer is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Northern Illinois University. His research focuses on the relationships between gender and sexuality, with specific focus on the experiences and perspectives of people on the asexuality spectrum. You can keep up with his research on Bluesky.

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