I started a list the other day of the different descriptors that can be added to single and describe people who fit into that category. Never married, no kids, widowed, divorced, and on it goes. It's an incredibly long list and I'm not going to attempt to write an exhaustive list.
People are single for all sorts of reasons. There's one fact that groups them all together, and many that indicate different circumstances.
Looking at my attempts at listing it all, I knew it was probably incomplete. It also made me wonder if I've done a dis-service in all my writing about singleness. If the diversity within that group is part of the reason why it's so difficult to find people who have written well on the topic.
But, I've realized that the same could be said for those who are married or have kids or pretty much any other external life circumstance we could describe. And that hasn't stopped people from writing about those topics.
I think it's a good reminder why we must be careful not to let these categories define what we see as everything about a person. They describe one aspect of a person's life - not everything.
We like to look for labels for people. Boxes we can put them in so we can assume we know everything we need to know about them. But, people are way more complicated than that. Those words describe only a part of who they are. And we miss out on so much when we use those characteristics to define people. We don't get to know the richness of who they are.
So, we need to learn to go beyond the labels we give. The labels are helpful sometimes. They're not always bad or wrong. They can help us. But, we can't stop there. They're only a starting place for getting to know someone.
Whatever group you're looking at, remember, they're more than just one thing you see or know about them.
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