Why is it seemingly OK to ask single people „Why are you single?“ when married people are rarely asked „Why are you married?“
Why is it seemingly OK to ask single people „Why are you single?“ when married people are rarely asked „Why are you married?“
Sociologist Kris Marsh hopes to break this double-standard with her new book „The Love Jones Cohort: Single and Living Alone in the Black Middle Class.“ In it, she examines the lifestyles of single people and explores the stigma that can come with their decision to not marry.
My mentor and I coined the expression „The Love Jones Cohort“ over coffee on a hot and humid summer day in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. We were discussing how my idea to study Black middle class men and women who are single and living alone came from both media and my own life experiences.
I said that I was noticing—in both film and TV—a demographic shift in Black characters away from married couples to single adults. I believed this started with the 1997 romance drama „Love Jones,“ starring Larenz Tate as an up-and-coming poet, and Nia Long as a talented but recently unemployed photographer.
The film follows the two characters, as well as their friends and acquaintances, as they pursue careers and lovers. It deals with relationships, premarital sex, choosing partners, the gender pay gap and the realization that growing old and single might affect one’s health. More than 25 years later, the film remains a staple within Black culture.
In the 1980s and 1990s, the media prototype for the middle class—whether Black or white—had been a married couple with children. For the Black middle class, this was exemplified by the Huxtable family from „The Cosby Show,“ a sitcom starring Bill Cosby that ran from 1984 to 1992 about an obstetrician father, a corporate attorney and their four happy, intelligent and adorable children.
After „The Cosby Show,“ a surge of sitcoms and films depicted Black middle-class characters of a quite different demographic profile. These characters were 20-something, educated professionals who had never been married, were child-free and lived alone or with an unmarried friend or two. „Living Single,“ a sitcom that ran from 1993 to 1998, centered on six Black friends living in a Brooklyn brownstone.
