Are we still living in the 1950s? I wondered about the CPB calculation of the election manifestos last Wednesday, in which the planning agency consistently talks about ‘families’ instead of citizens or households.
I wondered when Pieter Omtzigt said in the RTL debate last weekend that it is especially complicated to find a house for “young couples” who want to start their lives.
And I thought so when CDA, BBB, ChristenUnie and SGP submitted a bill last week to include “respect for family life” in the Constitution. “For us, families are the heart of society,” explained CDA MP Hilde Palland.
I’ve thought it before, but lists work best if you give three examples.
According to Statistics Netherlands, there are 8.3 million households in the Netherlands, of which 3.3 million are single-person households: 40 percent of the total. Yet many political parties act as if the family is the smallest social unit. “There is a great inner strength hidden in our families, neighborhoods and villages,” NSC writes in its election manifesto. The VVD wants to “reduce the tax on energy bills for families”, BBB says that “putting bread on the table for your family” gives satisfaction and pride, and the CDA, “the modern family party”, states: “The need to ensure social security to increase, applies first to our families.”
All this compassion for families leaves an important fact underexposed, namely that issues such as inflation and the housing shortage are particularly annoying for single people, or people who do not live with their partner. Groceries are simply more expensive if you live alone, and the rent or mortgage takes up a larger part of your salary. Buying a house or finding an affordable rental property on your own is impossible in many places. Parents teach their children that they have to do their best at school to find a good job later, but they are better off explaining how to find and keep a partner.
And then I haven’t even mentioned the allowances and tax benefits for people with a partner and/or children: child benefit, childcare allowance, lower waste tax, lower wealth tax, conveniently distributed income tax deductions. This will not change for the time being: in most right-wing parties, which currently appear to be likely coalition partners, single people will benefit less than single-income families in a family, according to the CPB calculation.
I think that the fact that little attention is paid to this is related to the stigma that is still attached to being alone. 80 percent of people living alone are not in a relationship, and as far as their image is concerned, we are indeed still living in the 1950s: we see people without relationships and/or children as unfinished, incomplete. In the collective imagination, a normal human life runs from the family through a short period of experimentation to a new family. This was also evident from the way in which the impact of the measures was discussed during the corona crisis: they would be especially annoying for young people. After all, they still had to go to the pub to meet someone; people over thirty would normally just sit there with their partner and children All of Holland Bakt to watch.
The German writer Daniel Schreiber describes in his book Only how lonely the pandemic felt for a single forty-something like him. “I had always lived with the confidence that my friends were an unconventional extended family to me,” he writes, but his friends became overcome by a “nesting instinct” and withdrew into their nuclear family. Schreiber suddenly felt how out of place he was as a man alone. And although he normally led a full and cheerful life, he came to feel ashamed of being alone: “Not having a romantic relationship is usually seen as a personal failure, due to a lack of attractiveness, economic success, mental fitness.”
Perhaps it is this shame that prevents single people from demanding political representation, and why even single politicians continue to focus on families. No matter how many people live alone today, they are still seen as abnormal, and no party fully stands up for them. Still quite special, in 2023. Pieter Omtzigt may complain that we are so individualistic in the Netherlands, but we are still very traditional in this respect.