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Methinks you've spent too much time on facebook. In the dead tree world we don't usually have an "It's Complicated" option for marital status.

He left his girlfriend behind. He's not married and never has been.

True. I had forgotten the exact status, still, I was merely using it as a pretext for my terrible joke.

I'd assume that single in this sense means "not married", as opposed to "not in a relationship at all".

Wikipedia backs this up [1] but I'm not familiar with Ecuadorian legal nomenclature!

Married to his ex-job maybe

Quite often marital status is simply used to indicate if the person in question is married or not. As far as I know that wasn't the case for Snowden.

I wonder if it would have complicated the whole thing if he had been.

Huh? He wasn't married before. But yeah, he left his girlfriend to keep her safe. Apparently she knew absolutely nothing until he blew the whistle.