I took my first steps toward studying singlehood, and not just practicing it, in 1992. I wasn’t surprised to find that single people were stereotyped and stigmatized in popular culture. I was dismayed that the same kinds of put-downs appeared even in prestigious nonacademic publications, such as the New Yorker and the New York Times. I was heartbroken to find deficit narratives of single life in scholarly writings.
It has been my mission to expose those deficit narratives of single life and show the many unacknowledged ways in which single people are flourishing. My article doing exactly that was just published in the Journal of Family Theory & Review, Single and flourishing: Transcending the deficit narratives of single life.
The Keys to Flourishing in Single Life
The single people most likely to be flourishing are the single at heart, the single people who love being single and embrace their single lives as their most authentic, fulfilling, and meaningful way to live. But even single people who are not single at heart can thrive while single, especially if they share or adopt or master some of the perspectives and strengths of the single at heart.
Joy
People who embrace their single lives typically experience their lives as joyful. Even averaging across all single people, including those who very much wish they were coupled, single people are typically happy. In decades of closely examining research on single people, I have never found a study of a representative sample of single people in which their average happiness ratings were not clearly on the happy end of the rating scale.
Contrary to those scare stories about what’s going to happen to single people as they grow older, what actually happens, across midlife and into later life, is that they grow increasingly happy with their lives. And remember, they were already happy when they were younger.
Freedom
Everyone’s life is potentially constrained by resources and opportunities they may not have, and challenges they do have, but within those constraints, single life is especially likely to offer freedom and autonomy. Single people get to chart their own life courses, in ways that are true to themselves, rather than defaulting to the expected ways of doing things. Single life can be a psychologically rich life.
Solitude
Single people who flourish typically savor their solitude. For them, neither spending time alone, living alone, nor living single is a recipe for loneliness. It is instead an opportunity for contemplation, relaxation, productivity, authenticity, and personal growth.
Mastery
Single people – particularly those who live alone – learn to master the tasks of everyday life. They either figure out how to do them, or they find or hire or already have people who can help them. That may be one of the reasons why, in later life, people who have been single their whole life are often doing better than those who are widowed or divorced and are trying to figure out how to do the things their spouse used to cover.
Social ties
Single people often have “The Ones” rather than “The One.” They typically put more into their friendships and their relationships with the other people who matter to them, and get more out of them. They have more expansive and inclusive ideas about the kinds of people who are significant others. The single at heart, in particular, do not see a romantic relationship as more valuable than other close and meaningful relationships.
Family ties
All single people have families. They all have families of origin. Many have other relatives, too, such as cousins, grandparents, aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews. Single parents have families. Single people with no kids do the kinds of things that families do, such as offering and receiving support from the people who matter to them, and sharing experiences with people who have been in their lives for years. Single people are also more open-hearted in the people they count as family – they don’t just limit themselves to blood relatives or relatives from marriage or adoption.
Intimacy and Love
To single people, especially the single at heart, intimacy encompasses far more than just sexual intimacy and love includes far more than just romantic love.
Why Single People’s Achievements Are Especially Impressive
Coupled people, particularly if they are married, are systematically advantaged. Marriage is deemed worthy of lavish celebrations, while the accomplishments and milestones of single people are mostly ignored. In the US, hundreds of laws benefit and protect only people who are legally married. Single people, meanwhile, are often stereotyped, stigmatized, marginalized, or ignored. (I provide many examples of these systems of inequality in Single and flourishing.)
Popular writings about single life, and even many scholarly contributions, fail to acknowledge the systematic ways in which couples are advantaged and singles are disadvantaged. That misleads readers into thinking that if single people are struggling, it is because there’s something wrong with them. Maybe what’s really wrong are the ways in which people get special treatment just for being coupled and singles get treated as “lesser than” just because they are single.
How We’ve Been Led to Believe that Singles Are Mostly Struggling When So Many Are Flourishing
In Single and flourishing, I offer many examples of deficit narratives of single life. Here are just a few.
Misleading and demeaning language
A book that has been cited more than 3,000 times in the scholarly literature describes single men as leading “warped lives” and lifelong single people as having “failed to marry.” Those are obvious examples of deficit framing.
But also consider “alone” and “unattached.” They are used as synonyms for single, even though single people typically have more friends than coupled people (they are not alone) and they often have genuine attachment relationships with other people.
And why are single people called “unmarried” when it is singlehood that comes first and then, for some, is undone by coupling? Why are single people described as having no families, or as having “alternative” family forms? That’s a way of saying that only a certain kind of family counts as the real thing.
Coupled-centered ways of thinking
One of the teams of singlehood researchers who found that singles become happier and happier with their lives in midlife and on into later life suggested a possible explanation: maybe older single people have satisfying social ties with people “who may be able to provide the type of social rewards a romantic partner would have provided.” That’s a way of implying that the people who are important to single people, such as their friends and relatives, are not important in and of themselves, but instead are mere substitutes for what the truly valued kind of person, a romantic partner, would have provided.
They also suggested that by midlife, single people may have “come to terms with being single.” That may represent how some single people feel, but it can also suggest that singlehood, like some deadly disease, is something awful that needs to be reckoned with.
Research often focuses on the presumed advantages of coupled people, ignoring the ways in which single people flourish
Here are a few of my suggestions for scholars studying singlehood:
“. . . rather than just asking whether people who couple become happier, they could also ask whether they enjoy the same freedoms and psychologically rich experiences they had when they were single. Rather than just asking whether people who marry have more money, they could also ask whether they have the same amount of control over their money that they had when they were single. Rather than just asking whether people who couple become less lonely, they could also ask whether they have the same amount of time to themselves, or the same agency in the use of their time, that they had when they were single.”
Conclusions
Here’s just a paragraph from my conclusions, where I explain what happens when deficit narratives of single life are perpetuated and single people and the people who matter to them are devalued:
“Employers see less need to offer time off to single employees to care for the important people in their lives, because those people really aren’t all that important. Oncologists recommend less aggressive treatment to single patients because they think they don’t have anyone in their lives to help them or because they think single people lack the will to live (DelFattore,2019). The deficit narrative that maintains that single life is just temporary, a place where people mark time until they are coupled (Lahad, 2017), stands in the way of social change. Why join a movement advocating for justice for single people when single people will get all the benefits and privileges of coupling once they find that special someone?”
[Notes: (1) The opinions expressed here do not represent the official positions of Unmarried Equality. (2) I’ll post all these blog posts at the UE Facebook page; please join our discussions there. (3) For links to previous columns, click here.]
About Bella DePaulo
