Single at Heart: The Power, Freedom, and Heart-Filling Joy of Single Life

Introduction

Lovers of single life, set yourselves free! Unshackle yourselves from those old, regressive stories that claim that single life is sad and lonely. Rise above those repressive notions that everyone wants a romantic partner and if you think you don’t, you’ll get over it, and if you don’t get over it, you need help. Gleefully reject the idea that putting a romantic partner at the center of your life is something you have to do, something that everyone wants, or that it is the normal, natural, and superior way to live.

I have a new story to tell you. It is based on experiences of people all around the world who are telling their stories, often for the first time. It is also grounded in social science studies of hundreds, thousands, and sometimes even hundreds of thousands of people.

My story is about people who are powerfully drawn to single life. I call them single at heart, and I’m one of them. For us, single life is our best life. It is our most authentic, meaningful, and fulfilling life. It is a psychologically rich life. No other way of life will ever feel as profoundly satisfying. To us, living single is every bit as normal, natural, comfortable, and desirable as a committed romantic partnership is to people who are drawn to coupled life.

We are the curators of our lives. Being single doesn’t limit our lives—it throws them wide open. We have our freedom, and we use it to make the most of our resources and opportunities, however vast or meager they may be. We get to decide the shape and contours of our lives, from our daily routines to life-altering transformations. We get to pursue our interests and passions, without trying to refashion or resize them in ways that suit a romantic partner. We get to welcome into our lives anyone we want—friends, relatives, mentors, colleagues, lovers, neighbors, spiritual figures, pets, or anyone else—as many or as few as we like, with no pressure to elevate a romantic partner above all others. We can devote ourselves to our inner circle, our larger communities, our countries, and our causes, if that’s what we want to do. We create homes that are our sanctuaries. We have our sweet, sweet solitude. If we don’t want kids, no partner is going to pout. If we do have kids, we get to raise them as we see fit. We enjoy intimacy on our own terms.

The risk to people who are single at heart is not what we will miss if we do not put a romantic partner at the center of our lives, but what we will miss if we do. I will never say that it is OK to be single, that it is better to be single than to be in a bad romantic relationship, or that it is better to be single than to wish you were. Those sentiments are far too grudging. For people like us, it is better to be single. Period. It is better to be single when we are young. It is better to be single when we are old. And it is better to be single during all the years in between.

People who are single at heart include women and men and people who identify as neither. We include parents and people who are not parents. We include the rich and the poor, the young and the old, the formally educated and the self-educated, people of all gender identities and orientations, races and ethnicities. Among our numbers are many kinds of believers as well as nonbelievers. Many of us hail from WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) societies, but substantial numbers do not.

The single at heart range from people who have never married, never lived with a romantic partner, and never had a serious romantic relationship to people who, in the past, have had all of those experiences, sometimes over and over again. We include people who are not at all interested in sex or romantic relationships and people who are quite fond of both. Some of us enjoy dating now and then. What we all share is that we do not put a romantic partner at the center of our lives, and we do not ever want to organize our lives around a romantic partner.

Perhaps even more importantly, we share the joy we experience by living single. Being single is something we savor. It doesn’t matter if we have had no past romantic experiences or plenty of them. It doesn’t matter if any such experiences were glorious, horrifying, boring, or a mixed bag. It doesn’t matter if we had a miserable childhood or an exemplary one. We are not defined by any of those things. We are not single just because we are running away from something or because we have issues (everyone has issues). We are single because we love what single life offers and will continue to offer for as long as we commit to it and invest in it. For us, that’s forever. We don’t ever want to unsingle ourselves.

We realize we are bucking the relentlessly touted and celebrated cultural script that insists that what adults want, more than anything else, is a committed romantic partnership. We know what people think: that it’s fine to be single for a while, but to stay single forever is just sad, and that to want to stay single isn’t natural or normal.

Over the course of my lifetime, I’ve seen other bedrock beliefs pulverized. Is it abnormal to be attracted to people of your own gender? We know better now. Is a woman’s place in the home? Oh, please. Is it only natural for women to want kids? That doesn’t seem obvious anymore.

Each time our understanding of human nature becomes more expansive, we all become freer to live our best and most authentic lives. In the enlightened world that I envision, every child will understand, as a matter of course, that living single is a life path that can be just as joyful and fulfilling as any other—and for some people, the best path of all. Every adult will forsake forever the temptation to pity or patronize people who are single, and will instead appreciate the profound rewards of single life. Adults who are naturally drawn to single life will not be asked to defend that choice ever again. Millions of happy single people will realize that they are happy and thriving not in spite of being single, but because of it.

Because we who are single at heart are embracing our single lives rather than trying to escape them, we develop strengths, skills, resources, and attitudes that are less often honed by those who lead a conventionally coupled life. The time, money, and emotional resources that some other people devote to their pursuit of a romantic partner and then bestow upon that partner if they find such a person, we invest in the experiences that make our lives meaningful and that can never be taken away from us by a divorce or any other casualty of coupling. We value our friends, rather than looking past them for the romantic partner who may be on the horizon or waiting for us at home. Because we don’t split the tasks of everyday life with a romantic partner, we learn how to cover everything ourselves, either by mastering each task, finding ways around it, or figuring out how to find people who will help or who we can hire. Because we plan to stay single, we create homes that will continue to accommodate, comfort, and inspire us as we age.

Our years of investing in our single lives and embracing all that single life has to offer payoff along the way, but the investment comes to its ultimate, stereotype-shattering pinnacle later in life. We’ve been warned that we are going to end up decrepit, despondent, despairing, and oh so alone when we are old, but that’s not what happens. Studies show that it is the people who have stayed single who are most likely to be thriving in later life. Unlike the newly single, such as the divorced and widowed people who organized their lives around a spouse, the lifelong single people aren’t trying to figure out for the first time how to do the things their spouse used to do for them. Lifelong single people never demote the people who matter to them once a spouse waltzes into their lives. They aren’t trying to create a social circle or an emotional support system anew; they have been doing that all along. A study of older people in the United States showed that the men and women who stayed single were most optimistic about the future, were most likely to have an active social life, and most likely to have the help they needed and the intimacy they wanted. Black Americans, who are the targets of so much moralizing and shaming for their relatively low rates of marrying, were especially likely to be living a fulfilling life in their old age if they had never married.¹

An Australian study of more than ten thousand women in their seventies found that the lifelong single women were not just doing better than the previously married women, they were also doing better than the currently married women.² Compared to the currently or previously married women, with or without children, the lifelong single women who had no children were the most optimistic, least stressed, most altruistic, and had the fewest diagnoses of major illnesses.

Those studies included all people who stayed single and did not distinguish between the reluctantly single and the single at heart. Once researchers start zeroing in on the single people who want to be single, the findings will be even more impressive. We already have hints of that. A ten-year study of more than seventeen thousand people without romantic partners found that, over time, the people who were not looking to unsingle themselves were becoming increasingly happy with their lives, while those who were pining for a partner were becoming increasingly dissatisfied.³ Other research shows that single people who are not looking for a partner value their friends more, and as they continue to invest in their friends, they become even more delighted with their single lives.⁴ Single people who yearn to be coupled often do not enjoy that heartening dynamic. The single people who want to stay single are also more sexually satisfied.⁵

I’ve been studying single people since December 17, 1992. That’s the day I created a secret folder labeled only with the number 1 and slipped into it a clipping from an advice column in the local newspaper. I had underlined one sentence, Remember that one is a whole number.

I was thirty-nine and single. I didn’t think I was less than a whole person, but I did think it was curious that so many of the depictions of single people I would place in the folder, from Cathy cartoons to book reviews in the New Yorker, were based on the premise that to be single was to be sad and that no one would choose to be or stay single.

My obsession did not stay secret for long. Within a few years, I had mostly forsaken my previous area of expertise (in the psychology of lying and detecting lies), and completely immersed myself in my new study of single people and single life. Deception was an interest of mine. Singlehood became my passion. I conducted studies, taught courses, published research papers, wrote dozens of articles for newspapers and magazines, published hundreds of blog posts, gave a TEDx talk, started the Community of Single People Facebook group, and wrote books, beginning with Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After.

I’m a social psychologist, a researcher and not a therapist, but over the years hundreds of people have sent me emails or handwritten notes telling me about their single lives. Two themes have stood out. The first one is dismaying. Over and over again, people have told me that until they encountered my work, they never realized that it was OK to like being single and to want to stay single. The second is more exuberant. Those people have described themselves as powerfully drawn to single life. They have effused about how meaningful and fulfilling it was to live single, and how nothing else compared. That’s how I felt too. And that’s when I realized that the popular narratives of single life just weren’t capturing what it could mean to live single and to love that life truly and deeply. They did not speak to people like us, who were single at heart.

I was also intrigued by the single people who were pining for a romantic partner and the many pundits, essayists, and experts who extolled coupled life. Some seemed clear-minded, but many others seemed to be envisioning what I would come to think of as the Magical Mythical Romantic Partner. That’s the person who is always kind, always attentive, always around when you need them, and always happy to do their share of the work. That’s the partner who always wants the same kind and amount of sex that you do, at the same time that you do, and who never strays. As a parent, this partner is always present with your children and devoted to them, and the family you have together is free of conflict or cruelty. In later life, the Magical Mythical Romantic Partner is always there when you’ve fallen and can’t get up. This person is there when you need a ride to a medical procedure or need someone to stay with you at the hospital, and is by your side no matter how long your illness lasts. This partner is never sick, and is never sick of you.

I don’t doubt that some romantic partners, married or otherwise, truly are wonderful. But I also know they are human. As obvious as that sounds, I think it is a point that eludes the single at heart skeptics, who don’t believe that anyone could want a life that is not built around a romantic partner. The partner they have in mind is fictional. For the single at heart, though, even a perfect partner would not lure us away from our single lives. We are drawn to single life by what it has to offer; we are not fleeing from coupledom because romantic partners are imperfect.

On Valentine’s Day 2012, I posted a brief quiz online titled Are you single at heart? (It is at the end of Chapter 1 if you want to take a look.) By 2019, when I was ready to analyze the data for this book, nearly nine thousand people had taken the quiz. By 2022, that number had more than doubled to nineteen thousand, and it just keeps growing. The participants hailed from more than one hundred countries and every continent except Antarctica. Residents of the United States, Canada, England, and Australia flocked to the quiz. People from places such as Albania and Algeria, Egypt and El Salvador, Iran and India, Japan and Jordan, New Zealand and Norway, Russia and Rwanda, Ukraine and Uruguay—all found their way to the quiz and answered the questions.

The results of the quiz helped me understand, in broad strokes, how people who are single at heart differ from people who are not. But I also wanted to understand the single at heart more deeply. I wanted to hear the stories of their lives. I posted on my website, blogs, and social media a request for people who identified as single at heart to tell me, in great detail and in writing, all about their lives, and to allow me to quote them in this book. The forty-one people who agreed by the time I was ready to start writing this book include women and men, people of different sexual and gender identities and orientations, parents and people with no children, and people of different races and ethnicities. They range in age from twenty-somethings to seventy-somethings. Most are from the US, but others are from Austria, Australia, Canada, England, India, Mexico, and Portugal. (I’ll mostly use first names only, either their actual names or the ones they requested. A few people have published books or articles about single life, and when I refer to those publications, I will use their last names too. The ages I report, as well as the places where they live and the other details of their lives, are from the year they described their experiences, 2019 or 2020. I describe their location however they wished—a specific city, a region, or country.)

My understanding of what it means to be single at heart has also been informed by the hundreds of people who shared stories of their lives with me more informally or told me about their role models, including people who are and are not single at heart, and by the results of many systematic studies of single people. When I noticed people expressing a single at heart sentiment in an essay, book, podcast, talk, or anywhere else, I added them to my files. They include everyone from the famous to the unknown, and you will meet some of them in this book too.

In early 2020 I thought I was ready to start writing this book. I gathered my copious materials and opened a new document on my computer. The date was March 10, 2020. The next day, Governor Gavin Newsom of California, where I am an academic affiliate at the University of California, Santa Barbara, announced that public health officials had determined that gatherings should be postponed or canceled across the state until at least the end of March. COVID-19 had come to California.

For the first time in all my years of studying single life, I had a crisis of confidence. The single at heart love solitude, but how would we deal with weeks of it? If there’s anything we cherish more than solitude, it’s our freedom. With a pandemic lockdown, spending time alone would not be something we freely chose, but something that was imposed. What if the lockdown went on for months? What if it lasted a year?

I stopped writing and watched as the pandemic threw everything it had at single people, particularly those who live alone: isolation, social distancing, masks, financial woes, terrifying health risks, canceled plans, work disruptions, and the inability to see friends and family. Would it send singles lunging into the arms of a romantic partner—any romantic partner—just for relief?

The ominous headlines began to pile up: A pandemic is hard enough. For some, being single has made it harder, wrote the New York Times.⁶ On Twitter, a sixteen-part thread was posted that began with, I don’t know who wants to hear this, but being single during this pandemic has been downright dreadful.⁷ It went viral, and it was tweeted at me a few times. I got the message, and yes, I was worried.

Before the pandemic, the forty-one single at heart people who shared their life stories had been providing me with some of my most valuable anecdotal data for more than a year. Now I was afraid to check on them. Finally in December 2020, I began reaching out to them again, starting with the first seventeen people on my list. If all my high-minded optimism about people who love their single lives was going to get snuffed out by COVID, well, I needed to know.

I posed a slew of new questions to the people I contacted. The most important was: After nearly a year of pandemic life, do you still feel that single life is your best life? I held my breath and waited for them to answer. I did not have to wait long.

One by one they replied. Most responded almost immediately. Some had suffered setbacks, often financial ones. Many desperately missed seeing their friends in person and some craved human touch. Most were eager to get back to the before times. But not a single person wanted to trade their single life for a life of conventional romantic coupledom.⁸ In fact, some felt even more secure about being single than they had before the pandemic.⁹

They were thriving because they had already cultivated the kinds of interests and practices that turned out to be hugely helpful in surviving pandemic life. They enjoyed pursuits like reading, writing, meditating, and exercising, all of which could be savored solo. Many have long attended lovingly to their homes, and during the pandemic they continued to experience their homes as sanctuaries not prisons. The single at heart are used to taking the initiative to maintain their relationships with friends and relatives, and they are also accustomed to staying in touch virtually. Even when they were not seeing anyone in person, they were not socially isolated.

Many of the people who jumped on that Twitter thread about the dreadfulness of being single during the pandemic had one thing in common: they wanted to be coupled. For them, 2020 was a lost year in their quest to find a life partner. No one who is single at heart experienced the pandemic that way.

I was relieved to hear how the single at heart had fared during COVID isolations. I was also emboldened. Was it possible that some single people had gone into the pandemic wanting to find a romantic partner, but then changed their mind as the lockdown continued? I posed the question to the Community of Single People Facebook group. One person, then another, then several more described the lockdown as transformational.¹⁰ During the pandemic, they told me, they faced their fears. They faced themselves. They found comfort in solitude, emotional closeness in relationships that were not romantic, wisdom in their self-reflection, and joy in both the new opportunities they pursued and the strength they’d never realized they had. Most significantly, they learned that single life was not just something they could handle, but something they relished.

The pandemic was a time of reckoning for couples as well as singles. Some couples have grown closer. Others have fallen apart. In Covid Ended Our Marriage, the BBC reported, All around the world—from South America to West Africa—previously happy couples are splitting up, and many are divorcing.¹¹

The already fraught issue of the division of household chores became even more tense as those chores multiplied during lockdown. Many couples and families longed for what people who are single at heart access easily: freedom to do what they wanted to do when they wanted to do it, and time and space to themselves. The Globe and Mail reported on people sitting alone in their parked cars just to have a moment on their own.¹² In a work of photojournalism, the Washington Post published photos of pandemic sheds some families had built to create room for silence, storage, and solace.¹³

New York Times reporters talked to people across the country about their pandemic experiences and in April 2021, they described their findings: Over and over, people were reevaluating their most important relationships, where they want to live, and how they want to be in the world.¹⁴

My book project was back on. The single at heart had reaffirmed their commitment to single life by a once in a century natural experiment.

This Is Our Time

For more than half a century we have been in the midst of a worldwide transformation in how we live. Women have been having fewer babies.¹⁵ More people are living alone.¹⁶ Where nuclear families once were the norm, they are now less common. In at least twenty-five nations, if you knock on any door at random, you are more likely to be greeted by a person living alone than a couple and their children.¹⁷ In those countries, there are more one-person households than nuclear family households. In some of them, such as Finland, Germany, Japan, and Estonia, there are about twice as many.

Central to the demographic revolution is a retreat from marriage. A United Nations report tracking changes between 1990 and 2010 showed that in every region of the world, a smaller percentage of adults were marrying, and of those who did marry, they were doing so at increasingly older ages.¹⁸ Also, all around the world, a greater percentage of people were divorced in 2010 than several decades before.

The decline of marriage has continued beyond the years tracked by the UN report. For example, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development found that between 1970 and 2020, rates of marriage had declined for thirty-four of the thirty-seven nations for which data were available.¹⁹ They included, for example, Costa Rica, Greece, Japan, Korea, Norway, Slovenia, and Switzerland. In every nation, women and men who married for the first time were on average older in 2020 than they were in 1990.

In the US, it is not just the rates of marriage, but also the rates of remarriage that are decreasing, a trend only partly explained by the decision of some couples to cohabit instead.²⁰ Although rates of divorce have slowed overall, they remain high, and they are continuing to increase among the over-fifty set.²¹ All told, Americans spend more years of their adult lives not married than married.²²

In theory, the decline of marriage could mean that the people who do marry are happier than they were when marriage felt more mandatory. But that’s not what’s happening. Every year since 1972 (when researchers started keeping track), couples in the US have been reporting lower and lower levels of happiness in their marriages.²³ That trend has not put a dent in the relentless promotion of marriage. In fact, the unabashed defense of marriage may have reached a remarkable nadir in 2022, when the Well+Being editor of the Washington Post proclaimed that hating your romantic partner is ‘normal.’ She offered tips on what to do about it, and the first was, It’s OK to hate your partner.²⁴

The flip side of the decline of marriage is the rise of single people. In many nations, it has never been as possible to lead a full and fulfilling life as a single person as it is now, especially for women. Even though women often get paid less than men for the same work, many earn enough to support themselves as well as children, if they want kids. They don’t need a spouse for that. Single motherhood still does not have the same social acceptance as married motherhood, but the number of single mothers—and fathers—keeps growing, and contrary to all the scare stories, most of their children are doing just fine.²⁵ Or more than fine. As I will show a little later, single-parent families have some rarely acknowledged advantages over married-parent families.

Want to stay single and still have sex? In many nations it has been a good long time since sex outside of marriage or committed romantic coupling has been stigmatized. If anything, we’ve teetered in the other direction, in which not having sex or not wanting sex is what needs to be justified or explained. Want sex but not children? Use birth control. Want children without having sex, a committed sexual partner, or a spouse? Advances in reproductive medicine have made that more possible too.

Want companionship you can count on? Want intimacy? No one needs marriage or a committed romantic partner for either of those things. Have you gotten married but now want out? Around the world, divorce is more likely to be legally available and less likely to be denounced than it was a half-century ago.

Not into cooking? You don’t need a wife or husband or any kind of romantic partner for that. You can pick up takeout on the way home from work or just stop at a restaurant and have a nice meal with friends or with your own sweet self. Don’t want to deal with those bothersome repairs? Check the Better Business Bureau listings for a handyperson in your area. Need medications when you are sick? In many places, they can be delivered. Are you older and worried that you might fall and not be able to get up? You don’t need a spouse in the house for that either—you can get a medical alert device. It’s more likely to be there when you need it.

I’m not saying that contemporary societies cater to single people. They most certainly do not. Most policies and practices are designed with couples and families in mind, and that needs to change. In the meantime, though, the possibilities for living single that are already in place should mean that more and more people are living outside of committed coupledom.

And in fact, they are. The UN report showed that in Australia and New Zealand, by 2010, one out of every seven women (14 percent) had been single (never married) all her life as she approached the age of fifty.²⁶ The rates were nearly as high for Latin America and the Caribbean (13 percent) and still in the double digits (11 percent) for Europe and North America. In the US, a 2014 Pew Research Center report predicted that by the time the young adults in the US reach the age of fifty, about one in four of them will have been single their whole life.²⁷

In the US in 2021, nearly half (48 percent) of all adults eighteen and older were not married.²⁸ If single is defined much more stringently—not married, not living with a romantic partner, and not in a committed romantic relationship—then 31 percent qualify.²⁹ That segment of the population, the solo singles, has been growing too. From the way solo singles are relentlessly targeted with self-help books and other sources of advice on how to snag a spouse, and pelted with unsolicited offers from relatives and friends to fix them up with some other solo single person (as if they were broken), even after previous offers had been declined, you might think they are all desperately seeking coupledom. But in a survey of a national sample of US adults in 2019, the Pew Research Center found that half of the solo single people were not interested in a romantic relationship, or even a date.³⁰ The older singles were especially unlikely to want to unsingle themselves, but even in the youngest groups (eighteen to twenty-nine and thirty to forty-nine), close to 40 percent said they were uninterested in dating or romantic relationships.

In 2022 the Pew Research Center repeated the survey.³¹ This time, they found that an even greater proportion of solo singles, 56 percent, were not interested in a romantic relationship or a date. If all those single people were saying they were uninterested in becoming coupled for negative reasons, such as thinking that no one would be interested in them, or even neutral ones, such as being too busy, then the rise of these solo single people might not provide any evidence for the rise of the single at heart. But when the single people were offered a list of possible reasons for staying single, they most often endorsed the most positive one: 72 percent said they weren’t looking to unsingle themselves because they just liked being single.

No matter how many people in the US or any other nation in the world say that they like being single and they have no interest in unsingling themselves, the number who would flourish by staying single is likely much higher. The deck is stacked against people saying they want to be single and stay that way, or even realizing how fulfilling single life could be for them. We’ve seen this kind of dynamic before, when many people—including many women—came to believe that a woman’s place is in the home and that no woman