Are Single People Happier? Bella DePaulo's Case for Single Life

Originally published 2016-10-23.

Are married people really happier and healthier than single people? Social psychologist Bella DePaulo has spent much of her career arguing that the evidence is far weaker than most of us assume. In August 2016 she took that argument to one of the biggest stages in her field, a plenary talk at the American Psychological Association's annual convention in Denver, and said that single life has real, measurable strengths that research has largely ignored.

Her short answer to the question: studies do not show that getting married reliably makes people happier, longer-lived or healthier, and many single people are thriving. Below is what she said, what the research behind it looks like, where the debate is more complicated, and what any of this means for an ordinary life.

Who Bella DePaulo is and what she argued

DePaulo holds a PhD in psychology from Harvard and is affiliated with the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is best known for work on deception and, since the mid-2000s, for books such as Singled Out and Single at Heart, which examine how single people are stereotyped and how they actually live.

Her APA talk, titled "What No One Ever Told You About People Who Are Single", was held on 5 August 2016. Its central claim was that researchers and the wider culture have focused so heavily on the supposed benefits of marriage, and the supposed dangers of being alone, that the strengths of single people have barely been studied.

To make the point, she searched for studies that included people who had never married. She found 814 of them, but most did not study single people for their own sake. They used singles as a comparison group to learn more about married couples.

What the research she cited found

Several findings formed the core of her case:

• Growth and self-direction. A study comparing people who stayed single with people who stayed married found that the singles reported a stronger sense of self-determination and were more likely to say they kept growing and developing as people.
• Meaningful work. Longitudinal research suggested that single people place more value on meaningful work than married people do.
• Self-sufficiency. Among lifelong single people, those who were more self-reliant experienced fewer negative emotions. Among married people the link ran the other way.
• Wider social ties. Single people tended to be more connected to parents, siblings, friends, neighbours and colleagues, while couples who marry often turn inward.

That last point captures her argument neatly. In the APA's summary of the talk she put it this way: "When people marry, they become more insular." Marriage can concentrate attention on one relationship, while many single people keep a wider web of support.

How many people are single now

DePaulo's talk landed at a time when single adults were no longer a minority. According to US Bureau of Labor Statistics figures she cited, 124.6 million Americans over 16 were unmarried in 2014, or 50.2% of the adult population, up from 37.4% in 1976.

The pattern is similar in other wealthy countries. In the UK, the Office for National Statistics publishes estimates by marital status for England and Wales; figures reported alongside coverage of her talk put never-married adults at roughly 16 million in 2015, compared with about 12.5 million in 2002, while the married population stayed close to 23 million. People are marrying later, marrying less, and spending a much larger share of adult life unmarried.

Yet, DePaulo argued, the reasons many people choose and enjoy single life are rarely acknowledged, and the stigma persists. Couples who marry are celebrated with showers, gifts and legal benefits; she noted that married Americans gain access to more than 1,000 federal benefits and protections. Single people, meanwhile, often face assumptions that they are lonely, immature or simply waiting for the right partner.

Is marriage good for you? Where the evidence gets tricky

The popular claim that marriage makes people happier usually rests on studies that compare married and unmarried people at one moment. DePaulo has pointed out several problems with that approach:

• Selection. People who are already healthier, wealthier or happier may be more likely to marry in the first place, so the comparison flatters marriage.
• Who gets counted. If divorced and widowed people are grouped with the never-married, or left out entirely, the "married" group looks better simply because the unhappy marriages have ended and moved to another category.
• The honeymoon effect. Long-term studies that follow the same people over time often find a small rise in life satisfaction around the wedding that fades back towards the earlier level within a few years.

None of this means marriage is bad for people. Many researchers still find that a good, supportive marriage is linked to wellbeing, and an unhappy one to stress and poorer health. The honest reading is that the quality of relationships matters far more than marital status, and that being married is not a guarantee of anything.

Loneliness and solitude are not the same thing

One of DePaulo's most quoted lines from the talk was: "The preoccupation with the perils of loneliness can obscure the profound benefits of solitude." Loneliness is a painful feeling of being disconnected; solitude is time spent alone, which many people choose and value.

Public health bodies are right to take loneliness seriously, and it affects married people too. But treating every single person as at risk of loneliness misses those who are deliberately "single at heart", her term for people who find that single life suits them best and who are not looking to change it.

Practical takeaways, whatever your relationship status

• Invest in a wide circle. Friends, siblings, neighbours and colleagues provide support that one partner cannot cover alone. This applies to couples as much as to singles.
• Value meaningful work and interests. Purpose outside relationships appears to be one of the ways many single people build satisfying lives.
• Use time alone well. Solitude can be restful and creative. If being alone mostly feels painful, that is worth talking about with someone you trust or a professional.
• Question the script. Searching for "The One" is not a requirement for a good life, and being in a couple is not a prize in itself.
• Notice the stereotypes. Comments that a single friend must be lonely or unfinished say more about cultural expectations than about the person.

DePaulo's message was not that everyone should stay single, nor that marriage cannot be wonderful. It was that single people deserve an accurate portrait, one that recognises their resilience, their relationships and the meaning they build into their lives.

Sources: American Psychological Association press release, August 2016; Office for National Statistics; originally reported via Expanded Consciousness.