Speaking of Psychology: Living the better single life

Married people are often considered to be happier and healthier, while single people are often stereotyped as being isolated, self-centered and unhappy. But what if these are myths? In this episode, psychologist Bella DePaulo, PhD, talks about the benefits of remaining unattached and calls on psychology to pay more attention to why certain single people do, in fact, thrive.

Bella DePaulo, PhD, is a project scientist and social psychologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She has written more than 100 academic publications, including many on the topic of the single life. DePaulo is the author of the book, "Singled Out: How Singles are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After."

DePaulo received her PhD from Harvard University in 1979. Her work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Mental Health and the National Academy of Education.

Audrey Hamilton: For generations, living happily ever after usually meant getting married. If you found your perfect match and tied the knot, you would be happier, healthier and less lonely. Meanwhile, single people are often stereotyped as being isolated, self-centered and unhappy. In this episode, we speak with one psychologist who has dug deep into the research on singles and married couples and finds that everything you think you know about single people is probably wrong. I’m Audrey Hamilton and this is Speaking of Psychology.

Bella DePaulo is a project scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara and has been described by Atlantic magazine as America’s foremost thinker and writer on the single experience. She has written more than 100 academic publications, including many on the topic of single life and is the author of the book “Singled Out. How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized and Ignored and Still Live Happily Ever After.” Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Mental Health. Welcome Dr. DePaulo.

Bella DePaulo: Thank you so much for having me.

Audrey Hamilton: There has been a lot of research and media coverage focusing lately on happiness. One of the big questions seems to be “will getting married make you happier?” We all know that there are unhappy marriages out there, of course. But yet, our culture obviously seems to favor marriage over being single. What does the research show us? Do you have to be married to be happy?

Bella DePaulo: You are so right about the culture favoring marriage. And you would think with all of this celebration of marriage and coupling and weddings that married people would be happier. But it turns out that if you follow the same people over the course of their lives and ask them over and over again, “Are you happy? Are you happy? Are you happy? How happy are you?” It turns out that when people get married they end up no happier than they were when they were single.

So if they were a really happy single person they’ll probably be a happy married person and if they were not so happy as a single person, they probably will not be so happy as a married person. The only little hint you get that getting married makes you happier is when you first get married – you know, right around the time of the wedding and it’s all so exciting…

Audrey Hamilton: You’re a newlywed, right?

Bella DePaulo: Yes, exactly. So sometimes, people get a little bump in happiness then, but then they go back to being as happy or as unhappy as they were when they were single. And here’s something else about that newlywed effect – that little increase in happiness around the wedding -- it only happens for the married people who get married and stay married. If you’re one of those married couples who’s going to end up divorced, as your wedding is approaching you’re already getting a tiny bit less happy.

Audrey Hamilton: Interesting.

Bella DePaulo: Yes.

Audrey Hamilton: So, you’re single. Your biography on your website says I’m single – always have been – always will be. So, what made you want to focus on studying the lives of single people? You know, how much of the research is about understanding yourself?

Bella DePaulo: Okay. Well, yeah, I have always been single. And I was never insecure about my own desire to live single. It just felt right to me. Was I really that different in wanting to stay single and feeling like I got a lot out of my single life? And so, a lot of my research was motivated by that. In fact, at the very beginning, before I had ever done a single study, I just started approaching other single people at social events and I’d go up to them and I’d say something like “Do you ever feel like you’re treated differently because you’re single?” And the first person I approached had all of these stories. And then somebody else joined us and he had stories. And then somebody else joined us. And we talked all night. There was something about the lives of single people that was really important to them and was not being addressed in the culture at large, in the popular media and as I would later learn, really not so much by social scientists either.

One of the things I did in the last couple of months was to look at PsycINFO^®, which is the database of all the articles, books, dissertations, etc. that had ever been published relevant to psychology. And I looked for articles on marriage and married people and I looked for articles on people who had always been single. And I found that just since the year 2000, there have been more than 19,000 articles about marriage and married people and only 501 about single people. And most of those articles about lifelong single people were just articles in which they were the comparison group in studies where marriage researchers were trying to say “Oh, if you get married you’ll be happier and healthier.” Which of course, turns out not to be true.

So, I thought that was really interesting too and it shows that even now nearly two decades after I first started studying single life, we still are the neglected population among social science researchers. Research is still overwhelmingly about marriage and married people. And that is so inappropriate at a time when the number of people who are not married in the United States, if you start counting at 16 – so 16 and older – the number of people who are not married is greater than the number of people who are married.

Audrey Hamilton: Yeah. The single population is growing.

Bella DePaulo: Yes, and it has been for decades.

Audrey Hamilton: What are some of the key differences in what single people value versus married couples? I’m particularly interested among those who consciously choose to remain single, like yourself.

Bella DePaulo: Right. I like to – I’ve been trying to study people who I call single at heart. Those are people who live their best, most authentic, most meaningful lives by living single. So when you ask people who are single at heart what they think when they know they’re going to have some time alone coming up, overwhelmingly, more than 95 percent say they look forward to, they really savor their solitude. And they don’t worry – or they very rarely worry that if they have time to themselves they’re going to feel lonely.

And yet, social science researchers have just been totally preoccupied with studies of loneliness. Now loneliness is a really important thing to study and yet, we also need to be more aware of what people can get out of solitude rather than just worrying about people who are going to be lonely. So that’s one of the things, one of the ways that single people differ from married. They really love their solitude.

Another thing is that they really want their work to be meaningful. So there was this study that followed people starting when they were high school seniors until they were 27 years old. And when they were 27 years old people who had been single the whole time said that they wanted jobs that were meaningful and the married people were more likely to say they wanted jobs with good pay and a good chance to get a raise. Now you might think well the married people just said that because they’re married. But if you look back to when they were all in high school and no one was married, the people who would eventually stay single were already saying that they wanted work that was intrinsically rewarding and the people who would eventually get married were already saying I want work that pays well and there’s lots of chances to advance.

Audrey Hamilton: Right. We talked a little bit about the growing number of single people and I want to go back to that. So is this simply because people are delaying marriage or people are just forgoing it altogether? You know, I’m just curious what this says about our society moving forward.

Bella DePaulo: Right. So there is a big difference in when people get married now compared to in the past. So for example, in 1956 men got married on the average around age 22, about half got married before 22 and half got married after. Women it was 20. Now those ages are 29 and 27 so half of all men who will eventually get married are not yet married at age 29. And half of all women who will eventually get married are not yet married at age 27. So that’s a huge difference in how we spend our early adult lives. And also, more people are simply staying single. And when you think about the reasons for it, there is, people sometimes want to finish their education first or they want to get a good job first and that can be difficult with growing inequality and economics and globalization. It’s just can be harder for people to find the economic security that they sometimes want to have before they first get married. So there are lots of reasons like that.

But the reason that I focus on, because it gets so little attention, is that for some maybe many single people – they are single because they want to be. Because they are embracing single life. Because living single is the way they live their best, most fulfilling, most meaningful life.

Another way that single and married people differ in their values and what they care about is that married people tend to focus on the one – their spouse – and so their life can be centered around this one person. Well people who are single, maybe especially people who embrace single life like to create a life around the ones instead of the one. So, there is research showing that it’s single people who are more connected to friends, to siblings, to their parents, to neighbors, their colleagues and it’s just the opposite of our stereotypes, which say single people are the loners who are social isolates and in fact, it’s single people who are knitting society together and these kinds of studies that follow people from when they are single to when they get married find that when people get married, they become more insular, even if they don’t have kids. They tend to focus more on each other and the time they used to spend with their friends or the attention they used to pay to their parents or their siblings, that sort of diminishes – whereas single people are still connected to other people in those kinds of ways. So that’s another way that single and married people differ.

Another is in the meaningful contributions they make. So, single people do a lot of volunteering. Single people also are very much there for people who need help. So for aging parents in particular, if your parents are getting older and they’re needing help they are much more likely to get it from their grown kids who are single than from their grown kids who are married.

And the same thing is true for other people, whether they’re you’re parents or someone you’re related to or someone you’re totally not related to at all. If there’s someone you know and care about who has the kind of illness or disability that requires help for a long period of time, three months or more, again it’s single people who step in to provide that help more than married people do. And I think that’s really interesting because of the stereotypes of single people as leading lives of unfettered pleasures, when in fact they tend do a lot of meaningful work.

One last thing I wanted to say about the differences in single and married people. Single people experience more personal growth. So there was this one study that followed single people more than a thousand people who had always been single and followed them over a five-year period and also followed more than 3,000 people who had been married during that entire five years. And they asked them questions about personal growth and the single people were more likely to agree with statements such as “For me, life has been a continuous process of learning, change and growth” and statements such as “I think it’s important to have new experiences that challenge how you think about yourself in the world.” Whereas the people who stayed married over that five-year period were more likely to agree with statements such as “I gave up trying to make improvements in my life a long time ago.”

Audrey Hamilton: It sounds like single people and married people could actually learn from each other when it comes to leading a richer life or a better life being in happiness. What kind of advice or words of encouragement for single and married people would you give out there for people who might be listening?

Bella DePaulo: Let me start with single people. Because single people are so often pressured to think that there’s something wrong with them, whether they should be trying to get married or trying to find someone, what I like to say to single people is live your single life fully, joyfully and unapologetically. And even if you are a single person who wishes you weren’t single, I say the same thing. Those years that you are single – embrace them. Live them fully. Do the things you’ve always wanted to do. Don’t think about single life the old fashioned way, which is single years are the years when you just mark time until you find the one. Don’t do that.

And then what I have to say to single people, married people, people in between, people who don’t know what they want or what they’re going to do is that we live in wonderful times. This is a time when, more so than any other time in history, people, if you have the resources and granted not everybody does – but if you have the resources, you can choose the life path that works for you, whether that’s single life, married life, something that’s sort of in between, of it you want to go in between different possibilities – all of those options are possible. There is no one blueprint for the good life. We can all get to choose the life path that work best for each of us as individuals.

Audrey Hamilton: Well Dr. DePaulo, thank you so much for joining us. This has been a pleasure.

Bella DePaulo: Thank you.

Audrey Hamilton:Thanks for listening. If you would like more information on the topics we discussed or if you would like to hear more episodes, please go to our website. With the American Psychological Association’s Speaking of Psychology, I’m Audrey Hamilton.