From matchmaking apps to speed dating services to meddling moms, clearly a lot of time and effort goes into ensuring that people end up as part of a couple, but as one researcher from the University of California, Santa Barbara explains, it is possible to be single and happy.
During an address at the American Psychological Association’s 124th Annual Convention on Friday, Dr. Bella DePaulo, a visiting professor in social psychology at the university, presented research showing that single people value performing meaningful work more than their married counterparts and that they also tend to be more connected with friends and family.
“When people marry, they become more insular,” Dr. DePaulo said in a statement, adding that many single men and women tend to embrace that lifestyle and are actually more likely to enjoy a higher degree of psychological growth and development than those who have gotten married.
“The preoccupation with the perils of loneliness can obscure the profound benefits of solitude,” she added. “It is time for a more accurate portrayal of single people and single life – one that recognizes the real strengths and resilience of people who are single, and what makes their lives so meaningful.”
Findings indicate that there is ‘no one blueprint for the good life’
Scientific research focusing on the wellbeing of singles is sparse, according to Dr. DePaulo. As she reviewed papers discussing individuals who had never married, she learned that the majority of the 814 studies she found did not specifically set out to examine single people, but used them as a comparison group to learn more about married couples and marriage itself.
Those that did focus on never-married reached some rather interesting conclusions, she added. For instance, one study comparing lifelong singles with married individuals found that those who were unwed possessed a higher sense of self-determination, and were more likely to experience a “sense of continued growth and development as a person.”
Another study reported that lifelong singles who were more self-sufficient were less likely they were to experience negative emotions, while the opposite proved to be true for married men and women – those who were less dependent on others (including their spouses) were actually more likely to experience negative emotions, according to the authors of a June 2009 paper.
The findings run contrary to the notion that married people should be doing better than the nearly 125 million unmarried Americans over the age of 16, Dr. DePaulo said, in light of the many laws that benefit them. In fact, she said that married men and women have “access to more than 1,000 federal benefits and protections, many of them financial.
“Considering all of the financial and cultural advantages people get just because they are married, it becomes even more striking that single people are doing as well as they are,” the UCSB professor added, emphasizing that her research shows that “there is no one blueprint for the good life. What matters is not what everyone else is doing or what other people think we should be doing, but whether we can find the places, the spaces and the people that fit who we really are and allow us to live our best lives.”
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