What's Wrong with Staying Single?

By Bella M. DePaulo, American Sexuality Magazine. Posted February 18, 2008.

I'm fifty-four years old and I have always been single. I love my single life. But for a long time I rarely said that out loud. I thought I was the only happy single person.

I didn't love everything about my single life. I didn't like that "poor thing" look I'd get when others first learned that I was single. I didn't like their assumption that I must be miserable and lonely and pining for a partner.

There were other things I didn't like that I thought I could pin on my single status, but I wasn't really sure. For example, sometimes at work colleagues with partners would assume that I could cover the tasks that no one else wanted. Maybe they presumed that since I was single, I didn't have a life and so had nothing better to do with my time. Socially, I was invited to lunch with my coupled colleagues during the week but not to their dinner and movie outings over the weekends.

Tentatively at first, I began asking other single people if they thought they were viewed and treated differently than coupled people just because they were single. The responses were overwhelming. It was time to proceed beyond anecdotes.

Years later after I had read hundreds of scientific studies about marital status, happiness, and discrimination, and after I conducted my own program of research, I realized that much of the conventional wisdom about people who are single was either grossly exaggerated or just plain wrong. The place of singles in society and the significance of getting married have changed dramatically over the past decades. But our views of single and married people have not yet caught up. I wrote about this in my book Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After. The subtitle captures what I learned about singles. Let me explain.

After collecting stories of singlehood, informally, from hundreds of others, I began conducting systematic research. My colleague Wendy Morris and I first studied perceptions of people who are single and married. We approached this work in a number of ways. In one set of studies, for instance, we created profiles of married and single people that were exactly the same (in terms of the person's age, hometown, interests, employment, and so forth) except for their marital status. In one experiment after another, we found that the single people were viewed more negatively than the married people. For example, they were seen as unhappy, lonely, and self-centered compared to their married counterparts. (The one exception is that single people were consistently viewed as more independent than married people.)

We looked up federal statutes and found more than a thousand instances in which official marriage was linked to federal protections and benefits. We found discrimination against singles in the workplace and the marketplace. We then did research of our own on discrimination and found that realtors (and other people we asked) would prefer to rent to married couples than to single women, single men, unmarried couples, or a pair of friends -- even when they all had equally positive references and ability to pay. They even preferred the married couple to the unmarried couple when the unmarried couple had been together six years, compared to only six months for the married couple.

The story that was taking shape in my mind was becoming clear. Single people are not as happy as married people in part because they are targets of stereotyping and discrimination.

At first I did not doubt that getting married made people happier. I saw indications of that in headlines and book titles. In fact, the assumption had become so much a part of conventional wisdom that some began to build other arguments on that foundation. In an op-ed in The New York Times, for instance, Jonathan Rauch argued that gay men and lesbians should be allowed to marry because social science research shows that marriage makes people happier.

When I set out to study the research on marital status and happiness, I thought I was looking for nuances -- are there some people who benefit from marriage even more than others? I was amazed by what I found.

In the typical study people in different categories are asked to rate their happiness, perhaps on a 1 to 4 scale, with 4 indicating "very happy". The categories usually include people who are single (and always have been), currently married, divorced, or widowed. Here are the results of one such study by Walter R. Gove and Hee-Choon Shin published in 1989; the numbers are the average happiness ratings of 2,200 Americans in the four groups:

3.3 currently married

3.2 single

2.9 divorced

2.9 widowed

The first thing to notice is that all four groups are on the happy end of the scale. They are all closer to calling themselves a 3 in happiness (the scale point that has the label "pretty happy") than to any other label. Second, the differences between the groups are not impressive, and the smallest difference is between those who are currently married and those who have always been single.

See more stories tagged with: discrimination, marriage, relationships, stereotypes, single

Bella DePaulo is the author of Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After. She is a visiting professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara and a contributor to the Huffington Post. Her op-ed essays have appeared in papers such as The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, and Newsday. Visit her website at www.belladepaulo.com.

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from Sex and Relationships! Sign up now »