Kim Mills: We talk a lot on this podcast about relationships, and there's no doubt that relationships can be an important driver of many people's health, happiness, and well-being. But focusing solely on partnerships or romantic relationships misses a crucial fact. More Americans than ever before are single and many are perfectly happy to stay that way. A 2019 Pew Research Center poll found that three in 10 US adults are single. They're not married, living with a partner or in a committed relationship. Among those singles, half said they were not interested in dating or looking for a relationship.

Meanwhile, looking simply at marriage rates, we find the number of singles is even higher. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, about 50% of American adults are unmarried, or close to 127 million people. Those singles are a diverse bunch. Some have never been married. Some are divorced, some widowed. They're older or younger. Some are parents. Others have no children. All of those factors and many others may affect how people experience singlehood.

So how is relationship status related to well-being? What makes some people happy with singlehood while others are not? Is there a societal stigma against singles, and if so, how does that stigma affect people's lives? Why is there so much more research on being in a happy relationship than on being happily single?

Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills.

My guest today is Dr. Geoff MacDonald, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. He has studied aspects of relationships for many years, including attachment theory and intimacy. More recently, he turned his attention to singlehood, and today the primary aim of his lab is to better understand well-being in singlehood. His and his colleagues' research has started to create a portrait of what makes for a happy single person. So I'm looking forward to talking today about that and much more.?

Thank you for joining me, Dr. MacDonald.

Geoff MacDonald, PhD: It's my pleasure to be here.

Mills: I mentioned that you studied relationships for many years before you started studying singlehood. What made you turn your attention to single people and why do you think it's important for researchers to study singlehood?

MacDonald: I mean, I think the primary driver in turning my attention to singlehood is just recognizing, like you said at the top there, there are a lot of single people out there, and that number is increasing, not just in the United States, not just in Canada, this seems to be a worldwide trend. So it's something that's important to pay attention to. But we know really very little about who single people are and what makes single people happy. And even if you just want to take this from the perspective of a relationship researcher, everybody is single before they get in their first relationship. Most of the time when you end a relationship, you end up single. So it's important to not think about this as two different groups of people largely speaking. These are different phases of most people's lives. And so even if your goal is just to understand relationships, you need to understand—but I think understanding single people is important on its own.

Mills: So a lot of research over the years has found evidence that on average married people are happier, healthier, and generally have better life outcomes compared with single people. But some researchers who study singlehood have pushed back against that idea. What do you think? Are partnered people generally better off than those who are single? Is that even the right question to ask?

MacDonald: I think it's one of the right questions to ask but it's not the only one. And I certainly think I should say off the top that this is such a young field of research, so we have some initial things to say about it. But I think all of this is up for debate and discussion. From my reading of the literature, I think it would be fair to say that the average person who is in a romantic relationship is higher in well-being, they're happier, they're higher in life satisfaction than the average person who is single. But there's so much variability within each group. Not every single person is miserable and certainly not everybody in a relationship is ecstatic with their life. So that's really been the focus of what we've been doing in our lab. And I think a lot of singlehood researchers have been doing is looking at who are the happier versus less happy single people to get a sense of which types of single people are doing really well for themselves and which types of single people might not be doing so well.

Mills: One of the central questions in your lab is what makes people happy, or content with being single? Are there common traits that happy singles share? Personality traits, or life circumstances or other things?

MacDonald: There's a few things that we seem to be starting to put our finger on now. So one for example is that people who have never been married or people who have never been in a romantic relationship tend to be happier singles than people who have been. We don't really have any direct evidence as to why that's the case, but my guess would be people know what's good for them, and there's a reason why some people don't choose to be in romantic relationships, because they know that's not what's going to make them happy. And the flip side of that is that one of the groups that does less well with singlehood is people who've been through a divorce. There is some evidence that suggests that divorce can have a bit of a damaging effect on at least some people, which we think is particularly interesting because the bias tends to be that romantic relationships are good for people.

But if you think about the way that people come out of divorces, maybe less well off than when they started, relationships can actually be damaging. But there's a reason that as a society we haven't thought about relationships as damaging. The assumption is that they're good. So relationship history I think is an important one.

Generally speaking, the tack that I tend to take on this is that the people who are doing well in singlehood are sort of the people who are good at life in general. The people, for example, who are higher in attachment security, so these would be the kinds of people who are comfortable making close relationships with people and who are not really worried so much about getting rejected by other people. I mean, they do well in romantic relationships, but our evidence suggests that these are people who do well in singlehood as well.

Maybe one of the reasons for that is that people who are happier in singlehood are also people who have good relationships with their friends and good relationships with their families. And that skill set that comes with attachment security, the ability to be comfortably close to people, to take emotional risks that allow you to get close to people, that's not just limited to romantic relationships. Those people are going to bring those kinds of skills to their friendships and their family relationships. And I do think there's a bit of old fashioned wisdom here that I think that some people have the idea that when you get into a romantic relationship that then you're going to become a happy person. But when you understand the kinds of people who are happy single are also the kinds of people who are happy in relationships, it suggests that maybe the best idea is to get right with yourself first and go towards a romantic relationship when you've done whatever that work is.

Mills: Now when you're studying people who are single, does that mean that they can't have relationships, that they can't have intimacy with other people?

MacDonald: Yeah, no, not at all. I mean, certainly in terms of their friendship and their family relationships, there's lots of opportunity for intimacy there. One of the projects that we have ongoing in the lab right now is also looking at the romantic and sexual kinds of connections that single people have. So certainly over the last however many decades, social norms have changed around opportunities for casual sexual opportunities or relationships that sort of straddle the line between dating and not dating, like friends with benefits for example,

Mills: Friends with benefits, that's what I was thinking too, yeah.

MacDonald: Yeah, exactly. So we know that there are a number of single people who tell us that they're sexually active, but we haven't really collected the data yet on well, what kinds of relationships are those? And so we're trying to delve into that a little bit. What we do know is that single people who are higher in sexual satisfaction tend to be happier with singlehood. But the other part of that is that the data suggests to us that singles who are happier with their sex lives are also more likely to end up in relationships down the road.

And so one of our guesses about that is that being with people in sexual and romantic relationships, it's not shopping for a product where if you don't like it you take it back. The human heart works such that relationships are kind of sticky. And even when you are in casual sexual relationships, for example, next thing you know you're leaving a toothbrush, and next thing you're leaving a set of pajamas, and next thing you know it's easier to just move in because you're already spending three nights a week there. So we think that even though sexual satisfaction is definitely something that's associated with happiness in singlehood, that might also indicate somebody who's on the road to being in a committed romantic relationship.

Mills: Let me ask how age affects people's experience of singlehood? Do people become more or less content with being single as they get older?

MacDonald: So our evidence suggests that there's kind of an inflection point around midlife that single people, starting at about age 40, start to become more satisfied with being single. It's important to point out that's not unique to singlehood, that it looks like there's some evidence suggesting that well-being in general for people tends to increase after about midlife. So there's another study by Janina Buhler where she looked at are people happy with the romantic relationships? And she found exactly the same pattern. Starting at about age 40, people start to become happier with the relationships. So it kind of looks like around midlife people start to become happier with the path that they've chosen. I do think another factor in that though is some people who want to be in a relationship get selected out of the singles pool, that if you're younger and you'd really like to be in a relationship, you're more likely to actually end up dating.

And so maybe part of the reason that older singles are happier being single is that there's going to be less of them in that pool who wish that they were in a relationship. Now having said that, in another study that we conducted, what the data looked like is that for older people who don't let go of wanting a relationship, like that variable of do you want to be in a romantic relationship or not, also seems to be something that's important in understanding whether people are happy with being single or not. That particularly older women who have let go of the desire or whom never had a desire for romantic relationship in the first place are our highest group in terms of life satisfaction. But it's the people who as they get older, continue to wish that they were in a romantic relationship, that seems to be associated with lower life satisfaction. So there's something about making peace with your circumstances, letting go of things that you can't have, that might also be part of this process of becoming a happy single person at an older age.

Mills: I believe that most of your research is with people in the U.S., right?

MacDonald: We've conducted studies with people in the U.S., with Europeans. We've done a little bit of data collection in Korea, but we haven't really expanded out culturally beyond that.

Mills: Are there cultural differences then in the research that you've done? Have you found in other countries that there is a difference in singlehood how it's experienced and how it's perceived?

MacDonald: I would say that so far we haven't collected enough data to be able to answer that question well. I think it is such an important question. I mean, I would say so far with the research that we've been conducting in Korea, we've been surprised at the similarities across the two cultures. So for example, when you ask single people what are your most important life priorities? In both Korea and in the West where we've collected data, they say, “My most important priorities are my family and my health.” And they say that, “My least important priorities,” at least of the ones that we asked them, “Are sex and dating.” And that was something that was consistent across those two countries. But one of the things that we've speculated about, and there has been a little bit of research in other labs about, is the role that family plays in single people's lives across different cultures.

The U.S. in particular is unique. It is by some measures, literally the most individualistic country in the world, which means that it's a system where your family doesn't have a lot of say in what you're dating and your marriage life is. That's really unusual. In most countries around the world, family has a pretty big say about “are you dating, who are you dating,” that kind of thing. And so it would make sense that that would lead to some kind of intense dynamics for single people in these more collectivistic kinds of countries where we would expect, because there's these cultural norms around you are representative of our family, you're supposed to be getting married, you're making us look bad by not getting married, that there could be some particular pressure on them to not be single even if that in their heart is what they want to be. So I think that's going to be a really important direction for future research. We don't have a lot to say about that yet.