Lone Stars: Being Single

Jillian Straus

The hard demographic fact that you will likely spend most of your life on your own is reshaping singlehood into a satisfying destination rather than an anxiety-ridden way station. Welcome to the richly diversified world of today's singles.

For 23 years—her whole career—Bella DePaulo built a stellar reputation as the go-to expert on the subject of deception, the lying and lie detecting we do in our everyday social life. She published dozens of papers, wrote scores of chapters and found a tenured professional home at the University of Virginia. At the same time, she was building a wide web of friendships, a vibrant intellectual life, traveling extensively and generally enjoying life as a single, unattached human being. Research psychologist that she is, she also began collecting data on attitudes about singles in America.

Two years ago, she went out West on sabbatical. She liked it so much she chose to stay. Moreover, she was ready to put aside her work on deception for a while. "I decided to take a chance on writing a book about singles and not look for a full-time job," she reports. She signed on as a visiting professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara and teaches an occasional course.

Sacrificing her status, following her passion and taking a huge personal and professional leap into the unknown—"I never could have considered that if I were part of a couple," says DePaulo. "Even now I'm not sure it will pay off. But in a marriage, I would have felt that I was not pulling my weight."

DePaulo's own path exemplifies a seismic shift in the place of singles in American culture—in the lives they lead, in the way others see them and, more profoundly, in the way they see themselves. Not only are singles the fastest-growing population group in the country, most of us will spend more of our adult lives single than married. That hard demographic fact is rapidly turning singlehood into a satisfying destination rather than an anxiety-ridden way station, a sign of independence rather than a mark of shame, an opportunity to develop a variety of relationships rather than a demand to stuff all one's emotional eggs into one basket.

"Singlehood is no longer a state to be overcome as soon as possible," says social historian Stephanie Coontz. "It has its own rewards. Marriage is not the gateway to adulthood anymore. For most people it's the dessert—desirable, but no longer the main course." People may still be eager to meet a long-term partner, but they are a lot less desperate, she adds. Increasingly, individuals are finding singlehood preferable to being in an unsatisfactory relationship. In fact, the possibility of singlehood as a viable life path throws into high relief a finding that is slowly emerging from mountains of social science data—that neither the coupled nor uncoupled life is an automatic ticket to bliss; much depends on the achievement of meaningful life goals and quality of the relationships you create.