That Doesn’t Mean that You Are Sad BECAUSE You Are Single

Romantic coupling isn’t a magical road to happiness. For some, it is exactly the wrong route

Ifyou are single, living alone, and feeling down, do you think you are sad because you are single and living alone? Do you think that if you would just find a romantic partner and get married, or at least move in with a romantic partner — or any other human, for that matter — then your sadness and your loneliness would dissipate?

There are many reasons why you may be inclined to think that way. In fact, that sort of reasoning is so pervasive, it takes a special effort to challenge it. But we should challenge it. Partnering and changing your living arrangements are major life decisions. For some, they really will result in a happier life. For other people, though, being single and living alone are deeply satisfying, and trying to do something different because of social pressures or some feeling that it is what you “should” do, is misguided. If you love being single and living alone, you will probably be miserable if you try to live differently. Inauthenticity is rarely a path to fulfillment.

Emotional Double Standards

In everyday life, people can be sad for any number of reasons, and being single or living alone may have nothing to do with it. But in the conventional ways of thinking about things, coupling is associated with happiness and singlehood with sadness. Sometimes “happy” is used to mean “coupled” — for example, “She deserves to be happy. She should commit to her boyfriend.” Why don’t we say, “She deserves to be happy. She should stay single”?

Because of the relentless linking of happiness to coupling, it is all too easy for single people, when they are sad, to jump to the conclusion that they are sad because they are single. And it is even easier for other people to look at sad single people and make the same unjustified leap.

Tellingly, the reverse is rarely true. When coupled people are unhappy, well, life is hard. It is a bad time. Or they are in a bad mood for reasons that have nothing to do with their romantic partner. Or if they do concede that their sadness has something to do with their romantic partner, well everyone knows that romantic relationships are hard work. The solution (in the prevailing way of thinking about things) is not to live single, but to work harder at the romantic relationship, or go on to try another romantic partner.

Sometimes working harder or finding a more appropriate romantic partner can be the solution. And sometimes when single people are sad, it is because they are single — or because of the ways they are treated because of being single (the singlism). I’m not disputing any of that. I’m pointing out the double standard: If a single person is sad, it is because they are single and they should unsingle themselves; if a coupled person is sad, they should work harder at their romantic relationship or find another romantic partner.

The temptation to attribute sadness to singleness is present almost all the time. But during certain special times, that sort of biased reasoning is even more relentless. Holidays are one example; the pandemic is another.

Single and Sad Over the Holidays

Suppose you are single and on your own on some random day of the year, and for whatever reason, it is a day when you have no work and feel free to do whatever you want. Feasting and splurging are encouraged! Doesn’t that sound great?

Now change one thing — it is not some random day, but a holiday, such as Thanksgiving, Christmas, or New Year’s Eve. Now how do you feel? If you felt happy about the random day but sad about the holiday, then maybe the issue is not that you are single and on your own, but the cultural messaging insisting that on holidays, you should be with other people.

Single in a Pandemic

In 2020, in a post about the pandemic for my Living Single blog at Psychology Today, I wrote about this theme of conflating being sad with being single. Here’s what I said:

Social Media Is Messing with Your Mind

If you are living alone and feeling cut off from friends and family during the pandemic, especially as couples and families are feeling freer to go out and about, social media is messing with your mind. All those pictures of happy couples, festive families, and their awesome outings and vacations can make you feel worse than you already do. But research suggests something you probably already know: Facebook doesn’t tell the whole story. And sometimes the story it does tell is untrue.

In America the Anxious, Ruth Whippman recounts running into a friend who was just back from what was supposed to be a romantic weekend with her husband. The friend ranted about what a horrible time she and her husband had, how rude her husband was, how they barely spoke the whole time, and how the entire experience was a complete disaster. Then, Whippman went home and checked her Facebook feed, only to find that her friend had posted something entirely different: “Without the remotest hint of strife are ten or so whimsically captioned pictures of an adorable couple in complementary sun hats, frolicking.”

The Pandemic Is Screwing with Your Emotions

Some people who are single and living alone are doing fine, even thriving, despite the pandemic, but others are not. If you are someone who is struggling, you may think that’s because you are single and living alone. And for some, it may well be.

But the pandemic has let loose a cascade of complications to our lives. Many people have suffered devastating losses of jobs, health, and people they loved. Others are scared that those things could happen. Just about everyone has had routines disrupted, plans delayed or forsaken, and in-person gatherings transformed into masked, socially-distanced events, if they are taking place at all. Any of those factors could be among the real reasons for your distress. Being single or living alone could have little to do with it.

It is so easy to look at single people living alone during the pandemic and say, “You poor thing.” It fits right in with the prevailing deficit narrative of single life — a wildly misleading and unfair portrayal of what it means to be single. When inquiring minds have turned their attention to cohabiting and married couples, though, they discover that many of them are also feeling the stress of the pandemic, in special ways that may be exacerbated by sharing a space. Their relationships are suffering. These people are not single and they are not living alone, but that hasn’t spared them from stress, strife, loneliness, sadness, and sometimes even abuse.

What the Research Shows

People who have read a lot of what I’ve written already know what the research really does show about the implications of getting married or living alone. But for everyone else, here are some highlights.

Getting Married and Not Getting Happier

Just about every relevant movie, novel, love song, advice column, media story, and fairy tale encourages magical thinking. If only that Prince or Princess Charming came along, we are led to believe, then all our wishes would come true. We could get married and then we would never be lonely again, and we would live happily ever after.

Scientific research, though, suggests something different. Some of the best evidence comes from 18 studies that followed the same people over years of their lives, as they went from being single to getting married. On the average, the people who got married experienced a brief increase in happiness around the time of the wedding; then they went back to being as happy or as unhappy as they were when they were single. But even that short-lived honeymoon effect was only enjoyed by those people who got married and stay married. Those who were headed toward divorce were already becoming less happy as their wedding day drew near.

Every finding from scientific research is a result averaged across lots of people. That means there are always exceptions. Some people really do get married, get happier, and stay happier. It is wrong, though, to expect that to happen as a matter of course.

Living with Other People and Still Feeling Lonely

Being single isn’t the same as being alone, as I’ve discussed before. Single people often have robust social networks that they maintain diligently. Many single people live with other people, and some committed couples — including some married couples — live apart.

But even when “alone” means living alone, the connection with loneliness is not always the one we are led to expect. A study of more than 16,000 adults is a great example of why we often get confused about that. At first, the researchers just compared all the people who lived alone with all the people who lived with others (whether a romantic partner or anyone else). The people living alone were lonelier, just as the disparaging stereotypes insist.

The social scientists realized, though, that the people living alone differed from the people living with others in important ways. For example, they were doing less well financially. So then the researchers took the important next step of making sure that when they were comparing the two groups of people, they were similar to each other in important ways. When people living alone were compared to people living with others who were similar to them financially (and in other ways, too), then the results were entirely different: the people living alone were actually less lonely.

It’s Complicated

Humans are complicated and so are human emotions. It does a disservice to all of us to tell only one story of why we are feeling sad or lonely.

Cultural narratives sway us to understand our emotions in particular ways. Too often, they lead us astray, especially with regard to people who are single or living alone. Sometimes they pressure us to forsake the life we love the most, and that’s a true road to regret and sorrow.