I have always been interested in how the family will change in the future. I mean that the family as we know it now has its historical preconditions, limitations and cultural specificities, and the times we live are changing. It is changing dramatically. And with that, the forms of togetherness are changing. So when I came across an article by Bella DePaulo, a psychologist, professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and longtime researcher of people who don’t marry or live alone, I was delighted – I knew I had found an answer that I found very meaningful and satisfying.
This woman is dedicating her life’s work to destigmatising the single group – people who don’t fit the traditional idea of success, according to which success is, in addition to a professional career and creating a home and family. With the arguments of a researcher who has been working on this topic for more than two decades, Bella DePaulo reveals a distinct trend of changes in the modern family form, according to which more and more people live alone and never marry (in the US it is one in four adults). It also proves that “single” life is in any way less fulfilling and satisfying than that of married couples. According to her, new forms of “living together”, i.e. different forms of “extended family” which, in addition to family of origin, include friends, neighbours and membership of interest groups.
For some people, writes Bella DePaulo, a sense of connectedness and belonging does not run through living as a married couple. What’s more, as being“single and unmarried” becomes more mainstream, it’s beginning to rewrite the social consensus about what home and family are. Because I want to support people who are blazing new trails through their social role as innovators in the family field, I decided to translate an article of hers titled, “More and more people are single – and that’s a good thing.” Here it is below.
Bella De Paulo: “More people than ever before are single – and that’s a good thing.”
“The 21st century is the age of living single.
Today, the number of single adults in the U.S. – and many other nations around the world – is unprecedented. And the numbers don’t just say people are staying single longer before settling down. More are staying single for life. A 2014 Pew Report estimates that by the time today’s young adults reach the age of 50, about one in four of them will have never married.
The ascendancy of single living has left some in a panic. US News & World Report, for example, cautioned that Americans think the country’s moral values are bad and getting worse, and one of the top reasons for their concern is the large number of people remaining single.
But instead of fretting, maybe we should celebrate.
I’m a social scientist, and I’ve spent the past two decades researching and writing about single people. I’ve found that the rise of single living is a boon to our cities and towns and communities, our relatives and friends and neighbors. This trend has the chance to redefine the traditional meaning – and confines – of home, family and community.
Ties that bind
For years, communities across the country have been organized by clusters of nuclear families living in suburban homes. But there are some signs that this arrangement isn’t working out so well. These houses are often too isolating – too far from work and from one another. According to a national survey ongoing since 1974, Americans have never been less likely to be friends with their neighbors than they are now, with neighborliness lowest in the suburbs.
But studies have also shown that single people are bucking those trends. For example, they are more likely than married people to encourage, help and socialize with their friends and neighbors. They are also more likely to visit, support, advise and stay in touch with their siblings and parents.
In fact, people who live alone are often the life of their cities and towns. They tend to participate in more civic groups and public events, enroll in more art and music classes, and go out to dinner more often than people who live with others. Single people, regardless of whether they live alone or with others, also volunteer more for social service organizations, educational groups, hospitals and organizations devoted to the arts than people who are married.
Building strength and resilience
Unfortunately, single life continues to be stigmatized, with single people routinely stereotyped as less secure and more self-centered than married people. They’re said to die sooner, alone and sad. Yet studies of people who live alone typically find that most are doing just fine; they don’t feel isolated, nor are they sad and lonely. Reports of the early death of single people have also been greatly exaggerated, as have claims that marriage transforms miserable, sickly single people into happy and healthy spouses.
In some significant ways, it’s the single people who are doing particularly well. For example, people with more diversified relationship portfolios tend to be more satisfied with their lives. In contrast, the insularity of couples who move in together or get married can leave them vulnerable to poorer mental health. Studies have shown that people who stay single develop more confidence in their own opinions and undergo more personal growth and development than people who marry. For example, they value meaningful work more than married people do. They may also have more opportunities to enjoy the solitude that many of them savor.
Redefining family and home
Married people often put their spouse (and, for some, kids) at the center of their lives. That’s what they’re expected to do, and often it’s also what they want to do. But single people are expanding the traditional boundaries of family. The people they care about the most might include family in the traditional sense. But they’ll also loop in friends, ex-partners and mentors. It’s a bigger, more inclusive family of people who matter.
For many single people, single-family suburban homes aren’t going to offer them the balance between sociability and solitude that they crave. They are instead finding or creating a variety of different lifespaces. Sometimes you’ll see 21st-century variations of traditional arrangements, like multi-generational households that allow for privacy and independence as well as social interaction. Others – and not just the very young – are living with their friends or other families of choice.
Those who cherish their alone time will often choose to live alone. Some have committed romantic relationships but choose to live in places of their own, a lifestyle of “living apart together.”
Some of the most fascinating innovations are pursued by people who seek both solitude and easy sociability. These individuals might move into their own apartment, but it’s in a building or neighborhood where friends and family are already living. They might buy a duplex with a close friend, or explore cohousing communities or pocket neighborhoods, which are communities of small homes clustered around shared spaces such as courtyards or gardens.
Single parents are also innovating. Single mothers, for example, can go to CoAbode to try to find other single mothers with whom they can share a home and a life. Other single people might want to raise children with the full support of another parent. Now they can look for a partner in parenting – with no expectations for romance or marriage – at websites such as Family by Design and Modamily.
As the potential for living a full and meaningful single life becomes more widely known, living single will become more of a genuine choice. And when living single is a real choice, then getting married will be, too. Fewer people will marry as a way of fleeing single life or simply doing what they are expected to do, and more will choose it because it’s what they really want. If current trends continue, successive generations will have unprecedented opportunities to pursue the life that suits them best, rather than the one that is prescribed.”
Bella De Paulo
I would like to add my impressions to what Bella De Paulo said. I have the honor of knowing more than one and two people who are living examples of what she writes – people who have full and dynamic lives of happy single people. This is a result of the fact that they have invested no small amount of effort and time to nurture their personal and spiritual development by participating in personal development seminars and groups, seeing a psychotherapist or other forms of inner work, and actively reading books. For them, not starting a family of their own is a conscious life choice with which they are in harmony – something they have always known with the “deeper” of their soul and in which they see the possibility of greater freedom than the average.
I also know people for whom living alone and unmarried is an externally imposed compulsion whose hidden logic they don’t understand and so continue to resent. When I have interacted with them, I have always been amazed at how it is that despite their undoubted physical attractiveness, intelligence and professional success, Life decides not to provide them with an encounter with “Mr. Right or Ms. Right for starting a family and raising children“. These kind of people leave therapy if it does not lead to a change in their family status. There are others – who in the process of psychotherapy realize that what they thought they wanted, namely a family and children, they actually don’t want. That the desire for home and family was an introjection, i.e. a belief that came from outside – from the family and social environment, which they had uncritically accepted as their own. When they make the differentiation from such collective prescriptions or parental expectations, they are reassured and discover new possibilities for togetherness that they had not seen before.
While I do not have statistics for this country, as I do for Bella DePaulo with respect to the United States, I have reason to believe that the number of people who do not form a traditional family is on the rise here as well. As I know how psychologically crippling the pressures of the status quo can be, I would very much like to lend my voice to the destigmatization of single people – in them I see the true family innovators who are discovering new forms of “living with others.” In my professional practice, and not only, I have met enough unhappily married and enough unhappily single people to know that a fulfilling life and love have nothing to do with whether you have managed to trade yourself well in the marriage contract market.
The time has come for the desire to start a family to break free from the pressures of tradition or the fear of loneliness. Both are reasons too neurotic to be included in the decision to commit oneself deeply to another human being.
Historically, family has ensured our survival as individuals. Without the support of other members of the clan, the individual was very weak and vulnerable. But times are changing, and individual survival in the modern world is now supported by other kinds of communities that also enable belonging and support. Such changes have been described as one aspect of the transition from the Age of Pisces to the Age of Aquarius, and it is impressive that a purely scientific discourse such as Bella DePaulo’s psychological research supports such an esoteric theory with its arguments.
Among the many changes, associated with this transition, is a shift from the values of traditional family, religious faith, sacrifice, and compassion to the values of individuality, freedom, and group consciousness. The kinship of the future person will be based on similarity, not on consanguinity. The bond that will bind us will be spiritual, not genetical. I see in De Paulo’s redefinition of the traditional concepts of home and family the scientific justification for the idea of the transition between the aeons.
Kameliya Hadzhiyska
Bella DePaulo is a speaker at TED presenting on “What no one ever told you about people who are single”, as well as numerous books, including “Single: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, Yet Live Happily,” “The Best of Living Alone,” “How We Live Now: Redefining Home and Family in the 21st Century.” Key ideas from her research are also presented in articles on her website www.belladepaulo.com.
