If you knew you would be single for the rest of your life, how would you feel? Delighted? Depressed? Relieved?
For some individuals, being single is about having the freedom to do what you want, when you want, without consultation or compromise. They thrive in their singlehood. For other people, being single is a profound disappointment, a sign of personal failure, and, in their view, the main reason they can't achieve their life goals.
These opposing takes on singlehood highlight a key idea: if you know someone is single, you actually know nothing about their happiness.
Historically, the dominant thrust of psychological research has operated under the assumption that to be single is to be lacking (DePaulo, 2023). Operating from this perspective, single people have served as a comparison group in research on relationships, where overall averages on measures of life satisfaction or well-being obscure critical variability in single people's experiences.
In other words, the field has often treated single people as one type of person, when, in fact, there's important diversity among single people.
How can scientists reveal underlying differences among single people? One way is to identify a feature (e.g., if they're single by choice) and compare single people based on this chosen feature. Any differences that emerge might be interesting, but this approach still obscures important variability among single people.
Enter latent profile analysis (LPA). LPA is an analytic approach that looks for similarities among people and sorts people into groups based on these similarities. In other words, it clusters people (in this case, single people) into meaningful groups based on a set of indicators, without specifying in advance how many groups or relying on one sorting variable (e.g., if they've ever been married or not). In recent research, LPA was used to help reveal important differences among single people (Walsh et al., 2023).
Walsh and colleagues (2023) used LPA to sort 562 single adults based on their self-reports of their relationship quality (e.g., satisfaction and closeness with friends and family), and their self-esteem, stress, and health. These single adults were part of a nationally representative sample and included approximately equal numbers of self-identified single men and single women. Their results revealed six unique types of singles (Walsh et al., 2023). Which one represents you? (Note: group names are original to this blog but based on the researchers' descriptions).
Using a person-centered analytic approach to identify diversity among single adults is an important step forward. It reveals that many single people are happy and satisfied with their life, with their relationships, and with their friendships (Walsh et al., 2023). At the same time, other single individuals are unhappy, with patterns reflecting challenges either with their social lives or their own well-being. No one way of living represents all singles.
Indeed, recognizing variability among single people is a much more faithful way to think about people's lived experiences than assuming all single people are one way or another. What's critical from this study is the idea that being single doesn't automatically mean a person is happy or unhappy in life. Ultimately, life happiness does not depend on relationship status.
References
DePaulo, B. (2023). Single and flourishing: Transcending the deficit narratives of single life. Journal of Family Theory & Review, 15(3), 389-411.
Walsh, L. C., Horton, C., Rodriguez, A., & Kaufman, V. A. (2023). Happily ever after for coupled and single adults: A comparative study using latent profile analysis. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 40(12), 3955-3982.
How the 6 Types of Single People Differ: Which One Are You?
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09.05.2024
If you knew you would be single for the rest of your life, how would you feel? Delighted? Depressed? Relieved?
For some individuals, being single is about having the freedom to do what you want, when you want, without consultation or compromise. They thrive in their singlehood. For other people, being single is a profound disappointment, a sign of personal failure, and, in their view, the main reason they can't achieve their life goals.
These opposing takes on singlehood highlight a key idea: if you know someone is single, you actually know nothing about their happiness.
Historically, the dominant thrust of psychological research has operated under the assumption that to be single is to be lacking (DePaulo, 2023). Operating from this perspective, single people have served as a comparison group in research on relationships, where overall averages on measures of life satisfaction or well-being........
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