There’s so much about growing up that the arrangement, which has grown more common in the U.S., can’t teach you.
Recently, someone I’m close to made a confession: He felt embarrassed to still be living with roommates in his early 30s. I assured him that was absurd, but given that I also live with two of my friends, I knew what he meant; I’ve noticed the same societal clock ticking, and I’m a few years younger. I don’t feel pressure to find a spouse or start a family—my social circle is filled with single people, the prospect of homeownership seems laughable, and I can’t keep a spider plant alive, much less a human baby. But I have watched as more and more of my peers start to rent their own apartments. So I search for studios online, balk at the prices, and shut the tab.
Over the course of the 20th century, solo living grew significantly more common for Americans. In 1940, only about 8 percent of households in the U.S. had just one person in them; by 2020, that number had risen to nearly 28 percent. And the trend is growing fastest among young adults. The number of 18-to-34-year-olds living alone grew tenfold from 1950 to 2010—from 500,000 to 5 million (though it inched back slightly from 2010 to 2020). The researchers I spoke with seemed to agree on why: People are getting married later. Today, the median age for women to first wed is nearly 29; for men, it’s 30. Having a decade or so between high school and marriage, then, to develop one’s own identity, career, and bank account is not unusual. And, as the NYU sociologist Eric Klinenberg notes in his book Going Solo, many people—especially young professionals in urban centers—have come to see living alone as “a rite of passage and a reward for success” along the way.
But as rites of passage go, it’s a strange one. Though some people live solo throughout their adult life, for the large majority, the arrangement is just a stopover before they start a family. It might feel like an achievement, and it can teach you independence, but it doesn’t have much to reveal about the messy intimacy inherent to becoming an adult. And the value American society ascribes to it is evidence of how confused we are about what growing up really means.
Historically, living alone has been unusual in the U.S.—especially for women. Steven Mintz, a University of Texas at Austin professor and the author of The Prime of Life: A History of Modern Adulthood, told me that women in colonial times “couldn’t really survive” without marriage. By the late 19th century, more remained single, but, unable to support themselves, they commonly lived with extended family or in boarding houses. Men struggled to function on their own too, not knowing how to keep a home. Even through much of the 20th century, people tended to have little time, if any, between living with parents and living with a spouse.
But now solo living has been quietly normalized. Children are far more likely to have a separate bedroom. More and more college students, Mintz said, live in their own room. And in adulthood, the ideal remains pervasive even among those who can’t afford it. Virginia Thomas, a psychologist at Middlebury College who studies solitude and the transition to adulthood, told me that when she asks her students what makes someone an adult, “always on the top of their list is financial independence and self-sufficiency.” They see their early 20s as a time for rooming with friends, and imagine having a spouse and kids years down the line. But before they settle down, “they want to move into this fuller expression of adulthood,” she said. “Living alone kind of encapsulates that.” Unfortunately, that association might be misguided.
Solo living, to be fair, has a lot of benefits. For one, many young adults find it satisfying to know they can handle responsibility—rent, utilities, water leaks—on their own, Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, a Clark University psychologist, told me. And autonomy can, in some ways, lead to emotional maturity, Thomas said. You can develop not only hard skills but also the confidence that you can learn them. You might grow comfortable spending time with yourself—a good way to avoid ending up in codependent relationships, she told me, because you won’t look for someone just to occupy empty moments. Plus, you won’t always be on your own: Klinenberg has found that young solo dwellers tend to be busily engaged in the world beyond their walls. But the arrangement does allow you to curate your social existence, choosing when to be alone, when to invite people over, and when to go out; you can call your own shots.
Read: Single people aren’t to blame for the loneliness epidemic
This is a deeply American value. Living alone has become more common in other countries too, even in some cultures we might consider more collectivist. But in the U.S., the trend also fits into a long tradition of individualism. Older adults in the U.S., for example, tend to value “intimacy at a distance”—they don’t want to be far from loved ones, but they also don’t want to live with them, Susan Brown, who directs Bowling Green State University’s Center for Family and Demographic Research, told me. Now young adults seem to want that too: connection they can control, love that doesn’t impinge on freedom, socializing that fits on their calendar. That’s basically the opposite of sharing a home, which tends to be chaotic and annoying, even when it’s great.
Living alone just doesn’t set you up for what often lies ahead. After a few years on their own, people who move back in with others (perhaps especially those who eventually have a family) might have to relearn some tough lessons. You’ll need to be flexible, to work with others, to make peace with not getting your way—the exact skills you might gain from sharing a home. “You can’t just decorate the place the way you like,” Arnett told me. “You can’t spend money on anything you want.”
We didn’t always equate growing up with self-sufficiency. Most people used to mature with their spouse. Now people tend to see marriage not as a step toward adulthood but as the culmination of it, Mintz told me. Of course, you don’t need a romantic partner to find your identity. But we shouldn’t assume that we can do all of that growing on our own. Discovering what you care about, gaining familiarity with others and the world, making and learning from mistakes—those strides are easier with other people’s perspectives and support.
Ultimately, your career might be the true beneficiary of early independence; young adults are, in fact, the cohort most likely to move between geographic locations, commonly to follow jobs. But that can be a bleak kind of freedom. Mintz mentioned the 1950s sociologist Talcott Parsons, who idealized the nuclear family as a “productive unit” that would allow people to travel to find work, without the trouble of bringing along a whole extended family. Young solo dwellers, who don’t have to consider roommates or live-in partners, might be an even more isolated version of Parsons’s productive unit. “Without any ties or obligations, you can adapt to the marketplace freely,” Mintz said. “And everybody around you is sort of an interchangeable part. And wherever you go, you’ll find friends who sort of replace old friends that you left behind.”
Read: The hidden costs of living alone
Where growing up once was marked by parenthood, now it’s marked by participation in the economy, Satya Doyle Byock, a psychotherapist and the author of Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood, told me. Under this new model, living alone is seen as a symbol of success. But having your own place doesn’t actually signify all that much, other than that you can pay your (likely high) rent—or that your parents can. In many cases, it’s a mark of wealth, not maturity.
Still, Brown told me, as people continue to marry later and less, the number of Americans living alone will probably keep increasing. But hopefully our accepted paths into adulthood keep multiplying too. After all, growing up is about becoming a specific human playing a role in a particular community, shaping and being shaped by others as you go. Living alone can be part of that process—but no 401(k) or promotion or even a coveted one-bedroom apartment should be confused for maturity itself. Maybe in the future, when Thomas asks her students what makes someone an adult, she won’t get a consensus at all—she’ll get a debate.
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