Singles Under Quarantine: Are They Really Disadvantaged?

It is pandemic time, and reporters are filling my inbox with their questions. They want to write about the experiences of single people, and for that I am grateful. Most, though, have a particular angle in mind. They assume that single people are especially likely to be having a hard time, and they want to know what advice I could offer to help them cope.

For example, one asked me to “offer insight on how long-term single people, in particular, may be struggling at this moment.” Another wanted to know how being “stuck home alone” could “exacerbate the feelings of loneliness a single person might have.” A different reporter is also writing about loneliness and asked how her readers can “protect their mental health.”

I see three problems with these inquiries, not so much on their own, but as part of a bigger-picture story of what it means to be single.

1. They perpetuate a deficit narrative of single life that suggests that single people are inferior to couples.
2. They fail to recognize the special strengths of single people, especially those who are single at heart.
3. The deficit narrative can provide legitimacy for discrimination against single people.

The Deficit Narrative and the Social Scientists Complicit in Legitimizing It

It is true that some single people are having a very difficult time during this extraordinary moment in history, as are some coupled people. There are also issues that transcend marital or relationship status, such as the sadness and grief at all the pain and loss, and the anxiety triggered by the uncertainty over how it will all unfold.

Apart from those universal vulnerabilities, there are some problems that are pinned selectively on single people. Too often, single people are the ones presumed to be particularly lonely, overwhelmed by the challenges posed by the pandemic, and in need of help.

The story that single people are especially likely to be lonely and struggling is based on assumptions that need to be interrogated rather than simply accepted:

• It assumes that single people find time alone to be toxic.
• It assumes that single people don’t know what to do with all their alone time. They need help.
• It assumes that because single people don’t have a spouse, they don’t have anyone at all—or at least no one who matters.
• It assumes that even if single people do have friends, they are now cut off from them.
• It also assumes that all single people live alone, when in fact, the majority do not.
• By implication, these assumptions suggest that people who are not single are doing fine. They have someone right there with them. They aren’t lonely, they aren’t struggling, and they do not need help.

The deficit narrative of single life is not unique to the pandemic. Much to my chagrin, it has been peddled by social scientists for more than half a century. Dip into any relevant scholarly journal, and you will find claims, under the banner of science, that single people are just not as good as those married people. They aren’t as happy. They aren’t as healthy. They are going to drop dead sooner. And on and on. If only they would marry, all that would change. I have spent the last two decades of my professional life debunking those claims.

I’ve shown, for example, that studies that supposedly document the inferiority of single people are often based on cheater techniques that stack the deck in ways likely to make married people look like they are doing better than they really are. I’ve pointed to more methodologically sophisticated studies demonstrating that people who marry do not become lastingly happier than they were when they were single (there are more than a dozen of those) and may even become less healthy. Nonetheless, the same singles-shaming claims continue to litter the academic journals.

Suppose, though, that the best studies really did show that there were ways in which single people, on average, were not doing as well as married people. Suppose, too, that it was possible to show that they are doing less well because single life is so awful (and not, for example, because they are targets of singlism) and they really would magically have more fulfilling lives if they got married? Then, wouldn’t it be fine to have a science of single people focused on documenting those deficits?

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Let’s make that personal. Suppose someone wanted to write your biography, and they decided that your life is the sum of all of your weaknesses and all the things you screwed up. Your biographer is not going to say anything that isn’t true. They just think they can paint a complete picture of you based solely on your shortcomings.

Of course, that would be ridiculous. But I worry that the social science of single people, taken as a whole, looks a little like that.

Failure of Imagination: The Strengths of Single People That Are Going Unrecognized

Belief in the superiority of married people is so pervasive and so rarely contested that I think it qualifies are more than just a myth. It is an ideology. People are invested in believing in it, and that includes too many social scientists.

We miss a lot when we think about single people only in terms of the ways in which they are supposedly inferior to married people. We miss their special strengths. We miss what is particularly good about their lives.

For example, single people, on average, are in many ways more giving and more caring than married people. They have more robust social lives, and they are better at tending to more of the important people in their lives. They typically do not focus their concern on just one person. They don’t have The One, they have “the ones”—and yes, that can be a strength and a source of resilience. The single people who stay single often experience more personal growth than those who stay married.

Scientific results are always averages. Not all single people can boast of those strengths, and some married people can.

See what I did there? I’m not going to claim that all married people share the same weaknesses, even when married people, in general, are doing less well than single people. I’m still waiting for social scientists to routinely offer single people the same consideration.

With regard to the pandemic, a particular category of people seems to be doing particularly well. They are the “single at heart”—people who live their best, most authentic, most fulfilling, and most meaningful lives by being single.

Since 2012, I have been studying the preferences, interests, and life experiences that distinguish people who are single at heart from everyone else. Based on responses from nearly 10,000 people all around the world, I have found that one of the key characteristics of the single at heart is their love of solitude. They cherish the time they have to themselves. Savoring solitude comes naturally to them. They are very unlikely to feel lonely.

Under quarantine, the single at heart seem to be defying the assumptions that have been made about single people. They are not finding their time alone to be toxic. Quite the contrary. They don’t need help figuring out what to do with their solitude—they are probably the ones who should be doling out the advice. (I think you can find some of their stories in an article Professor Joan DelFattore wrote for The Washington Post, though she did not explicitly ask the people she interviewed whether they were single at heart.)

People who are single at heart are more likely to live alone than those who are not. They are skilled at that, too. Sure, they may miss seeing their friends in person. That may be especially so for singles in cities, whose lifestyles included walking out their front doors and into the restaurants, cafes, shops, bookstores, and other venues where humanity used to congregate. But a lot of the time, single people who live alone—even pre-pandemic—were not in touch, face-to-face, with the other people in their lives. They don’t need to learn anew how to stay in touch virtually. They’ve already been doing that.

The Danger of the Deficit Narrative: Justification for Injustice

As a 66-year-old lifelong single person, it hurts my feelings when scholars of single life focus almost entirely on what they think is wrong with me, all the ways they think my life is just not as good as the lives of those awesome coupled people. I’ll admit that. But the problem with having an entire scholarly enterprise preoccupied with the presumed inferiority of single people goes far beyond hurt feelings or the misleading media stories encouraged by that way of thinking.

The deficit narrative can cost single people their rights. It has been used as fodder by marriage fundamentalists promoting agendas that hurt single people and their families. It can even cost single people their lives. (I’ve explained these points in detail at Unmarried Equality and elsewhere.)

Single people are not the only group unfairly portrayed as inferior by research labeled as scientific. Early social science writings on people of color as well as gay men and lesbians, for instance, also peddled deficit narratives. The media picked up on those, too. I doubt that anyone looks back on that work with pride.