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Whenever Valentine’s Day draws near, I get inquiries from reporters asking me what I think of "Galentine’s Day." And I say, Yes! Let’s celebrate friendship, and not just women’s friendships. And not just on one day of the year. We should routinely recognize, cherish, and honor all of the important people in our lives, instead of thinking of people who are not a romantic partner in dismissive ways, such as “just friends.”
Let’s Celebrate Happy Homebodies
Socializing can contribute to a happy life. But one thing I’ve learned from studying people like me who are single at heart is how much we cherish our solitude. We value the time we have to ourselves; it doesn’t make us feel sad or lonely or restless. Often our alone time is spent at home. A comment that came up repeatedly from single at heart people who shared their stories with me was, “My home is my sanctuary.” That doesn’t rule out socializing; most of us also enjoy the time we spend with our friends and the other people we care about. But there can be something truly wonderful about just staying home. Something, I think, that is worth its own day of celebration: an International Happy Homebodies Day.
Although the single at heart probably love their home-alone time as much or more than anyone, it turns out that we are not the only happy homebodies. Adults in the U.S. more generally are also spending more and more time at home – and have been for the past two decades. That’s what Princeton sociologist Patrick Sharkey reported in “Homebound: The Long-Term Rise in Time Spent at Home Among U. S. Adults,” published in Sociological Science in 2024.
Of course, the time adults spent at home spiked in 2020, at the height of the pandemic, with its lockdowns and social distancing. In the years since, time spent at home has decreased some, but remains far higher than it was in 2019, before the pandemic.
But Isn’t It Bad to Spend Time Alone?
In the cover story of the February 2025 issue of Atlantic magazine, “The Anti-Social Century,” Derek Thompson documents a striking increase in the amount of time Americans have been spending alone, including at home, in the opening decades of this century. Despite the ominous title, this is not an article about people getting ostracized or rejected. Americans are spending more time alone, he believes—rightly, I think—because we want to. We find it convenient, comfortable, and pleasant to spend time by ourselves.
Thompson, though, thinks that’s a bad thing. In his view, we are spending too much time alone. Sure, we are choosing it, and we think it will make us happy, but we are just fooling ourselves—and so we have ended up more anxious and depressed, and society has become “weaker, meaner, and more delusional.”
Thompson’s evidence for the rise in time spent alone is compelling; he also points to an increase over time in anxiety and depression among teens. And he cites some correlational evidence. For example, in the “Homebound” study, Sharkey found that people were less happy when engaging in activities inside the home than outside. As Sharkey notes, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they were less happy because they were at home. And typically, they were also less stressed when they were at home.
Missing from the lengthy Atlantic article was any mention of what scholars of solitude have been discovering about the potential benefits of spending time alone. Consider, for example, “Balance between solitude and socializing,” a 21-day diary study by Netta Weinstein and her colleagues. Participants kept track of the amount of time they spent alone and with others, and how they experienced that time. Results showed that on days when people spent more time alone, they felt less stressed. They also felt freer to be who they are, rather than feeling pressured to be a certain way. Those day-by-day advantages of spending time alone added up; people who spent more time alone across the 21 days felt less stress overall and more like themselves.
It's not that there were no costs to spending time alone. On any given day, people who spent more time alone were lonelier and less satisfied with how their day went. But those negative effects did not add up: People who spent more time alone across the entire study were not generally lonelier. Also, those costs to solitude were not true of everyone. The people who, on any given day, said that they were alone because they enjoyed being alone were just as happy with how their day had gone as when they spent less time alone, and they were not that lonely either.
There’s another important counterpoint to the potential costs of spending too much time alone. Robert J. Coplan and his colleagues have found that people who do not get as much alone time as they want—the “alonely”—are subject to the same kinds of negative experiences, such as feeling stressed, depressed, and unhappy with their lives, as the lonely people who get more time alone than they want.
Thompson is especially concerned with the potentially dire implications of spending more time alone “year after year.” But in At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life, Fenton Johnson celebrates people he calls “solitaries,” who are “choosing to live alone or who deliberately carve out periods of solitude from otherwise conventionally coupled lives.” They spend a lot of time alone, year after year, and they include some of the most celebrated contributors to creative life, such Emily Dickinson, Henry David Thoreau, Eudora Welty, Paul Cezanne, and Walt Whitman.
The Point of Celebrating Happy Homebodies
I don’t doubt that many people would benefit from spending more time with other people. I agree with Thompson about that. My concern is that by calling people who choose to spend a lot of time alone anti-social and delusional, and suggesting that they are contributing to the warping of society, he is unfairly stigmatizing and shaming them. He is pressuring everyone to live one version of the good life, when their own version may be very different. They are not fooling themselves when they find solitude to be good for relaxation, contemplation, creativity, productivity, spirituality, or getting in touch with themselves.
So, happy homebodies, let’s defy the pressure and celebrate our sanctuaries. I hereby call for an International Happy Homebodies Day. Let’s all take a day and guiltlessly spend it at home doing whatever makes us happiest. Maybe get cozy with a warm blanket and bucket of popcorn on a comfy couch and watch Netflix all night. Or tend to your plants or your pets or your creative endeavors, or cook a wonderful meal, if that’s what you enjoy.
Let’s encourage restaurants to offer great deals on take-out. Urge merchants to offer us discounts on all sorts of self-care items—not because I want to promote consumerism, but because I’d like to see the same kind of public celebration of solitude that we already have for couples on Valentine’s Day and friends on Galentine’s Day. The model might be how China celebrates Singles Day on November 11.
If lots of us post pictures of ourselves savoring our solitude, then International Happy Homebodies Day could become a communal experience. We will get to have our alone time and strengthen our feelings of belonging, too.
Facebook image: PeopleImages.com - Yuri A/Shutterstock
