[Hot] Happiness in being single 2026

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Article:
Understanding Loneliness Take our Social Anxiety Test Find counselling near me. If you have only stereotypes and scare stories to go by
you know what your life is supposed to be like if you get to your golden years without ever having married. You are going to be utterly miserable and lonely.

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Reality begs to disagree. More and more people are staying single for life
and social scientists are starting to learn what their lives are really like. They are finding that the cautionary tales about misery and loneliness may well be misplaced. It is not the lifelong single people who are especially likely to be struggling with those issues. In one other way
though
the lifelong single people
on the average
really are having a harder time than everyone else. Every 10 years
the Journal of Marriage and Family publishes a collection of articles reviewing what we learned in the previous decade. This year
2020
an article on “Families in later life” by Deborah Carr and Rebecca L. Utz
included a section on lifelong singlehood. It was brief
but important. Most of the findings I’m discussing here
along with the quotes
are from that review
though I have also added a few more findings (points 1
2
and 7). Two Ways Lifelong Singles Are Doing Really Well in Later Life
and One Way They Are Not. 1. As people progress from mid-life through old age
those who stay single feel happier and happier with their lives. As I discussed previously
a study of 40- to 85-year-olds showed that lifelong single people became increasingly satisfied with their lives as they grew older. The results for the people with romantic partners were not so straightforward. 2. Staying single pays off with lesser loneliness in old age. The warning lobbed at single people most relentlessly is that if they stay single
they will end up hopelessly lonely. If you get married
the story goes
you will avoid that fate. The right way to test that is to compare the people who never got married to those who did marry
whether they stayed married or not. Fellow Psychology Today blogger Elyakim Kislev tested that prediction and reported his findings in Happy Singlehood . At age 65
Kislev found
the lifelong single people were
in fact
a tiny bit lonelier than the people who had married — a difference of about one-quarter of 1 point on an 11-point scale. Over the course of their adult lives
though
more and more married people feel lonely. Kislev found that “the share of married people feeling lonely is around 50 percent more at age 60 than 30
and that it doubles by the age of 90.” Meanwhile
the loneliness of lifelong single people increases much less. By age 70
it is the people who married who are now lonelier
and that continues all the way through the oldest of ages. The lifelong single people are less lonely. (The graph is on page 50 of Happy Singlehood .) 3.













happiness in being single