How to Talk to People - How to Start Over: When Partnership Is Not the Destination

Episode Date: June 13, 2022

In a society dominated by romantic couples, it can be hard to accept your unpartnered state for what it is. But for the “single at heart,” the desire for partnership is nonexistent—replaced with a sense of self-sufficiency, satisfaction, and robust friendships.  In this episode of How to Start Over, we explore misconceptions about singlehood and what explains a broad perception of it as an unwelcome fate. We also talk about how social and economic structures orient themselves around couples, and discuss arguments for why stigmas against solo living and single life are long overdue for a change.  This episode was produced by Rebecca Rashid and is hosted by Olga Khazan. Editing by A.C. Valdez and Claudine Ebeid. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Engineering by Matthew Simonson. Special thanks to managing editor Andrea Valdez and Adrienne LaFrance, executive editor of The Atlantic.  Be part of How to Start Over. Write to us at [e-mail]. To support this podcast, and get unlimited access to all of The Atlantic’s journalism, become a subscriber. Music by FLYIN (“Being Nostalgic”), Timothy Infinite (“Rapid Years”), and Matt Large ("Value Every Moment" “The Marathon Will Continue [For Nipsey]”). Click here to listen to more full-length episodes in The Atlantic’s How To series. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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I have, and I'm 68 years old. I've always been single, and I always will be. Wow, okay. Hi, I'm Olga Hazan, staff writer at The Atlantic. And I'm Rebecca Rashid, a producer at The Atlantic. This is How to Start Over. Today, we're talking about starting over as a single person, both if you're single by choice or not so much.

we're going to explore why singlehood is often portrayed as a worst-case scenario, the economic and social barriers to living alone, and how to rethink what it means to be emotionally satisfied in a society dominated by romantic couples. What comes to mind when someone tells you they're happily single? That can't possibly be true. I am the rare person who's never single always has to be in a relationship, but, but, whose parents did not put pressure on her to do that and who have not pressured me to get married. And maybe this is because I have this bias of like, I feel like it's important to have a romantic partner. I've just never been single. I had probably like a year of my adult life where I was single.

I really hated it. I got in a relationship like as quickly as possible. Why did you hate it? I just felt really alone. Like, I'm not someone who makes friends very easily, and I don't have any social support in my life that doesn't come from a romantic partner. I realize that not everyone is like that, though. People are so invested in this idea that the only way you can be truly happy is to be coupled. And they want to believe it.

That's why it's not just in your belief. It's an ideology. Dr. Bella de Paulo is a pioneer in research on singles and a former visiting psychology professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. As a leading researcher of singlehood, Bella uses her own experience to explain what it means to be single at heart. So singleism is the stereotyping and stigmatizing and discrimination against people who are single. And you see it at all levels of society from politics and religion and the workforce, and universities and everyday life.

And you see it even in federal laws. So in the United States, there are more than a thousand laws that benefit and protect only people who are legally married. And that was one of the big motivators for all the people who work so hard to get same-sex marriage legalized, now they too got access to all those benefits and protections. But everyone else, regardless of their gender orientation or sexual identity, got stuck with the same exclusions if they were still single. I wanted to zoom into your personal experience with this topic.

Have you been single your entire life? I have. And I'm 68 years old. I've always been single and I always will be. Wow. Okay. So you don't have to get more personal than you're comfortable with, but what is that, what qualifies a single? Do you just mean you're not married but you have occasional romantic partners or do you mean you don't go on dates or anything like that?

When I was younger, I did have some romantic partners. I did some dating. but I would have been truer to myself if I never did. There's this phrase that people use, relationship virgin, which really should be romantic relationship virgin, because for me and for I think many other people, our most authentic life is single life.

And single for me, in the most single sense possible. I live alone. I don't daze. I happily don't taste. And that's the life that works best for me. People who feel like that, that single life is their best life, I call them single at heart.

Because single at heart, it's who they really are. I guess have you always been this happily single? or was there a time when you were younger when you kind of wish that you had a partner and weren't super happy with being single? No. Well, there's two parts to that. One is, I never wanted to be married. You know, you get to that age when more and more of your friends and relatives are getting married. I thought for a while, well, maybe I'm just slow.

And I don't know when I finally realized that no self, single is who you really are. And once I realized that, it was just so liberating because I never had this thought in the back of my mind, well, I like being single now, but maybe it's going to change. No, it's not ever going to change. So I never wanted married life. Now, what I did want and still want

are all those benefits and protections that married people get just because they're married, you know, all the tax breaks and the benefits and the respect and the valuing that motivated a lot of people to get same-sex marriage on the book. So I want that, but I don't want to have to marry to get it. Hmm. Okay. So here comes some logistical day-to-day questions. What do you replace the role of the romantic partner with? I want to change the question because what we find in big national studies is that when people move in with the romantic partner are when they get married, they become more insular. They spend less time with their friends. They stay in touch with their parents less. They are less likely to be in touch with their neighbors, their coworkers. Sociologists who study this have a term for it. They call it greedy marriage.

It's like when people get married, they greedily want each other for everything. You know, that you're going to be my everything now. I want you to be my everything. And single people, especially people who are single at heart, don't do that. So what about if you have a, let's say, an eye appointment and you have to get your pupils dilated? and the doctor is like, you need someone to drive you home. Who drives you home from the doctor's appointment? It's an example of a way in which our medical system is built around the assumption that you have someone.

And typically that someone is expected to be a spouse. Even if you have a spouse or a romantic partner, maybe they actually have a job. It's not going to be that easy for them to take time off from work. Or if you're older, maybe your romantic partner isn't able to drive anymore or they're sick. They might have to go out and do an error and they might be traveling. So the whole system that's built around this idea that, oh, someone's there and you can just count on them, it's not just an issue for single people. It can be an issue for anyone.

And we do need a better way of dealing with that systematically so that we don't need to do. be married to get a ride to the eye doctor. Drill into your 2016 book, which is single, no children. You're right. People who get married almost like a reflexive thing to say is you're my everything. Even I think that's too much. Right. So what's a different way of building that everything without getting married?

Like tell me about the texture of your emotional world. Yeah. So there's someone I go to who I know if something could happen. she's always going to be really happy for me in an uncomplicated way. There's somebody else when I'm upset about something. Wow, she's just really the person I want to talk to. I created this Facebook community called the community of single people. And it's mostly for single people who like being single.

Though we don't bar people who don't. And there are now about 6,600 people from more than 100 nations. And so when we want to talk about something about our single lives, things that we are happy about and want to celebrate or things we want to vent about, that's a great place to be. And a lot of single people have different people who fill different slots in our social convoys, in our social circles. There is research on this.

It's called having emotionships rather than relationships. So you have different people who are good at dealing with different emotions. And what this program of research shows is that people who have emotionships, they go to different people for different things, they are actually more sense.

satisfied with their lives than people who do the you are my everything thing. I do. Okay. So I basically only have two emotions, which is complaining about journalism and feeling fine. And so I have a friend who I complain about journalism too. And then I have my partner who I feel fine around. And even that took some work to set up.

Like even that was like, like my friend and I built up this very trusting relationship over time. I think one reason why people have a my everything is because it simplifies their social calendar and their emotional life in a way that can feel really efficient. Yeah. I had several different kinds of routine ways of staying in touch with people. So there were several people I met about once a week. And I had a cooking club that I was part of for 10 years. And it was a group of who got together about once a month and we decide on a menu and each of us would contribute something to the menu and go from one house to another. And so those kinds of things did create a kind of routine and it made it so that every time I wanted to see someone, I wouldn't have to

from scratch have to start and say, okay, who can I figure out to hang out with this time? There was this expected planned socializing all the time. Yeah. Have you ever told someone that you were happily single and they reacted badly? Oh, yes. In fact, there are studies that show that when people evaluate single people, they're much more harsh in their evaluations of single people who say they want to be single, who say that they're happily single.

And instead, when they read about a single person in these studies that says, oh, I'm single, but I wish they were married, I really don't like being single. They're much more sympathetic to that person. They think the single person who says they don't want to be single is actually happier than a single person who is saying that they're happily single. It's like people are so invested in this idea that the only way you can be truly happy is to be coupled. And they want to believe it. That's why it's not just in your belief.

It's an ideology. It's a worldview. People want to have what that ideology is promising, which is fine, that one special, person and your whole life will fall in place. You'll have your best friend and your lover and your vacation planner and your financial planner and your co-parent and you will live happily ever after. Are there some steps that unhappy single people can take to feel happier? If you're single and you don't love it, is there something you can tell yourself some sort of self-talk or concrete steps you can take?

to be happily single. One of the biggest obstacles to loving single life is never having given it a chance. And we'd learn this during the pandemic. So about six or eight months into the pandemic, I started asking single people, how is this going for you? Then I started wondering if it changed. for other people who were single, who started out in the pandemic, wanting to be coupled. My favorite example was this woman who was 50-some years old.

She lived in a small town in Michigan, and she spent her life devoted to being partnered or married. And when her 30-year marriage ended, she dated 100 men in four months. Four months. Then, during the pandemic, she was living with this guy who lost his job. And he became needy. He became overbearing. And she became fed up and went and lived by herself and realized for the first time that she actually loved being alone. she said she never felt more like herself than she did when she was single.

And somehow she had missed this her whole life, that she realized that she had often been lonely when she was married. And other people told me the same thing, that they used to feel like if they had no plans or if they were alone or if they didn't have a romantic partner, that meant they were a loser. And now, during the pandemic, there were lots of people who had no plans, who were alone. And so it became normalized. So they got to lean into their solitude, give it a real chance without feeling self-conscious about it.

And some of them do eventually want to go back to being romantically partnered. But now they are in a great position of strength because they are not desperate. I would tell people who are unhappily single, give it a chance. But I feel like where I get stuck is that I feel like my relationship with my friends is fundamentally different than my relationship with my partner. Yes. My relationship with my partner is almost like my relationship with family, where it's, It's like he has to do certain things. Like if I'm cut my hand, he has to take me to the ER right away.

There's not an option. I don't call him and ask if he can. Like he has to do it. Maybe it's just me. But like in my friendships, there's a lot more kind of voluntariness. Anyone can kind of opt out at any time. And like, I definitely don't have very many fights with my friends, but we also don't have very many obligations to one another. Whereas my boyfriend and I will get fed up and, you know, scream.

but we also like it's it's the person who has to drive you to the ER you know and I don't know right you are describing the mindset of someone who is really really not single at heart no yeah exactly and people who um people who like what you like love the security in that you know that if something happens there's this person who is obligated to be there for you and it's not just driving you to the yard it's Like, you know, going to a wedding, you don't get stuck at the singles table, right? But it's obligatory. And in families and in romantic relationship, there are kind of these obligations and expectations.

There are these gender rules. And so the flip side of that is you don't have the voluntariness, which you are seeing as a downside because it involves them. negotiation and seeing if the person is available and all that. But there's a real power and affection and love of knowing that someone is there because they want to be and not because they are expected to be. So in my single at heart quiz,

one of the questions is, do you like having someone in your life who's always going to be your plus one, who's going to be there for you, and you're going to be there for the, them, you're going to go to things even if you don't want to, or do you wish you had more different options? And people who are single and heart overwhelmingly don't want to have that one person that is always going to come with them and that they're always going to be obligated

to. It's different ways of being in different preferences. And I think that the kind of preferences that you describe of wanting to have that one person and feeling secure knowing that they're obligated to be there for you, that has been so centered in our cultural imaginations, in our popular culture, in our conversations, that we don't realize as much as we should that there is power and joy and resilience in having a whole convoy of people in our lives

rather than focusing on the one. At MedCan, we know that life's greatest moments are built on a foundation of good health, from the big milestones to the quiet winds. That's why our annual health assessment offers a physician-led, full-body check-up that provides a clear picture of your health today and may uncover early signs of conditions

like heart disease and cancer. The healthier you means more moments to cherish. Take control of your well-being and book an assessment today. Medcan, live well for life. Visit medcan.com slash moments to get started. Bella's story intrigued me as much as it confused me. How can someone be so happily single when there are so many social and economic barriers actively working against single life and solo living?

As Bella said, this is partly a difference in worldviews. But society is oriented around one of them. How do people keep swimming upstream when being single is not a choice? For some, singlehood can be unwelcome. Maybe someone broke up with you. Maybe you haven't met the right person yet. Or maybe you unexpectedly lost a spouse. How do you find meaning and happiness if singlehood is a transitory phase for you?

And is there any way to improve the day-to-day realities for single people so that you don't have to get married or be coupled to get a ride to the eye doctor? One quick note for our listeners. When Bella is referring to big national studies, she's referring to data from the late 1980s and early 1990s. So they might not apply to all married couples' ability to maintain social ties today. Other research on this has found exceptions to this idea that married couples socialize less. When we talk about single people, it's important to distinguish between people who live on their own and then people who don't. But also, I think there's a further distinction to draw between people who live on their own or a single, choice and people who do so not by choice, sort of regretfully, that should inform their ways

we think about the challenges that each group faces. Joe Pinsker is my colleague and a fellow staff writer at The Atlantic. He wrote a piece in October of 2021 called The Hidden Costs of Living Alone. There was a statistic that really caught my eye in a Pew Research Center analysis about how there was a growing number of Americans who were unpartnered. And it's sort of every time I come across the statistic, it kind of just is mind-boggling given the norms in our culture. There are 36 million people who live alone, and they make up 28% of households. And so anytime there's mini viral story online about how some restaurant exists and it has this wild concept of being set up for solo diners.

And it's just kind of funny to me that those are framed as a novelty when it's like how strange. something that serves 36 million people. And yet the way that they build their life sort of runs against a lot of the ways that we set society up. So how much more expensive is it to be single than to be in a relationship? How much more does it cost you to live alone or to be like functionally single in society?

I think it was some economists ran the numbers on this. Their guess was that if you were looking at two people, who were a couple, and if they were to live alone versus living together, it would cost about 28% more for them to live separately. And that was when you're looking at kind of the costs of housing and utilities. These are the sorts of things that when you kind of bundle them all together, it just is less costly if you're dividing it among multiple people. I think it's worth pointing out how that's an inherent inefficiency. It's not about, you know, necessarily how society is set up. When you're looking at people who are single, people who are single can have

roommates. They can live with other people. So that said, if everything were more affordable, if housing and food, healthcare weren't so expensive, then the hurdles that single people and people living alone would face just are much lower. Yes, they may benefit from sharing an electric bill with somebody else. but one guy wrote in saying that after his wife died a few years ago, he took a cruise by himself, and he ended up having to pay for not just the empty bed of a two-bed room, but also he had to pay for a whole second cruiser's worth of food. So he was literally like paying for the empty seat next to him in the dining room. It's weird.

We have, you know, these tens of millions of people who live alone, and yet society hasn't really caught up to them. I think it's just that there's the concept of what's called cultural lag in a lot of this research, in sociological research, where society changes in the numbers and demographically, but it kind of takes a while for culture to actually catch up. And so we end up in these weird situations where the way life is for a lot of people is sort of being governed by a lot of the norms and taboos of almost a previous generation. You wrote a piece in 2015 called the unexpected pleasure of doing things alone. And I was wondering why it was unexpected.

unexpected, I think, because of all the kind of biases that are stacked against people who are doing stuff on their own. I had prepared some thoughts on, sometimes I refer to it as my winter of Eat, Pray, Movie Past. And I basically just went and watched a lot of movies on my own in theaters. I had been dating on and off for a few years and hadn't really found anybody that I I thought I'd want to be in a long-term relationship with. And I ended up really kind of just leaning hard into being single and kind of just doing basically whatever I wanted. And that coincided perfectly with the preposterously good deal of $9.99 a month for basically as many movies as you can see in a month. And so I just went to a ton of movies and it was, it was awesome.

I would bring a book and read before the show. I'd go in the morning or I'd go at night or whenever I wanted. And at first, it felt like a little off or a little weird to be going alone. But each time I went, I just kind of felt more and more okay with going on my own and not feeling like it was weird at all. During that winter, I think I got more at peace with being single and just enjoying it for what it was, not judging it at all or wishing that it wasn't the status I was, but just kind of like basking in the parts of it that are really wonderful. And the funny thing is, I couldn't have known this at the time, but it was right before I started dating my current partner. And sometimes I think it was, in retrospect, like the perfect mentality to be in before diving into a committed relationship.

Because I wasn't doing it out of fear of the alternative of being single. I was kind of actively choosing it from a base of already being secure and happy with what I was. So I went on a couple's trip, essentially, this past. Memorial Day weekend with two couples and I love my friends and they did everything they could to make me feel included and not make me feel like I was imposing in any way, shape, or form. At some point, we were going to go kayaking and the number of seats in the kayaks were just enough for the two couples and I was the one who had to make the awkward decision of, no, you guys go ahead. I think that is just so emblematic of always kind of tiptoeing around this structure of everyone being coupled.

And I was almost throwing off something that could just be logistically smoothed out if I was also in a partnership. So I think those are the moments for single people that lead to inadvertent shame. Oh, yeah. And I totally think society is designed around. the idea that everyone will end up in a couple. I don't doubt that at all. But would you say that you are quote-unquote single at heart or not? I think that idea scares me to a certain degree.

Weirdly, because there are so many single-at-heart people in my family, I always assume that I was that way as well. It took me a long time to reconcile those two realities, that I love to have things my way. I love to do what I want when I want, but I also love having someone else around to engage with that side of me. And I think a lot of people tell you

that you can't have those things coexist. Wouldn't it be so cute if someone listened to this podcast and they fell in love with your voice and then they like emailed you and then it was like a rom-com. No, Olga, we can't. Sorry. I'm just trying to make things happen here. I'm going to give you my grandma's phone number right after this conversation.

Yeah, we'll conspire together. That's all for this week's episode of How to Start Over. This episode was produced by me, Rebecca Rashid, and hosted by Olga Hazan. Editing by A.C. Valdez and Claudine Ebaid. Fact check by Anna Alvarado. Our engineer is Matthew Simonson. Special thanks to managing editor Andrea Valdea. and to Adrian LaFrance, executive editor at The Atlantic.