Speaking of Psychology - Living a happy single life, with Geoff MacDonald, PhD

Episode Date: November 16, 2022

More Americans than ever before are single -- about half of American adults are unmarried and close to three in 10 are not in a committed relationship. Geoff MacDonald, PhD, of the University of Toronto, talks about how relationship status is related to well-being, whether there is a societal stigma against singles, and why there is so much more research on being in a happy relationship than there is on being happily single. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We talk a lot on this podcast about relationships, and there's no doubt that relationships can be an important driver of many people's health, happiness, and well-being. But focusing solely on partnerships or romantic relationships misses a crucial fact. More Americans than ever before are single, and many are perfectly happy to stay that way. A 2019 Pew Research Center poll found that 3 and 10 U.S. adults are single. They're not married, living with a partner, or in a committed relationship. relationship. Among those singles, half said they were not interested in dating or looking for a relationship. Meanwhile, looking simply at marriage rates, we find the number of singles is even higher.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, about 50% of American adults are unmarried or close to 127 million people. Those singles are a diverse bunch. Some have never been married. Some are divorced, some widowed. They are older or younger. Some are parents. Others have no children. All of the those factors and many others may affect how people experience singlehood. So how is relationship status related to well-being? What makes some people happy with singlehood while others are not? Is there a societal stigma against singles? And if so, how does that stigma affect people's lives? Why is there so much more research on being in a happy relationship than on being happily single? Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that

examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills. My guest today is Dr. Jeff McDonald, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. He has studied aspects of relationships for many years, including attachment theory and intimacy. More recently, he turned his attention to singlehood, and today, the primary aim of his lab is to better understand well-being in singlehood. His and his colleagues' research has started to create a portrait of what makes for a happy single person. So I'm looking forward to talking today about that and much more. Thank you for joining me, Dr. McDonald. That's my pleasure to be here.

I mentioned that you studied relationships for many years before you started studying singlehood. What made you turn your attention to single people and why do you think it's important for researchers to study singlehood? I mean, I think the primary driver in turning my attention to singlehood is just recognizing, you know, like you said at the top there, there are a lot of single people out there, and that number is increasing, not just in the United States, not just in Canada. This seems to be a worldwide trend. So it's something that's important to pay attention to, but we know really very little about

who single people are and what makes single people happy. And even if you just want to take this from the perspective of a relationship researcher, everybody is single before they get in their first relationship. Most of the time when you end a relationship, you end up single. So, you know, it's important to not think about this as two different groups of people, largely speaking. These are different phases of most people's lives. And so even if your goal is just to understand relationships, you need to understand singlehood. But I think understanding single people is important in its own right.

So a lot of research over the years has found evidence that on average, married people are happier, healthier, and generally have better life outcomes compared with single people. But some researchers who study singlehood have pushed back again. that idea. What do you think? Are partnered people generally better off than those who are single? Is that even the right question to ask? I think it's one of the right questions to ask, but it's not the only one. And, you know, I certainly think I should say off the top that this is such a young field of research. So we have some initial things to say about it. But I think all of this is up for debate and discussion. You know, from my reading of the literature, I think it would be fair to say that the average person who is in a romantic relationship is higher in well-being. they're happier, they're higher in life satisfaction than the average person who is single. But there's so much variability within each group. Not every single person is miserable and certainly not everybody in a relationship is ecstatic with their life.

So that's really been the focus of what we've been doing at our lab. And I think a lot of singlehood researchers have been doing is looking at who are the happier versus less happy single people to get a sense of, you know, which types of single people are doing really well for themselves. which types of single people might not be doing so well. One of the central questions in your lab is what makes people happy or content with being single. Are there common traits that happy singles share personality traits or life, circumstances, or other things? There's a few things that we seem to be starting to put our finger on now. So one, for example, is that people who have never been married or people who have never been in a romantic relationship tend to be happier singles than people who have been. We don't really have any direct evidence as to why that's the case, but my guess would be people know what's good for them.

And there's a reason why some people don't choose to be in romantic relationships because they know that's not what's going to make them happy. And, you know, the flip side of that is that one of the groups that does less well with singlehood is people who've been through a divorce. There is some evidence that suggests that divorce can have a bit of a damaging effect on at least some people, which we think is particularly interesting because the bias tends to be that romantic relationships are good for people. But if you think about the way that people come out of divorces maybe less well off than when they started, relationships can actually be damaging, right? But there's a reason that as a society we haven't thought about relationships is damaging. The assumption is that they're good. So, you know, relationship history, I think, is an important one. Generally speaking, the tack that I tend to take on this is that the people who are doing well in singlehood are sort of the people who are good at life in general.

That, you know, people, for example, who are higher in attachment security. So these would be the kinds of people who are comfortable making close relationships with people and who are not really worried so much about getting rejected by other people. I mean, they do well in romantic relationships, but our evidence suggests that these are people who do well in singlehood as well. Maybe one of the reasons for that is that people who are happier in singlehood are also people who have good relationships with their friends and good relationships with their families. And that skill set that comes with attachment and security, the ability to be comfortably close to people to take emotional risks that allow you to get close to people. That's not just limited to romantic relationships. Those people are going to bring those kinds of skills to their friendships and their family relationships. And I do think, you know, there's a bit of old-fashioned wisdom here that I think that some people have the idea.

that when you get into a romantic relationship, that then you're going to become a happy person. But when you understand the kinds of people who are happy single are also the kinds of people who are happy in relationships, it suggests that maybe the best idea is to get right with yourself first and go towards a romantic relationship when you've done whatever that work is. Now, when you're studying people who are single, does that mean that they can't have relationships, that they can't have intimacy with other people? Yeah, no, not at all. certainly in terms of their friendship and their family relationships, there's lots of opportunity for intimacy there. One of the projects that we have ongoing in the lab right now is also looking at the romantic

and sexual kinds of connections that single people have. So certainly, you know, over the last, like however many decades, social norms have changed around opportunities for casual sexual opportunities or relationships that sort of straddle the line between dating and not dating, like friends with benefits. Friends with benefits. That's what I was thinking to. Yeah, exactly. So, you know, we know that there are a number of single people who tell us that they're sexually active.

But we haven't really collected the data yet on, well, what kinds of relationships are those? And so we're trying to delve into that a little bit. What we do know is that single people who are higher in sexual satisfaction tend to be happier with singlehood. But the other part of that is that the data suggests to us that singles who are happier with their sex, lives are also more likely to end up in relationships down the road. And so, you know, one of our guesses about that is that, you know, being with people in sexual and romantic relationships, it's not like shopping for a product where if you don't like it, you take it back.

You know, the human heart works such that relationships are kind of sticky. And even when you are in casual sexual relationships, for example, next thing, you know, you're leaving a toothbrush. And next thing, you know, you're leaving a set of pajamas. And next thing, you know, it's easier to just move in because you're already spending three nights a week there, right? So we think that even though sexual satisfaction is definitely something that's associated with happiness and singlehood, that might also indicate somebody who's on the road to being in a committed romantic relationship. Let me ask how age affects

people's experience of singlehood. Do people become more or less content with being single as they get older? So our evidence suggests that there's kind of an inflection point around midlife, that single people starting at about age 40 start to become more satisfied with being single. It's important to point out that's not unique to singlehood, that it looks like there's some evidence suggesting that well-being in general for people tends to increase after about midlife. So there's another study by Unina Bueller where she looked at are people happy with the romantic

relationships? And she found exactly the same pattern. Starting at about age 40, people start to become. happier with the relationship. So, you know, it kind of looks like around midlife, people start to become happier with the path that they've chosen. I do think another factor in that, though, is some people who want to be in a relationship get selected out of the singles pool, that if you're younger and you'd really like to be in a relationship, you're more likely to actually end up dating. And so maybe the part of the reason that older singles are happier being single is that there's

going to be less of them in that pool who wish that they were in a relationship. Now, having said that, in another study that we conducted, what the data look like is that for older people who don't let go of wanting a relationship, like that variable, do you want to be in a romantic relationship or not, also seems to be something that's important in understanding whether people are happy with being single or not, that particularly older women who have let go of the desire or who never had a desire for romantic relationship in the first place are our highest group in terms of life satisfaction. But it's the people who, as they get older, continue to wish that they were in a romantic relationship.

That seems to be associated with lower life satisfaction. So there's something about making peace with your circumstances, letting go of things that you can't have that might also be part of this process of becoming a happy single person in an older age. I believe that most of your research is with people in the U.S., right? We've conducted studies with people in the U.S., with Europeans. We've done a little bit of data collection in Korea, but we haven't really expanded out culturally beyond that. Are there cultural differences, then?

In the research that you've done, have you found in other countries that there is a difference in singlehood, how it's experienced and how it's perceived? You know, I would say that so far, we haven't collected enough data to be able to answer that question well. I think it is such an important question. I mean, I would say so far with the research that we've been conducting in Korea, we've been surprised at the similarities across the two cultures. So, for example, when you ask single people, you know, what are your most important life priorities in both Korea and in the West where we've collected data, they say, my most important priorities are my family and my health. And they say that my least important priorities, at least of the ones that we ask them, are sex and dating. And that was something that was consistent across those two countries. But one of the things that we've speculated about, and there has been a little bit of research in other labs about, is the role that family plays in single people's lives across different cultures.

You know, the U.S. in particular is unique. It is, you know, by some measures, literally the most individualistic country in the world, which means that it's a system where your family doesn't have a lot of say in what you're dating and your marriage life is. that's really unusual. In most countries around the world, family has a pretty big say about, you know, are you dating? Who are you dating? That kind of thing. And so it would make sense that that would lead to some kind of intense dynamics for single people in these more collectivistic kinds of countries where we would expect because there's these cultural norms around you're a representative of our family. You're supposed to be getting married. You're making us look bad by not getting married. That there could be some particular pressure on them to, not be single, even if that in their heart is what they want to be. So I think that's going to be a really important direction for future research. We don't have a lot to say about that yet. Are you finding differences between the sexes? Are single men happier than single women or vice versa? We've been surprised in that regard. We have looked at gender differences in a number of our studies and haven't found a lot of differences between men and women. I know that there's

some sort of cultural tropes that men in particular as they get older, are going to really struggle with singlehood. Generally speaking, the data so far are more equivocal on that. You know, it does seem to be true that men, when they're single, struggle more than women do with social support, so that men will tend to have, like, less supportive friendships, for example, and so that can be a bit of a struggle for them. But generally speaking, the data that we've been looking at, the numbers in terms of, like, how on average, Are you happy with singlehood, for example? There doesn't tend to be a lot of difference. What we suspect is that underneath those numbers, the content of people's experiences might

be different. So, you know, for example, if you are a single woman, there's going to be different stereotypes about you than if you're a single man, right? Like women, for example, are seen as cold if they're single, and that might not necessarily be the case for men. And there are some negative words that define women who are single like spinster. There's nothing quite equivalent for a man. No, there's not.

Not yet anyways. A few moments ago, you talked about attachment in singlehood. I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit more about attachment theory and how that relates to singlehood and the work that you do. Sure, yeah. So attachment theory is, you know, basically a theory to explain why is it that some people are more comfortable getting close to others than other people are? You know, the original development of theory had this very psychodynamic kind of event to it where the idea was you get treated a particular way in childhood and that teaches you how to interact with other people.

More recently, there's been some longitudinal research that has looked at, you know, how much of this is really rooted in childhood. And there's some questions about that. So, you know, I think that that part of attachment being about childhood is a little bit in flux these days. But what is absolutely clear from an attachment theory perspective is that you can measure stable personality differences in how people relate to other people. So the two dimensions on which we typically think of differences in people about how they relate to others are these two variables that we call anxious attachment and avoidant attachment. So anxiously attached people, I mean, these are the kinds of people who you would sort of colloquially think about is the needy and clingy type. So the person who needs a lot of attention, they want validation because they don't feel so great about themselves. But they also feel really hesitant in approaching other people because they're really scared of getting rejected.

So they can have this kind of strong approach of wind's dynamic going on in their relationships. With avoidantly attached people, avoidantly attached people, they're the kinds of people who you would think of as the independent type. They're the person who's likely to tell you that they don't really need relationships. I always like to say that if you're the person when there's eight bags of groceries to carry from the car into the house that you want to take them all by yourself, you might be avoidantly attached. They're the kinds of people who don't really like to be reliant on other people, don't like to get a lot of help from other people. So we have a little bit of research looking at, you know, do these individual differences in how people relate to other people? Are they related to how happy people are in singlehood? And so it turns out the people who are more anxiously attached.

And again, these are the needy and clingy type. They have a bit of a sense that they can't quite get through life without other people. They're not very happy with being single. So single anxiously attached people are relatively low in their overall life satisfaction. They're relatively low in how satisfied they are with singlehood. So they feel like they really need a relationship. I mean, the unfortunate thing for anxiously attached people is that they're also, when they do get into relationships, tend to have relatively low relationship satisfaction.

So it's kind of like they have this story. If I just get into a relationship, I'll be okay. And it turns out that that doesn't quite work. And so that definitely goes back to what I was saying before, that there's some people who probably need to work on themselves first before they're ready for a relationship. And that might particularly be the anxiously attached people. avoidantly attached people are a bit of a curious case in that avoidantly attached people are not particularly unhappy about being single. So they're no less satisfied with singlehood than your more secure type of person, but they do seem to be lower in overall life satisfaction. So they're interesting to me because they say that they're not unhappy about being single.

They don't report particularly wanting a romantic partner, but something is going on that's leading to them to feel less happy in life overall. One of the things that we've speculated there, and this came from my graduate student, an amazing collaborator, Ubin Park. Her idea, which I think is a really good one, is that with avoidantly attached people, again, they like distance, right? They don't like to get too close to people, but that doesn't just apply to their romantic relationships. And as we talked about before, to be a happy single, it's going to help a lot to have close relationships with your family and with your friends. And avoidantly attached people struggle in those kinds of domains, too, because they keep their emotional distance there. And there is some research

that suggests that this is avoidantly attached people, even though it feels better or easier for them in the short term to avoid those kinds of relationships, if you actually do, like in an experimental study, kind of push them a little bit to get into an emotional, intimate situation. I mean, I always say that for avoidantly attached people, intimacy is like exercise. It doesn't feel good in the moment, but it builds capacity over the long term, right? And so they do seem to get something good out of those close interactions. They just don't seem to be motivated to push themselves into them. So that's one reason we think that avoidantly attach people are kind of attracted to being single because you can avoid all the problems and the conflicts that

come with relationships. But the flip side of that is that you don't get the benefits of relationships. You've also looked at something called progression bias, which, as I understand it, is the tendency among people to stay in relationships, even when they're not that great. From an evolutionary perspective, aren't we almost hardwired to try to stay coupled even when it's not optimal? It's a really good question. Yeah. So this is some work that I've done with my former PhD student, and she's now a professor at Western University, Samantha Joel. And the idea with progression bias is it's kind of like I was talking about before when you get into a casual sexual sexual relationship and then it's all of a sudden you find yourself more and more committed.

What we think is that we think that there's a couple of reasons why this might be. And one of them is definitely the evolutionary case that you're bringing up there. That, you know, our thinking on this is our ancestors long, long ago, right? If you think about hunter-gatherer groups living in relatively small numbers of people, that if he kind of took the online dating strategy of like swiping left on everyone until you came to your like absolute perfect match. I mean, there's only 30 people that you could possibly date. You might end up rejecting everybody and you're not going to pass your jeans down because

you're not mating with anybody, right? If the human heart is kind of built to just sort of fall for somebody and make that work relatively easily, then that might have been sort of a successful strategy for people living in those relatively small groups. And so we think that it is true that people in relationships are kind of biased toward keeping the relationship going, sometimes even if it's not the happiest relationship, because that might have been evolutionarily useful. But having said that, we don't think that the evolution part of it is the only part of the story. There's all kinds of social and structural systems, as we've talked

about today, that are also biased towards relationships that give people the sense that you're supposed to be in a relationship. And one of the things that we argue in my lab is make it hard for people to notice sometimes if they're happier being single. You're not looking at. You're not looking for that when you're raised in a society where you expect relationships to be what makes you happy. So we think that there's two really powerful forces happening. We do think that the human heart kind of, you know, gets itself stuck in relationships sometimes. But we also think there's a lot of social pressure to get into and to stay in relationships.

Which raises the question of societal stigma then against singlehood, which it seems you're saying is pervasive. Is that really a bad thing? It's certainly a bad thing for single people. If you're trying to, well, if you're trying to build a society where you want people to stay stuck in relationships, it's great. But if you're a single person who wants to be single and is living their best and happiest life as a single person, it can be a really negative force in people's lives. And I think that one of the problems with discrimination against single people is that to a certain extent, it's still kind of an acceptance. I think people have internalized the idea that there's something wrong with single people.

And so it doesn't even feel like unfair discrimination when, for example, and this is something that data has shown, people are more likely to rent an apartment to somebody who's in a relationship than somebody who is single, right? That if you get into a big health crisis and your social support is your best friend, they may not be able to get into the emergency room with you. But if it's your wife or your husband, there's no problem there whatsoever. So it can create some really important barriers in people's lives. Bella DiPaula is someone who's talked about this extensively, and I think she makes a really good argument here, that these are some forces that not only affect single people's lives negatively, but I think a lot of people are only just realizing that these are unfair stereotypes.

Do you think that the pandemic affected how some people think about being single? And I'm asking because at the beginning of the pandemic, many people were strictly social distancing. And there were lots of news stories about how social distancing was particularly difficult for single people, especially those who were living alone. Was that just a temporary blip that we're done with now that social distancing is over? Or do you think this is going to have some kind of lasting effect on how people treat and value relationships? I think that's a very interesting question. There's not a lot of data on this point. So I'm just going to go ahead and speculate now.

But, you know, I think that the reason why more and more people have been living single is that we've been structuring society in a way that makes it easier and easier for people to do so. That, you know, the economic system is set up in a way that we don't need to be as dependent on close others as we did 100 or 200 years ago. So the people who really like their independence can do that in a practical kind of way now. But I think that the pandemic was kind of a reminder. of that, you know, it's not that more people are becoming single because there's something inevitably correct about the societal move. I think it's people are adjusting themselves to the society that they live in. And during the pandemic, when people were more housebound, you didn't

have access to the kinds of social networks that make it easier to live as a happy single person. So, you know, for example, I think a lot of the discourse around, you know, who was really struggling during the pandemic. A lot of this discourse is, you know, people, with kids, for example, you know, how do you balance the workplace and kids and all this kind of stuff? All of which is totally valid. You know, having kids during the pandemic was a real challenge. But when you look at the data as to who was the most happy versus who was the least happy during the pandemic, it was people living with partners and children who were the most happy, right? You might be stressed, but you're stimulated. You're not bored. The people were having the

hardest time were the people who were living by themselves, that there is something about just not having any stimulation and social connection in your environment that can be really challenging. So I think that was something that got people to think twice anyways about, you know, how sustainable is a single life. And then I think it's interesting to think about what are the future social structural changes that might drive people into different kinds of living circumstances. So, for example, you know, here in Toronto, rent and house prices are out of control, that people who might have been able to afford to live on their own in the past are going to be forced into more group living situations.

But maybe when you've got a roommate, that accounts for some of the need that you might have had a romantic partner for, right? So maybe there's another force that leads people to be less motivated to be in romantic relationships. So I think it's completely unpredictable. Are people going to be living single more or be living single less? I think it really depends on, you know, what happens to society and what are the opportunities and challenges for single people. So I think that's the important thing to remember

is that it's not just some amazing moral choice to live single or to not live single. All of us are trying to just get by in the society that we live in. And that society is constantly changing. This is a relatively young field with a lot of wide open questions. And I'm wondering what are some of the most important research questions that you still want to explore? I'd say that the thing that is in the front of our mind in my lab right now is that, and you know, maybe this is a little bit because we came to singlehood research as relationship researchers. And so I think that as we've been doing singlehood research, a lot of our focus has been on

are they dating? Do they want to date? Are they having sex? Do they want to have sex? And so our focus has been this narrow kind of dating and sexual domain. But we've started to do some studies that I've alluded to a little bit where we're asking about single people's broader lives and refining out things like sex and dating is relatively low on their priority list, that things like their health, things like their workplace, for example,

are really important factors. So I think because, in a sense, single people are defined as people who have the absence of a romantic relationship that's led us to think that everything about their life surrounds a romantic relationship. I think for a lot of happy singles, they don't even think about romantic relationships. There's a lot of other parts of their life that are more important, but I don't think we've done a good enough job of studying single people's lives holistically in that sense. Well, it sounds like a really interesting area to be researching. Thank you for joining me today, Dr. McDonald. I really appreciated your taking the time. It's been my pleasure. Thank you. You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at www.

speakingof psychology.org or on Apple, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at speaking of psychology at APA.org. Speaking of psychology is produced by Lee Weinerman. Our sound editor is Chris Kondyin. Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I'm Kim Mills.