Nobody Told The Deep Singles They Were Supposed To Be Unhappy, And They Thrived Anyway

I was single for a long time. Long enough that people stopped asking if I was seeing anyone and started asking if I was okay. Long enough that I developed a set of rehearsed answers for family dinners and work events, a rotating menu of explanations that were cheerful enough to end the conversation without inviting further investigation. And long enough to start wondering, privately, whether the people asking the questions were onto something. Was I actually happy, or had I simply convinced myself that I was because the alternative was too depressing to digest?

The cultural machinery around singlehood is relentless, and it runs in one direction. Movies, families, social media, the entire architecture of adult life as it is currently constructed, all of it operates on the assumption that being unpartnered is a temporary condition to be resolved rather than a valid state to inhabit. The question was never whether being single was working for me. The question was always when I was going to fix it. And eventually, even the most clear-headed person starts to absorb that framing. I did. I spent more time than I care to admit wondering whether my contentment was real or just what resignation looks like after long enough to settle.

A new study published in the Personal and Social Psychology Bulletin has something to say about all of this, and it is not what the cultural narrative would have predicted. Researchers at the University of Toronto tracked nearly 3,000 long-term singles over eleven years, checking in annually to measure life satisfaction, intimate satisfaction, and their desire for a partner. The findings will send Carry Bradshaw and her girls into a tizzy.

Bored Panda spoke to relationship psychologists, therapists, and behavioral scientists to find out what the data actually means, why the cultural story refuses to update itself in the face of it, and what the research reveals about personality, desire, and the difference between wanting a partner and needing one to be whole.