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Home > Featured Articles > Single Women

How to Live Alone Without Being Lonely

March 30, 2012 | Philip Moeller | U.S. News & World Report

Healthy and happy solo households achieve well-being by expanding social networks and

activities

They are known as singles, singletons, the never-married, the divorced, and the widowed. What

they share is that they are part of the country's fastest-growing living unit--more than 31 million

one-person households in 2010, according to the U.S. Census.

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[See the Top 10 U.S. Cities for Well-Being.]

Traditionally, relationship researchers have found that people living alone are on the bottom

rung of the wellness ladder. They lack the emotional, financial , and daily help of a committed

partner, which are major reasons why people in successful marriages and other strong two-

person relationships fare better in measures of health, happiness, and longevity.

"When people succeed in having a good intimate relationship, it has so many benefits," says

UCLA psychology professor Ben Karney. "Your body works better, your immune system

functions better, your body produces more antibodies. Study after study shows that people in

good relationships live longer." Even severely ill people who were in good relationships recovered

faster and lived longer than comparably ill people who were not in good relationships.

Single men, in particular, take especially poor care of themselves. "Unmarried men are more

likely to have bad health habits than married men," says Linda Waite, a sociologist at the

University of Chicago. "They drink too much, don't eat well, don't wear seat belts, have more

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unprotected sex" and don't enjoy the kind of social supports they would in a committed

relationship. Single women, by comparison, fare better, precisely because they have better social

connections and are used to taking care of themselves.

However, many experts say the health and happiness disadvantages of living alone are

disappearing. Social science research tends to look at a long-distance rearview mirror, analyzing

large groups of people over many, many years. Current trends are easily documented.

"Over the past 30 years, the health gap between the married and never-married has narrowed to

almost nothing," says Debra Umberson, a sociologist at the University of Texas. "Being not

married has increasingly become an accepted option."

[See How to Get Marital Benefits--Sans Marriage.]

"Once they accept [being unmarried] and make their peace with it, they fare just as well as

anyone else," says Deb Carr, a Rutgers University sociologist. "We see them expanding their

definitions of what is a family. Not only do they have larger numbers of friends [than married

people], but they have more frequent contact with them and closer relationships with them."

Carr says society has become friendlier to "never marrieds" as well, and that people are more

tolerant and supportive of a broad range of different ways people choose to live.

"I think that there is a really important distinction to be made between social isolation and

choosing to live alone," Umberson says. "People who are socially isolated are the ones more likely

to die" at earlier ages.

Eric Klinenberg is a sociologist at NYU and author of a recent book about living alone called

Going Solo. It supports, if not celebrates, the emergence of the one-person household as an

increasingly preferred living choice, not only in the United States but even more so in many

Western European nations.

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Klinenberg is careful to distinguish among different types of one-person households when

assessing their occupants' health and well-being. He also thinks that much of the pro-marriage

research is based on either misleading or flawed assumptions.

"Many, if not most, studies of the health consequence of marriage compared currently married

people versus never married people," he says. The adverse health consequences of divorce and

widowhood are well-documented but are usually viewed separately from the positive health effects

of people who remain married. No one gets married thinking the marriage will fail or their spouse

will die, Klinenberg notes. And while staying married produces benefits, he says it's impossible to

conclude that simply getting married improves a person's well-being and longevity compared with

staying single.

In looking at the effects of living alone, Klinenberg says, "I make a very careful distinction

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between living alone, being alone, being isolated, and feeling lonely. These are four different

things. And most researchers, even the best of them, conflate them."

"It's really a specific minority of people who live alone who are vulnerable," he says. "And we

could do much more to provide care and support for them than we do now. We could do more to

connect them to other people and services. And that's what would make them safer."

[See What Happy People Know About Money.]

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