The cultural assumption about single women is so thoroughly embedded that it has its own genre of fiction — the spinster, the tragic bachelorette, the woman who wanted something that wouldn’t happen for her. In film, single women are protagonists in the process of finding love. In comedy, they are cautionary tales. In drama, they are explained — something must have happened, some reason they ended up here.

The research tells a different story.

Bella DePaulo, a psychologist at the University of California Santa Barbara, coined the term “singlism” to describe the stereotyping and discrimination of single people — and has spent two decades assembling the research on what single life actually looks like, as opposed to what the cultural narrative claims it looks like. Her findings have been consistently and deliberately ignored by a culture invested in marriage as the default human good.

What DePaulo’s Research Shows

DePaulo’s foundational finding, synthesised in Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatised, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After (2006) and extended in subsequent research, is that single people — and single women specifically — report significantly higher levels of wellbeing than the cultural stereotype predicts.

The mechanism she identifies is specific: single people, particularly those who have always been single rather than those who are recently divorced or widowed, invest more heavily in social networks beyond the couple. They maintain closer friendships, stronger family connections, more diverse community involvement. The married couple, particularly in Western cultures, is often a dyad that exists in relative social isolation — the “couple bubble” that substitutes intimacy with one person for intimacy with many. Single people, without this option, build the broader social structures that are associated with long-term health and happiness.

The research on social connection and health is unambiguous: the quality and diversity of social relationships predicts longevity and health outcomes. DePaulo’s argument is that single women, who are stereotyped as lonely, often have richer social structures than their partnered counterparts, precisely because the culture hasn’t handed them a single person to be close to and told them that’s enough.

The Happiness Research: A Closer Look

The oft-cited finding that married people are happier than single people has been significantly revised by more recent and more rigorous research.

The original finding came from large population surveys that asked about life satisfaction and correlated with marital status. The problems with this approach, identified by subsequent researchers:

Selection effect. Happier people are more likely to get married and to stay married. If you’re measuring the happiness of currently married people, you’re measuring a selected group, not the effect of marriage.

Comparison problem. Early research compared married people to all single people, including those who were recently divorced, recently widowed, and those who were single against their preference. When DePaulo and others separated out “single by choice” from “single not by choice,” the happiness gap narrowed significantly.

Measurement changes over time. When Wendy Morris and colleagues tracked individuals’ wellbeing before and after marriage in longitudinal data, they found that marriage produced a temporary boost in wellbeing that faded to pre-marriage levels within approximately two years for most people. The happiness “effect” of marriage was largely explained by the honeymoon period.

Gender asymmetry. The marriage happiness premium, where it exists, is larger for men than for women. Research consistently finds that men report greater wellbeing gains from marriage than women. The opposite finding also holds: divorced women, once the initial disruption resolves, often report higher wellbeing than divorced men. The gender-neutral “married people are happier” finding conceals an asymmetry that is significant for women considering marriage as a route to happiness.

A 2019 study in Journal of Women’s Health found that single, childless women were the happiest and healthiest subgroup in their sample. The researcher Paul Dolan, presenting the preliminary findings at the Hay Festival, summarised: “If you’re a man, you should probably get married. If you’re a woman, don’t bother.”

The Women Who Didn’t

The history of women who built full, purposeful lives outside marriage is long and largely untold, because the cultural history of women has been organised around the marriage plot.

Florence Nightingale refused multiple marriage proposals and structured her life entirely around her work. Her creation of modern nursing, her statistical innovations (she was one of the pioneers of data visualisation), her extensive reform work — none of this was compatible with the demands of 19th-century married life, which she understood clearly enough to decline it.

Jane Austen, who wrote about marriage with the precision of someone who had studied its mechanics from close range, chose not to marry. She accepted and then rescinded a proposal at age 27, returned to single life, and wrote the six novels that constitute the most sophisticated literary analysis of the marriage market ever produced. Her letters make clear that she was not simply resigned to single life; she valued the freedom it gave her to write.

Simone de Beauvoir’s open relationship with Sartre was not marriage — she and Sartre never lived together, never had children, were mutually committed to a partnership that gave both of them the freedom to pursue other relationships. This was not a compromise in the absence of something better. It was a deliberately constructed alternative to the institution of marriage, which de Beauvoir had analysed in The Second Sex as fundamentally structured to serve male interests.

Gloria Steinem married for the first time at 66, which she described as the most radical act of a radical life — not because she was anti-marriage but because she had spent her adult life building something that marriage, in its conventional form, would have required her to subordinate.

Across Cultures

The universal assumption that women aspire to marriage as the primary life goal is not universal.

In Japan, sōshoku-kei (“herbivore”) culture — young men who are uninterested in conventional romantic pursuit — has its female complement in women who are increasingly choosing careers, friendships, and solo life over marriage. Japan’s marriage rate has declined precipitously; surveys show significant proportions of Japanese women in their twenties and thirties who prefer single life not as a default in the absence of a partner but as a preference.

In Scandinavia, cohabitation — long-term committed partnership without legal marriage — is so normalised that the marriage/single binary is largely meaningless for social analysis. The question of whether to marry is, in Sweden and Norway, genuinely separate from the question of whether to have a committed partnership.

In matrilineal societies — the Mosuo of China, the Khasi of Meghalaya, certain West African cultures — the relationship between women, marriage, and social organisation is structured differently enough to challenge the assumption that the Western marriage model is natural rather than historical. In Mosuo society, women and men maintain separate households throughout their lives, with romantic partnerships conducted through “walking marriages” that do not disrupt either person’s primary residence in their family home.

The Question Behind the Question

The cultural investment in women’s marriage is not primarily about women’s happiness. The research demonstrates, fairly clearly, that marriage does not produce the happiness gains for women that the culture claims. The investment is about something else: about the social and economic structures that marriage has historically organised and enforced, about inheritance, about labour, about the reproduction of the nuclear family as the basic social unit.

Women who choose not to marry are not failing to achieve happiness. They are refusing to subordinate their lives to a structure that was not built to serve them — and building different structures in its place. The research on what these structures look like — the friendships, the chosen families, the communities of purpose, the solitude chosen rather than imposed — is genuinely positive.

The single woman is not the tragic figure of the cultural imagination. She is, in many cases, the person who understood her own interests clearly enough to act on them.

That deserves to be said without the hedging the culture usually requires.

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