- Bella DePaulo, 70, has and says she always will be single by choice.
- Having the freedom to live exactly how she wants makes her feel fulfilled and happy.
- Around 31% of American women had never been married in 2023, up from around 24% in 1999.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Bella DePaulo, 70, a social scientist and author from Pennsylvania. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
I'm 70, and I've never been in a relationship, nor do I ever want to be. I consider myself "single at heart," which means I'm happiest and most fulfilled living life as a single person.
I never wanted to be married, but for a long time I thought that maybe I was just slow getting there. People around me were obsessed with it, so I thought I just hadn't gotten bitten by the marriage bug yet. I knew I didn't want to have kids either.
I dated a bit when I was a lot younger, and I have positive memories of it, but whenever a romantic relationship ended, I felt relieved. I was so happy to go back to my one true love, my single life.
Eventually, I realized I was never going to want a romantic partner, and once I did, it was transformative. That little voice in the back of my head that said, "You've never wanted it before, but maybe you'll change your mind," which had previously cast doubt in my mind, disappeared.
I'm happy and flourishing because I'm single, not in spite of it. The risk to me is not what I'd miss if I didn't put a romantic partner at the center of my life, but what I'd miss if I did. I wouldn't get to live my best life and be who I really am.
I'm fully in control of my life
The everyday lifestyle of being single just suits me. I love having complete control of my life on a day-to-day basis. I choose when I sleep and when I stay up. I decide what I eat and when I eat, when I work, and when I play.
I live alone and get to have my house just the way I want it. I decide how it's arranged, how warm or cold I keep it, how tidy or messy it is. And when I leave something in a certain place one day, when I wake up the next day, it's still there.
Being single has also given me the freedom to make big picture changes in my life.
I'm a social scientist and author and in 1999 I was working at the University of Virginia. I took what was meant to be a year-long sabbatical at the University of California at Santa Barbara but loved it so much that I decided to stay.
I loved the weather—it was spectacularly beautiful—and I loved the intellectual and political climate. I really didn't want to go back, and a friend said to me, "You're single, don't!"
Moving from the East Coast, where I have friends and family, to the West Coast was a huge change, but I was willing to take the risk. And it paid off because I've lived here happily ever since.
I think I would've been far less likely to make the move, let alone take a sabbatical, if I had a romantic partner to consider.
Single people tend to be connected to more people than married couples
In 1992, I started researching single life because the representations of single people I was seeing in the media just weren't matching up to my experience. The common message they were sending was that there was something wrong with you if you're single, you're unhappy and lonely, and others should feel sorry for you.
Personally, this was not at all how I felt, and I later learned through my own research and reading the work of other scholars, that single people on average are more connected to more different people than married people. I like to say that married people have "the one", but single people have "the ones."
When you're single, you get to spend as much time as you want with as many different people as you want. You get to be there for them, if you want to be, without having a romantic partner who's thinking "that time belongs to me."
There are so many different kinds of love other than romantic love. There's love for friends, mentors, and teammates, as well as love for your work and your passions. And when we think about it that way, which is how people who are single think about it, there's a lot of love in our lives.
Flipping the script
Although I'm happy living as a single woman, I have been hurt at times by the way coupled up people have treated or perceived me. It's as if there's this couples club out there, and I'm not good enough to be in it.
I've been demoted from dinner arrangements to lunch or brunch many times or from weekends to weekdays, by friends or family once they have entered into a relationship. I'm excluded from things like couples' trips, or expected to take holiday or weekend shifts at work because I'm single, so people presume I don't have a life.
I used to get upset by these things but now I see that if a person's criteria for including someone is whether or not they're in a romantic relationship, they're the problem, not me.
I try to flip the script to illustrate how stereotypes and assumptions about single people are harmful and often ridiculous. I do this mainly through writing books like my latest "Single at Heart," so that other single people will be inoculated against feeling bad when these things happen.
I like to tell single people: Live your single lives fully, joyfully, and unapologetically.
