Being single still gets treated as a waiting room. It is the thing you are before real life starts, a temporary status you are meant to grow out of once you find the person who ends it. Ask a single person at a family gathering how they are and the follow-up question tends to give the game away.

The trouble with that framing is that the numbers have quietly stopped supporting it, and so, increasingly, has the research.

I am a writer with an interest in this material, not a psychologist, so take this as a careful reading of the evidence rather than advice.

Single is becoming ordinary

The clearest sign is how many people are now reaching midlife without ever having married. A 2023 analysis by the Pew Research Center found that a quarter of Americans who were 40 in 2021 had never married. In 1980 that figure was 6 percent. It is the highest share since this kind of record began, back around 1900.

This is not simply people marrying later and getting there in the end. A growing number are not marrying at all, and plenty are living alone rather than quietly partnered. The gap shows up more among men than women, and more among those without a four-year degree. Whatever else is happening, single life has moved from the margins to something close to a default stage that many people spend years, or all of their lives, inside.

The health-and-happiness story is shakier than advertised

You have probably heard the counterclaim: married people are healthier, live longer and are happier, so being single is a genuine cost. It is repeated so often that it sounds settled. It is less settled than it sounds.

A lot of the eye-catching results come from studies that compare people who are currently married against everyone else lumped together, a group that includes the divorced and the widowed. That comparison can make marriage look protective when part of what it is really capturing is how hard divorce and bereavement are. There is also a selection effect that is easy to miss. People who are already healthier and more financially secure are more likely to marry in the first place, and more likely to stay married, so some of the apparent benefit was there before the wedding.

When researchers follow the same individuals over time instead, the pattern is more sobering. Studies of life satisfaction tend to find a bump in happiness around the time of the wedding, followed by a drift back toward wherever the person sat beforehand. Marriage, on that evidence, does not reset your baseline. It gives it a nudge that tends to fade.

The bias with a name

The social psychologist Bella DePaulo, whose work is collected at Psychology Today and in books including Singled Out and Single at Heart, has spent decades on this. She coined the term singlism for the everyday stereotyping and disadvantaging of single people, and it is a useful lens.

Some of it is financial, from the cost of housing and travel priced for two to tax and benefit rules that assume a couple. Some of it is social, in the steady assumption that a single person is lonely, immature or unchosen rather than simply living a different arrangement. DePaulo’s argument is not that everyone should stay single, but that we treat one life path as the destination and every other as a detour, and the data no longer justify that.

What actually seems to matter

The most useful correction is about what the wellbeing research really points to. When you look at what predicts a good life over decades, the throughline is not marital status but the quality of a person’s close relationships in general. I have written before about how the longest study of human happiness ever run landed on connection, not wealth or status, as the strongest predictor of a good life.

Crucially, marriage is only one of the containers that connection can come in. Friendships, siblings, extended family, neighbors and community can carry the same weight, and single people are often the ones investing most in exactly those ties. DePaulo describes a group she calls single at heart, people who are not failing to find a partner but are genuinely at their best on their own, and for whom coupling up would be the compromise rather than the prize.

Holding it honestly

None of this is an argument that marriage is bad or that being single is secretly better. Averages hide enormous variation. There are married people who are thriving and single people who are lonely, and the reverse is just as true. Loneliness is real and worth taking seriously wherever it shows up.

The narrower, better-supported point is simply this. Being single is now one of the most common ways adults live, the evidence that it is a lesser or unhealthier way is weaker than the headlines suggest, and what seems to carry a life is the strength of your relationships rather than the legal label on one of them. That is worth knowing, whether you are single by choice, by circumstance, or just for now.