Honoring Singlehood

Remaining single is as valid an option as seeking a partnered relationship. We need to honor singlehood more than we do.

This newsletter is about adventurous sexualities and relationships. I love sparking thought and discussion within the sex-positive, kink, nonmonogamy, and polyamory realms.

But there’s something that’s not often discussed when the topic of relationships comes up – singlehood.

We live in a culture that worships at the altar of paired and officially sanctioned relationships, but we also worship partnering of any kind over what some consider the worst of possible situations, being single.

That needs to stop. Personally, I know many people who are single and prefer to remain that way. Many of them have been single for years or decades and are quite happy without an official relationship of any kind.

Despite some messaging to the contrary like “10 Reasons Being Single Can Be an Excellent Option,” “9 Ways Being Single Can Improve Your Life,” and “When You Start to Enjoy Being Single, These 12 Things Happen,” the vast preponderance of messaging within most of our social circles, families, and institutions is that people “should” be partnered and ideally married.

In “I'm 70 And I've Lived Alone My Entire Adult Life. Here's What Everyone Gets Wrong About Single People,” Bella DePaulo describes her research and articulates the benefits many see from being “single at heart.”

Now I know better. I don’t just live single; I am also a scholar of single life. As a social scientist, I’ve spent decades studying single people, scrutinizing the research of others, and rewriting what it can mean to be single. I’ve found that people I call “single at heart” — I’m one of them — are powerfully drawn to single life. It is, to us, the most deeply fulfilling way to live.

I learned about this joyful state of singlehood from dozens of people who identify as single at heart and shared their life stories with me in interviews, hundreds who told me about their single lives more informally, and thousands who completed an online survey.

Then there’s a variation of single that isn’t really inherently single, but it’s seen that way by some – being solo poly. I wrote about solo poly in “I’m Solo Poly.”

When people ask me to describe my current perspective on how I view my relationships, I tell them the best description is that I’m solo polyamorous (solo poly) and a relationship anarchist.

The main purpose of this post is to try to nudge our conversations away from “Are you partnered?” to “Are you happy with your current situation (whether partnered or not)?” That’s the only worthwhile approach because isn’t the whole purpose of life to be as happy as we can be, and if being single makes someone happy, why should anyone challenge that stance.

Much of the world and our culture revolves around partnering, coupledom in particular. Let’s try to make the world a welcoming place for those who consciously choose to be single, whether that’s for a short time or a lifetime.

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