No, we single women are not desperate for a partner

Challenge yourself with today’s puzzles.
Crossword
Polygon
Sudoku
If you cried in Jerry Maguire, when Tom Cruise told Renée Zellweger “you complete me”, look away now. If you sympathised with Bridget Jones as a sad singleton and cheered when she met her Mr Right then Bella DePaulo has news for you: you’re wrong. DePaulo is an academic whose life’s work is changing the way we think about singleness, starting with the idea that it’s sad. For the single at heart, she argues, being single isn’t just their relationship status, it’s their identity. And while they might resent some of the perks that society bestows on couples, they very much don’t want your pity.
“Single life is not a lesser life,” DePaulo explains over Zoom from her home near Montecito, California. “For people who are single at heart, single life is their best, most meaningful, fulfilling and joyful life.”
DePaulo is 70 and has been single her whole life. She has had a few brief relationships with men, when she was younger, but wishes she hadn’t bothered. “It wasn’t who I was,” she says. For years in her youth she thought she was perhaps a bit slow to get the marriage bug because everyone else seemed “obsessed” with it. Then she realised it was never going to bite because she was, in her own phrase, single at heart. She isn’t single because she’s a loner or because she never met Mr Right. She isn’t starved of love and romance in her life, nor is she selfish or unwilling to compromise. She isn’t bitter or scarred or unhappy, in fact quite the opposite. She looks back on those early encounters with fondness: “I think I even kind of liked it.” She just doesn’t want to be part of a couple. Ever. And never has. Whatever you do, don’t ask if she’s protesting too much. “When have you ever, ever, ever said the same thing to a married person who said they love being married?” she says, laughing. “No, I just knew at my core that I want to be the captain of my own ship.”
• I’m single and childless — so I borrow a family for my holidays
Slightly to her surprise, she discovered that she wasn’t the only one. Trained at Harvard and now an academic affiliate in the department of psychological and brain sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara, DePaulo had long been struck by how differently she was treated professionally, and socially, from her married colleagues. At work, she was offered the evening teaching jobs, which were “too hard” for the married members of faculty. During the week, everyone had lunch together. At weekends, lunches were couples only.
At a party, she asked another single colleague if she had similar experiences and by the end of the night she had so many stories from so many single-at-heart people that she spent two hours writing up notes when she got home. She knew there was a book in it, not to mention a new area of specialism; she was a psychologist of lying and the detection of lies but is now a full-time researcher into singleness with a book to boost her thesis, Single at Heart: the power, freedom and joy of single life.
There are plenty of books about how to be happily single while you’re looking for love, she says, but with the premise that being single is not really what anyone actively wants. Actually, she reckons, some people do want to be single as an active, positive way of life, not as the scarred result of a bad break-up. The details of the single-at-heart people she’s interviewed may differ — some are more sociable than others, some are interested in having sexual encounters, others are asexual — but they all have three things in common: they’re happier single than in a couple, they love their freedom and they love solitude. And contrary to popular belief, they are no less likely to be happy than their married counterparts.
“Some people are better suited to being single. People take it as scientifically established fact that if you get married you’ll be happier and healthier but, actually, there are now dozens of studies which find that married people end up being about as happy or unhappy as they were when they were single.”
This matters, DePaulo believes, not just because society “fetishises” marriage and romance but because it diminishes, if not demonises, singleness: on screen, single women are sad or dangerous. Single men can be perceived as loners who sit in their parents’ basement playing video games. Humans have evolved to be social animals but you can be a social animal, she points out, with your friends and relatives. Evolution isn’t about wedding rings, she says, though she is not anti-marriage, far from it. Whatever floats your boat. What frustrates her is the unfairness and statutory discrimination faced by the single, or as she puts it: “Giving people special privileges and rewards and perks just because they’re married.” In America, she says there are “hundreds” of federal laws benefiting married couples. In Britain being married can have positive implications on tax, savings, pensions and private healthcare, where spouses can sometimes share provision but friends or parents can not. You could argue that married couples get those breaks because they’re deemed to be the bedrock of civil society, so worth encouraging. She disagrees.
“What would happen if we reversed everything and gave all those benefits to single people? What would happen if single people were the ones that get the tax breaks and married people pay supplements for vacation packages or insurance. Take everything and flip it and see who would be doing better and whose kids would be doing better. There’s a whole system of inequality.” In the workplace; in housing, where rental agents prefer married couples; and most egregiously of all, in medicine. She cites a paper by Joan DelFattore published in the New England Journal of Medicine titled Death by stereotype? Cancer treatment in unmarried patients, which found that oncologists were less likely to prescribe the most aggressive treatments for single patients, because they thought they didn’t have the will to live. “This,” DePaulo says, outraged, “is mindblowing.”
For people such as DePaulo, there is always a conflict in a romantic relationship between your time belonging to you and your time belonging to your spouse. Single-at-heart people want their time to be entirely their own. They don’t want to create a life with someone else. People get in touch with her to admit how much they love being single and completely independent but worry that they’re a freak. One woman asked DePaulo if she thought there was something wrong with her.
“I’m not at all against valuing romantic coupling. What I object to is overvaluing it, and the undervaluing of all other important relationships in our lives, and the mythology that if you only find this one person and commit, all the pieces of your life will fall into place. Imagine if that were true! I’m trying to break through this mindset and let people know that the things we always thought were true aren’t, necessarily. Or they’re not true of everyone.”
• Deborah Ross: JD Vance, leave the childless cat ladies alone! It’s a tough gig
Which brings us back to Bridget Jones and Jerry Maguire, and the pervasive “obsession” on big and small screens with romance and weddings. She stopped watching Grey’s Anatomy when a season finale featured three weddings. “Even sporting events have a kiss cam!” she wails. “Saaave meeee!” And finally it brings us to JD Vance and his attempt to disparage Kamala Harris by calling her a childless cat lady. It earned him a rebuke from Jennifer Aniston and a million memes pointing out that one of the biggest, richest, most popular stars in the world, Taylor Swift, is a childless cat lady who posed for the cover of Time magazine with one draped around her neck.
“Oh my gosh I LOVE that his remark triggered such a backlash,” says DePaulo, who does not, for the record, have a cat. “It’s emblematic of how things have evolved, where single people and people who don’t have kids are less likely to let themselves be shamed. If someone comes after us now, we’re not taking it. That’s a wonderful thing.”
Single at Heart by Dr Bella DePaulo (Profile £14.99). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members