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Singles, no need to mingle.
A new research study published in the Personal and Social Psychology Bulletin found that those who remain unmarried and unpartnered in a committed relationship reported high levels of contentment with their lives overall, even as they continue to face various ongoing romantic and sexual experiences throughout their singlehood.
“We found that while relationship-focused outcomes, like sexual satisfaction and desire for a partner, varied more between participants, singles’ overall satisfaction with their lives remained remarkably robust,” Elaine Hoan, a University of Toronto PhD candidate and lead author of the study, told PsyPost.
She also emphasized a growing public and academic interest in singles’ wellbeing as the unpartnered population grows and “people are increasingly delaying marriage,” paying increasing attention to internal factors like singles’ own personalities, age and sexual fulfilment status, rather than comparing them to their coupled-up peers.
“In light of this rise, much is unknown regarding how singles’ psychological well-being changes over time, with some individuals arguing that singles report generally low well-being across the life span,” said Hoan.
The study involved data from the German Family Panel, tracking 2,930 never-married German singles over an 11-year period between 2009 and 2021. Participants were divided into three distinct groups: singles who began the study around age 18 (“emerging adults”), those who started around age 26 (“young adults”) and those who entered around age 36 (“middle-aged adults”).
There was one main requirement: to continue to be eligible for the study, participants had to still be loveless at every one of the yearly check-ins.
This proved to be more of an issue for the middle-aged cohort, as many partnered up with age — only 14% of this group qualified, as opposed to 67% of the emerging adults.
Singles in the study answered regular questions about three main personal topics — overall life satisfaction, satisfaction with singlehood, sexual satisfaction, and any desire for a romantic partner.
An earlier analysis of the same data presupposed that all singles go down one average life path, and found that singles’ life satisfaction tends to decline as the years go by. However, Hoan and her team used a statistical modeling technique designed to look at the nuance of different life paths for singles.
The new study also measured participants’ income, education, physical health, and personality traits to see how these factored into their singles’ wellbeing.
The standout verdict was that the lion’s share of singles across all three age categories reported high life satisfaction at a relatively even keel, with approximately 90% of each cohort’s members reporting life satisfaction rates above the midpoint of the scale for the decade-and-change period.
While satisfaction with actually being single varied much more widely — around 67% of the emerging adults reported feeling satisfied with their relationship status (or rather, lack thereof) — these percentages went down among the older two groups.
Sexual satisfaction also varied among various subgroups in the three cohorts. But another standout finding was that those with higher education levels typically fell into the subgroups who were least sexually satisfied — a phenomenon the researchers suggested may be due to study time getting in the way of fun time.
Researchers found that the groups who reported the most life, sexual and singlehood satisfaction generally had the healthiest personality profiles, lower neuroticism and high extraversion.
While most of the singles in Hoan’s study did still report a moderate to high desire to find a relationship, their satisfaction with their overall lives remained overwhelmingly high — perhaps going against certain cultural undertones that single-dom automatically equates to unhappiness.