MORE CHOOSING SINGLE LIFE.
More choose to be alone than couple
Singleness. Loneness. Oneness. Almost a third of people in Britain now live alone, and the statistics are rising exponentially.
For all politicians’ cultivation of the marital unit and courting of the muchfetishized “hardworking, middle-class families,” it’s the singles who are culture’s increasing power group. Living solo is estimated to cost an extra $388,000 over a lifetime compared with being coupled. Yet, the number of British people going solo has risen by more than a million over the past 16 years.
Almost 2.5 million men and women between ages 45 and 64 live alone in their own homes. According to the U.K. Office for National Statistics, the number of such sole occupants has risen by 833,000 in the past two decades and there are expected to be a further two million at least by 2020.
Eric Klinenberg’s new book, Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone, proposes that the trend for solo living has sprang from a sort of liberal perfect storm. Klinenberg’s evidence suggests that singleness is a consequence of mainstream liberal values, women’s liberation, not least. Add to this ever more urbanization, developments in communications technology and increasing longevity, and lone living is the natural result.
The urban myth that those who live solo are more likely to be depressive turns out to be just that, with women faring better mentally from such arrangements. Even the spectre of the lonely old lady is a fiction: indeed, American studies indicate that such women boast a superior psychological function to those dwelling with spouses.
Kate Bolick, a contributing editor at The Atlantic, is 40 and single, but in a committed relationship. She is working on a book entitled Among the Suitors: On Being a Woman, Alone, and argues: “Even if the single woman isn’t ostracized the way she once was, she’s still regarded as an anomaly. I see three explanations. One is that the creators of popular culture are so intent on pandering to the mainstream, which they believe to be stalwarts of ‘traditional family values,’ that single women are still portrayed in film and television according to reductive stereotypes.
“Second, there’s our cultural fetishization of romance, and the couple form, and the idea that marriage is the catch-all answer to all our problems. This notion that one person can make us happy in every way is fairly recent — and it’s an impossible expectation. We are each responsible for our own happiness. Finally, even in light of women’s incredible social, economic, educational and professional advances, our social system is still largely patriarchal, and as such hasn’t evolved to the point where it can consider women outside marriage and motherhood.”
As Bolick notes, “Being alone is a fact of life, part of what it means to be alive, and these days, between medical advancements that allow us to live for so long, and the fact that we’re marrying later, most of us spend more time on our own than ever before.