Singled out: why can't we believe unmarried, childless women are happy?

At the Hay festival late last month, I gave a talk about my new book, Happy Ever After, which discusses happiness data surrounding relationships. My conclusion – that single women might be healthier and happier than married women and married women with children – was met with surprise from many, delight from single women and shock and even outrage from other quarters, especially on social media. Many pointed to their own experience to criticise me, saying that they – or their wives – were happier now that they were married or parents than they were when they were single. One man tweeted photos of his wife as apparent proof. I was accused of spreading propaganda. “How far will the media push this ‘independent woman’ narrative?” was one popular tweet.

It is true that there is lots of variation across people, and people are obviously not randomly allocated to marriage – so we cannot know for sure the causal effects of marriage on health and happiness. There is some pretty robust evidence, though, that single people are more likely to foster social connections that bring them fulfilment, whereas married people often find themselves with less consciously chosen social networks, such as a spouse’s family members. Single people are also more likely to volunteer and to participate in social events. By contrast, married and cohabiting individuals tend to become more socially isolated, even without the excuse of children. The longitudinal nature of these data suggests this relationship is causal, with those entering marriage more likely to lose existing connections than those who do not marry. Social connectedness is linked to happiness – so this might go a long way towards explaining why single people aren’t as miserable as many people would imagine (and, it seems, sometimes even hope) them to be.

There is more evidence, but it can never provide a definitive answer on how any of us should live our lives. Instead it is more useful to focus on why so many people seemed to take the suggestion that single women are doing just fine without men and children so personally and so badly. It certainly appears that the “married is best” narrative remains pervasive.

A study in Israel (where there are relatively strong ideals around marriage) asked people to look at comparable biographical accounts of both married and single people (invented by the researchers) and then to rate the extent to which they displayed several traits. Most people assumed the married folk scored higher on traits relating to happiness than the “depressive”, “lonely” and “shy” singletons. No matter how single people were described and what great things they had experienced and achieved, people were insistent that their happiness must have been overstated.

What is particularly interesting about this study is that the researchers also varied whether or not the single people profiled had chosen their relationship status. Counterintuitively, those who had chosen to be single received lower positive trait ratings than those who would have preferred to be married, even though the former group was living the life they had wanted. It’s as though the choice to be single is too great a societal affront to be sincere – it must be a provocation.

Most troubling of all, marriage was endorsed both by those in relationships and by single people. In other words, singles uphold the notion of committed relationships even though they suffer negative stereotyping – “singlism” – as a direct result of endorsing the marriage myth. This is perhaps because, according to recent estimates, only 4% of singles realise that they are being stigmatised, which highlights the power of this particular social narrative.

Discrimination against single people also rears its ugly head in professional contexts. Married people generally get first dibs on holiday times, and are the last to be asked to relocate offices. Employers often assume that single people are more time-rich than married people, and expect them to put in more hours and effort relative to their married counterparts, the assumption being that they have no other meaningful commitments and are therefore less likely to be put out – so single people work harder and are not rewarded for it.

Outside work, the discrimination continues. Singles are excluded from a host of “couple-specific” deals on insurance, hotels, gym memberships, banks accounts and mortgage payments. Laws and other regulations discriminate against singles further. The UK’s marriage allowance, for example, allows one half of a married couple to transfer £1,250 of his or her personal tax allowance to their spouse, cutting their annual tax bill by up to £250.

Our insistence on advocating committed relationships through marriage may be caused in part by a desire to defend overarching power structures, such as government, political frameworks and religion. These represent codes and practices that bring a sense of reliability and familiarity to our lives. Anything that might be perceived as what psychologists refer to as a “system threat” can cause us to feel uneasy, and to spring to the defence of the systems that we consider to be working in our favour.

In one study from Canada, male participants who were primed to feel that society was suffering economically, politically and socially compared with other countries defended committed relationships much more than the men in a control group. But the same results did not hold for women. In general, men have more to gain than women from existing power structures and systems – such is the nature of gender inequality – so it is not surprising that they defend these systems, including marriage, more vehemently when they are perceived to be under threat.

The idea that it is marriage or bust ignores not only individual differences but also the many ways in which we can find fulfilment in and out of relationships. If we are to start to tackle the narrative trap of marriage, employers must ensure that any flexible working policy is available to everyone, no matter their personal circumstances. There are good libertarian and egalitarian grounds for the state to stop incentivising marriage, such as by removing the tax breaks for married people. The legal system also needs to rethink how it favours married people. If anything, singledom and singletons should be celebrated, especially when wider social benefits are accounted for. Singles have more time to devote to meaningful activities that can benefit society, and they leave more of their money to charity in their wills.

Each of us as individuals can start by caring less about what kinds of relationships other people choose to have, and how they live their lives. If they are not harming us, why should it matter? Perhaps we do see them as a threat to the hierarchies and presumed order in society. Or perhaps we are a bit jealous of them having apparently freed themselves from social convention. Or it might be that we cannot resist making comparisons with our own lives when we hear about how happy other people are: if they are happy, then I must necessarily be less so, as if happiness were a zero-sum game. Whatever the reasons, the key message is that we need to become much more accepting of the myriad ways in which different people can be differently happy. In so doing, we could all become a little happier.