A “Singles-Centred” Perspective Sounds Uplifting. What Does it Mean in Practice?

A (very long) reply to DePaulo (2026)

In a recent paper, Dr. Bella DePaulo reflected on her years as a singlehood scholar, and described what she sees as the most important lesson from her years of work:

Perhaps, the most important lesson I’ve learned is that single people need to be understood from a singles-centred perspective rather than the couples-centred perspective that still dominates…

In this post, I want to argue that when Dr. DePaulo refers to singles, what she primarily means is single people who want to stay single. When she argues that single people should be understood from a “singles-centered” perspective, functionally this means selectively focusing on evidence that supports a narrative that singles are well off.

Although it is important to attend to the benefits that singlehood brings many people and the mistreatment that single people receive at times for being single, following Dr. DePaulo’s lead in practice means two things: 1) singlehood scholarship that downplays focus on the majority of singles (i.e., those who are open to partnership) and 2) incomplete examination of evidence about singles’ well-being. What I advocate for instead is an integrative approach to singlehood studies that finds a way to recognize and attend to the full range of singlehood experiences.

Points of agreement

Before I get to my critiques, I want to make clear my respect for Dr. DePaulo’s career. It’s good that she is taking space to celebrate her years of work on singlehood. She has especially advocated for people whose preference is to live single, who she calls the single at heart. Happy, long-term singles have not received the attention they deserve, and are now on the cultural map because of Dr. DePaulo (for a particularly impactful description of the joys and challenges of a life of chosen singlehood, I recommend listening to this interview).

Dr. DePaulo is a pioneer and I have often said I wouldn’t be doing the work I do if it wasn’t for her. Although Dr. DePaulo and I disagree on a number of points, she opened the door I am walking through and I appreciate that. I think that a lot of my best arguments were generated by wrestling with the insightful challenges she has laid out to conventional ways of thinking about singlehood.

I also want to attend to parts of the paper I agree with. Two sections of the paper in particular stood out to me:

What we think we know about single people depends critically on the people we include and exclude from our research, the questions we ask and do not ask, and how we design and interpret our research….

This is absolutely true. Dr. DePaulo and I seem to disagree about who is being included and excluded and with what consequence, but the idea that these choices are often unconscious, are consequential, and are worth unpacking is at the heart of both of our perspectives.

Finally, the lesson I have learned every day of every year I have been studying singlehood is that our scholarly work is not just academic. It is personal. People outside of academia hear about our work from social media and traditional media and take it to heart.

This is also true – we don’t do our work in a vacuum, neither in terms of the society we influence nor in terms of the society that influences us. Dr. DePaulo and I seem to disagree about what the right messages to be sending single people are, but neither of us think that we are simply playing an academic game here.

One way Dr. DePaulo has improved my work

I also want to note that I agree with, and have learned from, Dr. DePaulo on a procedural point she makes in her piece. In particular, she accurately notes a misframing in one of my lab’s papers where we are describing the average well-being of single men:

“…sometimes they describe married people as happy and unmarried people as unhappy (as, for example, the ‘unhappy single men’ of Hoan and MacDonald (2025, p. 616).”

Indeed, if you look at the average reported level of life satisfaction of single men in our research, they are above the midpoint of the scale meaning that although it is accurate to describe single men as less happy than single women, it is not accurate to describe them as unhappy in an absolute sense. So yes, we were wrong here.

I’ve long thought this was an insightful procedural point from Dr. DePaulo that I have seen her deploy multiple times. In fact, in an upcoming chapter, I include the following sentence because of this insight:

Importantly, Walsh et al. (2023) note that singles are still on average above the midpoint on measures of well-being, suggesting these data should be interpreted as singles doing less well than partnered people rather than doing poorly per se.

Good insights should be applied consistently

One place this insight (i.e., that you should look at where a group mean falls on a scale in an absolute sense) has been useful for me is in interpreting the extent to which singles feel pressure to be partnered. Although we need more data, initial research indicates that singles report levels of pressure to partner that are below the midpoint, so narratives that singles experience strong pressure to partner in an absolute sense should similarly be tempered.

I would also say that it’s a difficult thing in academic writing and speaking to not get swept up in your narrative and present it in dramatic terms. A contrast between unhappy and happy is more compelling than one between less happy and more happy, so it is an easy trap for an impassioned writer or speaker to fall into. As evidence, I point to the fact that Dr. DePaulo made just such a group mean misframing in this very paper where she critiques us for doing so:

The Dutch social scientists Lonneke van den Berg and Verbakel (2024) studied young men and women who either lived single after leaving their parents’ home or went directly into a committed romantic relationship. All of them eventually experienced a romantic break- up. The men who had gone straight from the parental home into a romantic relationship were especially dissatisfied with their lives when they were breaking up…

Examination of the van den Berg and Verbakel (2024) findings shows that these men were indeed above the midpoint of the life satisfaction scale and can best be described as less satisfied rather than unsatisfied. Like I said, it’s an easy trap to fall into.

Academic disputes should seek integration, not a winner and a loser

From very early on in my work on singlehood, the central point I have been making is that we need a singlehood studies that represents the full range of singlehood experiences. Although there are singles who do not desire partnership at all, as I discuss in my upcoming chapter, the majority of singles are either seeking or open to partnership. Along with Yuthika Girme and Yoobin Park, I wrote a paper arguing for this perspective in Perspectives on Psychology Science (PoPS).

Part of my motivation here was that, in my years of working in academics, I have seen numerous academic debates. For example, my graduate school advisor was entangled in the self-enhancement/self-verification wars of the late 1990s. Each side goes back and forth trying to argue why their perspective is superior and the other side should be dismissed and the ending is always the same; the answer is always, “it’s both.” For example, Lorne Campbell did some excellent work reconciling self-enhancement and self-verification by testing moderators to see when one was healthier for relationships than the other. It was both. It’s always both.

My hope with the PoPS piece was that we could fast forward past the part where we argue “being single is better” versus “having a relationship is better,” and get to the good stuff right away like “who is singlehood for?” and “in what stages of life does singlehood work best?”. Unfortunately, we received the same public critique of that PoPS paper as the one that is embodied in Dr. DePaulo’s current paper: That our paper was promoting “deficit narratives” (you can see our reply to the critique here).

In the current paper, the issue is framed less in terms of adopting deficit narratives and more in terms of adopting a “couples-centred” perspective. For example:

Especially important to singlehood scholarship are the explanations offered for gender dynamics. To explain why women like being single more than men do, Hoan & MacDonald (2025) offer several possibilities. For example, when they are in a heterosexual romantic relationship, women do more than their share of household tasks and chores. That might make single life more appealing to them. Also, single women may be more sexually satisfied than single men because women’s sexual pleasure is less valued than men’s in romantic relationships. Both may be true, but they are couple-centred explanations, anchored in the experiences of heterosexual romantic coupling. Singles-centred scholarship would seek to understand how single life is experienced by people of different genders. For example, there is evidence from German studies that women enjoy the time they have to themselves more than men do (Hagemeyer et al., 2013). Among singles in the US living alone in later life, women spend more time pursuing their interests and hobbies (Stepler, 2016). The same study showed that the women are more satisfied with the number of friends they have. (A similar point about social support was acknowledged by Hoan and MacDonald.)

An important point to note here is that you might get the impression from the way this is written that we grudgingly acknowledged women’s friendship networks as a sort of an afterthought. But if you read our paper, you see that women’s friendship networks are the very first point we offer in the discussion to explain our findings. So the heart of the critique can’t be that we don’t include what are called “singles-centred” explanations or even that we don’t foreground them.

One problem with Dr. DePaulo’s paper is that definitions of “singles-centred” and “couples-centred” are never provided. I am reverse-engineering that that the definition of “singles-centred” is meant to be that one should understand singlehood with reference to the experience of being unpartnered itself – the activities that single people engage in, the friends that single people have, the ways that single people see their single life.

What the critique of our gender paper leaves unclear is whether Dr. DePaulo is saying that only “singles-centred” explanations should be offered, or whether they should be included alongside “couples-centred” explanations. It seems unlikely that she means the former, but then why would she choose our paper where we do exactly what she thinks should be done to make her point without lauding us for meeting her standard? It leaves open the interpretation that real critique is that we offer “couples-centred” explanations at all.

Why I think “singles” is being used to refer to people who don’t want a relationship

The insight that it is important to consider explanations for singles’ outcomes with reference to aspects of singlehood itself is a genuinely important contribution. I absolutely agree that this is a perspective that has been diminished in a variety of ways and singlehood scholarship has benefitted from single people’s lives being brought more strongly to the fore.

But here are some things that are also part of the experience of singlehood, that happen in the context of unpartnered lives – wishing someone would make you a cup of coffee, missing sex, wanting to cry in someone’s arms after a hard day at work, hoping to meet someone that you can raise a family with. Often the refrain at this point is that you can have all of these things without a romantic partner, but the word can is doing the work in sentences like this. These are all things that, on average, are more accessible when you’re romantically partnered.

The real key here for me is that most people have romantic desire. In singlehood, that romantic desire has to go somewhere and be dealt with somehow. I suspect that if I discussed something like missing sex as part of understanding singlehood I would be accused of taking a “couples-centred” perspective because I would be referring to something that people do primarily as part of a couple. But the myriad ways in which single people’s lives intersect with the absence of a romantic partner are, in my view, also “singles-centred.” All of these are normal parts of many people’s lives lived single.

It seems to me that the only way to split off single people’s wrestling with romantic desire as “couples-centred” is to conceptualize single people as not having romantic desire.

Of course, there are many people without romantic desire, either short- or long-term, and the data show many of them are doing well in singlehood. We should make sure that fact gets proper foregrounding. But work on the real integrative path that I’d like to see singlehood studies take begins when you try to figure out how to integrate and honour the stories of people with no interest in romantic partnership amongst the many more people for whom romantic desire is, in fact, “singles-centred.”

How should we do right by single people?

It’s understandable that when you think about the ways in which single people have been devalued that you would want to make sure singles are shown in a positive light. I think comparing singles’ devaluation to that of queer or Black people as Dr. DePaulo’s paper did is an overreach, but there is a middle ground to be found here that acknowledges that there are social trials for single people to endure. So I would assume that it is with good intentions that one would want to foreground the positives of singlehood and keep narratives free of a “couples-centered” perspective that might suggest that singlehood often involves a degree of lack.

So then what’s the harm? Isn’t being “singles-centred” the best way to do right by single people?

Consider an alternative perspective. To do well in a difficult world, we need to see that world accurately. To make good choices about how to make our lives what we want them to be, we need good information about the consequences of those choices. If something is causing us problems or interfering with our goals, we need to know what the block is, even (especially, really) if the block is ourselves. A social scientist’s job is to provide that map of reality. The map won’t always make people feel good, but it will show the way to where better lives can be found. The truths it shows may be difficult, but our task is not to shield people from the difficult feelings it provokes. In short, we do right by single people by showing as much of the truth as we can.

And here’s where I think Dr. DePaulo’s review shows that the “singles-centred” perspective falls down, at least the version of it that, in practice, means not discussing what partnership might bring to single people’s lives.

Showing the full picture

In one section of the paper, Dr. DePaulo reviews research showing that single people have more friends than people who are partnered. This is true; a big advantage of being single is the breadth of one’s social network, and Dr. DePaulo reviews that research well. But if your only exposure to research on the social lives of single people was the review in this paper, it would be easy to walk away thinking that singlehood is the best choice for being socially connected.

What the review does not include is work on the depth of social connection – levels of intimacy and social support. Presumably this something most people, including single people, want in their lives. And the literature is clear that people in romantic relationships report higher levels of intimacy and social support than single people. Although I’m sure some of the reason for this is selection effects (e.g., more secure people being more likely to partner), part of the reward for narrowing your social life to focus more strongly on one particular individual like a romantic partner is that you can make the kind of time investment you need to build those levels of closeness.

Understanding the tradeoffs involved in making decisions about relationship status (e.g., more friends versus one deeper relationship) is something both single and coupled people should know. Telling incomplete stories about the typical levels of closeness that come with singlehood or partnership is not, in my opinion, doing single people a favour.

Another example: Well-being and romantic partnership

As part of her evidence for the inappropriateness of deficit narratives of singlehood, Dr. DePaulo reviews literature on the well-being benefits associated with marriage:

Based on more than a dozen studies, we know what happens when people who are not married get married. They get a little happier or more satisfied with their lives at first, but then they go back to being as happy or as unhappy as they were when they were unmarried (Luhmann et al., 2012). One of the most recent studies shows that they eventually become less happy than they were when they were unmarried (Dupuis et al., 2025).

On balance, this is true. As conveyed to me by the authors of the Dupuis et al. (2025) study, it is a misread of that paper to say that the research shows participants becoming less happy than before they were married, but Dr. DePaulo and I agree on the overall state of the marriage literature that marriage typically provides a short-term bump in well-being that fades with time.

I’ve often argued that singlehood studies would benefit from more integration with relationship science. In this case, this finding makes perfect sense from perspectives like that of the Investment Model. The Investment Model would frame marriage as a heightened investment into the relationship that should leave people more dependent on the relationship and thus more committed to it. Primarily that means that getting married shouldn’t change how you feel about the relationship, but should make you think of it differently, as more of a long-term venture. I’d guess that the short-term bump in well-being is partly because it’s fun to plan and throw a big party like a wedding, but a good relationship scientist would tell you that changes in a relationship that are primarily about investment shouldn’t really have a big impact on happiness.

I suspect another place that Dr. DePaulo and I agree is that there are marriage advocates like Dr. Brad Wilcox who overhype the benefits of marriage by doing things like conflating correlation and causation. Personally, I have a lot of ambivalence about marriage as an institution. As with any relationship investment, it can help stabilize a relationship in the long term, but when you see moves to do things like outlaw no fault divorce it’s easy to see how marriage can be a political tool men can use to control women. And in case you’re of a certain ilk, and that sounds too woke for you, it might be worth reading about the evolutionary case for the existence of patriarchy.

But the thing about longitudinal research on marriage is that you’re examining people who start out partnered and end up partnered, so it can’t really tell you anything about the well-being consequences of romantic partnership. As Dr. DePaulo notes, there are best practices to answer that question:

In quantitative research, studies that follow people over time as they become coupled or break up or divorce are far more revealing than studies that compare married and unmarried people at one point in time. They show, for example, whether people who marry become happier or healthier than they were when they were single.

And this is what is curious to me about Dr. DePaulo’s review of the marriage literature, it doesn’t mention the growing research literature following exactly this methodology that indeed shows increases in well-being following transitions from singlehood to partnership (see also these studies that were published after Dr. DePaulo wrote her piece). A common refrain at this point is that increases in well-being from partnership might be because being partnered shields you from hurtful social structural forces like singlism. But such narratives are not parsimonious or satisfying explanations for things like the giant increase in sexual satisfaction that accompanies transition to partnership. You need more than social structural perspectives to fully understand the benefits of partnership.

In general, it seems like it would be important to discuss why one is focusing on the marriage literature but not the partnership literature, and to at least acknowledge that although marriage benefits are overhyped, partnership benefits are real.

In fact, isn’t talking about marriage statistics “couples-centred” since it involves discussing what happens in partnerships and is not about the lives of single people? It gives the impression that, in practice, “couples-centred” doesn’t refer to talking about couples, it refers to talking about couples positively.

Divorced people are single too

And one last point on this front; an argument that is often made in this context is the importance of thinking about different kinds of unmarried people such as never married versus divorced.

If divorced people are less happy and less healthy than people who have never been married, which is typically the case, then including them with the currently married people might tell a different story.

It is true that some, but not all, studies suggest that divorced people have worse well-being outcomes than people who are never married. There’s even very careful, longitudinal research that suggests that this might be because divorce is indeed damaging for people.

But I’ve never been able to figure out why we are supposed to avoid deficit narratives about single people, unless those single people are divorced. I certainly didn’t read any caveats about the harmful effects of stereotypes about divorced people in this part of Dr. DePaulo’s paper, nor concern that repeating these statistics might reinforce deficit narratives about them. This is an aspect of the paper that suggests to me that there is an implicit hierarchy of single people in Dr. DePaulo’s paper, with never married singles residing at the top.

Heroic singlehood can come in many forms

One of my favourite papers in the singlehood literature is Andrew Hostetler’s, “Single by Choice? Assessing and Understanding Voluntary Singlehood Among Mature Gay Men.” In this paper, Dr. Hostetler discusses the distinction between primary coping and secondary coping. With primary coping, you respond to a problem (e.g., your neighbours are being too loud) by directly confronting the problem (e.g., you tell your neighbours to be quieter). With secondary coping, you respond to a problem by adjusting yourself to it (e.g., moving to another room in the house where the noise is reduced). In Western cultures like the United States, cultural values promote primary coping. In cultural contexts like East Asia, secondary coping is promoted as wise and mature.

Dr. Hostetler’s work focuses on the lives of older, gay single men and, among other things, how these men adjust to a singlehood in which many of them would prefer to be partnered but also see their singlehood as voluntary. One of the central messages of this paper, in my reading, is how these men adjust to their circumstances and build the best life they can. I’ve always thought it was probably not a coincidence that these men who have been marginalized by mainstream communities their entire adult life, likely needing to find paths to their best life by adjusting to the less than ideal world they find themselves in, are the ones to raise the experience of secondary coping in singlehood. Gay men might not find it unfamiliar to make the best out of a life where a love they wish they could have can’t be had. In some cultural frames, we would see this as wise, mature, and heroic.

And so it is with this perspective I process this critique in Dr. DePaulo’s paper:

…when the researchers tried to come up with an example of a psychological process associated with thriving, they produced a deficit narrative instead. In their telling, single people who are thriving may have started out wanting a romantic partner, but they never found one. Therefore, they adjust to ‘what is perceived as an unchangeable situation’. That doesn’t sound much like thriving to me. The single people they envision did not get what they wanted, so they settled for their lesser single lives.

The thing that strikes me here is that this perspective disqualifies single people with romantic desire from being considered as thriving. It appears again that an implicit hierarchy is in play, and that singlehood without romantic desire is something like a more pure form of singlehood. But given that the majority of singles desire partnership, a path that winds through unmet desire is surely the most common path to happy singlehood. It’s not clear to me how we can have a complete singlehood studies that does not foreground this experience.

Everyone needs to come to terms with imperfect lives

Indeed, research broadly shows that coming to terms with imperfect life circumstances is what people do on the path to mental health and maturity. For example, Dr. DePaulo writes:

Consider the previous discussion of the finding that single people, beyond age 40, become happier and happier with their single lives. The authors suggested that single people were coming to terms with being single. To flip the script, imagine that married people became happier and happier as they grew older. Would it seem appropriate to suggest that they were coming to terms with being married?

In this case, we don’t need to imagine – research by Bühler et al. shows that, for people in romantic relationships, their satisfaction with their relationship begins to rise after age 40. I think one misperception that people in singlehood studies have about relationship science is that it’s a venue for cheerleading romantic partnership in a one-sided way. But relationship science is filled with work on the problems and perils of romantic relationships such as conflict, violence, and infidelity.

Perhaps the most relevant perspective on people coming to terms with their relationships is again Interdependence Theory, originally developed by Thibault and Kelley, but honed by one of my personal heroes, Caryl Rusbult. One of the foundational concepts is “interdependence dilemmas,” or the idea that as you get closer and closer to a romantic partner, your needs will come more and more into conflict. I think there are a lot of reasons why people feel better about their romantic relationships after age 40 (people in general just start getting happier at that age), but I think part of the reason is that people get better at solving these interdependence dilemmas. That is, people come to terms with the problems associated with their relationship, accept it for what it is, and find ways to work with what they have.

It’s not just academic. It’s personal.

So here’s what’s strange to me about the perspective communicated in Dr. DePaulo’s paper. The reason I foreground coming to terms with singlehood is that it’s part of a process that most people go through in most areas of their lives. It’s about normalizing single people as regular people going through regular things that most people go through. Personally, I think that stands a better chance of having single people better accepted as part of society than an approach that lionizes them with one-sided plaudits. I also think it’s closer to the truth.

If we take seriously the idea that singlehood research is personal, then we need to try to reflect all experiences of singlehood so that every type of single person is seen. I understand that lifelong happy singles often feel that their experience has been diminished and hidden, and maybe they feel that bringing the picture of less happy singles into focus in singlehood studies will undermine the progress that has been made on that front. But leaving the majority of singles out of singlehood studies is just not an option. It’s both. It’s always both. It’s both now. How do we work together to represent this fuller picture?