NOTES

Introduction: the singleton society

1. Genesis 2:18.

2. Aristotle, Politics, Trevor J. Saunders, trans. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 11.

3. Carel van Schaik, Among Orangutans: Red Apes and the Rise of Human Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004).

4. This quote is in Craig Haney and Mona Lynch, “Regulating Prisons of the Future: The Psychological Consequences of Solitary and Supermax Confinement.” New York University Review of Law and Social Change 23 (1997): 477–570.

5. Craig Haney, “Mental Health Issues in Long-Term Solitary and ‘Supermax’ Confinement.” Crime & Delinquency 49, 1 (2003): 124–56.

6. See Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives (New York: Little, Brown, 2009).

7. George Peter Murdock, Social Structure (Oxford: Macmillan, 1949), pp. 2–3.

8. See Pew Social Trends, “The Decline of Marriage and the Rise of New Families,” Washington, D.C., November 18, 2010.

9. The data on group quarters are from Robert Ellickson, The Household: Informal Order Around the Hearth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), p. 40.

10. On the durability of one-person households, see Toni Richards, Michael White, and Amy Ong Tsui, “Changing Living Arrangements: A Hazard Model of Transitions Among Household Types,” Demography 24, no. 1 (1987): 77–97. On their prevalence, see Euromonitor International, “Single Living: How Atomisation—The Rise of Singles and One-Person Households—Is Affecting Consumer Purchasing Habits,” 2008.

11. The statistics on living alone are from the 2006–2008 American Community Survey Three-Year Estimates, published by the U.S. Census Bureau.

12. See Harold Bloom, Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Chelsea House, 1985); David Potter, “American Individualism in the Twentieth Century,” in Ronald Gross and Paul Osterman (eds.), Individualism: Man in Modern Society (New York: Dell, 1971). On Franklin as the “quintessential American,” see Robert Bellah, Richard Madsen, William Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven Tipton, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007 [1981]).

13. See Barry Alan Shain, The Myth of American Individualism: The Protestant Origins of American Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).

14. See Philip Gura, American Transcendentalism: A History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2008).

15. Potter, “American Individualism in the Twentieth Century.”

16. Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), p. 367.

17. The international statistics on living alone come from varied sources and are produced with different methods, and I treat them as good estimates rather than as absolute facts. Here I draw primarily on two sources: Euromonitor International, “Single Living”; and Maria Iacovou and Alexandra Skew, “Household Structure in the EU,” in Anthony B. Atkinson and Eric Marlier, Income and Living Conditions in Europe (Luxembourg: Eurostat Statistical Books, 2010), p. 84. I use different sources for a few additional cities and nations. For Paris, see Philip Ogden and François Schnoebelen, “The Rise of the Small Household: Demographic Change and Household Structure in Paris,” Population, Space, and Place 11 (2005): 251–68. For Japan, see Richard Ronald and Yosuke Hirayama, “Home Alone: The Individualization of Young, Urban Japanese Singles,” Environment and Planning A 41, no. 12 (2009): 2836–54. The European nations with the lowest rates of living alone are war-torn Kosovo, where in 2003 just 2 percent of all households had one resident, and impoverished Albania, where in 2001 only 5 percent of all households had a single dweller. This is consistent with the observations of Yale law professor Robert Ellickson, who writes, “As a nation becomes more prosperous, its households generally shrink in size.” See Ellickson, The Household, p. 35. For Kosovo and Albania, see Sasha Tsenkova, Housing Policy Reforms in Post-Socialist Europe: Lost in Transition (Heidelberg: Physica-Verlag, 2009), p. 115.

18. See Euromonitor International, “Single Living.”

19. See Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper Perennial, 1962 [1942]). p. 157.

20. The survey figures are reported in Frank Furstenberg Jr., Sheela Kennedy, Vonnie McLoyd, Rubén Rumbaut, and Richard Settersten Jr., “Growing Up Is Harder to Do,” Contexts 3, no. 3 (2004): 36.

21. Andrew Cherlin. The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today (New York: Knopf, 2009), p. 31.

22. The “community of limited liability” concept comes from Morris Janowitz, The Community Press in an Urban Setting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967). I should note that in the 2000s Americans were moving less often than they had in previous decades. See Claude Fischer, Made in America: A Social History of American Culture and Character (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).

23. Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim, Individualization: Institutionalized Individualism and Its Social and Political Consequences (London: Sage, 2002), p. xxii.

24. See Claudia Goldin, Lawrence F. Katz, and Ilyana Kuziemko, “The Homecoming of American College Women: The Reversal of the College Gender Gap,” National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 12139, 2006.

25. See Mitra Toossi, “A Century of Change: The U.S. Labor Force, 1950–2000,” Monthly Labor Review (May 2002): 15–28. Although women’s compensation continues to lag behind men’s, a growing number of women do well enough to become financially independent and, in turn, domestically independent, too. As the international trends suggest, when women can live alone without enduring poverty, a great many of them will.

26. Women’s economic independence is not the only reason for the increase in divorce. Legal reforms, most notably the no-fault divorce laws that became common during the 1970s, have allowed a dissatisfied spouse to terminate a marriage without accusing the partner of any wrongdoings and likely have given divorce rates a gentle nudge upward. See Andrew Cherlin, Marriage, Divorce, Remarriage, third edition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992).

27. See Michael Rosenfeld, The Age of Independence: Interracial Unions, Same-Sex Unions, and the Changing American Family (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007).

28. Telephone use rates are from the U.S. Census and reported in Inventors and Inventions (Tarrytown, NY: Marshall Cavendish, 2008).

29. Ethan Watters, Urban Tribes: A Generation Redefines Friendship, Family, and Commitment (New York: Bloomsbury, 2003).

30. See Claude Fischer and Michael Hout, Century of Difference: How America Changed in the Last One Hundred Years (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2006).

31. On England, see Steven Iliffe et al.,“Are Elderly People Living Alone an At-Risk Group?” British Medical Journal 305 (1992): 1001–4. On mental health in the United States, see Robert Michael, Victor Fuchs, and Sharon Scott, “Changes in the Propensity to Live Alone: 1950–1976,” Demography 17, 1 (1980): 39–56. For the survey, see Emily Grundy and Michael Murphy, “Marital Status and Family Support for the Oldest-Old in Great Britain,” in Jean-Marie Robin et al. (eds.), Human Longevity, Individual Life Duration, and the Growth of the Oldest-Old Population, Volume 4 (New York: Springer, 2006), pp. 415–36.

32. See Dora Costa, The Evolution of Retirement: An American Economic History, 1880–1990 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

33. See Ellickson, The Household, p. 39.

34. According to one rigorous sociological study: “In general, persons living alone are not fundamentally more socially isolated than others in comparable marital situations, and they are generally more likely to be socially integrated outside the household.” See Duane Alwin, Philip Converse, and Steven Martin, “Living Arrangements and Social Integration.”

35. See Jacqueline Olds and Richard Schwartz, The Lonely American: Drifting Apart in the Twenty-first Century (Boston: Beacon Press, 2008), pp. 2, 135. The article on social isolation is Michael McPherson, Lynn Smith-Lovin, and Matthew Brashears, “Social Isolation in America: Changes in Core Discussion Networks over Two Decades,” American Sociological Review 71 (2006): 353–75. The response is Claude Fischer, “The 2004 Finding of Shrunken Social Networks: An Artifact?” American Sociological Review 74 (2009): 657–69.

36. John Cacioppo has done the most cutting-edge research on loneliness. For a synthesis, see John Cacioppo and William Patrick, Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection (New York: Norton, 2008).

37. Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher. The Case for Marriage: Why Married People Are Happier, Healthier, and Better Off Financially (New York: Doubleday, 2000).

38. See Debra Umberson, Kristi Williams, Daniel Powers, Hui Liu, and Belinda Needham, “You Make Me Sick: Marital Quality and Health over the Life Course,” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 47 (March 2006): 1–16.

39. One great exception is the writing of Vivian Gornick, and in particular her arresting book Approaching Eye Level (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996).

40. Jenna Appelbaum, Jill Conte, Jane Jones, Sarah Kaufman, Isadora Levy, Allison McKim, Elena Portacolone, Nerea Puzole, Jason Stanley, and I conducted interviews with people who live alone, as well as with service providers and family members who care for them. Throughout this book, I use phrases such as “my interviews” and “tells me” rather than “our interviews” or “tells us.” The reason is primarily stylistic, but in the social sciences it is not unusual for the principal investigator of a large-scale interview project to use this language.

Chapter 1: Going Solo

1. See Jemele Hill, “Kickball Carnival in Las Vegas,” ESPN.com. October 16, 2009; and “Nobody Lost Their Virginity at Hipster Kickball Prom,” Gawker, September 22, 2008.

2. Rosenfeld, The Age of Independence, p. 6.

3. Younger adults, between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four, are also not much more likely to live with their parents than they were several decades ago. In 1960, for instance, 52 percent of young men and 35 percent of young women lived at home, compared with 53 percent of men and 46 percent of women in 2005. The data on young adults living with parents are from the U.S. Census Bureau and are publicly available at www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0193723.html.

4. See Rosenfeld, The Age of Independence; and Sharon Jayson, “‘Boomerang’ Generation Mostly Hype,” USA Today, March 14, 2007.

5. The historic data on living alone come from Wendy Wang and Rich Morin, “Home for the Holidays . . . And Every Other Day,” Washington, D.C., Pew Research Center, November 24, 2009. See also Elizabeth Fussell and Frank Furstenberg Jr., “The Transition to Adulthood During the Twentieth Century,” in Richard Settersten Jr. et al. (eds.). On the Frontier of Adulthood: Theory, Research, and Public Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), pp. 29–75.

6. Peter Brown, 1971. “The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity,” Journal of Roman Studies 61 (1971): 82–83. On China, see Aat Vervoorn, Men of the Cliffs and Caves: The Development of the Chinese Eremitic Tradition to the End of the Han Dynasty (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1990), p. 3.

7. For a rich account of the monastic tradition in several world cultures, see Isabel Colegate, A Pelican in the Wilderness: Hermits, Solitaries, and Recluses (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 2002). And see Anthony Storr, Solitude: A Return to the Self (New York: Free Press, 1988).

8. Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in Donald Levine (ed.), On Individuality and Social Forms (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971 [1903]).

9. Ibid.

10. See Howard Chudacoff, The Age of the Bachelor: Creating an American Subculture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). The data on single men between ages twenty-five and thirty-four are from George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1991), p. 136.

11. Quoted in Paul Groth, Living Downtown: The History of Residential Hotels (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 7.

12. Quotes are from Groth, Living Downtown, p. 23. Walt Whitman, in Emory Holloway and Ralph Adimari, eds., New York Dissected (New York: Rufus Rockwell Wilson, 1936 [1856]), pp. 96–97. Harvey Zorbaugh, The Gold Coast and the Slum: A Sociological Study of Chicago’s Near North Side (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983 [1929]), pp. 73–80.

13. Zorbaugh, The Gold Coast and the Slum, pp. 73–80.

14. Christine Stansell, American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century (New York: Metropolitan, 2000), pp. 6–7. Ross Wetzsteon, Republic of Dreams: Greenwich Village: The American Bohemia, 1910–1960 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998).

15. Stansell, American Moderns, pp. 14, 27–28, 33. Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

16. “The place where everything happens first” is from Wetzsteon, Republic of Dreams. See Anna Alice Chapin, Greenwich Village (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1917); and Luther Harris, Around Washington Square: An Illustrated History of Greenwich Village (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). On converting tenements and houses into small apartments, see Caroline Ware, Greenwich Village, 1920–1930 (New York: Octagon, 1935), p. 19. Groth (Living Downtown, p. 63) writes that by the 1920s women were the majority residents of many hotel residences, from New York City to Seattle. It’s worth noting that Shakespeare’s Benedick ultimately reverses his position on matrimony. By the end of Much Ado About Nothing, he is ready to commit to Beatrice.

17. See Ware, Greenwich Village, pp. 38–43.

18. Chauncey, Gay New York, chapter six.

19. Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York: Norton, 1974), pp. 40–41.

20. Helen Gurley Brown, Sex and the Single Girl (New York: Bernard Geis, 1962), p. 13.

21. On Brown, see Jennifer Scanlon, Bad Girls Go Everywhere: The Life of Helen Gurley Brown (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: Norton, 1963); and Brown, Sex and the Single Girl, pp. 12, 18.

22. Brown, Sex and the Single Girl, pp. 12, 16.

23. Sharon Marcus, “Placing Rosemary’s Baby,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 5 (1993), no. 3: 121–40.

24. Brown, Sex and the Single Girl, p. 16.

25. Bill Osgerby, “The Bachelor Pad as Cultural Icon,” Journal of Design History 18 (2005), no. 1: 99–114; Barbara Ehrenreich, The Hearts of Men (New York: Vintage, 2005), p. 42.

26. See Susan Thistle, From Marriage to Market: The Transformation of Women’s Lives at Work (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), p. 102. Mitra Toossi, “A Century of Change.”

27. The divorce statistics are published by the National Center for Health Statistics, “Advance Report of Final Divorce Statistics, 1981,” Monthly Vital Statistics Report 32 (1984), no. 9: 5. The statistic on divorces from 1970 to 1977 is from Chudacoff, The Age of the Bachelor, p. 271.

28. Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, The Divorce Culture: Rethinking Our Commitments to Marriage and Family (New York: Knopf, 1996), pp. 4–5.

29. Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 84; Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), p. 89; Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim, Reinventing the Family: In Search of New Lifestyles (Oxford: Polity, 2002).

30. David Sarasohn, “Modern Love: A Joint Account That Underwrites Our Marriage,” New York Times, December 11, 2009.

31. John Adams, Housing America in the 1980s (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1988), p. 48.

32. The data are from the U.S. Census, and are available at www.census.gov/hhes/www/housing/census/historic/livalone.html.

33. The data on rooms per child are from Rosenfeld, The Age of Independence, p. 135; the data on square feet in the typical home are from the National Association of Home Builders.

34. Waln Brown and Thomas Newman, “Latchkey Kids,” Tallahassee, FL: William Gladden Foundation, 2005.

35. European Commission, “Demography Report: Meeting Social Needs in an Ageing Society,” chapter two. Data for Canada come from Statistics Canada; for Japan, see the Statistics Bureau and the Director-General for Policy Planning of Japan; for the increase in floor space within homes, see Ann Waswo, Housing in Postwar Japan: A Social History (London: Routledge Curzon, 2002), p. 110; and for the U.S. see the Bureau of Labor Statistics (www.bls.gov/opub/uscs/1950.pdf).

36. Annette Lareau, Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), p. 39.

37. Benjamin Spock’s book is now in its eighth edition, and is currently called Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care. See the discussion of this in Rosenfeld, The Age of Independence, p. 133.

38. Richard Ferber, Solve Your Child’s Sleep Problems (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986), pp. 38–40.

39. See Lisa Chapman, “MU Housing Creates Dorm Singles to Meet Students’ Privacy Demands,” The Miami Student, February 17, 2006; Shimmy Edwards, “Single Dorms Are in High Demand,” The GW Hatchet, March 3, 2008; Tracy Jan, “BU Dorm Offers a Study in Luxury,” Boston Globe, September 2, 2009.

40. Quoted in Tracy Jan, “BU Dorm Offers a Study in Luxury.”

Chapter 2: The Capacity to Live Alone

1. Bella DePaulo, “How I Discovered That Living Single Was My True Happily Ever After,” Onely blog, September 26, 2009.

2. Ethan Watters, Urban Tribes.

3. See Lori Gottlieb, “Marry Him! The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough,” Atlantic Monthly, March 2008; and the book by the same name (New York: Dutton, 2010).

4. In fact, as DePaulo reports, those who stay single and live alone over time are relatively successful at managing the challenges that stem from their lifestyle. Consider a long-running (more than twenty years) German survey that asks more than 30,000 participants to rate their happiness annually. On average, those who remain single throughout the study self-report slightly lower happiness than those who get and remain married, but they also report higher happiness than those who marry and then divorce or become widowed. A similar study, conducted by Dutch demographers over eighteen years, got similar results. Respondents who had remained married or remained single reported relatively high happiness, whereas those who had coupled up and then separated experienced a sharp drop in life satisfaction, followed by a gradual increase over time. DePaulo discusses the German study in Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After (New York: St. Martin’s, 2006), pp. 35–40; she also compares the two studies in her Psychology Today blog at www.psychologytoday.com/blog/living-single/200912/another-longitudinal-study-satisfaction. The Dutch study is Judith Soons, Aart Liefbroer, and Matthijs Kalmijn, “The Long-Term Consequences of Relationship Formation for Subjective Well-Being,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 71 (2009), no. 5: 1254–70.

5. Rose M. Kreider and Jason M. Fields, “Number, Timing, and Duration of Marriages and Divorces: 1996,” U.S. Census Reports, 2002.

6. See Matthew Bramlett and William Mosher, “First Marriage Dissolution, Divorce, and Remarriage: United States,” U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2001. The statistics on never-married Americans are reported in Eduardo Porter and Michelle O’Donnell, “Facing Middle Age with No Degree, and No Wife,” New York Times, August 6, 2006.

7. See Laura Kipnis, Against Love: A Polemic (New York: Pantheon, 2003), p. 23.

8. See Matthew Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work (New York: Penguin Press, 2009); Daniel Pink, Free Agent Nation: How America’s New Independent Workers Are Transforming the Way We Live (New York: Warner, 2001), pp. 10–11, 103.

9. For an extensive report on the appeal of social life in professional office spaces, see Arlie Hochschild, The Time Bind: When Home Becomes Work and Work Becomes Home (New York: Metropolitan, 1997).

10. One important study of social networks and time use found that “persons living alone appear to be no less attached outside the household, and in some instances have higher levels of such contact.” Duane Alwin, Philip Converse, and Steven Martin, “Living Arrangements and Social Integration,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 47 (1985): 319–33.

11. See the Pew Internet & American Life Project report “Social Isolation and New Technology: How the Internet and Mobile Phones Impact Americans’ Social Networks,” Washington, D.C., November 2009, pp. 3–4.

12. See “Singles in the U.S.: The New Nuclear Family,” Rockville, Md.: Packaged Facts, 2007.

13. The concept that loneliness is a social pain comes from the psychologist John Cacioppo, who has also argued that those who feel lonely are not more likely to be alone than those who do not. In fact, one important scholarly article based on a random national sample of 2,248 adults age eighteen and over found: “Contrary to what would be predicted . . . unmarried persons who live alone are in no worse, and on some indicators are in better, mental health than unmarried persons who live with others.” See Michael Hughes and Walter Gove, “Living Alone, Social Integration, and Mental Health,” American Journal of Sociology 87 (1981), no. 1: 48–74. The authors look closely at the question of whether there is a selection bias that determines who lives alone—i.e., are people who live alone different from those who live with others, and are differences that are unrelated to their residential status the things that most affect their mental health. Their conclusion: “The data clearly suggest that in a representative population, a process of social selection related to poor mental health does not appear to play a significant role in determining who will live alone” (p. 62).

14. This is an overstatement, since recent research shows that men over forty produce less sperm than their younger counterparts and that their children face higher risks of conditions such as autism and schizophrenia. See Roni Rabin, “It Seems the Fertility Clock Ticks for Men, Too,” New York Times, February 26, 2007.

15. Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963).

16. Waite and Gallagher, The Case for Marriage, p. 77.

17. Gretchen Livingston and D’Vera Cohn, “Childlessness Up Among All Women; Down among Women with Advanced Degrees,” Washington, D.C.: Pew Research Center, 2010.

18. See Richard Fry and D’Vera Cohn, “Women, Men, and the New Economics of Marriage,” Washington, D.C.: Pew Research Center, 2010.

19. See Judith Jones, The Pleasures of Cooking for One (New York: Knopf, 2009).

20. Kari Bodnarchuk, “A Woman Traveling Alone? The World Can Be Your Oyster, Too,” Boston Globe, March 15, 2009.

21. Other hotels are also starting to market to solo tourists. The Fairmont Miramar hotel in Santa Monica has a “Single and the City” package, which includes tips on how to tour the city on your own, and the Westin St. John resort offers a three-night “solo-cation,” complete with private pool. A number of new travel agencies offer group trips designed for those in search of romance as well as special offers, such as the Solo Super Saver from Singles Travel International, for those who just want a good deal when they are alone. These changes are outliers. Solo travelers see all the special things the travel industry does for couples and families and say that it has yet to make singles feel at home when they are away.

22. Ellen Rand, “When Single Women Buy Homes,” New York Times, December 20, 1981.

23. Data on home buyers are from the National Association of Realtors, “Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers,” 2009; the quote is from Liz Lemmer, “Singles Taking Stride in the Home Buying Market,” Medill News Service, February 17, 2007.

24. Fry and Cohn, “Women, Men, and the New Economics of Marriage.”

25. The National Consumer Survey data used in the Packaged Facts study show that 24 percent of singles self-report as “TV addicts,” compared to 19 percent of married individuals (“Singles in the U.S.,” p. 165).

26. According to its Web site, Single Mothers by Choice “is not an advocacy group. It is not fair to urge a woman who may not have the emotional or financial resources, or who does not feel she would be able to handle single parenting, to get into an impractical or overextended situation. Single parenting is difficult enough for the woman who is sure and prepared. In the absence of a good partnership, and with the rate of divorce as high as it is, we feel that being raised by a caring and competent single parent is definitely a viable option.” See www.singlemothersbychoice.org/about/philosophy/.

27. Katherine Grier, Pets in America: A History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), p. 315; Alan Beck and N. Marshall Meyers, “Health Enhancement and Companion Animal Ownership,” Annual Review of Public Health 17 (1996): 247–57.

28. The census data on pet ownership are available online at www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2010/tables/10s1204.xls.

29. For some who live alone, cats do occasionally substitute for human companions. On the blog Onely, which promotes and affirms the solo lifestyle, a graduate student confesses: “I have two new men in my life . . . I spend all my non-work hours with Alvin or Theo. Several times in the last week I’ve postponed phone calls to friends and family so that I could hang out with, cook for, or cuddle with a new flame. I’m sleep deprived because we stay up too late laughing and talking. When people do call to find out where I’ve been, I barely ask about their lives, but instead I blather on and on about how handsome Theo is or how smart and funny Alvin seems . . . Alvin is adventurous and brings out my wild side, but Theo is more shy and has a chronic worried look on his face that makes me want to comfort him. I’m lucky I don’t have to choose between them, because they seem to enjoy sharing my lap. Oh, my poor matchmaking coworkers, who don’t have kittens . . . I will try to comfort and support them.” See “OMG, I’m One of THEM” at http://onely.org/2010/02/06/omg-im-one-of-them/.

30. Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm, 2003), p. 12.

31. Beck and Meyers, “Health Enhancement and Companion Animal Ownership,” pp. 247–53.

32. Lee Rainie and Mary Madden, “Not Looking for Love: Romance in America,” Washington, D.C.: Pew Research Center, 2006.

Chapter 3: Separating

1. In 2008 about 30 million of the 93 million unmarried Americans were either divorced (25 million) or separated (5 million). Within five years, nearly one in four marriages in the United States results in separation or divorce. These data are from U.S. Census, “Number, Timing, and Duration of Marriages and Divorces: 2001,” 2005, p. 6, available at www.census.gov/prod/2005pubs/p70-97.pdf.

2. Cherlin, The Marriage-Go-Round, p. 4.

3. The data on remarriage come from a 2002 report by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and are available online at www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/series/sr_23/sr23_022.pdf.

4. For one careful analysis, see Richard Peterson, “A Re-Evaluation of the Economic Consequences of Divorce,” American Sociological Review 61 (1996): 528–36. Peterson shows that the typical decline in men’s and women’s standard of living after divorce is 10 percent and 27 percent, respectively, numbers that are substantial but actually lower than many previous estimates.

5. The survey, which was conducted by Knowledge Networks, is based on a nationally representative sample of 1,147 people. See Xenia P. Montenegro, “The Divorce Experience: A Study of Divorce at Midlife and Beyond,” Washington, D.C.: AARP, 2004. The statistics on frequency of sexual activity appear on pp. 45–49. An academic study of American sexual practices published in the British Medical Journal adds support for the AARP’s findings. Drawing on two nationally representative samples of the U.S. population, scholars at the University of Chicago found that men and women who live with a partner are significantly more likely to report being sexually active in the previous six months than those who live alone, and the disparity increases with age. For instance, 72 percent of men ages twenty-five to fifty-four who do not live with a partner report sexual activity in the previous six months, compared to 58 percent of women. Among those ages sixty-five to seventy-four, 38 percent of solo-dwelling men but only 4 percent of solo-dwelling women report sexual activity in the previous six months. See Stacy Tessler Lindau and Natalia Gavrilova, “Sex, Health, and Years of Sexually Active Life Gained Due to Good Health,” British Medical Journal 240 (2010): c810.

6. The study published in the British Medical Journal confirms that gender differences in interest in sex are widespread, and that they grow with age. Among those between fifty-five and sixty-four years old, 50 percent of men who live without a partner say they are “interested in sex,” compared to 24 percent of women who live without a partner. Among those ages sixty-five to seventy-four, 31 percent of solo-dwelling men and 8 percent of solo-dwelling women say they are “interested in sex.” Lindau and Gavrilova, “Sex, Health, and Years of Sexually Active Life,” p. 5.

7. The data on remarriage come from Cherlin, Marriage, Divorce, Remarriage; and the AARP study “The Divorce Experience.”

8. In their study of elderly Londoners, Haines and Hurlbert found that women with broad social networks were actually more likely to experience distressing events, such as the death or illness of a friend, than women with fewer ties. See Valerie Haines and Jeanne Hurlbert, “Network Range and Health,” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 33 (1992): 254–66.

9. These numbers are based on an original analysis of the GSS data from 2002 to 2008, conducted by the sociologist Erin Cornwell. According to the psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky, “Studies have shown that, relative to married people, singles are closer to their friends and have more frequent contact with them and that lifelong single older women tend to have close to a dozen devoted decades-long friends.” See Sonja Lyubomirsky, The How of Happiness: The Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want (New York: Penguin Press, 2007), p. 147.

10. The data on loneliness come from Cornwell’s analysis of the GSS.

11. Ibid.

12. See T. M. Luhrmann, “The Art of Hearing God: Absorption, Dissociation, and Contemporary American Spirituality,” Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality 5 (2005), no. 2: 133–57.

13. The data on church attendance are from Cornwell’s analysis of the GSS. See Herbert Anderson and Freda Gardner, Living Alone (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1996), p. 24.

14. Support for this skepticism about the quality of life within marriage comes from the General Social Survey. One recent study found that “only one-third of all marriages were both happy and intact after sixteen years.” Paul Amato, Alan Booth, David Johnson, and Stacy Rogers, Alone Together (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 2.

15. See Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982); and Deborah Belle, “Gender Differences in Children’s Social Networks and Supports,” in Deborah Belle (ed.), Children’s Networks and Social Supports (Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 1989), p. 179.

Chapter 4: Protecting the Self

1. William Deresiewicz, “The End of Solitude,” The Chronicle of Higher Education: Chronicle Review 55 (2009), no. 21; and Dalton Conley, The Elsewhere Society (New York: Pantheon, 2009), p. 7.

2. See Sandra Smith, Lone Pursuit: Distrust and Defensive Individualism among the Black Poor (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2007), p. 22.

3. Phil’s account of the benefits of going solo are reminiscent of the arguments made by the late psychologist Anthony Storr in his book Solitude. Storr’s thesis was that solitude, used wisely, allows a “return to the self” that enhances the creative abilities of great writers and artists. He quotes Edward Gibbon: “‘Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius; and the uniformity of a work denotes the hand of a single artist.’” Storr, who was careful to note that solitude can take a constructive or destructive course depending on the way it’s used, reports that “many of the world’s greatest thinkers have not reared families or formed close personal ties.” Storr, Solitude, p. 1.

4. On the reluctance of employers to hire men with criminal records, particularly African Americans, see Devah Pager, Marked: Crime, Race, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

5. See Porter and O’Donnell, “Facing Middle Age”; and Richard Fry and D’Vera Cohn, “Women, Men, and the New Economics of Marriage.”

6. The University of Wisconsin sociologist Alice Goffman makes a similar observation in her ethnographic study of young black men with criminal records in Philadelphia: “Suspicious even of those closest to them, young men cultivate unpredictability or altogether avoid institutions, places, and relations on which they formerly relied.” Few of these men actually live alone, but the fact that their survival strategies involve avoiding potentially helpful networks and institutions means that they are less likely to get out of poverty. See Alice Goffman, “On the Run: Wanted Men in a Philadelphia Ghetto,” American Sociological Review 74 (2009), no. 3: 339–57.

7. Psychologist Randy Frost and social work scholar Gail Steketee estimate that 2 percent to 5 percent of the American population—between 6 million and 15 million people—hoard enough to affect their lives, and argue that hoarding has become a significant problem in cities. They note that, like Mary Ann, hoarders shift their behavior to emphasize interaction with objects rather than people. See their book Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010).

Chapter 5: Together Alone

1. Ethan Watters discusses the problem of organizing around the stigmatized “singles” concept in chapter five of Urban Tribes.

2. Kris Marsh, William Darity Jr., Philip Cohen, Lynne Casper, and Danielle Salters, “The Emerging Black Middle Class: Single and Living Alone,” Social Forces 86, no. 2: 750, 753.

3. Natalie Nitsche and Hannah Brückner, “Opting Out of the Family? Social Change in Racial Inequality in Family Formation Patterns and Marriage Outcomes among Highly Educated Women,” presentation at the convention of the American Sociological Association, 2009.

4. Marsh et al., “The Emerging Black Middle Class,” p. 740.

5. Page Gardner, “Twenty Million Women, Twenty Million Reasons,” Huffington Post, November 8, 2007.

6. The Women’s Voices, Women Vote report on the 2008 trends, “Unmarried Women in the Electorate: Behind the Numbers,” is available at www.wvwv.org/assets/2010/1/19/Unmarried_Women_in_the_Electorate_-_Behind_the_Numbers.pdf.

7. Women’s Voices, Women Vote/Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, “Unmarried Women Change America,” November 2008.

8. See Women’s Voices, Women Vote, “Unmarried Women in the Electorate: Behind the Numbers.”

9. Packaged Facts, “Singles in the U.S.,” p. 16.

10. Euromonitor International, “Single Living.”

11. See David Brooks, “The Sandra Bullock Trade,” New York Times, March 29, 2010. The response on DePaulo’s Psychology Today blog, Living Single, appeared later the same day. See “David Brooks + Sandra Bullock = Matrimonia” at www.psychologytoday.com/blog/living-single/201003/david-brooks-sandra-bullock-matrimania.

12. Available at http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/26/3/836.short.

Chapter 6: Aging Alone

1. See the U.S. Administration on Aging report, “A Profile of Older Americans 2009,” at www.aoa.gov/AoARoot/Aging_Statistics/Profile/2009/6.aspx; the European Commission report, “Independent Living for the Ageing Society,” at http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/policy_link/brochures/documents/independent_living.pdf; and the Japan Times report at http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20100514x2.html; on China, see Xin Meng and Chuliang Luo, “What Determines Living Arrangements of the Elderly in Urban China,” 2004, http://people.anu.edu.au/xin.meng/living-arrange.pdf; on South Korea, see Young Jin Park, “The Rise of One-Person Householders and their Recent Characteristics in Korea,” Korea Journal of Population and Development 23 (1994), no. 1: 117–29.

2. The data on aging in Europe come from Henry Aaron, “Longer Life Spans: Boon or Burden?” Daedalus, Winter 2006: 9–19. And see Robert William Fogel, The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700–2100: Europe, America, and the Third World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 1.

3. The classic study of increased mortality among the recently widowed is C. Murray Parkes, B. Benjamin, and R. G. Fitzgerald, “Broken Heart: A Statistical Study of Increased Mortality Among Widowers,” British Medical Journal 1, no. 5646 (March 22, 1969): 740–43.

4. About 1.5 million Americans live in a nursing home on any given day, and about 3 million people reside in them over the course of a typical year. Although many nursing homes maintain a high level of quality care, many others—including a disproportionately high number of those recently acquired by private equity groups—do not; federal oversight of them has been criticized by the U.S. Government Accountability Office. See Charles Duhigg, “At Many Homes, More Profit and Less Nursing,” New York Times, September 23, 2007.

5. See Benjamin Cornwell, Edward Laumann, and L. Philip Schumm, “The Social Connectedness of Older Adults: A National Profile,” American Sociological Review 73 (2008): 185–203. The paper showing constant rates of reported loneliness in England is Christina Victor, Ann Bowling, John Bond, and Sasha Scambler, “Loneliness, Social Isolation, and Living Alone in Later Life,” Research Findings no. 17, Growing Older Programme. Economic & Social Research Council, 2003, www.growingolder.group.shef.ac.uk/ChristinaVic_F17.pdf; the study on the health of people aging alone is Steven Iliffe et al., “Health Risk Appraisal in Older People II: The Implications for Clinicians and Commissioners of Social Isolation Risk in Older People,” British Journal of General Practice 57 (2007), no. 537: 277–82.

6. On the gender disparity in aging, see Deborah Carr, “Widows and Widowers,” in Dennis Peck and Clifton Bryant (eds.), Encyclopedia of Death and the Human Experience (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 2009), pp. 989–95. On the desire to date, see Deborah Carr, “The Desire to Date and Remarry among Older Widows and Widowers,” Journal of Marriage and Family 66 (2006), no. 4: 1051–68.

7. Paula Span, “They Don’t Want to Live with You, Either,” New York Times, March 24, 2009. The data on widows living with children are from V. Joseph Hotz, Kathleen McGarry, and Emily Wiemers. “Living Arrangements among Elderly Women in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics,” PSID Conference on Pensions, Private Accounts, and Retirement Savings over the Life Course, November 20–21, 2008.

8. Deborah Carr, “The Desire to Date and Remarry.”

9. Yvonne Michael, Lisa Berkman, Graham Colditz, and Ichiro Kawachi, “Living Arrangements, Social Integration, and Change in Functional Health Status,” American Journal of Epidemiology 153 (2001), no. 2: 123–31.

10. This is consistent with findings from some qualitative research on the dating practices of elderly women. See Kate Davidson, “Gender Differences in New Partnership Choices and Constraints for Older Widows and Widowers,” Ageing International 27 (2002): 43–60.

11. The Stanford psychologist Laura Carstensen has developed the socioemotional selectivity theory to explain this transformation among the elderly. See Laura Carstensen, “Social and Emotional Patterns in Adulthood: Support for Socioemotional Selectivity Theory,” Psychology and Aging 7 (1982) no. 3: 331–38.

12. See Martha Albertson Fineman, The Autonomy Myth: A Theory of Dependency (New York: New Press, 2005).

13. For instance, in his classic study of urban social networks, Claude Fischer reports that “old men were the most isolated” of all social groups. Claude Fischer, To Dwell Among Friends: Personal Networks in Town and City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 253. Erin Cornwell’s analysis of recent General Social Survey data reveals the same pattern.

14. The Commonwealth Fund Commission on Elderly People Living Alone, “Aging Alone: Profiles and Projections.” Baltimore, Md., 1987.

15. Among elderly women, roughly 4 in 10 Latinas and African Americans who live alone are impoverished, compared to about 2.5 Asians and 1.5 whites. The trends are similar for solo-dwelling elderly men: 3.5 in 10 Latinos are poor, compared to about 3 African Americans, 2 Asians, and 1 white. These figures are from the 2009 American Community Survey and are reported in Deborah Carr, “Golden Years? Poverty Among Older Americans,” Contexts, Winter 2010: 62–63.

16. Neal Krause, “Neighborhood Deterioration and Social Isolation in Later Life,” International Journal of Aging and Human Development 36 (1993): 9–38.

Chapter 7: Redesigning Solo Life

1. Dolores Hayden, Redesigning the American Dream: Gender, Housing, and Family Life, 2d ed. (New York: Norton, 2002).

2. See, for instance, the ratings available on the U.S. News and World Report Web site: http://health.usnews.com/senior-housing.

3. See “Nursing Homes: Business as Usual,” Consumer Reports, 2006, www.consumerreports.org/health/healthy-living/health-safety/nursing-homes-9-06/overview/0609_nursing-homes_ov.htm. The report on Illinois nursing homes is David Jackson and Gary Marx, “Illinois Nursing Homes Mix Felons, Seniors,” Chicago Tribune, September 29, 2009. In Heat Wave, I reported on a similar practice in Chicago’s public housing for seniors. Residents I interviewed complained that the presence of violent neighbors discouraged them from using public spaces and kept them locked in at home.

4. Duhigg, “At Many Homes, More Profit and Less Nursing.”

5. Nicholas Roy, Gregory Baltus, Dieter Fox, Francine Gemperle, Jennifer Goetz, Tad Hirsch, Dimitris Margaritis, Mike Montemerlo, Joelle Pineau, Jamie Schulte, and Sebastian Thrun, “Towards Personal Service Robots for the Elderly,” 2000, available at several Web sites, including http://www.ri.cmu.edu/publication_view.html?pub_id=3390.

6. Robert Sparrow and Linda Sparrow, “In the Hands of Machines? The Future of Aged Care,” Minds and Machines 16 (2006) no. 2: 141–61.

7. Ibid.

8. The Kompaï is profiled in Brian Horowitz. “Will Robots Help the Elderly Live at Home Longer?” Scientific American, June 21, 2010.

9. See George Ford and Sherry Ford, “Internet Use and Depression among the Elderly,” The Phoenix Center, 2009, Policy Paper 38, www.phoenix-center.org/DepressionOct152009.pdf.

10. See Jim Moore, “Deep Economic Impact,” Assisted Living Executive, January–February 2008: 10–15; and Paula Span, “Assisted Living: Back to the Future,” New York Times, December 28, 2009.

11. Jane Gross, “The $500,000 Dilemma,” New York Times, July 2, 2009.

12. Ibid.

13. See, for instance, Debra Dobbs, J. Kevin Eckert, Bob Rubinstein, Lynn Keimig, Leanne Clark, Ann Christine Frankowski, and Sheryl Zimmerman, “An Ethnographic Study of Stigma and Ageism in Residential Care or Assisted Living,” The Gerontologist 48 (2008), no. 4: 517–26. The fact that there is cruelty in these cultural practices should not call into question the extent to which these residential communities also provide care and support. But it does mean we shouldn’t romanticize them. See Arlie Hochschild, The Unexpected Community: Portrait of an Old Age Subculture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973); and Barbara Myerhoff, Number Our Days: A Triumph of Continuity and Caring among Jewish Old People in an Urban Ghetto (New York: Touchstone, 1980).

14. See the 2009 report “Coming Home: Affordable Assisted Living” by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

15. Jo Williams, “Innovative Solutions for Averting a Potential Resource Crisis—The Case of One-Person Households in England and Wales,” Environmental Development and Sustainability 9 (2007): 325–54.

16. David Owen, “Green Manhattan: Why New York Is the Greenest City in the U.S.,” The New Yorker, October 18, 2004.

Conclusion

1. There is a myth that Sweden has a high suicide rate, and another that the high rates of living alone there are partly responsible. But the most recent World Health Organization statistics debunk them. The reported Swedish suicide rate, 26 per 100,000 residents, places it far below the top twenty-five high-risk nations. The nations where suicide is reported to be more common include Austria, Belgium, China, Finland, France, Japan, Poland, Russia, South Korea, Sri Lanka, and Uruguay. See www.who.int/mental_health/prevention/suicide_rates/en/.

2. David Popenoe, “Beyond the Nuclear Family: A Statistical Portrait of the Changing Family in Sweden,” Journal of Marriage and Family 49 (1987), no. 1: 180.

3. See Lars-Erik Borgegård and Jim Kemeny, “Sweden: High-Rise Housing for a Low-Density Country,” in Richard Turkington, Ronald van Kempen, and F. Wassenberg (eds.), High-Rise Housing in Europe: Current Trends and Future Prospects (Delft: Delft University Press, 2004), pp. 31–48.

4. All the major Swedish political parties, including the neoliberals, who advocate more laissez-faire economic policies, support sustaining a welfare state that is far more generous than those found in nations in Europe and North America where collective living is more common. They have to, since the overwhelming majority of Swedish voters believe that robust public programs (for housing, health, education, and the like) allow them to become strong and autonomous individuals, and they demand that their political representatives, even the conservative and libertarian ones, promote the common good.

5. A news story about the report is here: www.dn.se/sthlm/s-lovar-50000-nya-bostader-i-stockholms-lan.

6. See the building’s site at www.fardknappen.se/fardknappen.se/In_English.html.

7. The study of supportive housing in San Francisco is Tia Martinez and Martha Burt, “Impact of Permanent Supportive Housing on the Use of Acute Care Health Services by Homeless Adults,” Psychiatric Services 57 (2006): 992–99. The study in Seattle is Mary E. Larimer, Daniel K. Malone, Michelle D. Garner, et al., “Health Care and Public Service Use and Costs Before and After Provision of Housing for Chronically Homeless Persons with Severe Alcohol Problems,” JAMA 301 (2009), no. 13: 1349–57.

8. The New York City study is “The Impact of Supportive Housing on Surrounding Neighborhoods: Evidence from New York City,” Furman Center for the Study of Real Estate and Urban Policy, New York, 2008.

9. See “Medicaid Payment for Assisted Living: Current State Practices and Recommendations for Improvement,” National Senior Citizens Law Center, 2010.

10. The quote and the claim that there are about 38 million uncompensated family caregivers come from the White House Middle Class Task Force, www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/Fact_Sheet-Middle_Class_Task_Force.pdf. Advocacy groups estimate that the annual value of the care given by family members is approximately $375 billion.

11. For instance, the commentator Paul Begala calls baby boomers “the most self-centered, self-seeking, self-interested, self-absorbed, self-indulgent, self-aggrandizing generation in American history.” See Paul Begala, “The Worst Generation,” Esquire, April 2000.

12. These numbers are based on an original analysis of the GSS data from 2002 to 2008 conducted by the sociologist Erin Cornwell, and on the data in the Packaged Facts report “Singles in the U.S.”

13. Cacioppo and Patrick, Loneliness, p. 13.

14. Christakis and Fowler, Connected, pp. 292, 305.