INTRODUCTION:
THE SINGLETON SOCIETY

IN THE BEGINNING of the Old Testament, God creates the world one day at a time: The heavens and the earth. Water. Light. Day and night. Living species of every kind. After each creation, God declares: “It is good.” But the tone changes when God makes Adam. Suddenly, God pronounces the first thing that is not good, lo tov: “It is not good that the man should be alone.”¹ So God makes Eve, and Adam is no longer on his own.

In time, injunctions against being alone moved from theology to philosophy and literature. In Politics, Aristotle wrote, “The man who is isolated, who is unable to share in the benefits of political association, or has no need to share because he is already self-sufficient, is no part of the polis, and must therefore be either a beast or a god.” The Greek poet Theocritus insisted that “man will ever stand in need of man,” and the Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius proclaimed that “human beings are social animals.”²

So, too, are other animals. (Aristotle, alas, was only half right.) Beasts will indeed live on their own when conditions favor it, particularly when there is a shortage of food. Otherwise most species fare better in groups. Collective living carries some costs, including competition for status and occasional outbursts of violence. But the benefits—protection from predators, cooperative hunting, efficient reproduction, among others—can easily outweigh them. Our closest animal relatives, the apes, are typically social and live in stable units. Even orangutans, which are notoriously solitary, live with their mothers during their first seven or eight years, and as the Dutch primatologist Carel van Schaik has discovered, orangutans living in a calorically rich swamp forest in Sumatra are “every bit as sociable” as their cousins, the chimpanzees.³

Orangutans are not the only misrepresented creatures. Hermit crabs, it turns out, are actually quite social, living in communities of up to one hundred because they cannot thrive alone. One manual for prospective pet owners advises that “it’s best to always have at least two hermit crabs in a tank—if possible at least two of each species.” Not because they need protection or help with food gathering, but for a simpler reason: When alone, hermit crabs get stressed and unhealthy. Their bodies fail them. They may even lose a leg or a claw.

Isolation can also be unbearably stressful for people, as policy makers in different historical eras have recognized. In the ancient world, exile ranked among the most severe forms of punishment, exceeded only by execution. (Though some called exile a fate worse than death.) During the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, modern prison systems popularized the use of solitary confinement because, as the English jurist William Paley put it, isolation “would augment the terror of the punishment” and thereby deter crime.⁴ Today, the United States alone detains roughly 25,000 people in “supermax” prisons where, one prominent psychologist writes, inmates “experience levels of isolation . . . that are more total and complete and literally dehumanized than has been possible in the past.”⁵ A common phrase used to describe this condition conveys one widespread belief about being cut off from others: It is, say both critics and advocates of solitary confinement, a “living death.”

Nothing better expresses the human interest in collective living than the formation of families. Throughout history and in all cultures, families, not individuals, have been the fundamental building blocks of social and economic life. And for good reason. As evolutionary biologists argue, living with others offered a competitive advantage to members of the first human societies because it provided security, access to food, and a means of reproduction. Through natural selection, argue the social scientists Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, our species developed a genetic disposition to establish close social ties.⁶

In 1949, the Yale anthropologist George Peter Murdock published a survey of some 250 “representative cultures” from different eras and diverse parts of the world. He reported, “The nuclear family is a universal human social grouping. Either as the sole prevailing form of the family or as the basic unit from which more complex familial forms are compounded, it exists as a distinct and strongly functional group in every known society. No exception, at least, has come to light.”⁷

Since then, scholars have challenged Murdock’s argument, identifying domestic arrangements, such as the kibbutz, that don’t fit into his nuclear model. Yet their counterexamples are always alternative collectives, typically including more people than the conventional family. Though this debate remains unsettled, there’s one thing both sides would agree on: Human societies, at all times and places, have organized themselves around the will to live with others, not alone.

BUT NOT ANYMORE.

During the past half century, our species has embarked on a remarkable social experiment. For the first time in human history, great numbers of people—at all ages, in all places, of every political persuasion—have begun settling down as singletons.* Until recently, most of us married young and parted only at death. If death came early, we remarried quickly; if late, we moved in with family, or they with us. Now we marry later. (The Pew Research Center reports that the average age of first marriage for men and women is “the highest ever recorded, having risen by roughly five years in the past half century.”)⁸ We divorce, and stay single for years or decades. We survive our spouses, and do whatever we can to avoid moving in with others—even, perhaps especially, our children. We cycle in and out of different living arrangements: alone, together, together, alone.

Not long ago, it might have made sense to treat living on our own as a transitional stage between more durable arrangements, whether coupling up with a partner or moving into an institutional home. This is no longer appropriate, because today, for the first time in centuries, the majority of all American adults are single. The typical American will spend more of his or her adult life unmarried than married, and for much of this time he or she will live alone. Naturally, we are adapting. We are learning to go solo, and crafting new ways of living in the process.

Numbers never tell the whole story, but in this case the statistics are startling. In 1950, 22 percent of American adults were single. Four million lived alone, and they accounted for 9 percent of all households. In those days, living alone was by far most common in the open, sprawling Western states—Alaska, Montana, and Nevada—that attracted migrant workingmen, and it was usually a short-lived stage on the road to a more conventional domestic life.

Today, more than 50 percent of American adults are single, and 31 million—roughly one out of every seven adults—live alone. (This figure excludes the 8 million Americans who live in voluntary and nonvoluntary group quarters, such as assisted living facilities, nursing homes, and prisons.)⁹ People who live alone make up 28 percent of all U.S. households, which means that they are now tied with childless couples as the most prominent residential type—more common than the nuclear family, the multigenerational family, and the roommate or group home. Surprisingly, living alone is also one of the most stable household arrangements. Over a five-year period, people who live alone are more likely to stay that way than everyone except married couples with children.¹⁰

Contemporary solo dwellers are primarily women: about 17 million, compared to 14 million men. The majority, more than 15 million, are middle-age adults between the ages of thirty-five and sixty-four. The elderly account for about 10 million of the total.* Young adults between eighteen and thirty-four number more than 5 million, compared to 500,000 in 1950, making them the fastest-growing segment of the solo-dwelling population.¹¹

Unlike their predecessors, people who live alone today cluster together in metropolitan areas and inhabit all regions of the country. The cities with the highest proportion of people living alone include Washington, D.C., Seattle, Denver, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Chicago, Dallas, New York City, and Miami. One million people live alone in New York City, and in Manhattan, more than half of all residences are one-person dwellings.

DESPITE ITS PREVALENCE, living alone is one of the least discussed and, consequently, most poorly understood issues of our time. We aspire to get our own places as young adults, but fret about whether it’s all right to stay that way, even if we enjoy it. We worry about friends and family members who haven’t found the right match, even if they insist that they’re happy on their own and will find someone in due course. We struggle to support elderly parents and grandparents who find themselves living alone after losing a spouse, and we are puzzled about what to do if they tell us they prefer to remain home alone.

In all of these situations, living alone is something that each person or family experiences as the most private of matters, when in fact it is an increasingly common condition and deserves to be treated as a subject of great public significance. Unfortunately, on those rare occasions when there is a public debate about the rise of living alone, commentators tend to present it as an unmitigated social problem, a sign of narcissism, fragmentation, and a diminished public life. Our morally charged conversations tend to frame the question of why so many people now live on their own around the false and misleading choice between the romanticized ideal of Father Knows Best and the glamorous enticements of Sex and the City. In fact, as we’ll see, the reality of this great social experiment in living alone is far more interesting—and far less isolating—than these conversations would have us believe.

The rise of living alone has been a transformative social experience. It changes the way we understand ourselves and our most intimate relationships. It shapes the way we build our cities and develop our economies. It alters the way we become adults, as well as how we age and the way we die. It touches every social group and nearly every family, no matter who we are or whether we live with others today.

THIS “WE” IS MORE EXPANSIVE than you might imagine. It’s tempting to treat the soaring rates of living alone as a peculiar American condition, an expression of what the literary critic Harold Bloom called the nation’s “religion of self-reliance.” After all, Americans have long taken pride in self-sufficiency. Thomas Jefferson called individualism “the great watchword of American life,” and the historian David Potter wrote that Americans view it as a “sacred term.” In Habits of the Heart, sociologist Robert Bellah and his coauthors distinguish between two traditions of American individualism. “Utilitarian individualism,” best exemplified by Benjamin Franklin, is based on the belief that society flourishes when each person pursues his or her interests first; this notion has inspired America’s libertarian streak. “Expressive individualism,” as exemplified by Walt Whitman, advocates cultivating and “celebrating” the self (as the poet put it in the first line of the first edition of Leaves of Grass). This view has inspired America’s ongoing search for identity and meaning. Though these two strains of individualism promote different values and agendas, together they offer Americans a well of cultural resources for putting the self before society. We draw from them often.

Consider Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of America’s first public intellectuals. In his powerful essay “Self-Reliance,” Emerson warned that “society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members,” and he offered advice for those seeking relief: “Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.”¹² Emerson’s neighbor Henry David Thoreau made the case for self-reliance in more dramatic fashion, moving into a cabin he built near Walden Pond. “It is as solitary where I live as on the prairies,” he wrote. “I have, as it were, my own sun and moon and stars, and a little world all to myself.” Thoreau insisted that there was no loneliness in such a setting: “There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of Nature and has his senses still . . . I have never felt lonesome, or in the least oppressed by a sense of solitude, but once . . . when, for an hour, I doubted if the near neighborhood of man was not essential to a serene and healthy life. To be alone was something unpleasant . . .” Until, in an instant: “I was suddenly sensible of such sweet and beneficent society in Nature . . . as made the fancied advantages of human neighborhood insignificant, and I have never thought of them since.”

The wisdom of Emerson and Thoreau has inspired generations of American individualists to chart their own paths out of society. Lone rangers on the Western frontier. Cloaked detectives in the shadowy urban streets. Adventurers going “into the wild” to discover themselves. All are icons of American popular culture, symbols of our romantic fantasy of an unfettered self. So it would be easy to conclude that the contemporary urban singleton is just the latest variation on this theme.

It just wouldn’t be right.

Americans have never fully embraced individualism, and we remain deeply skeptical of its excesses. De Tocqueville found here both a creeping individualism “which disposes each citizen to isolate himself from the mass of his fellows and withdraw into the circle of family and friends” and an abiding moral code that binds citizens to each other in civic organizations and associations of all kinds. Transcendentalists such as Emerson and Thoreau espoused the virtues of solitude. But the escape, for them, always preceded a return to society, and the insights borne of solitude were meant to promote the common good.¹³

In fact, reports of the transcendentalists’ individualism have been greatly exaggerated. Most of the leading figures in that movement—Emerson and Thoreau, as well as Bronson Alcott, Elizabeth Peabody, and Margaret Fuller—were deeply engaged in civic and political life. Thoreau was hardly alone, or self-sufficient, during the two years (from 1845 to 1847) he spent on and off at Walden Pond. His cabin, as modern visitors know, sat on land owned by Emerson and was less than two miles from Concord. Thoreau could walk to town in less than thirty minutes, and he returned often to see family and friends, sometimes spending hours downing drinks in the local pub. The human traffic went in two directions. Thoreau was happy to receive visitors, particularly his mother, who came frequently to deliver home-cooked meals.¹⁴

Who could blame her? Anxiety about the fate of people who live alone, particularly family or close friends, has always shadowed America’s interest in self-reliance. In the early colonial towns of New England, local authorities prohibited young men from living independently, lest they use this liberty for licentious pursuits. And as the historian David Potter noted, “In our literature, any story of the complete isolation, either physical or psychological, of a man from his fellowman, such as the story of Robinson Crusoe before he found a human footprint on the beach, is regarded as essentially a horror story.”¹⁵

So, too, are reports that document the decline of American “communities”—another of our sacred terms. The titles of the most popular sociology books in U.S. history—The Lonely Crowd, The Pursuit of Loneliness, The Fall of Public Man, The Culture of Narcissism, and Habits of the Heart—raise the specter of individualism run amok. As does one of the most influential works of recent scholarship: Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, which argues that many of our contemporary problems—poor health, failing schools, distrust, even unhappiness—result from the collapse of community life.¹⁶ Americans are attracted to arguments like these precisely because we remain, at heart, a “nation of joiners,” just as we were when De Tocqueville visited nearly two centuries ago.

American culture is not the driving force behind the incredible rise in living alone.

IF YOU’RE NOT PERSUADED, consider another piece of evidence: Today Americans are actually less likely to live alone than are residents of many other nations, including those we generally regard as more communal. The four countries with the highest rates of living alone are Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark, where roughly 40 to 45 percent of all households have just one person. By investing in each other’s social welfare and affirming their bonds of mutual support, the Scandinavians have freed themselves to be on their own.

They have good company. In Japan, where social life has historically been organized around the family, about 30 percent of all households now have a single dweller, and the rate is far higher in urban areas. Germany, France, and the United Kingdom have famously different cultural traditions, but they share a greater proportion of one-person households than the United States. Same for Australia and Canada. And the nations with the fastest growth in one-person households? China, India, and Brazil.¹⁷ According to the market research firm Euromonitor International, at the global level the number of people living alone is skyrocketing, having risen from about 153 million in 1996 to 202 million in 2006—a 33 percent increase in a single decade.¹⁸

So what is driving the widespread rise in living alone? Unquestionably, both the wealth generated by economic development and the social security provided by modern welfare states have enabled the spike. Put simply, one reason that more people live alone than ever before is that today more people can afford to do so. Yet there are a great many things that we can afford to do but choose not to, which means the economic explanation is just one piece of the puzzle. We cannot understand why so many people in so many places are now living alone unless we address a difficult question: Of all the ways that the relatively privileged citizens of the most developed nations could use their unprecedented affluence and security, why are they using them to separate from each other?

IN ADDITION TO ECONOMIC PROSPERITY and social security, the extraordinary rise in living alone stems from the world-historic cultural change that Émile Durkheim, a founding figure of sociology, called “the cult of the individual.” According to Durkheim, the cult of the individual grew out of the transition from traditional rural communities to modern industrial cities, where the individual was gradually becoming the “object of a sort of religion,” more sacred than the group. A Frenchman who wrote his major works in the late nineteenth century, Durkheim did not envision the radical economic individualism later endorsed by figures such as Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, or Margaret Thatcher (who famously declared, “There is no such thing as society”), nor did he share their conviction that liberating individuals from the state was the most effective way to generate wealth and advance the common good. But he wasn’t entirely pessimistic, either. Durkheim argued that the modern division of labor would bind citizens organically. After all, individuals could achieve “independence” and “liberty” only if they were supported by the key modern social institutions—the family, the economy, and the state—which meant they had a clear self-interest in joining together to promote the common good.

The Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter didn’t think individuals would see things this way. In his 1942 book Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, Schumpeter observed that modern capitalism promoted “the rationalization of everything in life,” and predicted that a cold, calculating culture would ultimately lead to the “decomposition” of the collective. “As soon as men and women learn the utilitarian lesson and refuse to take for granted the traditional arrangements that their social environment makes for them, as soon as they acquire the habit of weighing the individual advantages and disadvantages of any prospective course of action . . . they cannot fail to become aware of the heavy personal sacrifices that family ties and especially parenthood entail . . .” Schumpeter predicted the gradual “disintegration of the bourgeois family” form, because free-thinking men and women would opt for lives “of comfort, of freedom from care, and opportunity to enjoy alternatives of increasing attractiveness and variety.”¹⁹

The transition would take some time, though, since the cult of individualism still had to contend with deep cultural attachments to commitment. For most of the twentieth century, even the most modern societies expected individuals to marry and judged them harshly if they “failed” to do so. Schumpeter may well have seen singles as rational, but in a survey of Americans conducted in 1957, more than half the respondents said that unmarried people were “sick,” “immoral,” or “neurotic,” while about a third viewed them “neutrally.” These positions did not hold. By 1976, a generation later, only one-third of Americans acknowledged that they had negative views about the unmarried, while half were neutral and one in seven actually approved. Today, with single adults outnumbering married ones, pollsters don’t even bother asking whether Americans approve of being unmarried. Though the stigma of living alone is not entirely gone, there’s no question that our cultural attitudes about singlehood and family life have changed.²⁰

According to contemporary wisdom, the search for success and happiness depends less on tying oneself down to another than on opening up the world of possibilities so that one can always pursue the best option. Freedom. Flexibility. Personal choice. These rank among our most cherished modern virtues. Today, writes the demographer Andrew Cherlin, “one’s primary obligation is to oneself rather than to one’s partner and children,” which means the contemporary cult of the individual has intensified far beyond what Durkheim had envisioned.²¹

Not long ago, someone who was dissatisfied with his or her spouse and wanted a divorce had to justify that decision. Today it’s the opposite: If you’re not fulfilled by your marriage, you have to justify staying in it, because of the tremendous cultural pressure to be good to one’s self.

Our commitment to places is even weaker. We move so often that some sociologists call modern neighborhoods “communities of limited liability,” places where people make connections without expecting those links to be deep or lasting.²² The same is true in the workplace, where employers no longer reward productive employees with career-long positions, and we all know that being self-regarding, self-motivated, and entrepreneurial is the only way to stay afloat. “For the first time in history,” write the German sociologists Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim, “the individual is becoming the basic unit of social reproduction.”²³ Everything revolves around it.

THE CULT OF THE INDIVIDUAL SPREAD gradually across the Western world during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But it made its deepest impressions on modern societies in the West and beyond only in the second half of the twentieth century, when four other sweeping social changes—the rising status of women, the communications revolution, mass urbanization, and the longevity revolution—created conditions in which the individual could flourish.

Begin with the rising status of women, whose advances range from gains in education and massive incorporation into the paid labor force to the right to control their domestic, sexual, and reproductive lives. Consider, for instance, that in 1950 there were more than two men for every woman on American college campuses, whereas today women make up the majority of undergraduate students as well as of those who earn a bachelor’s degree.²⁴ Or the fact that, between 1950 and 2000, the number of working women counted by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics rose from 18 million to 66 million while the proportion of women working jumped from 33 percent to 60 percent.²⁵ Most other advanced nations have experienced similar changes during the past half century, such that today the level of men’s and women’s participation in higher education and the paid workforce is more balanced than ever before.

Women’s assertion of control over their own bodies has also changed the terms of modern relationships, resulting in delayed marriage, a longer transition to adulthood, and increased rates of separation and divorce. In the United States, divorce rates have climbed steadily since the mid-nineteenth century, but in the 1960s they began to rise sharply, and by 2000 marriages were twice as likely to end in divorce as they were in 1950.²⁶ Today, neither breaking up with a spouse nor staying single means settling for a life of unwanted abstinence. Rather than settling down, great numbers of young adults indulge in the opportunities afforded by easy access to contraception and freedom from family supervision. The Stanford sociologist Michael Rosenfeld argues that middle-class people in their twenties and thirties now look forward to a “second adolescence” in which they seek out new experiences—from serial dating to interracial and same-sex relationships—and refrain from commitment unless they find their “true romantic love.” The new permissiveness around sexual experimentation is an important feature of what Rosenfeld calls our “age of independence.” Living alone gives us time and space to discover the pleasures of being with others.²⁷

The second driving force behind the cult of the individual is the communications revolution, which has allowed people throughout the world to experience the pleasures of social life—not to mention vast amounts of entertainment—even when they’re home alone. The telephone, for instance, is the most common device that we use to stay connected. Home phone service in the United States first became available during the late nineteenth century, yet most Americans were either unwilling or unable to get it. In 1940, only one in three American households had phone service, but demand surged after World War II, with household penetration reaching 62 percent by 1950 and roughly 95 percent today.²⁸ The television penetrated into American households far more rapidly. In Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam reports that between 1948, when the device came on the market, and 1959, home ownership rates for TV went from 1 percent to 90 percent, a pace unmatched by any other major communications technology, including the radio, the VCR, the personal computer, and the mobile phone. Over the past decade, the Internet has further transformed our communications, combining the more active, interpersonal features of the telephone with the more passive, mass communications features of the television. Individual users can not only communicate instantly, at all hours, with friends and strangers, they can also express themselves to a potentially unlimited audience via a blog, a homemade video posted on YouTube, or a social networking site. For those who want to live alone, the Internet affords rich new ways to stay connected.

In the modern world, most people who live alone have another way to connect with each other: simply leaving their home and participating in their city’s robust social life. Mass urbanization is the third enabling condition for the rise of the singleton society, in part because it has led to a booming subculture of singles who share similar values, orientations, and ways of life.

Subcultures thrive in cities, which tend to attract nonconformists who are able to find others like themselves in the dense variety of urban life. (That’s why we tend to associate subcultures with particular places, from the bohemians of Greenwich Village to the surfers of Manhattan Beach.) When a subculture gets established and becomes visible, it can grow enough to influence or even transform the culture at large. The historian Howard Chudacoff argues that, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, single men in cities such as Chicago and New York created a new collective lifestyle built around drinking clubs, civic associations, apartment houses, and relatively liberal sexual mores. By the late twentieth century, what was once a distinctive bachelor subculture was such a big part of urban culture in general that the concept lost its salience. Singles, including those who lived alone, didn’t have to confine themselves to particular buildings, clubs, neighborhoods, or cities. A growing number of places—gyms, coffee shops, clubs, residential complexes—and services—cleaning, food preparation, home delivery—were being developed with their needs and interests in mind. With some notable exceptions, they could find people who understood their experiences and shared their concerns just about anywhere. Together, as Ethan Watters argues in Urban Tribes, they could help each other live alone.²⁹

The fourth change that has amplified the cult of the individual is also a collective achievement, but it is rarely experienced that way. Because people are living longer than ever before—or, more specifically, because women often outlive their spouses by decades, rather than years—aging alone has become an increasingly common experience. In 1900, about 10 percent of the widowed elderly in the United States lived alone; by 2000, 62 percent did.³⁰ Today it’s not unusual for women to spend a quarter or a third of their lives in a place of their own, and men are spending a greater share of their adult years living alone, too.

Aging alone is not easy. The ordinary challenges of growing old—adjusting to retirement, managing illnesses, enduring frailty, watching friends and family die—can become extraordinary hardships for someone who spends most of the time alone. Yet it is not always miserable, either. A survey in England, for instance, found that old people who lived alone had higher life satisfaction, more contact with service providers, and no more cognitive or physical impairments than those who lived with others. And according to a recent review of the literature on aging, studies of the entire elderly population have found that “those living alone are healthier than those living with adults other than a spouse, or even, in some cases, than those living with a spouse.”³¹ Indeed, in recent decades old people have demonstrated a clear preference for living alone rather than moving in with family or friends or to an institutional home.³² This, again, is not merely an American phenomenon. From Japan to Germany, Italy to Australia, aging alone has become common, even among ethnic groups that have long exhibited a clear preference for keeping multigenerational homes.³³ Today few people believe that aging alone is an ideal outcome, but most of those who are single as they get older do everything possible to maintain a place of their own.

The question is why. Or more precisely: Why do so many of us find living alone so much more appealing than other available options? Why has it become so common in the world’s most affluent societies? What makes it so compelling for the young, the middle-aged, and the old?

We have embarked on this massive social experiment in living alone because we believe it serves a purpose. Living alone helps us pursue sacred modern values—individual freedom, personal control, and self-realization—whose significance endures from adolescence to our final days. It allows us to do what we want, when we want, on our own terms. It liberates us from the constraints of a domestic partner’s needs and demands, and permits us to focus on ourselves. Today, in our age of digital media and ever expanding social networks, living alone can offer even greater benefits: the time and space for restorative solitude. This means that living alone helps us discover who we are, as well as what gives us meaning and purpose.

Paradoxically, living alone might be exactly what we need to reconnect. After all, for most people living alone is a cyclical condition, not a permanent one. Many, though by no means all, of those who live alone ultimately decide they want the intimacy of a domestic partner, whether a lover, family member, or friend. But they, too, know that today none of our arrangements are binding or permanent. We are unmoored from tradition yet uncertain how to remake our lives, and in contemporary societies it has become increasingly common for people to move through different experiences—single, solo, married, separated, partnered, and back—while anchored only by the self.

This means that each person who lives alone is subjected to extraordinary pressures, and at times it can be hard to stave off self-doubt about whether one is living the way one should. But it doesn’t mean that those who live alone are condemned to feel lonely or be isolated. On the contrary, the evidence suggests that people who live alone compensate by becoming more socially active than those who live with others, and that cities with high numbers of singletons enjoy a thriving public culture.³⁴

IT’S IMPORTANT, even urgent, that we find new and better ways to assist those who suffer from social isolation. But sweeping laments that associate living alone with the end of community and social decline divert attention from this project and do nothing for the people and places that most need help.

Living alone and being alone are hardly the same, yet in recent years journalists, professors, and pundits have routinely conflated them, raising fears that the rise of living alone signals the ultimate atomization of the modern world. Exhibit A is The Lonely American, in which Jacqueline Olds and Richard Schwartz, a married couple who teach psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, warn that “increased aloneness” and “the movement in our country toward greater social isolation” is damaging our health and happiness. The book opens with two blockbuster findings that are meant to support this conclusion. The first, drawn from an article published in an academic journal, reports that between 1985 and 2004 the number of Americans who said they had no one with whom they discussed important matters tripled, reaching nearly a quarter of the population.

A quarter of the population! This is an incredible statistic, and the authors of The Lonely American were hardly the first to note it. The finding, which came from research by social scientists at Duke University, ran in headlines and framed talk show conversations for weeks after its initial publication. And it would indeed be disturbing, deeply so, if it were reliable. In fact, the social scientists who authored the original article were skeptical of their own numbers, and they cautioned readers—to no avail, alas—that they had probably overstated the prevalence of social isolation. Berkeley sociologist Claude Fischer is even more dismissive. After scrutinizing the evidence, he reported that the paper’s claims about Americans’ isolation are implausible, anomalous, and inconsistent with all other research, and he attributes the problem to flaws in the social survey on which it is based. “Scholars and general readers alike should draw no inference from the [survey] as to whether Americans’ social networks changed substantially between 1985 and 2004,” Fischer concludes. “They probably did not.”³⁵

The Lonely American is even less careful with its second big claim: that by 2000 about one-quarter of all American households consisted of only one person, and that this reveals how lonely and disconnected we have become. In fact, there’s little evidence that the rise of living alone is responsible for making more Americans lonely. Reams of published research show that it’s the quality, not the quantity of social interactions, that best predicts loneliness. What matters is not whether we live alone, but whether we feel alone. There’s ample support for this conclusion outside the laboratory. As divorced or separated people often say, there’s nothing lonelier than living with the wrong person.³⁶

This point has also failed to register with the experts who regularly appear in the media to promote marriage and denounce the culture of singlehood. Take The Case for Marriage, in which authors Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher report that, compared to married people, those who live alone (including divorced, widowed, and single people) are less likely to be happy, healthy, and wealthy. “Marriage is good for everyone,” they declare, whereas being unmarried “chops almost ten years off a man’s life,” and “will shorten a woman’s life span by more years than would being married and having cancer or living in poverty.”³⁷

These cautions may well come from good intentions, but they vastly overstate what the research shows. For instance, there is good evidence that people who never marry are just about as happy as people who are currently married, but also significantly happier and less lonely than people who are widowed or divorced. We also have good evidence that bad marriages produce undue stress, strain, and sickness for those who suffer through them; one recent study reports that “individuals in low-quality marriages exhibit an even greater health risk than do divorced individuals.”³⁸ Moreover, as several critics of The Case for Marriage have noted, studies comparing the fate of married and unmarried people suffer from a serious problem that makes intuitive (not to mention statistical) sense: namely, that the mental, physical, and financial health of married people may well be the cause of their enduring marriage, not the consequence of it.

Marriage proponents are not the only ones whose activism can hinder their analysis. On the other side of the spectrum, singles advocates—or defenders, as is often the case—must work so hard to debunk the myths and stereotypes about the unmarried that they have little time or incentive to address the challenges of going solo.³⁹ For although, as the psychologist Bella DePaulo writes in Singled Out, singletons endure all kinds of prejudice and discrimination and “still live happily ever after,” they do not do so easily, or always. (After all, who does?) It is important to understand why.

Living alone may not be the social problem that it’s generally made out to be, but it generates all kinds of challenges for those who do it, and for those who care for them. The fact that no previous human societies have supported large numbers of people who lived alone means that we have no historical examples to learn from, no precedents to mimic or avoid. This makes understanding what it means to live in a society of singletons all the more important, and our first order of business is to analyze how we got here.

This book begins with a brief account of how the collective project of living alone grew out of the culture of modern cities, not the monastic or transcendental traditions, as we often assume. Cities allowed for the expression of individual eccentricities and permitted the experiments with new ways of living that small towns and villages suppressed. The urban environment, from the hotel residence to the apartment house and the social club, created places where young people who wanted to prolong the transition to adulthood could indulge in all kinds of new experiences while living in places of their own. Eventually middle-age and older adults made use of these same urban amenities, and helped develop new ones, too. By the late twentieth century, they had turned downtown areas throughout the developed world into adult playgrounds, where bars, restaurants, entertainment zones, and a booming commercial street culture encouraged singletons to comingle rather than hunker down at home.

Cities created the conditions that make living alone a more social experience, but they did not provide any answers to the difficult questions that those who pioneered the new lifestyle encountered. The core chapters of this book address these challenges, proceeding in the chronological order through which they typically appear. (This means that the early parts of the book focus on the experiences of younger and more financially secure solo dwellers, while the later parts focus on older and more frail ones.) Drawing on extensive interviews and observations, each chapter explores how people who live alone manage the most common problems that stem from their situation: Learning how to live alone after spending one’s early life in a shared household, and struggling to balance one’s investment in professional development with one’s social and personal needs. Remaking one’s life as a singleton after spending years in a marriage or domestic partnership, with little knowledge about how life after separation will feel. Organizing with others to promote the welfare and status of people who live alone as a group. Protecting oneself from the demands of the workplace, the reach of social media, the pull of troubled friends or family members, or what is, for some, the unmanageable pressure of collective life. Aging alone after the loss of a long-term companion. Facing up to the fact that since any one of us could live alone someday, it’s in everyone’s interest to make it a healthier, happier, more socially engaging experience. And that’s a challenge we can only overcome together.

I’VE DONE ENOUGH WRITING and public speaking about the rise of living alone to know that you might already be wondering why I care about this issue, and what the stakes might be for me. After all, most libraries and bookstores are full of polemical tomes in which married people make the case for marriage, or single people make the case for being single, or cynics argue against love altogether. My interest in living alone stems less from my private life (I’m now married with two young children, but was once quite happy living alone) than from a personal response to something I discovered in my research. During the late 1990s, when I was working on a book about the devastatingly lethal Chicago heat wave of 1995, I learned that hundreds of people in America’s “city of neighborhoods” had died alone and at home, out of touch with friends, family, and neighbors, and beyond the reach of the local safety net. They died not only because of the weather, but also because they had grown dangerously isolated while the rest of the city turned away from them. Silently, and invisibly, they had developed what one city investigator who worked with them regularly called “a secret society of people who live and die alone.” The heat wave was the morbid birth announcement of this society, and the question, once several hundred dead bodies showed up in the center of Chicago and entered public consciousness, was how we would treat the solitary people who’d survived.

Soon after Heat Wave was published, someone from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation asked if I would be interested in following up that study with a larger one, on living alone in America. At first I was reluctant, because my introduction to the topic had been so grim and difficult. But I recognized that I had come to it through its bleakest angle, and decided that by learning the story of how and why so many of us have come to live alone, I might also discover something fundamental about who we are and what we value today. I proposed a research project and, after the foundation agreed to support it, hired a team of research assistants to help with the investigation.⁴⁰

We started in Manhattan, the nation’s most popular place for living alone, and eventually expanded to other major American cities: Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Austin, and the San Francisco Bay Area, as well as to other nations where living alone has grown prevalent, such as Sweden, England, France, Australia, and Japan. By the end of this seven-year study, we had conducted in-depth interviews with more than three hundred singletons of all social classes and life stages—though, it’s important to note, most people who live alone are financially secure enough to do it, which means our interviews, as well as the analysis I offer here, focus mainly on the experiences of the middle class. To supplement what we learned from these interviews, we also observed places where people live alone together, including residential buildings for affluent young professionals, single-room occupancy dwellings, and assisted living facilities for the elderly. We mined the archives for historical research, social surveys, and market studies about the lifestyles of singles and solo dwellers (since some studies lump them together, for some issues we had to do so as well); and we interviewed scores of others—including caregivers, government officials, architects, and artificial intelligence designers—who are concerned about the fate of the growing number of Americans who live on their own.

We all came to the project with preconceived ideas about what we would discover. Some of us lived alone in our twenties or thirties and viewed having our own place as a mark of distinction or a reward for professional success. One of us worried about widowed grandparents in distant cities who spent untold hours on their own. Another was relieved that their mismatched parents had finally separated and embraced their independence. Another was concerned about the fate of female friends who lived alone and wondered whether they would ever have children. And another was fixated on the plight of the sick and the isolated poor.

A fundamental principle of social research is that we acknowledge our preconceptions but strive to move beyond them. We did our best to honor this rule, and I ask that you do the same as you read this book. I know that this is no simple request. For you, too, possess knowledge of issues related to living alone, and you may have some strong views of your own. Many times during the course of my research, friends and colleagues who felt passionate about this issue urged me to address their own pressing questions.

Some of these questions are deeply personal: Does the rise of living alone stem from or contribute to a growing sense of distrust—of others, of intimate relationships, or of commitments in general? Has it become a strategy of self-defense for those who fear rejection and the pain of separation? Or does it represent a more risky and adventurous lifestyle, one best suited for those who are willing to continually put themselves on the line?

Some questions are sociological: Does living alone mean something different now that we’re hyperconnected, through cell phones, social media, and the like? Has the fast growth of living alone among young adults led them to prioritize their personal development and avoid participating in communities and groups? Or has it paved the way for new “urban tribes” to replace the traditional families that, as so many of us know from experience, often break apart? Do the social networks formed by contemporary solo dwellers survive when participants marry, move, grow old, or become ill? If not, what happens to those who stay on their own?

Some questions are political: Will the growing ranks of people who live alone develop a collective identity and, as some prominent strategists believe, establish themselves as a lobbying group or voting bloc? Or will solo living give rise to political atomization, with each person promoting his or her own interests or looking out for his or her own needs? Will the nations where aging alone has become rampant invest in social programs that help those who become isolated, frail, and sick? What fate awaits us if we don’t?

For many of us, the mere thought of living alone sparks anxieties about isolation, and not without reason. But although it’s clear that for certain people, in certain conditions, living alone can lead to loneliness, unhappiness, sickness, or worse, it’s also clear that it need not have such disastrous effects.

Today more and more people are seeking ways to flourish despite—or is it because of?—the solitude they can achieve at home: young professionals who can afford to have their own places and prefer domestic autonomy to having roommates; singles in their thirties and forties who refuse to compromise in their search for a partner, in no small part because they recognize and enjoy the benefits (personal, social, and sexual) of living alone; divorced men and women whose previous experiences in relationships ended the fantasy that romantic love is a reliable source of happiness and stability; elderly people who, following the death of a spouse, rebuild their lives through new friendships, social groups, and activities, and take pride in their ability to live alone.

Though each of these situations is distinctive, those who confront them share a common challenge: They must not only solve the puzzle of how to live alone, but also of how to live well. In this they are in good company, and all of us—no matter where we are or whether we live with someone at this moment—can learn from their answers.