Study Followed The Same People For 13 Years To Determine Whether Being Single Or In A Relationship Makes You Happier
Rido | Shutterstock Many people would say that to be truly happy, you need a person to share your life with. But is that really true? According to a study that followed the same people for 13 years to determine if coupledom or living single meant a happier life, the truth is, it's complicated.
Happiness is the personal emotion that everyone, socially, strives to achieve and, if you're lucky, maintain. Having a partner through thick and thin certainly sounds ideal, but what if that relationship falls short on the loving and healthy scale? Most people getting out of a bad relationship would adamantly defend their joy in being single, and science might be able to back them up.
A study determined that couples were happier than their single peers, as long as their relationships were loving and healthy
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Over 13 years, Professor Menelaos Apostolou led a study following more than 12,000 German adults through relationships and periods of single life, analyzing their emotional states. The goal was to determine if being single or in a relationship makes you happier. What Apostolou found was that people in relationships have higher emotional well-being than single people, but there's an important caveat. They're only happier if the relationship is healthy.
Co-author of the study, Elyakim Kislev, Ph.D., explained that transitioning from singlehood to a healthy relationship leads to more positive emotions and greater satisfaction. Basically, happy couples are, well, happier than everyone else.
If, however, a partner holds on to a relationship out of fear of being alone or basically for any reason other than being in a loving partnership, the opposite holds true. People who are single are way happier than people in bad relationships. Apostolou and Kislev wrote, "People in poor- or moderate-quality relationships often fared worse than when they were single."
In the simplest terms, Kislev wrote, "being partnered is not automatically better than being single. For many emotional outcomes, individuals felt less happy and more distressed in low-quality relationships than during periods of singlehood. For emotions like sadness, depression, and despair, low-quality relationships were emotionally costly."
Single people are often labeled as unhappy because relationships, healthy or not, are more socially acceptable.
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How often in your life, regardless of your current relationship status, have you been asked if you're seeing someone? It's because we've somehow elevated coupledom above being single, regardless of true happiness.
Kislev wrote, "In most contemporary societies, intimate relationships are treated as the default and often as markers of adulthood, success, and emotional maturity. As a result, single individuals may experience subtle but persistent social pressure to 'move on,' 'settle down,' or 'find someone.'” He went on to say, "Over time, such pressure can create the impression that singlehood is a temporary failure rather than a legitimate life state."
I've lost count of the times people have asked me if I'm seeing anyone. It is likely one of the first questions when catching up with a friend. Being single is reduced to a temporary limbo until you find the right person.
Kislev contends that a relationship is a measure of social affluence. "Many social spaces and routines are implicitly structured around couples: invitations to events, housing arrangements, holidays, and even casual social conversations often assume paired participation. Singles may find themselves left out, not deliberately, but systematically."
Ultimately, the question then becomes: Are single people truly less happy than couples in healthy relationships, or have they been taught that being coupled up is better?
The stigma of being single is changing, and so is society's definition of a happy life.
If finding a partner wasn't considered a milestone, would there be as much pressure on it? Probably not. As Kislev noted, there's a huge distinction between someone who chooses to be single and someone who is single by circumstance. Somehow, the person choosing to be single gets lumped in with the person who wants a partner but just hasn't found the right person yet. Obviously, those two distinctions change how happy the person is.
The same could be said for someone in a relationship. You cannot weigh the happy, healthy partners with the partners stuck in toxicity. Those are very different scenarios.
Another study by Apostolou, titled "Singles' Reasons for Being Single: Empirical Evidence From an Evolutionary Perspective," identifies the reasons people stay single. Their desires and priorities are rooted in exploration, career, and courtship. Dating is figuring out what you like without the entire commitment of a long-term relationship. Freedom, although lonely, gives a single person more autonomy to find what makes them happy.
It is a choice. Relationships, romantic and platonic, are meant to add to a person's life and well-being. As Kislev explained, "The key lesson, then, is not that people should rush into relationships, but that relationship quality matters deeply and that remaining single may be psychologically healthier than staying in an unsupportive partnership, especially in social environments that fail to fully validate single lives."
The grass is greener where and when you water it. Hose, sprinkler, or any other mode of irrigation will do as long as you or a partner remembers to pay the water bill and sets aside time to make sure the lawn gets its sustenance. Ultimately, happiness is a choice we make every day. Editor of Happiness.com Calvin Holbrook wrote, "Abraham Lincoln is famously quoted as saying, 'Most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.” And he was right. Happiness is a choice but also a daily practice that requires time, effort, and dedication." Funny that Lincoln didn't include relationship status when discussing happiness.
Emi Magaña is a writer from Los Angeles with a bachelor's in English. She covers entertainment, news, and the real human experience.
