Research, Opinion: When a couple splits, who gets custody of the friends?
When two people come together as a romantic couple, they bring more than just themselves, their emotions, and their material possessions. They also bring their friends. When a romantic relationship ends, each person has certain expectations about who gets to “keep” which friends. But custody of friends does not always turn out the way each person expects and wants it to.
Read full storyResearch, Opinion: Not having kids and worried about regretting it
Are you thinking of not having kids? If you follow through, will you regret it? That’s a question you will probably ask yourself. Lots of other people, looking at the life you are pondering, will wonder the same thing.
Read full storyResearch, opinion: The health and wealth of older men and women with no kids
When people get to be 55 and older without ever having biological children, how are they doing? The U.S. Census Bureau published an important report on that topic, based on comparisons of biological parents to adults who have no biological children. Unlike many studies of adults with no children, this one included both men and women. The survey was based on a nationally representative survey of 92,200 adults who were 55 or older and not institutionalized. The data were collected in 2018, and the report, “Childless Older Americans: 2018,” authored by Tayelor Valerio, Brian Knop, Rose M. Kreider, and Wan He, was released in 2021.
Read full storyResearch, opinion: Around the world, fewer are marrying, more are staying single
All around the world, marriage is in decline and single living is on the rise. Those are some of the conclusions from an important and wide-ranging United Nations report, “Families in a Changing World,” published by UN Women.
Read full storyResearch, opinion: More than 4 in 10 young adults find singlehood empowering
Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash. Is singlehood empowering or disappointing? In “Empowering, pragmatic, or disappointing: Appraisals of singlehood during emerging and established adulthood,” Jonathon J. Beckmeyer and Tyler B. Jamison reported the results of their research on that question. Their findings were recently published online at Emerging Adulthood.
Read full storyResearch, opinion: Teens who don’t date are more socially skilled and less depressed
In graduate school, students get to immerse themselves in the research and writings that interest them most. University of Georgia doctoral student Brooke Douglas cares about adolescents and their health, including their psychological health. She read dozens of articles about their romantic relationships and discovered that a number of social scientists had settled on particular ways of thinking about the dating behavior of teenagers.
Read full storyResearch, opinion: People who are unafraid of being single have high standards and healthy personalities
Have you noticed those people who just won’t quit their romantic relationships, no matter how miserable they have become? Or the people who cannot bear spending any time at all uncoupled – when one romantic relationship ends, they rush off to the next? I’ve always thought that those people were scared of being single.
Read full storyOpinion, research: The fear of being alone in public is widely shared but often unwarranted
When I taught the graduate course, “Singles in Society,” years ago, one of the assignments was for students to go out for a meal by themselves. The students were totally into it. They upped the ante: It had to be dinner, not lunch. And then they upped it again: They could not bring anything to distract them during dinner, such as something to read or to look at. They had to just dine on their own.
Read full storySingle people with no kids often give more gifts than they receive
We like to think of many relationships as roughly equal. With friends, coworkers, and relatives such as siblings and cousins, we usually don’t think of one person as more valuable or more worthy than another. Ideally, the give and take is fundamentally, if not precisely, reciprocal.
Read full storyOpinion, research: Women like being single more than men do
Who is more satisfied with their single lives, men or women?. A scholar at a Polish university (Dominika Ochnik of the University of Opole) and one from a German university (Gal Slonim of Potsdam University) collaborated to study single people in both countries. The 316 German singles (103 women and 213 men) and the 196 Polish singles (123 women and 73 men) who participated met these criteria:
Read full storyCouples who want togetherness and the freedom of being single, too
A few years ago, an essay by Isabelle Tessier, "I want to be single – but with you," zipped around the internet, amassing hundreds of thousands of likes. The longings Tessier described may well be even more widely shared now than they were then.
Read full storySingle people value freedom more and get more happiness out of it
People who are not married have different values than married people do. They care more about expressive and individualistic experiences such as creativity, freedom, trying new things, and having fun. People who embrace those kinds of post-materialistic values, regardless of their marital status, are happier. But married and unmarried people do not benefit equally from such values. People who are not married get more happiness out of the valuing of freedom, creativity, trying new things, and having fun than married people do.
Read full storySingle people experience subtle and not-so-subtle put-downs
Getting asked questions such as “Why are you still single?” or “Just one?”. Getting invited by couples to lunch but not dinner, outings on weekdays but not weekends, kids’ birthday parties but not movies with grown-ups.
Read full storyFor young adults, future success may depend more on friendship skills than romantic skills
People who seem to be skilled at romance are admired and celebrated. When they are young, their prom pictures attract lots of likes. If they marry, they are showered with engagement gifts and wedding gifts, plus tons and tons of attention. People with friendship skills, though, are rarely acknowledged in such effusive ways.
Read full storyCouples who move in together or get married become more insular
In the decades I have been studying single people, one particular story comes up over and over again. Single people tell me that they had other single friends they socialized with frequently, but then when those friends got serious about a romantic partner, they didn’t see those newly coupled friends much anymore. They wonder about two things: Does this happen to other single people, too? And, are they just getting sidelined temporarily because their friend is newly infatuated with a romantic partner, or is their marginalized status going to continue?
Read full storyOver the past 75 years, couples have been acting more like single people
While researching my book, How We Live Now: Redefining Home and Family in the 21st Century, I discovered something interesting about how coupling has been practiced over the past three-quarters of a century. In some significant ways, couples have been acting more like single people. It started with couples living together and skipping over the part about getting married. Those who did marry have ended up doing so at later and later ages. From 1980 through 2000, married couples began to do things separately from each other a bit more often. Now, a nontrivial number of couples are deciding not to live together at all, even though they are totally committed to their relationship.
Read full storyFriend jealousy: People who do not want their romantic partner to see their friends
Why are some spouses and romantic partners so mean to their partner's friends?. Romantic jealousy gets tons of attention. It should. It happens all the time, it can be very intense, and it can motivate even very sensible people to do utterly stupid and embarrassing things. But there is another kind of jealousy that also matters. It, too, is pervasive. It, too, can get ugly. But compared to romantic jealousy, it mostly slips by unnoticed.
Read full storyWhat single and married people think they will miss if they stop working
When adults get to the age when they start thinking about retirement, a big factor in whether they actually do retire is, of course, money. For single people who pay all of their expenses themselves, financial factors are likely to loom especially large in their decisions.
Read full storyFewer Americans are finding fulfillment in romantic partners
In 2021, the Pew Research Center asked a representative sample of adults in the U.S. this question:. “What about your life do you currently find meaningful, fulfilling or satisfying? What keeps you going and why?”
Read full storyTurning to different people for different emotional needs is linked to life satisfaction
One and done. That's how some people think about their relationships. Find "The One" and now your relationship challenges have been mastered. In your spouse, you have the person who fulfills all of your wishes and needs, especially your emotional needs. You have the person who cheers you up when you are sad, calms you when you are anxious or angry, and cheers you on when things are going well. Popular songs romanticize the idea of "The One and Only" with lyrics such as "You are my everything" and "I just want to be your everything."
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