Lessons from Three Decades of Studying Singlehood

Part of ‘The place of singles studies in feminist and gender discourses’ seminar series co-hosted by University of Leeds’s Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies

‘The place of singles studies in feminist and gender discourses’ seminar series co-hosted by University of Leeds’s Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies

13 November 2024, 1130-1300, UK time, Online. For sign-up and login details, please email Professor Tendai Mangena at t.mangena@leeds.ac.uk. 

Presentation title: Lessons from Three Decades of Studying Singlehood by Prof Bella DePaulo

Abstract/focus

Our research on singlehood is not just academic. It is personal. Our findings make their way into the popular press, where people who are single and people who are not single take them to heart.

The experiences of single life are not just personal. They are also institutional and structural. Laws, policies, norms, and conventions are often designed in ways that disadvantage people who are single and advantage people who are coupled. As scholars, it is important for us to recognize the contexts of single life as we try to understand and explain our findings.

The values, wishes, and perspectives of people who are coupled dominate our everyday lives and too often our scholarship too. It is important for scholars to study single people from their own perspective, particularly the perspective of single people who love being single, the “single at heart.”

We need guidelines and heuristics for adopting a singles perspective and avoiding the perpetuation of deficit narratives of single life. I will describe a few.

Gender equality is important, but without equality for single people, it is not enough.

In the U.S., it is the groups that have been devalued, such as Black adults and queer people, who have often been the trailblazers in demonstrating how to flourish when single.

Interdisciplinary research is always important, but it may be especially important in the study of singlehood. For example, my field is psychology and I have found that sociologists and anthropologists have a lot to teach us about the importance of cultural and structural forces in the experiences of people who are single.

Similarly, global research is always important, but it may be especially important in the study of singlehood. That’s not just because the rewards, challenges, and meanings of single life may be so different in different places, but also because research across many nations helps us understand the commonalities in the experiences of single life.

Speaker bio: Bella DePaulo (PhD, Harvard) is the author of Single at Heart: The Power, Freedom, and Heart-Filling Joy of Single Life, as well as other books and more than 150 scholarly publications. She has been described by Atlantic magazine as "America's foremost thinker and writer on the single experience." Her TEDx talk, “What no one ever told you about people who are single,” has been viewed more than 1.7 million times. Professor DePaulo is an Academic Affiliate in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA. She has always been single and always will be.