Single? That's your problem, that your single. Go get a relationship and be happy!
Way to dogpile on people when they're down.
I say enjoy being single. If a relationship happens, good for you, but don't listen to people that say you're damaged / worse off / going down the drain because you're single. They're just jealous you can travel and play video games whenever you want. =)
Some people need relationships to be happy. Some don't. It's silly to deny the existence of either group, but most discourse seems to deny that it's valid for someone to see a relationship as an important component of their path to happiness.
> They're just jealous you can travel and play video games whenever you want. =)
This comment comes off defensive and hypocritical to me, rather than contributing to the conversation. You're basically saying we shouldn't talk about good things if some people don't have those good things; and also screw people with good things because they're actually jealous of the have-nots
I think life is incomparably better with a partner. It's not a question and it's not even close: there's nothing I miss about being single and almost every single thing about my life today is better because I'm in a relationship than if I weren't. It's cheaper, I have someone to share the good times with, I have someone to support me in my bad times, I have a teammate for life's plans and adventures, and I never feel lonely. I can also travel and play video games whenever I want; in fact my partner often buys me videogames and I often buy her things for her to enjoy on her own.
That's not dogpiling on anyone. It's not my fault if someone's single, and it may or may not be true that being in a (good) relationship would make them happier. It definitely makes me happier, and statistically it's a massive boost to quality of life for the vast majority of people. It's not fun to think that someone's worse off, but changing what you say doesn't change reality. This is meant to be a place where people can discuss ideas and concepts, and not talking about the benefits of relationships doesn't make them any less real.
Are you arguing that if someone claims that it's possible to be perfectly content and happy while single, that that somehow undermines the happiness you've found with your partner, as if the mere claim that contentment can be found without a partner invalidates the fact that you're happy with your partner?
I can easily read your response as saying something akin to:
"You're single and happy? Nah. You only think you're happy because you haven't experienced true happiness. Only partnered people can truly experience the incomparable joy that I have found, unlike those benighted singles."
You're happy with your partner. Good for you! That's awesome and amazing. But there's no reason to use that happiness as a reason to look down on other people.
> it may or may not be true that being in a (good) relationship would make them happier.
I don't know if person XYZ would be happier single in a relationship, and I don't have an opinion on it. Everyone should be free to do what they want, whether or not it makes them happy, and I don't care either way. What I was disagreeing with were your implications that (1) just because some people are single and unhappy, nobody can talk about how good and happy relationships can be, and (2) talking about being in a happy relationship is "dogpiling" on unhappy, single people. To take your wording, there's no reason to use unhappiness as a reason to shut down conversation
But this entire post is about how some people get sad, angry, and/or hateful when they want to be in a relationship but continually fail at it. It seems off-topic and missing the point to bring up a "well, actually" about how some people don't want or need that.
To infantilize people like this is more hurtful really. We both know your allotted time with a Nintendo isn't a source of envy. It's a problem, it needs addressing. If you've successfully overridden one of your most primal biological instincts then good for you, you don't need to read all this. However, I suspect most people who say they are just as happy single are not entirely truthful (to themselves).
Clearly the smiley face at the end didn't convey that I was half speaking in jest. But people seemed to have taken my position as an assault on their entire world view.
Let me ask you this though:
> overridden one of your most primal biological instincts
Have you considered the existence of individuals that are gay, lesbian, or asexual? How do these individuals fit into your apparently biological-reproductive-imperative based view of happiness?
Or would you go further to say that those individuals also cannot be happy, since they can't be truly fulfilling their biological instincts either?
Happiness comes from within. Pegging your happiness on something external to yourself - material wealth, social standing, another human being - is giving away all agency you have over your own happiness.
Why does everyone in this thread like posting definitive statements like this? As if it's universally true?
Life isn't as black and white as people like to think.
I was not much of a happy person before I found my (now) wife many years ago. She helps me deal with life in a way no therapist could ever do (and vise versa, me to her). We're in it together and help each other.
I could not figure out how to be happy on my own. Once I found my partner, I was able to be happy.
This isn't universal, of course. Many people are able to be happy on their own, but it's so strange reading definitive stuff like "there's no way!" when it's just not black and white.
See, for example:
https://academic.oup.com/ije/article/36/6/1244/819019
A death of a parent is identified as one of the most significant causes of unhappiness. If your happiness is negatively impacted by the death of your parents, is the issue that your parents died, or that you've given away your agency to choose your own happiness?
You have incomplete and varying, but nonzero levels of control over all these things.
I agree with the whole "if you're not happy alone" rule of thumb but happiness isn't a binary. It's a scale. And amassing a little more wealth, becoming a little more respected, having a partner, all those things can add amounts of happiness that push someone from "unhappy" to "good enough". Look at the reverse case when people lose all that stuff if you really want to see how evident it is.
It sounds good but it is BS e.g., money won't make you happy but the absence of money would make unhappy many people.
You can try to become Stoic or Buddhist monk but it is not the natural state for most humans.
This is infantilizing people's desires. Enjoying being single is something that many people just cannot do. To me, it's like telling someone who is paralyzed from the waist down to just walk it off - you can still enjoy all that life has to offer... Assuming those things don't involve the use of your legs!
For many people - this is debilitating. A lot of people are just wired up this way.
Married people live longer on average compared to single people.
https://www.webmd.com/a-to-z-guides/news/20191010/marriage-t...
Just wanted to add to the dog pile. ;)
I found
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3629371/
which addresses a variation of the question. The unpaired half of twins with discordant marital status show significantly (in the case of men) higher rates of depression; women also seem to too, but because there were so few twins of discordant marital status in general, the test is pretty underpowered and so the confidence intervals are huge. Given that, it's actually pretty impressive that it was able to find any significant differences at all.
Thanks for sharing the findings of your quick research. Depression score is indeed not exactly the same as happiness, or life satisfaction, but for the purpose of our conversation I would say they are all close enough to what matter to us, so they are all sufficiently meaningful (and probably very correlated to each other).
Eyeballing the paper you cited, there appears to be evidence that widowed and divorced people are more depressed, but not single people (compared to the baseline, married people). At least when running the regression with all the other important variables controlled. Am I reading it wrong?
I'll take a look at your paper later.
This is a bit silly: either it's trivially true but irrelevant, if the claim is that there exist people who can live happy lives without (sexual) relationships; or it's flatly false, if the claim is that everyone can be equally happy without relationships as they would be with them.
Relationships bring significant happiness. People who are in relationships self-report more happiness. They're richer. They live longer lives. You might say that I'm mistaking cause and effect: maybe happier/richer/healthier people are more likely to enter into relationships? This is probably part of the effect, but not the majority of it. If someone randomly ends up a widower from their partner experiencing a sudden, tragic accident, their happiness doesn't remain level. In fact, it substantially decreases: widowers have some of the highest suicide rates of any demographic group.
Relationships aren't some crazy random idea that just happened to develop in 2020 USA. They exist universally, across all cultures and times. All of them consider a relationship as a good, important goal (even as the typical attributes of relationships do vary). It's hard to name any facet of culture as universal as that.