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New research indicates that people who remain unpartnered and unmarried generally maintain high and relatively stable life satisfaction over long periods of time, even as their sexual fulfillment and desire for a partner vary widely. By tracking different generations of singles over more than a decade, the findings suggest that there is no single way to experience a solo life. The study was published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.
Never-married singlehood refers to the status of adults who have not entered a formal marriage and are not currently in a committed romantic partnership. For many years, lifespan theories treated romantic partnerships as a universal developmental milestone, suggesting that failing to find a mate could lead to isolation. Because of this framework, scientists often evaluated singles simply by comparing them to partnered people. But as marriage rates drop globally and solo living becomes more common, researchers have increasingly shifted their focus to investigating how individual factors like personality, age, and sexual fulfillment shape a single person’s happiness.
“As the population of single individuals grows and people are increasingly delaying marriage, there is both a rise in population as well as public and academic interest for singles, or romantically unpartnered individuals,” Elaine Hoan, a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto and lead author of the study, told PsyPost. “In light of this rise, much is unknown regarding how singles’ psychological well-being changes over time, with some individuals arguing that singles report generally low well-being across the life span.”
Recent research has begun to examine what shapes singles’ well-being. A study covered by PsyPost in 2024 indicated that adolescents born in the early 2000s tend to be more satisfied with being single than those born a decade earlier. Beyond generational differences, a 2020 study found that single people who are satisfied with their sex lives tend to be happier with their single status and show less interest in getting married. Additionally, a 2021 analysis of German adults showed that singles who feel less urge to find a romantic partner tend to be happier with their lives overall.
The new study builds directly on this work by tracking how these different facets of well-being evolve together over more than a decade across multiple generations of singles. Hoan and her colleagues analyzed data from the German Family Panel, a long-running national survey of relationships and families, tracking 2,930 adults over an 11-year period between 2009 and 2021. The participants came from three birth groups: emerging adults who started the study around age 18, young adults who began around age 26, and middle-aged adults who entered around age 36.
To be included, participants had to remain never married and without a committed partner at every one of the 11 yearly surveys, so the sample captures long-term singles rather than everyone who was single at the start. Because people frequently partner up as they age, this filtering was much heavier for older groups; only 14 percent of the middle-aged cohort qualified, compared with 67 percent of the youngest.
During the 11-year period, participants regularly answered single-item questions rating four specific outcomes on numeric scales: overall life satisfaction, satisfaction with their single status, sexual satisfaction, and their desire for a romantic partner. An earlier analysis of the same data, which assumed all singles follow a single average path, had suggested that singles’ life satisfaction tends to decline over time.
By using a statistical modeling technique designed to group people with similar over-time trends into distinct categories, the researchers sought to uncover whether multiple different paths existed. They also measured participants’ income, education, physical health, and personality traits to see how these factors lined up with different well-being paths.
The researchers found that the vast majority of singles across all three age groups reported high and relatively stable life satisfaction. Roughly 90 percent of the participants in each cohort fell into a group whose life satisfaction stayed above the midpoint of the scale for the entire 11 years, though it dipped slightly over time among the two younger groups. A small minority in each age group started the study with lower life satisfaction.
Among emerging and young adults, this smaller minority’s happiness tended to improve over time, eventually catching up to the rest of their peers. Among middle-aged adults, however, the smaller group with lower starting happiness did not show the same improvement; its scores edged down slightly, though this change was not statistically significant. The authors suggest this may reflect the social pressures of midlife, when expectations around marriage and family are often strongest.
“We found that while relationship-focused outcomes, like sexual satisfaction and desire for a partner, varied more between participants, singles’ overall satisfaction with their lives remained remarkably robust,” Hoan explained. “Overall, even while singles face different romantic or sexual experiences, they generally remain quite satisfied with their lives over time.”
Satisfaction with being single showed much more variety. About 67 percent of the youngest adults reported high and stable satisfaction with their single status. Young and middle-aged adults, by contrast, split into three groups: a highly satisfied group (about 30 and 37 percent, respectively), a larger group with middling satisfaction, and a group with low satisfaction (about 12 and 18 percent).
The authors suggest this shift may reflect changing life goals, since singlehood can suit the educational and career focus of emerging adulthood, while priorities often turn toward partnership later. They also point to selection: by midlife, many people have partnered, leaving a smaller group of singles who differ widely in whether they are single by choice.
Trajectories of sexual satisfaction remained flat over the 11 years but varied widely in their starting levels. The youngest adults split into four distinct groups ranging from very low to very high sexual fulfillment. By young adulthood, the pattern simplified to two groups, with about 63 percent reporting moderate sexual satisfaction and 37 percent reporting very low satisfaction.
Interestingly, individuals with higher education levels frequently fell into the groups with the lowest sexual satisfaction. The researchers propose that intense focus on advanced educational pursuits might reduce a person’s time or interest in seeking out sexual experiences, or that people less interested in sex may gravitate toward demanding educational paths.
When looking at the desire for a partner, the data indicated that most singles maintained a moderate to high interest in finding a relationship. For example, about 47 percent of young adults fell into a high-desire category. However, a small but distinct group of singles in each age bracket reported very low desire for a partner. These individuals tended to have higher education levels and lower levels of neuroticism, a personality trait associated with emotional instability and anxiety.
Across all the measures, the groups reporting the highest life, singlehood, and sexual satisfaction generally exhibited healthier personality profiles, including lower neuroticism and higher extraversion, meaning they were more outgoing, sociable, and energetic. “We found that the trajectories with the highest well-being tended to be more extraverted, less neurotic, more highly educated, and full-time employed,” Hoan said. “These results suggest that higher socioeconomic status is an important part of supporting a thriving singlehood.”
These findings are in line with earlier work by some of the same researchers, covered by PsyPost in 2024, which found that higher extraversion and lower neuroticism were linked to higher well-being among singles, though that earlier work compared singles and partnered people at a single point in time rather than tracking singles over years.
However, the new findings stand in tension with a study covered by PsyPost in 2026, which tracked emerging adults from age 16 to 29 and found that remaining consistently single was associated with declining life satisfaction relative to peers who partnered up. Because the current study followed only never-married singles across a broader age range of 18 to 48 without comparing them to partnered people, it suggests that most long-term singles maintain relatively high life satisfaction, even though the largest group of younger singles did show a slight decline.
As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind. Because the study tracked naturally occurring patterns, it cannot show that personality traits, education, or income cause singles to follow happier paths; these factors may simply travel together. The study also defined singlehood broadly, capturing anyone who had never married and was not currently cohabiting or in a committed relationship. This means that people who engaged in casual dating or brief romantic flings between the yearly surveys were grouped together with those who completely abstained from romance, though the authors note that removing people who briefly dated did not substantially change the results.
The study was also conducted in Germany, meaning the results might not fully translate to cultures with different social norms surrounding marriage and independence. Hoan is planning to address this limitation in future work.
“I am continuing to investigate longitudinal patterns of well-being across both single and partnered individuals, but in diverse contexts beyond WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) samples,” she noted. “Given that different cultures have strongly varying norms around singlehood, investigating singles’ experiences and how they might differ from partnered people’s experiences, across cultures is an important future direction. For instance, in India, being an unmarried woman can create daily logistical barriers, such as greater difficulty with renting apartments.”
Additionally, the oldest participants in the study were in their late forties by the end of the data collection period. Future studies will need to track singles into their sixties and beyond to see how retirement and older age shape the single experience. Finally, same-sex marriage only became legal in Germany in 2017, so “never married” carried a different meaning for gay and lesbian participants during much of the study period, and the sample included too few of them (65) to compare with heterosexual singles.
The study, “The Eras of Singlehood: 11-Year Longitudinal Trajectories of Never-Married Singles’ Well-Being Across Cohorts,” was authored by Elaine Hoan, Geoff MacDonald, and Matthew D. Johnson.