My Single Life: What Hurt Wasn’t Loneliness, But Getting Left Out

Why do stories about single people focus so much on loneliness and so little on the many ways they are excluded?

“Your single life seems perfect. Is it?” That’s how I remember a tweet that was sent to me by someone I don’t know, then deleted. I don’t think anyone has a perfect life, single or otherwise — I sure don’t — but it was an interesting question.

Judging by the stories that are out there, both in the popular press and in academic writings, you might think that the most painful problem plaguing single people is loneliness. That’s never been much of an issue for me: I’ve been single all my life. I rarely get lonely. More importantly, systematic research shows that the conflation of being single or living alone with being lonely is greatly overstated, and sometimes, exactly wrong.

Although I rarely experience the loneliness that other people expect to be a big part of single life, I have experienced painful moments that I do attribute to being single. Those moments are not about being lonely but being excluded.

I became most acutely aware of what it meant to be single in a coupled world many years ago. It was when I first made the transition from being a graduate student among other mostly-single fellow grad students to being a new assistant professor…