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 in a department in which most of the faculty members were coupled.

I liked my new colleagues and looked to them to be my friends. During the week, we went out to lunch nearly every day, stopped by one another’s offices just to chat, and served on committees together. On the weekends, I occasionally had invitations to out-of-town events, but I made a point of staying in town during those early months when patterns of socializing were likely to form. At the end of the day one Friday, as a work-related social event was drawing to a close, I watched two of my coupled colleagues and their partners head out together to dinner. I wasn’t invited. That hurt.

As a single person in a place dominated by couples, I would experience that sort of exclusion over and over again. For a while, it stung every time. Then it became the stuff of my intellectual explorations. I began tentatively, by asking other single people if they ever felt that they were…