Staying single used to be treated mostly as a waiting room, a temporary state on the way to eventually finding a partner. The actual numbers, and a separate line of psychological research on who thrives while single, suggest something more like a genuine, growing, and increasingly stable choice.
The clearest evidence of the trend itself comes from a 2021 analysis by Richard Fry and Kim Parker, published by the Pew Research Center, using decades of U.S. Census and American Community Survey data. Looking specifically at adults ages 25 to 54, the prime working years when most people have historically partnered, the researchers found that the share living without a spouse or partner rose from 29 percent in 1990 to 38 percent in 2019. Almost all of that growth was driven by rising numbers of people who had simply never married, rather than by divorce or widowhood increasing. The unpartnered rate rose faster among men than women over the same period. This wasn’t a temporary blip or a single generation’s quirk, it was a steady, decades-long climb.
A separate, more recent line of psychological research helps explain why staying single doesn’t automatically mean struggling. In a study by Christopher Pepping, Yuthika Girme, Timothy Cronin, and Geoff MacDonald, published in the Journal of Personality, the researchers surveyed single adults across two samples, one a community and undergraduate sample of 482 people, the other 400 people who had specifically been single for three years or more, and used a statistical method called latent profile analysis to sort them by attachment style. Rather than one uniform group, singles split into four distinct clusters: secure, anxious, avoidant, and fearful-avoidant. The securely attached group reported the highest life satisfaction, self-esteem, autonomy, and social support of the four, comparable to typical benchmarks reported in research on partnered people, not lower. Being single, in other words, wasn’t the variable driving lower wellbeing on its own. Attachment security was.
Put together, these two sources describe a shift that’s both real and, for a meaningful share of people, not a problem to be solved. Fry and Parker’s data confirms staying unpartnered has become measurably more common, and specifically because more people are simply not marrying in the first place, not because relationships are failing at a higher rate. Pepping and colleagues’ research suggests part of why that shift hasn’t produced a wellbeing crisis is that being single and being securely attached, feeling generally comfortable with closeness and independence alike, can coexist just fine, producing life satisfaction on par with what’s typically reported by partnered people. The rising numbers and the psychological data point toward the same underlying picture: for a substantial share of people, staying single looks less like a fallback and more like it’s simply working.
It’s worth being honest about what these two sources don’t establish. Fry and Parker’s analysis documents the trend and a plausible explanation, more people never marrying, but census-style data can’t fully capture why any individual person is choosing to stay single, whether by active preference, circumstance, or some mix of both. Pepping and colleagues’ research is correlational, so while securely attached singles reported notably higher wellbeing than the other three attachment groups, the study can’t fully establish that attachment security alone causes that wellbeing rather than some other factor influencing both. Their samples were also specific, one community and undergraduate group and one long-term-single online sample, which may not represent the full range of unpartnered adults across different ages, cultures, or life circumstances.
Within those honest limits, the research supports a more accurate picture than the old assumption that staying single is simply an unresolved waiting period. The numbers show it’s becoming a much more common, sustained pattern rather than a rare exception, and the psychological research suggests that for people who feel securely attached, single life can come with the same wellbeing benchmarks typically associated with being partnered, not a lesser version of it.
