The 6 Types of Single People

If you knew you would be single for the rest of your life, how would you feel? Delighted? Depressed? Relieved?

For some individuals, being single is about having the freedom to do what you want, when you want, without consultation or compromise. They thrive in their singlehood. For other people, being single is a profound disappointment, a sign of personal failure, and, in their view, the main reason they can't achieve their life goals.

These opposing takes on singlehood highlight a key idea: if you know someone is single, you actually know nothing about their happiness.

Single People Are Not All the Same

Historically, the dominant thrust of psychological research has operated under the assumption that to be single is to be lacking (DePaulo, 2023). Operating from this perspective, single people have served as a comparison group in research on relationships, where overall averages on measures of life satisfaction or well-being obscure critical variability in single people's experiences.

In other words, the field has often treated single people as one type of person, when, in fact, there's important diversity among single people.

New Analytic Techniques Reveal Types of Single People

How can scientists reveal underlying differences among single people? One way is to identify a feature (e.g., if they're single by choice) and compare single people based on this chosen feature. Any differences that emerge might be interesting, but this approach still obscures important variability among single people.

Enter latent profile analysis (LPA). LPA is an analytic approach that looks for similarities among people and sorts people into groups based on these similarities. In other words, it clusters people (in this case, single people) into meaningful groups based on a set of indicators, without specifying in advance how many groups or relying on one sorting variable (e.g., if they've ever been married or not). In recent research, LPA was used to help reveal important differences among single people (Walsh et al., 2023).

Six Types of Single People Have Different Experiences

Walsh and colleagues (2023) used LPA to sort 562 single adults based on their self-reports of their relationship quality (e.g., satisfaction and closeness with friends and family), and their self-esteem, stress, and health. These single adults were part of a nationally representative sample and included approximately equal numbers of self-identified single men and single women. Their results revealed six unique types of singles (Walsh et al., 2023). Which one represents you? (Note: group names are original to this blog but based on the researchers' descriptions).

1. The Happy-Go-Lucky Type. This group of single people (19.2%) enjoyed good health, low stress, and high self-esteem, while also feeling very satisfied with their friendships and family life. In addition, this group reported the highest life satisfaction.
2. The "Where's My Social Life?" Type. About a quarter of singles (24.7%) fell into this group. These single people indicated strong personal qualities, reporting high self-esteem, low stress, and good health. They also reported good family relationships. At the same time, these single people suffer in their friendships, reporting a lack of closeness and low satisfaction. These friendship challenges perhaps contribute to them indicating only moderate life satisfaction.
3. The Quiet Sufferer Type. In terms of social life, people in this group (27.6%) do well: they report strong friendships and strong family relationships. On the inside, however, they're struggling with low self-esteem, high stress, and below-average health. These latter issues may help explain their only moderate life satisfaction.
4. The "It's Not Me, It's You" Type. Fewer than 3% of people fall into this category, which is marked by high self-esteem, minimal stress, and good health... but also reports of strong dissatisfaction with their relationships (e.g., family and friends, especially friends). Interestingly, people in this group reported moderate life satisfaction.
5. The "Maybe I'm the Problem" Type. About one-fifth (16.9%) of single people reported poor friendships, poor family relationships, and poor self-esteem esteem, along with markedly high stress and below-average health. For these people, their poor interpersonal relationship experiences match their own poor self-evaluations. This group had comparatively low life satisfaction.
6. The "Mixed Bag" Type. On the one hand, single people in this group (8.7%) reported decent friendship experiences, but on the other hand, they indicated unsatisfying family relationships and low self-esteem, poor health, and high stress. With personal struggles and difficulties in their social relationships, it's not surprising that this group also indicated low life satisfaction.

What This Means for Single People

Using a person-centered analytic approach to identify diversity among single adults is an important step forward. It reveals that many single people are happy and satisfied with their life, with their relationships, and with their friendships (Walsh et al., 2023). At the same time, other single individuals are unhappy, with patterns reflecting challenges either with their social lives or their own well-being. No one way of living represents all singles.

Indeed, recognizing variability among single people is a much more faithful way to think about people's lived experiences than assuming all single people are one way or another. What's critical from this study is the idea that being single doesn't automatically mean a person is happy or unhappy in life. Ultimately, life happiness does not depend on relationship status.

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