How Someone Can Be Married but Still Single at Heart

One of the questions I am often asked when I talk about my book, Single at Heart: The Power, Freedom, and Heart-Filling Joy of Single Life, with people who have not yet read it, is: Can you be single at heart (meaning that single life is your best life) and married or in a committed coupled relationship?

I thought I knew the answer before many people shared their life stories with me and tens of thousands answered a survey, but I was only half right. I expected to find married people who got married because it was what they thought they should do, and then discovered that, no matter how much they loved their spouse, they yearned to be single again. They stay married to honor their commitment to their partner.

This really does happen. Early on, when I first started writing this “Living Single” blog, a married reader got in touch regularly to tell me how much he identified with the benefits and advantages of single life that I described. He wished he could be single again and stay single.

But he still cared about his wife, maybe even loved her, and she had done nothing wrong. He stayed married because he thought it was the right thing to do, even though what he really wanted was to be single. Since then, I have heard other stories like his.

What I did not anticipate was the other category of people who are married or in a committed romantic relationship yet still consider themselves single at heart. These people want to stay in their romantic relationship. They love their partner and do not fantasize about being single again. They typically have key characteristics of people who are single at heart, and they insist that they are single at heart.

What I learned from those who shared their stories in some detail is that their romantic relationships were unconventional in important ways. For example, people who are single at heart love having time and space to themselves. They savor their solitude—they don’t worry that they will be lonely if they have some alone time.

That’s been true of the coupled people who want to stay coupled and identify as single at heart. They typically have a lot of space in their relationship, both physical and emotional.

Some of these committed or married couples live apart from each other (“living apart together”), by choice and not because their jobs or other considerations keep them apart. Others share a home, but they have separate spaces within that home, such as separate floors.

Many like their psychological space, too. For example, some have told me that they don’t always want to talk about their day once they reconnect after coming home from work; they’d rather decompress first.

Committed couples who identify as single at heart also appreciate their freedom and often have less interconnected lives than the kinds of couples who are sentimentalized. For example, they often keep their finances separate. They may spend lots of time with friends or relatives and without their partner. Some enjoy sleeping alone at least some of the time. They may even travel solo, just because they want to.

I had to be persuaded that this second group really did qualify as single at heart, but now I agree with them that they are. They typically score a little lower on the Single at Heart survey than solo singles who are single at heart, but they are clearly in single at heart territory. They are not single, but they are single at heart.

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