The number of single people has increased over the last several decades. However, there is still something of a stigma attached to being single. Society seems to still be geared towards couples and families as the ‘normal’ social unit. Single people are often overlooked and some sociologists suggest single people may be discriminated against.
The main reason for the increase in single people is women’s liberation. Women now have higher levels of educational achievement than men and are more likely to be in work. Women are more likely to choose to live alone, and more likely to seek divorce. Of divorced people, men are twice as likely than women to recouple. Many more older women live alone than men.
Are single people discriminated against?
Some of the ways single people may be discriminated against include:
It is more expensive to live alone. SIngle person households spend 92% of their disposable income on necessities such as housing costs, food and bills. This compares to only 83% of disposable income spent by couples.
Letting agencies tend to discriminate against single people. They prefer couples because there are two incomes coming in, which they think is more secure.
Employers and employees expect more from single people as workers. The default view is that single people have fewer commitments outside of work than people with families. Thus it is single people who are expected to work odd hours or at the weekends if required.
Many holidays are geared towards couples, with single rooms often being the most inferior.
Getting engaged, married, or having children are seen as social markers of progress. Being single is just kind of overlooked.
You rarely hear single people talked about in the news, and they are rarely the focus of social policy. There is a lot of talk and policies aimed at helping families, for example, but rarely anything for single people.
An exception to this was during lockdown. The government announced that people living alone could form support bubbles with people in other households. This was one of the few times single people were explicitly mentioned in social policy.
Single women living alone are seen in a negative light. We have the spinster stereotype for example.
All of this is a problem when single people are a diverse group. There are many routes into singledom.
One of the ways social policy could adapt to single people is by allowing single workers time off to look after friends or pets.
there are 16 million people aged 16 or over who are ‘single and have never cohabited or married’, equivalent to 34.5% of the adult population.
there are 19.8 million people ‘not living as a couple’, equivalent to 39% of the adult population.
The problem with these statistics is that they do not actually tell us how many ‘single’ people there are in England and Wales (let alone the United Kingdom) – at least not if we take the commonly accepted definition of a single person as ‘someone who is unmarried or not involved in a stable sexual relationship’.
Below I explore why I think there are way less single people in the country than these official statistics suggest…
Single people never cohabited or married
There are 16 million people who are ‘single and never cohabited or married’, equivalent to 34.5% of the population aged over 16 in England and Wales, at least according to Office for National Statistics, 2015 data.
However, while it is interesting to know how many people are ‘single, and have never married or cohabited’, this isn’t the same as the number of people who are actually single, for the following reasons:
Firstly, and probably most obviously, this system of categorization does not tell us the proportion of divorced or widowed people who not married but are in relationships, and thus not single. (Some of these will be cohabiting as if married of course, so in ‘highly committed relationships!)
Secondly, it doesn’t tell us how many people who are ‘single and never cohabited or married’ are in committed relationships, and hence not actually single.
Thirdly, it doesn’t tell us how many ‘married’ people are in empty shell marriages, and thus single in a sense.
NB – the above data came from the Labour Force Survey, which gleans its information about relationship status from a series of interview questions – questions which will in no way tell us how many actual single people there are in the U.K. – this particular question is only really only useful for telling us the number of married people or in a formal civil partnership and cannot tell us very much about the relationship status of the non-married/ civil partnership people.
In fairness to LFS, it does go on to ask whether people are ‘cohabiting’, the results for which are shown below…
People ‘not living as a couple’
A second possible way of measuring the number of single people in the country, again taken from ONS Labour Force Survey data, is to look at ‘living arrangements’ – and here we find that approximately 39% of the population are not living as a couple, while 61% are living as a couple.
I’d say this is a more valid way of measuring the number of single people in the country because it includes a clear indication that 61% of the population are either married or cohabiting, rather than just the number of people who are ‘married’ like in the first data set. However, it still does not tell us how many single people there are in the country, because some proportion of people not living as a couple will still be in committed relationships, but the data does not tell us this!
We are thus forced to look elsewhere to find out how many actual single people there are in the country….
Other sources of data about ‘single people’
I guess I’ve got to at least mention Facebook….. According to ‘statistics brain‘, 37% of people report their relationship status as single on Facebook.
However, this data has validity problems because:
I don’t have access to the methodology used, no details are provided.
This probably isn’t from the UK.
According to this New Statesman article, 40% of 20 somethings are reluctant to report themselves as ‘in a relationship’ on Facebook unless it is an engagement.
This 2017 Statista survey reports that around 27% of the UK population aged 40 to 70 reported that they were single, not currently in a relationship.
While I’m inclined to intuit that this is a valid figure, unfortunately I’m not in a position to objectively validate the findings because I ain’t prepared to pay the subscription fee to gain the access required to get the information on sampling techniques (if they even exist in any meaningful sense because this was an online survey!)
Having said that, the above data is broadly backed up by this 2014 YouGov Poll which reports that 30% of the UK population are single (although the analysis doesn’t go into any detail about this aspect of the poll, limiting itself to how people who are in relationships feel about each other).
Personally I think this 30% figure sounds about right, given that the numbers of single people in their 20s and 30s will probably be higher than those in the their 40s-70s, you’d expect the later percentage to be slightly higher than the Statista results, so it triangulates nicely.
So…. how many people are single in the UK? About 30%.
Signposting and Related Posts
This topic is usually taught as part of the families and households module in the first year of A-level Sociology, and is part of the ‘family-diversity’ subtopic.
It may seem odd studying single people in a module on the family, but the simply fact is that declining marriage and increasing divorce mean that more people stay single for more of their lives than ever before!
Postscript – Fantasy reporting on the geographic distribution of single people
Heads up on click-bait lists like this from The Independent which show you the ‘cities with the most single people in’ – here are the results:
The percentages above are for people who are ‘single and never married’, the problem is that most of these are university towns…. where lots of young people live, most of whom will move on to another city once they’ve graduated, and to my mind to get a realistic picture of how ‘committed to single life’ a city’s population is, you’d need to control for age, and how long they intend to stay in that city. It’s sort or ironic, somehow, that geographical instability (most students only intend to reside in their university town temporarily) skews the figures on how many people are not in a stable relationship (i.e. single).
Then of course, as I mentioned above, many of these people will actually be in committed relationships.
people increasingly choose to live alone because of increased wealth, urbanisation, improved communications and living longer
Why are increasing numbers of people all over the world living alone?
People increasingly choose to live alone because of:
Increasing wealth: people in wealthier countries are more likely to choose to live alone.
Improved communications: makes it easier for solo-livers to keep in contact with friends and family while living alone.
Mass urbanisation: higher density populations = easier to connect with other people.
Increased longevity: following a relationship ending or one partner dying, there is less desire to pair-up again!
According to a recent book by Eric Klinenberg (2013) Explaining the Rise of Solo Living (1), this is a global phenomenon and mainly reflects the increasing degree of individual choice that comes with increasing wealth.
Global trends in single person households
The percentage of one person households has increased in many countries since the 1960s and since the year 2000, although there is a lot of variation by country.
In America the number of single person households has doubled since. the1960s, with 28% of households having only one person in them in 2018.
The countries with the highest levels of people living on their own are in Northern Europe. In Germany, for example, more than 40% of households. are single person households. (2)
Single Person Households in the UK
In 2022, 30% of households in the UK were single person households, this is a very slight increase since 2012.
Living alone: younger men and older women
There has been a change in the proportion of men and women living alone by age over the last decade. In 2022 the relative percentages are as follows:
Age
Men
Women
16-24
2.6%
1.8%
25-44
23.6%
20.7%
45-64
34.6%
26.6%
65-74
19%
23.5%
75+
20.3%
37.5%
Percentages of single person households by age, 2022 U.K.
A Summary of Going Solo by Klinenberg
Klinenberg argues that the rise of solo living is an extremely important social trend which presents a fundamental challenge to the centrality of the family to modern society. In the USA, the average adult will now spend more of their life unmarried than married, and single person households are one of the most common types of household. We have entered a period in social history where, for the first time, single people make up a significant proportion of the population.
Eric Klinenberg spent seven years interviewing 300 single Americans who lived alone, and the general picture he got was that these people were exactly where they wanted to be – living on their own was not a transitory phase, it was a genuine life choice. On the whole, living alone is seen as a mark of social distinction, living as part of a couple is for losers.
While single by choice is very much on the up among younger people who have never settled down into a long term cohabiting relationships and have no intention of doing so, it is also the norm among older people who have come out of relationships.
Where older people living alone are concerned, and these are mostly women, they are not all chasing the dwindling population of men in their age group (given the higher life expectancy for women). Most of them are in fact wary of getting involved in relationships because doing so will probably mean becoming someone’s carer (again), and similarly they are skeptical about moving back in with their children (and possibly their grandchildren too) because of fear that they will become an unpaid domestic and child-sitting slave.
NB, as a counter to the above, not all singles are happy about it, however. One such group consists of mainly men on low wages who are unmarriageable and live in ‘single room occupancy facilities’ often suffering from various addictions and who practice ‘defensive individualism’ in order to cope with their bleak situation.
Why are more people living alone?
So how do we account for this increasing in single person households?
Klinenberg suggests four reasons…
The increased wealth generated by economic growth and the social security provided by the modern welfare state – the basic thesis is that the rise of single living is basically just a reflection of increasing wealth. When we can afford to live alone, more of us choose to do so. We especially see this where Scandinavia is concerned, and nearly half of the adult population live alone.
The communications revolution – For those who want to live alone, the internet allows us to stay connected. An important part of his thesis is that just because we are increasingly living alone, this doesn’t mean that we are becoming a ‘society of loners’.
Mass urbanization – Klinenberg suggests that Subcultures thrive in cities, which tend to attract nonconformists who are able to find others like themselves in the dense variety of urban life. In short, it’s easier to connect with other singles where people live closer together.
Increased longevity – because people are living longer than ever and because women often outlive their spouses by decades rather than years — aging alone has become an increasingly common experience.
Discussion questions
In the video below, Wayne discusses his motivations for ‘going solo’ with his friend Archie, and together they explore some of the reasons for the increase in single person households.
To what extent do you think Kleinberg’s findings apply to the increase in Solo Living in the UK?
What other ‘deeper’ Sociological reasons might explain the increase in Solo Living?
Do you agree that the rise of Solo Living challenges the centrality of the family in modern society?
Historical data (on single person households)
Most people who live alone are 65+ and increasing numbers of those aged 45-60 are living alone. However, the numbers of younger people living alone are declining (so Wayne in the video above is actually wrong when he says solo living is on the increase among younger people!)
Signposting and Related Posts
This material is mainly relevant to the families and households module, usually taught in the first year of A-level sociology.
