Kapitel 4
Building Community: How Singles Create Connection
On a hot June night in 2008, San Francisco's Kabuki Cinema filled with singles-mostly women-for a special "Sex and the City" screening organized by five local authors who had written about being single. This sold-out event, complete with cocktails and an after-party, represented a growing movement celebrating singlehood rather than treating it as a temporary state to be escaped.
Co-organizer Sasha Cagen had started this movement a decade earlier with her "Quirkyalone" concept celebrating those who enjoy singlehood without anxiety about finding partners. Her 2003 manifesto and creation of International Quirkyalone Day sparked celebrations in forty cities across four continents, with thousands joining her online forums. Yet despite becoming the public face of contented singlehood, Cagen herself had evolved in her thinking, acknowledging: "I've lived alone for a long time, and at this point in my life I'd grow a lot more if I were partnered."
Other activists have taken different approaches. Kim Calvert cofounded Singular Communications with wealthy divorce David Wright to "liberate single people from the bondage of old ideas." Her magazine proudly declares "SEXY SAVVY SINGLE" on each cover, targeting affluent solo dwellers with luxury ads and content affirming singular living. Meanwhile, Nicky Grist, executive director of the Alternatives to Marriage Project, approaches advocacy from a policy perspective, working to address legal, financial, and social issues affecting unmarried Americans.
These efforts face significant challenges. Organizing solo dwellers is particularly difficult because they lack a shared identity-some are happily single while others are "just saving up for their weddings." This division complicates political mobilization despite common challenges like workplace discrimination, where supervisors often expect singles to work longer hours and weekends.
African American middle-class singles represent a particularly interesting demographic phenomenon. Research by sociologist Kris Marsh shows never-married African Americans living alone are the fastest-growing segment of the black middle class, particularly women. This trend stems from multiple factors: the disappearance of industrial jobs once held by black men, mass incarceration, and educational disparities where black women now significantly outpace black men in college attainment.
Despite organizing challenges, singles represent a potentially powerful political constituency. They account for over 35% of consumer spending-approximately $1.6 trillion annually-making them impossible for marketers or politicians to ignore. The incentives for engaging unmarried Americans are simply too great for either party to overlook.
Kapitel 5
Redefining Family: Support Systems Beyond Traditional Bonds
The traditional notion that only marriage and family provide reliable support systems is being challenged by singles creating alternative networks. However, these "families of choice" face real tests during crises. Sasha Cagen experienced this firsthand when her aunt, a successful casting agent in her sixties who had lived alone for a decade, was diagnosed with brain cancer. Though friends initially rallied with tremendous support, the intensive caretaking needs proved overwhelming, eventually requiring family intervention.
This experience prompted Cagen to redefine her Quirkyalone concept to emphasize connection rather than independence, writing that "it's impossible to be connected to others without being comfortable alone." Her evolution reflects a broader recognition that while solo living offers freedom, it also demands intentional community-building.
For elderly singles, these support systems become increasingly crucial. Since 1950, the proportion of Americans over 65 living alone has grown from one in ten to one in three. Time-use studies reveal elderly singletons spend 10-12.5 hours daily alone-about 80% of their waking time. This isolation increases health risks, particularly for the recently widowed.
Yet paradoxically, most elderly singles strongly prefer living alone to other options. Only 2% of elderly widows and 20% of widowers ever remarry in the U.S. Similarly, while nearly 70% of elderly American widows lived with adult children a century ago, today only 20% do, preferring what gerontologists call "intimacy at a distance."
Ava and Victor exemplify this preference. Ava, a widowed bookkeeper in her seventies, lives in a subsidized housing complex near Coney Island where she's built a rich social life through mahjongg, exercise classes, and volunteering. Though she dates Victor, an octogenarian widower, they maintain separate apartments and limit their time together to weekends. Both deliberately avoid remarriage or cohabitation after previous experiences with ill partners, valuing their independence while still enjoying companionship.
This fierce independence stems partly from the "tyranny of independence" that pervades American culture, where admitting dependency feels like profound humiliation. Yet it also reflects genuine preferences for autonomy and dignity. As one elderly woman named Dee explained when resisting her children's attempts to relocate her: "This is my house. I'm in charge."
Kapitel 6
Navigating Challenges: Discrimination, Companionship, and Emotional Health
Singles face systematic workplace discrimination, with supervisors often expecting them to work longer hours and weekends. Ella, the only solo dweller in her office, routinely receives urgent assignments because colleagues assume she has no competing demands at home. Sherri Langburt experienced this firsthand when pregnant coworkers received schedule flexibility she didn't, and was denied a bonus because managers assumed a well-dressed single woman "didn't need it." This experience led her to create SingleEdition.com, featuring forums on workplace discrimination.
Housing discrimination presents another challenge, particularly from co-op boards suspicious of the "singles lifestyle." Despite these obstacles, singles have transformed the housing market since the 1975 Equal Credit Opportunity Act prohibited lending discrimination. By 2009, singles represented 31% of home buyers, with single women accounting for 21%-a dramatic shift from the 1950s when female buyers were virtually nonexistent.
Many solo dwellers find companionship through pets, though contrary to popular belief, they're less likely to own animals than families. For those who do have pets, the benefits are significant. Research confirms that pet ownership offers tangible benefits including reduced anxiety, decreased health risks, and perceived security. Angelina specifically chose solo living to have a cat, valuing the companionship while appreciating the low-maintenance relationship. Despite financial strain forcing her to relocate, she never considered leaving her pet behind.
Living alone inevitably involves challenges like loneliness and anxiety, but young adults develop productive strategies for managing these difficulties. The skills they acquire often benefit them when they eventually cohabitate. Some grow so comfortable living alone they question whether they could give it up, perhaps explaining why half of young singles in a Pew study reported going on no more than one date in three months.
Hoang, a professor in his thirties, appreciates the self-awareness and freedom to pursue interests like music listening that partnership might compromise. Yet this attachment to solo living sometimes reveals cynicism about relationships-Hoang believes "all you have ultimately is yourself" and fears depending on others who might disappear. This protective stance, while understandable after rejection, risks missing the unique power of intimate domestic connection.
Kapitel 7
Redesigning for Solo Living: Housing, Technology, and Urban Spaces
The dramatic rise in living alone requires reimagining our metropolitan areas, which were designed for nuclear families with stay-at-home mothers. These outdated forms don't suit today's world of working women and widespread singletons, and their sprawling, car-dependent nature is environmentally problematic.
This redesign is particularly urgent for vulnerable populations like the elderly and poor. While nursing homes are necessary for those needing assistance with basic activities, they often provide substandard care. A Consumer Reports analysis of 16,000 nursing homes found persistent problems despite reform legislation, with for-profit facilities typically providing lower quality care than nonprofit homes.
Technology offers partial solutions. Pearl, a four-foot-tall robotic assistant prototype developed by Carnegie Mellon and Stanford researchers, can help elderly people living alone by providing balance support, medication reminders, internet connectivity, and emergency assistance. Similarly, research shows robotic pets can be effective in reducing loneliness in nursing home residents. However, ethicists warn against substituting machines for human caregivers, arguing it shows "profound disrespect for older persons" who prefer human interaction.
The ideal solution combines technology with better-designed housing. Assisted living facilities attempt this balance, housing about one million elderly Americans in settings ranging from large apartment buildings with communal spaces to smaller homes with fewer than sixteen residents. The primary barrier is cost-typical monthly rent averages $3,500 ($42,600 annually), making such arrangements inaccessible to all but the most affluent families.
For younger singles with limited incomes, Rosanne Haggerty's Common Ground organization offers an innovative model. After discovering the lack of affordable housing for younger singles while working with Catholic charities in the 1980s, Haggerty founded Common Ground in 1990 and renovated the Times Square Hotel into a new kind of SRO with 652 units. Unlike typical SROs that isolate residents, she designed a "vertical village" with restored grand public spaces including a roof garden, community room, library, computer room, art studio, medical clinic, and gym. By 2011, they had renovated twelve SROs with nearly 3,000 units and established partnerships in other major cities.
The fundamental reason for insufficient affordable housing for singletons is that our cities weren't designed for them. What's needed are compact residential units in apartment buildings rather than single-family homes, walkable and densely populated neighborhoods, proximity to commercial services, attractive public spaces, and restaurants, bars, and cafes where residents can socialize. Good public transit is essential. While these features benefit all residents, they're particularly crucial for those living alone, who rely heavily on the spaces that support local social life.
Kapitel 8
Sweden's Model: Balancing Independence with Community
Sweden, where 47% of households contain just one person (compared to 28% in America), offers a model for supporting singleton life. In Stockholm, where a remarkable 60% of dwellings house solo residents, vibrant public spaces and thoughtfully designed housing create an environment where singles thrive.
Since the 1930s, Swedish architects and social planners have created buildings specifically for singletons. The pioneering "collective house" designed by Sven Markelius and Nobel Peace Prize winner Alva Myrdal opened in 1935, offering single women private apartments with communal services like cooking, cleaning and childcare. Between 1965-1974, the government's ambitious "Million Program" constructed a million new residential units, many designed for solo dwellers.
For middle-class Swedes, moving into one's own place after leaving home has become a rite of passage, almost a social right. Parents often help secure and pay for their children's first apartments, considering it "our responsibility." Under these conditions, going solo becomes a tremendously social experience, with young adults maintaining their own spaces while enjoying active social lives.
Stockholm continues this tradition with innovative housing like Fardknappen, a community-owned facility for residents over 40 with no children at home. With 43 residential units, communal dining, and shared facilities from carpentry rooms to saunas, it offers residents private apartments with optional social engagement. The building has a long waiting list, demonstrating the appeal of this model that balances independence with community.
Swedish women face less reproductive pressure knowing they're entitled to sixteen months of paid parental leave, heavily subsidized childcare, and excellent public healthcare if they have children alone. While America is unlikely to adopt such generous policies soon, we must recognize how market-based solutions fail our most vulnerable singletons.
Kapitel 9
Rethinking Solitude: The Future of Living Alone
The fundamental question isn't how many live alone but how we respond to this extraordinary social transformation. The rise of living alone could lead to community decline or a more socially active citizenry. While many researchers began alert to dangers like isolation and selfishness, the evidence shows these problems don't define the solo living experience for most people. Nearly everyone interviewed who lives alone prefers it to their alternatives, despite occasional loneliness or uncertainty.
Popular sociology often links living alone to civil society's collapse and loneliness, but this misleading narrative distracts us from helping truly isolated people. Moreover, treating solo living solely as a problem overlooks its benefits: urban singletons revitalize public life by spending more time in communal spaces and civic activities; women gain liberation from bad marriages; and environmentally, city-dwelling solos often consume less energy than suburban couples in single-family homes.
Perhaps most importantly, living alone provides the restorative solitude needed for meaningful connections-whether with others, communities, causes, or ourselves. As philosophers from the Stoics to the transcendentalists recognized, solitude helps us preserve energy for social participation and cultivate original ideas. In our hypernetworked, ultra-active culture, having one's own place offers productive retreat that, rather than leading to isolation, can spark new ideas about better ways to live together.
Just as we responded to the baby boom with suburban development and to immigration waves with municipal services, the rise of solo living demands bold policy initiatives. We need better-designed residential environments with smaller private spaces but well-designed communal areas. Studies show such supportive housing is cost-effective and even cost-saving for society, with research demonstrating that supportive housing for homeless individuals with psychiatric or substance abuse disorders significantly reduces their use of emergency services, generating savings that offset program costs.
The extraordinary rise in solo living represents both challenge and opportunity. By designing cities, technologies, and policies that support healthy independence while facilitating community, we can transform what some see as a crisis into one of modern society's greatest achievements-the ability to live alone but not be lonely, to be independent yet connected, to find in solitude not isolation but the foundation for more meaningful engagement with others and the world.
Kapitel 10
The Research Behind "Going Solo"
The findings in "Going Solo" emerge from extensive ethnographic observations and in-depth interviews with over three hundred people who live alone, supplemented by detailed interviews with professionals who regularly interact with or design for solo dwellers-including social workers, caregivers, urban planners, architects, housing developers, and AI scientists working on smart home technology.
This comprehensive study focuses specifically on urban solo living, with the majority of research conducted across four boroughs of New York City (Brooklyn, Bronx, Manhattan, Queens). These boroughs were chosen for their distinct demographic characteristics, ranging from wealthy Manhattan professionals to working-class communities in the Bronx, providing a rich, heterogeneous sample within a major metropolitan area. Additional fieldwork extended to other major U.S. cities including San Francisco's tech community, Los Angeles's entertainment industry workers, Austin's growing single population, and Chicago's diverse neighborhoods. International perspective was gained through research in Stockholm, known for having one of the highest rates of solo living globally. This primary research was complemented by extensive literature reviews examining solo living patterns in England, France, Australia, China, Japan, South Korea, India, and Brazil, offering crucial cross-cultural insights.
Different recruitment methods were carefully tailored for each demographic group: young adult professionals (28-40), middle-age middle-class adults (40-65), poor men in Single Room Occupancy buildings (30-65), and elderly people (65+). For young adults, targeted snowball sampling through professional networks and social media ensured diverse backgrounds spanning finance, technology, creative industries, and education. Middle-aged adults were recruited through a combination of poster advertisements in community centers, snowballing through existing participants, and web solicitations on platforms frequented by this demographic. Special efforts were made to recruit African American women through partnerships with community organizations and churches, acknowledging their disproportionately high rates of living alone in urban areas.
The research methodology maintained strict ethical standards: none of the subjects received monetary compensation, and all participants except public figures were guaranteed complete anonymity through coded identifiers. The research team, consisting of sociologists and anthropologists, met bi-weekly to refine interview questions, discuss emerging patterns, and address methodological challenges. Extensive field notes, including observations about living spaces, daily routines, and social interactions, proved crucial to the analytical process. Using ATLAS.ti qualitative data analysis software, the team coded and analyzed 273 interview transcripts, identifying recurring themes and patterns. Representative stories were carefully selected that best expressed the most important findings, ensuring that the themes highlighted represent broader social phenomena essential to understanding a world where solo living has become increasingly prevalent. The analysis paid particular attention to how different age groups, social classes, and cultural backgrounds approach and experience solo living.
