During the pandemic, it seemed like new couples were coming out of nowhere. Suddenly, people who had been single for long periods of time were living with their new partners or hard-launching them on Instagram. However, for a number of singles, the pandemic didn’t change their outlook on love. In fact, new research discovered that single people are enjoying staying single.
In February 2022, Pew researchers reached out to a sample of 2,616 single people to find out if the pandemic had made them want to enter a relationship. Almost 60 per cent revealed they were no more or less interested in finding someone, 11 per cent were more interested, and 10 per cent answered that they were now less interested in pursuing someone.
For the almost 60 per cent who had no interest in starting a relationship, this remained the case among men and women, with no gender being less interested. However, for the 11 per cent of respondents who said that the pandemic made them now want to find someone, more men than women wanted to start a relationship.
Related: 10 ineffective dating app profile tropes to avoid in 2022.
Why do singles want to stay single?
The researchers found that a large number of single people were not interested in finding a committed romantic relationship or even going on dates, and it’s not because they’re too busy with work or because of their ages or because they feel undesirable. The top reason singles want to stay single, is because… they enjoy it! The majority of singles — 72 per cent — feel this way.
Of course, staying single because you want to be shouldn’t be a surprising concept. However, as noted in Psychology Today, this is more of a radical finding than you’d expect, because it “shatters the stereotypes of single people that have been documented again and again, those inaccurate beliefs that single people are miserable or lonely or that they have ‘issues,’ and that’s why they are single.”
So the next time you’re at a family gathering and someone asks why you’re still single, and they don’t believe it’s because you want to be, show them the data!
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