This was published 8 months ago
Home alone and happy, thanks very much
More people than ever before are living solo. But forget lonely-only, cats-and-wine clichés: many are flourishing – not in spite of their solo dwelling, but because of it.
Credit: Getty Images
It occurred to me the other day, possibly in a moment of domestic exasperation, that I had never lived alone. Unless you count living with a three-year-old as living alone, and that was only for a year, before I leased a house with another single mother and later remarried. Someone has always been about, alongside, underfoot. I began to wonder about that decades-long history of always sharing a living space with others. Was it born of a love of intimacy and companionship, a failure of imagination, a puppy-like willingness to put up with quite a lot – first marriage – or just the panic some of us feel at the idea of being alone?
More people are living on their own now than at any other time in human history and, significantly, many by choice. Until quite recently, it wasn’t done to live by oneself, or not if it could be avoided. To put it another way, for the most part you couldn’t avoid living with others, even if you preferred your own company to the wrong company. Consequently, living alone is still in the process of throwing off its bad rep. Despite the boom, those who choose to live alone can find themselves judged – assumed to be lonely, selfish or, secretly, a little miserable. It can carry a whiff of failure, especially for women.
“It’s always been viewed negatively,” one solo dweller tells me. “Look how many words there are for older women on their own. Crone, witch, spinster, crazy cat lady, the list goes on. I don’t feel like any of those things.” Another says she was shocked to see “never married” written on her medical notes, as if this were relevant to her blood cancer.
Yet in recent decades, one of the fastest-growing types of household has been the lone household. It’s not a homogeneous group, of course. Young people, old, widowed, divorced, the resolutely single, the high-earning 30-something, the migrant worker a long way from home and family. It’s an upward trend not only in the US and European countries like Sweden, where it seems almost compulsory (in Stockholm, at least 50 per cent of households consist of one person) but also, increasingly, in affluent Asian ones, as young people stay single longer or have higher incomes. Japan is approaching 40 per cent; in Korea it jumped above 40 per cent in 2023; even China is joining the trend at about 25 per cent.
In Australia in 2021, according to the Australian Institute of Family Studies (AIFS), solo households accounted for just over a quarter of the total, up from 18 per cent in 1981. Women living alone outnumbered men (55 per cent versus 45 per cent).
It can be a phase, or it can last longer than you planned. In her 20s, freelance designer Rachel Kristenson* would never have imagined that at 42, she would still be scanning dating apps, with no children on the horizon – just eggs in the bank – and living by herself in a small but beautifully appointed apartment with a sea view. She’s clocking up her 12th year there.
She would have been even more surprised to know that, while part of her feels the lack of a regular partner and children, another part loves the life.
“I shared houses for most of my 20s, until I was about 32,” she says. “I wanted my own space because, to be honest, I was sick of other people, and I had spent a year living with my brother and was about to throttle him. This was a boy who would keep a half-eaten barbecue chicken next to his bed and occasionally graze on it. Now I could never, ever go back to a share house, or even a place with a good friend.”
Anyone who lives alone for long wonders if they could adjust, or re-adjust, to living with a partner. Kristenson thought about it recently. “My ex was moving to the US and was homeless for 24 hours so I said, ‘Come and stay with me.’ It was like cosplay living with someone. It was really nice and made me realise what I was missing – not in terms of the grand romance but the mundanities. At the same time, I was really relieved when he went. It was like, great, I can do what I want now. But I did start to worry about how entrenched I am in my ways and how selfish. I’m like a child who never has to share their toys.”
Don’t tell that to American social scientist Bella DePaulo. DePaulo has made a career of promoting the blessings of single life and solo living, and crushing jaundiced naysayers along the way. Now in her 70s and the author of Single at Heart: The Power, Freedom and Heart-filling Joy of Single Life, DePaulo has always lived alone and writes a regular blog defending the choice, although, in her eyes, contented solo dwellers shouldn’t have to defend anything.
The “single at heart”, she argues, are flourishing because they are single, not in spite of being single. She advises solos to reject the popular narrative that living alone is for the “selfish”. There’s plenty of evidence, she insists, that single people are in fact more generous than married people with their time, their money and their care. The same goes for the widespread idea of a loneliness epidemic, in the wake of more people living alone.
As DePaulo and others point out, promoters of the loneliness-epidemic theory tend to throw all solo dwellers in together, regardless of their particular circumstances, to come up with a picture of chronic isolation and fractured community. A lot of research, she argues, suggests many solo dwellers are more socially connected and involved with community than couples are. They make much more of an effort to reach out, join up, engage, hang out, go out.
“For most people, especially as they get older, being on their own starts with a big event, like a divorce, or a death, or a break-up.”
Psychotherapist Lesley Loughnan
Psychotherapist Lesley Loughnan, 67 and now mostly retired, acknowledges many people living alone do feel lonely but agrees it’s heavily influenced by how they got there. Loughnan herself, based in Sydney’s Blue Mountains, has lived on her own for about 25 years, after three long-term live-in relationships in her 20s and 30s.
“For most people, especially as they get older, being on their own starts with a big event, like a divorce, or a death, or a break-up. So as well as the new living situation, you’re experiencing these very intense feelings, whether it’s grief or anger or whatever is going on. It’s a job, learning to live on your own in those circumstances. You might choose to stay living that way but you have to work through the pain first.”
Several people tell Good Weekend of a sense of shame they had to fight off. They didn’t actually mind living by themselves but they couldn’t help feeling the world at large viewed them as failed candidates in the conventional-life test. One woman remembers that when she first lived alone, she used to ask the fishmonger for two pieces of fish and freeze one. She thought it made her look pathetic to be cooking for one.
Says Loughnan: “You have to build your confidence to do things like go to the movies alone and then it becomes a joy. I consciously did a lot to reframe my whole views around singledom, loneliness, connection. The things that helped me include – I know it sounds corny – the whole gratitude thing, running through that every morning. And remembering [17th-century philosopher] Blaise Pascal’s idea: ‘All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.’ To befriend myself has been the task of the past 25 years.”
Not everyone longs for a live-in partner. Many people are what Bella DePaulo calls single at heart. Or the new term, “perma-single”.
Artist Peter Simpson lives by himself in a two-storey terrace in inner-city Sydney. Step in the front door and the noise of the busy street gives way to a calm, elegant interior of comfortable sofas and armchairs, oriental rugs, a wall of books and others hung with Simpson’s beautiful landscapes. It’s considered, ordered, tranquil, mounting a silent but compelling argument for solo living.
“I’ve lived alone most of my adult life,” Simpson says. “The last time I really lived with others was in a group house in Melbourne in the ’80s. It was a very fluid time everywhere in those days for gay men. There were a couple of the people I didn’t get on with in the house. One was my partner. We became friends again later but at the time, it was such it was a relief to get out and on my own.
“Now I’ve lived alone for about 30 years. I think I’m probably not cut out to be living with someone. I’m 72, so, never say never, but chances are …”
“It’s a balancing act between reaching out to people and not forcing it, not using people to fill up some kind of void.”
Peter Simpson
Would he say it was by choice or circumstance? “I was about to say circumstance but I think if you’re doing it over as long a period as I have, you’ve probably got to say it’s your choice, that it’s really what you want. And after all this time, I’d probably be a terrible person to live with. It would be ‘I’m not mad at you, I’m mad at the dirt’ sort of thing. I like order, I like my routine, I’m comfortable with my own company.”
Living alone means he can work when he wants to. He’s working on a show for April and the distinctive smell of oil paint and turps drifts down the stairs from the light-filled room that is his studio.
He admits to moments of loneliness. “I think everyone has them, even in relationships. That feeling of loneliness is often more to do with worrying about externals,” he says, gesturing to the street, “than being comfortable in your own skin. It’s thinking, ‘Poor me, What have I done wrong? Why isn’t anyone calling me?’ or ‘There’s nobody to talk to about this. Boohoo.’ If you can challenge that and go, ‘Yes, I know that feeling,’ it dissipates.”
Peter Simpson has lived alone for about 30 years and suspects he’d be a “terrible person” to live with.Credit: Louie Douvis
Says Rachel Kristenson, who works from home as a freelance designer: “I definitely get lonely, especially now that I’m not working in an office and even though I have a good social circle. I now pay for a co-working space and try to go in one or two days a week, mainly to have people around. Even if I just say hi to one person and smile at someone in the lift and actually put jeans on rather than tracksuit pants covered in soup, I feel so much better.”
Dr Lixia Qu, a researcher with the AIFS, says while it’s true that feelings of loneliness are more often reported by people living alone, it’s only a proportion of those people – and the majority living alone don’t feel lonely. For that matter, the “loneliness gap” between solo dwellers and people living with others is not as big as you might imagine. In a 2020 households survey,
26 per cent of respondents living alone agreed with the statement “I often feel lonely”, but so did 17 per cent of people living with others.
“In the past, people living alone tended to be those who’d been widowed,” says Qu. “So when people conjured up a picture of people living alone, there was this negative stereotype associated with it, of being lonely.” A bleak life with a single gas ring, a tin of sardines and a temperamental cat for company. “I think that attitude has changed, and especially among young people. Family patterns are changing – people are marrying later, having children later, and lots of people are educated and in professional jobs, so they can afford to live alone.”
Now that we’re partnering later and living longer, more people than ever before will experience living alone at some point. Urbanisation, women’s increasing independence, and the revolution in communications have also made it more possible.
It’s a radical social change – “the biggest social change that we’ve yet to name or identify” as American sociologist Eric Klinenberg observed in his 2012 book, Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone. Until about the 1950s, Klinenberg notes, no society in the history of our species had ever supported large numbers of people living alone. Now it’s not only common; for those who can afford it, it’s often the preferred option. “Wherever there is affluence, and a welfare state,” notes Klinenberg, “people use their resources to get places of their own.”
It’s “one of life’s great luxuries”, recalls Lindsay Clement-Meehan, even though the 39-year-old communications consultant now lives happily with her partner in an apartment she bought in Melbourne.
“I lived alone for about five years, from my early to mid-30s, and I just loved it. It was at a really interesting time of life, when you’re becoming a bit more confident and successful professionally. You’ve got some disposable income and you’re able to carve out a life as an individual. It gives you this flexibility and independence.”
She doesn’t long for her old life but living with someone else took adjustment. “The biggest difference was an unstructured schedule versus a structured one. I was – and still am – a huge proponent of the girl-dinner thing. I love to go out or just get takeaway but when you’re living with someone, you tend to be a bit more sensible. My boyfriend eats a lot later in the day than I do, so that has changed my schedule a bit, too.
“Very banal things, but you do think about it. It’s not a loss of freedom
but occasionally I think, if I were still a single person, I’d just go out for a glass of wine and a meal somewhere on the way home. You don’t have that same spontaneity, so there’s some trade-off.”
Lindsay Clement-Meehan calls living on your own “one of life’s great luxuries”. That said, she’s now living with a partner.Credit: Simon Schluter
The notion of freedom comes up a lot. Says Lesley Loughnan: “I often joke and say, ‘I’m entirely flexible. I do what I want, when I want.’ If I’m tired, I can go to bed and leave the dishes. I don’t have to achieve some kind of standard that is witnessed. And I don’t have to negotiate finances or what happens in the house. I see this with my friends all the time. The negotiations go on and on, and you end up making some terrible compromise.”
Dr Jody Hughes, now a research manager with the AIFS, wrote her 2010 PhD thesis on young people living alone. She focused on people in their 20, 30s and early 40s, where there has been a massive growth in solo living, associated with delayed partnering, extended young adulthood and so on, she says.
“On balance, they talked about it more as a choice than a requirement. The way people define being an adult now is through independence and autonomy, not so much through partnering and having children.”
But what looks like a choice can also be something you’re corralled into by invisible social forces. We’re living in a time that insists on autonomy, and it’s no secret that individualism has become the 21st century’s dominant organising principle. Solo living fits with its particular, some might say alienated, set of aspirations.
As Eric Klinenberg writes of this way of thinking: “We have embarked on this massive social experiment in living alone because we believe it serves a purpose. Living alone helps us pursue sacred modern values – individual freedom, personal control, and self-realisation … It liberates us from the constraints of a domestic partner’s needs and demands, and permits us to focus on ourselves.”
Arguably, solo living also suits consumer capitalism and the labour market. Not only is every lone householder more available to devote themselves to their work without the pesky interruption of partners or family, they’re also buying their own fridge, TV, and so on. A 2006 report, published in the journal Environment, Development and Sustainability, found that one-person householders were the biggest consumers of energy, land and household goods – they consumed 38 per cent more products, 42 per cent more packaging, 55 per cent more electricity and 61 per cent more gas per person than an individual in a four-person household.
“Most people want to partner eventually, if it’s with the right person.”
AIFS research manager Jody Hughes
In an age of high divorce rates, experimenting with solo living was a kind of risk-management strategy for some, Jody Hughes found. It reassured them they could manage alone, if the couple thing failed. Even so, young solo dwellers don’t appear to be heralds of a brave new alternative to the nuclear family and a house in the suburbs.
“There’s a lot of theory around the idea that it’s a rejection of the couple relationship and changes in the family generally,” says Hughes, “but I didn’t find it was. Most people want to partner eventually, if it’s with the right person.
“Most people were living alone in the transition to adulthood, so they were comparing it with living with parents or in share houses. It was seen as a really positive step in their own life journey.”
Some saw it as helpful preparation for future relationships. But does living alone make you more able to live with others, or less?
“It can be empowering, especially for young women,” Hughes says. “It was seen as positive either way. ‘I’ll be OK on my own if it comes to that, but I’m also bringing more to a relationship by having all these things of my own that I’ve cultivated.’ ”
The paradox, of course, is that the happy, self-realised solo dweller is more likely to set the bar higher for any prospective live-in partner, that “right person”.
“It’s like, why would you potentially want to downgrade the day-to-day situation you already have?” Lindsay Clement-Meehan says. “We’re a bit more selfish – in the right way – these days. We’re thinking about that cost-benefit analysis.”
She knows several women in their 50s who have been through divorces and are now “living their best lives”.
“They have gorgeous houses, beautifully furnished with their lovely things. They’ll go on holiday whenever they want, do whatever they want. They’ve had that big relationship thing and it hasn’t worked out, but they seemed to be thriving at the other end of it. If they do have relationships, they’ll be quite casual. It’s like, ‘Oh yeah, I see him once a week, not bothered.’ ” Others are in more committed relationships but “living together apart”, as it’s known.
“In the past … when people conjured up a picture of people living alone, there was this negative stereotype associated with it, of being lonely.”
Dr Lixia Qu
Older women make up the highest proportion of those living alone in Australia. In household studies conducted by the Melbourne Institute, men living alone generally reported feeling more loneliness than women did. It’s possible there’s more in it for women. They often take a deeper pleasure in creating their own spaces, Jody Hughes found. They tend to have more friends. They may feel a burden of care lifting, or even just the expectation of it. Crucially, many more women can now support themselves financially. Young or old, the more fortunate don’t have to barter for a roof and security. And, as a household of one, the housework shrinks.
Lesley Loughnan has had relationships over the years but experience has taught her she’s happiest not living with a man. “I’ve often observed that women end up as both CEO of the house and chief worker, in charge of organising all the domestic tasks, but also doing most of them. I never wanted to be somebody’s domestic slave. The truth is, most men don’t do their share of the load. This way, not am I only not doing all that extra work, I’m not feeling resentful about it as well.”
It’s often said that humans aren’t meant to live alone. On the other hand, we’re not very good at living with other people, either.
Shared living might seem the logical answer to having company within arm’s reach, but almost everyone Good Weekend spoke to had had the classic share-house experience early on and no one was in a hurry to go back to the unvarnished version of Friends – the dirty frying-pans, the moody flatmate, the crappy room, the simmering conflicts and damaged friendships.
There is, however, a third option that has been largely ignored in Australia, despite a housing affordability crisis that makes shared living a logical way to go. That option is the intentional community, or co-housing, which combines the best of both worlds: private dwellings clustered around shared spaces and pooled resources.
Sascha Solar-March is a partner in the architectural firm Saha, based in Sydney. He’s always been attracted to the idea of a more communal, sustainable style of housing, separate but together. At 35, the architect has tried various permutations himself, including share houses, living in a tiny rented flat with a partner, and on his own in a two-bedroom apartment he bought.
Architect Sascha Solar-March had experienced both living with a partner and living alone before finding his “dream set-up” – renting in an informal co-op community among friends in a six-unit Bondi block.Credit: Louie Douvis
He liked aspects of living alone but felt the weight of responsibility. “It means you’re the sole driver of your life. That’s both really positive and really negative. I got so tired of that. When you live with others, you’ll walk in and someone will be putting on something on TV you haven’t chosen, or playing a song you haven’t heard, or cooking something you’ve never made – your world is so much bigger. I found it way too draining to be constantly at the helm.”
As a single man back on the dating circuit, his stylish bachelor pad, with no flatmates hogging the bathroom, gave him a certain Austin Powers cachet, but even that wasn’t enough in the end. Feeling isolated in the suburb he’d bought into, after a year he returned to renting in Bondi. “Here, even though a lot of people are living alone, everyone is out on the street constantly, or drawn to the beach. It’s densely populated and it has that feel of a European piazza.” (He’s not the only one to mention how much better parts of southern Europe and Scandinavia, for example, handle community life and welcoming public spaces for solo dwellers.)
Gregarious by nature, Solar-March is currently in what he calls his “dream set-up”, a kind of informal co-op. “It’s a block of six apartments that has been going for about 20 years, occupied by people who are all friends or friends of friends.”
If an apartment becomes vacant, word goes around. “There’s a shared garden, shared laundry, and two of the units share a bathroom, including mine. All the units are so tiny that everyone is always in the garden.”
Professionally, Solar-March and his fellow architect, Harry Catterns, have focused on designing intergenerational houses – spaces that can accommodate several generations with privacy. He’d like to see communal but independent living happening on a larger scale.
Efforts to create “communal spaces” in anonymous tower blocks are often token at best. The brochures might show laughing singles mingling sky-high on the astroturf, negronis in hand, but the reality is these spaces are often poorly thought out and deserted.
“To really work,” says Solar-March, “they need so many things to align. When developers try to do it within the one building, it’s destined to fail, whereas when cities or councils try to do it, it’s much more likely to succeed – like what [Sydney Lord Mayor] Clover Moore is doing, closing down streets and creating parks that are nice to be in.
“The scale of the intervention matters. If you have one big tower block and one big communal kitchen, no one has responsibility for that space, so it fails.“
In Melbourne, he knows of a few medium-density buildings designed to encourage a kind of benevolent “forced interaction” via shared facilities, like laundries, gardens, and parking. “If you have to take turns to use the dryer, you have to have a conversation about the dryer and then you maybe learn what their kids are called. That kind of stuff. That happens less when it’s a high-density block where you only share a lift. No one wants to chat in a lift.”
In the end, it comes down to social connection, not the number of people in a dwelling. Singles and solo dwellers soon learn that the world won’t come to them. They have to put in an effort, set up routines, maintain contacts. But they also learn that they don’t need the world all the time. Solitude can be its own reward, to a point.
Artist Peter Simpson says he has to remind himself to reach out. “It’s very easy to think, ‘I’ll just go off and be on my own,’ stay home. It’s a balancing act between reaching out to people and not forcing it, not using people to fill up some kind of void.”
Rachel Kristenson, in her early 40s, is uneasy with the prospect of flying solo indefinitely. “I still love living on my own. But part of me also hopes it’s not forever. That there’s an end date, where there is another person and maybe a child at some point.“
In her 60s, Lesley Loughnan is surprised to find herself not just content but actively rejoicing in her circumstances. “This perception of the ‘lonely old woman’ is often so wrong,” she says, sitting in a shaft of sunlight in the feminine, airy house she has built for herself. “I never imagined I would get to be an older woman, living alone, single, and find happiness in that. It would have seemed like the worst fate. But I’ve also worked hard on it. As Petrea King [head of Quest for Life] says, ‘Peace is not a place you arrive at and unpack. It’s a day-to-day job.’ I can still have miserable days, but I’m kind to myself. I know this too will pass.”
* Name has been changed.
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