New research suggests that people who remain unmarried and without a long-term partner maintain high and relatively stable life satisfaction over extended periods, even as their sexual fulfillment and desire for a partner vary. The study traces multiple generations of singles across more than a decade, indicating there is no single path to a fulfilling solo life.
Never-married singlehood refers to adults who have not entered a formal marriage and are not currently in a committed romantic partnership. As marriage rates decline globally and solo living becomes more common, researchers have shifted focus from comparing singles to partnered people to investigating how individual factors such as personality, age, and sexual fulfilment shape happiness.
Elaine Hoan, a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto and lead author of the study, told PsyPost that the rise of romantically unpartnered individuals has prompted both public and academic interest in singles, while much remains unknown about how their psychological well-being changes over time.
Prior work has shown generational differences in singles’ well-being and associations with sexual satisfaction. A 2020 study linked happier singlehood with a more satisfying sex life, and a 2021 German analysis found lower desire for a partner correlated with greater overall happiness among singles. The new longitudinal study builds on these threads by examining how these facets evolve together over more than a decade.
The researchers analysed data from the German Family Panel, tracking 2,930 adults over 11 years from 2009 to 2021. Participants belonged to three birth cohorts: emerging adults who started around age 18, young adults who began around age 26, and middle-aged adults who entered around age 36.
To be included, participants had to remain never married and without a committed partner at every one of the 11 surveys. This meant the sample represents long-term singles rather than everyone who was single at the outset, a filter that was stricter for older groups since many people partner up with age.
Over the 11-year period, participants answered yearly questions rating four outcomes on numeric scales: overall life satisfaction, satisfaction with being single, sexual satisfaction, and desire for a romantic partner. An earlier, cross-sectional analysis of the same data had suggested that singles’ life satisfaction tends to decline over time.
Using a statistical method that groups individuals with similar over-time patterns into distinct trajectories, the researchers explored whether multiple paths exist and also considered income, education, physical health, and personality traits to see how these align with different well-being paths.
The results showed that the vast majority of singles across all three age groups reported high and relatively stable life satisfaction. About 90 percent of participants in each cohort stayed above the scale’s midpoint for the entire 11 years, though there was a slight dip over time among the younger groups. A small minority in each cohort began with lower life satisfaction.
Among emerging and young adults, the smaller low-satisfaction group tended to improve over time, eventually converging with their peers. In the middle-aged group, the smaller low-satisfaction group did not show a similar improvement; its scores edged down slightly, a change that was not statistically significant and may reflect midlife social pressures around marriage and family.
We found that while relationship-focused outcomes, like sexual satisfaction and desire for a partner, varied more between individuals, singles’ overall satisfaction with their lives remained remarkably robust, Hoan explained. “Overall, even while singles face different romantic or sexual experiences, they generally remain quite satisfied with their lives over time.”
Satisfaction with being single itself showed more variation. About 67 percent of the youngest adults reported high and stable satisfaction with their single status, while young and middle-aged adults split into three groups: a highly satisfied segment, a larger middle group, and a smaller low-satisfaction segment (roughly 12 percent for the youngest and 18 percent for the middle-aged).
The authors suggest that this shift may reflect changing life goals, with singlehood suiting the educational and career focus of emerging adulthood, while priorities often shift toward partnership later. They also point to a selection effect: by midlife, many people have partnered, leaving a smaller, more heterogeneous group of singles.
Trajectories of sexual satisfaction remained relatively flat over the 11 years but differed greatly in their starting levels. The youngest group split into four distinct trajectories, from very low to very high sexual fulfilment; by young adulthood, the pattern simplified to two groups—about 63 percent with moderate satisfaction and 37 percent with very low satisfaction.
Interestingly, higher education levels were more common among those in the lower sexual satisfaction groups. The researchers speculate that intense focus on advanced studies may curtail time or interest in sexual experiences, or that those less inclined toward sex may be drawn to demanding educational paths.
Desire for a partner generally stayed moderate to high for most singles, with around 47 percent of young adults in a high-desire category. A distinct, smaller segment in each age group reported very low desire for a partner, a group that tended to have higher education levels and lower neuroticism.
Across measures, the groups with the highest life satisfaction, strongest satisfaction with singlehood, and greatest sexual fulfilment tended to display healthier personality profiles—lower neuroticism and higher extraversion—indicating broader social engagement and resilience. “These results suggest that higher socioeconomic status is an important part of supporting a thriving singlehood,” Hoan said.
The study aligns with earlier work by some of the same researchers, which found links between higher extraversion and lower neuroticism and greater well-being among singles, though that earlier work compared singles and partnered people at a single point in time rather than tracking singles over many years.
However, the new findings sit uneasily with another PsyPost report from 2026, which followed emerging adults from 16 to 29 and found that remaining consistently single was associated with declining life satisfaction relative to peers who partnered up. The current study, which followed never-married singles aged 18 to 48 without comparing them to partnered individuals, suggests that most long-term singles maintain relatively high life satisfaction, even though the largest group of younger singles showed a slight decline.
As with all research, the study has limitations. It observes natural patterns and cannot prove that personality traits, education, or income causally shape happiness pathways. It also defined singlehood broadly, including people who never married and who were not currently cohabiting or in a committed relationship, meaning casual dating or brief flings were lumped in with complete abstention from romance—though the authors note that removing those who briefly dated did not substantially alter results.
The German setting means the results may not transfer to cultures with different norms around marriage and independence. Hoan intends to address this limitation in future work, planning to examine longitudinal well-being across both single and partnered individuals in diverse contexts beyond Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic samples. For instance, she noted that in India being an unmarried woman can bring practical barriers, such as housing difficulties, highlighting the importance of cross-cultural research.
The oldest participants in the study were in their late forties by the end of data collection, and future research will need to track singles as they age into their sixties and beyond to understand retirement and older-age experiences. The sample also included too few same-sex marriages (65 participants) to compare with heterosexual singles, as same-sex marriage only became legal in Germany in 2017.
The study was titled “The Eras of Singlehood: 11-Year Longitudinal Trajectories of Never-Married Singles’ Well-Being Across Cohorts” and was authored by Elaine Hoan, Geoff MacDonald, and Matthew D. Johnson.
