To borrow and twist a line from Jane Austen, one of literature’s most famous spinsters: It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single woman not in possession of a man must be in want of a husband. That’s certainly what pop culture has long told us.
Picture Bridget Jones, the archetypal 1990s duvet-wrapped and big-knickered Sad Single, who recently returned to our screens to look for love yet again. Or Jennifer Aniston, hounded by the tabloids for decades after her 2005 divorce from Brad Pitt, to remarry or reproduce. Even Austen’s heroines, whip-smart and aware that they mostly needed men in order to secure stable housing, all eventually submitted to the marriage plot.
In 2025, the idea that single women are just odd socks miserably biding time till they’re paired up is still dominant, even as their numbers continue to grow. The latest data tallies in Canada — 800,000 more than a decade before. In Toronto, the number of single and never married people rose by 47,310 or 5.9 per cent between 2016 and 2021, and another 60,080 (8.1 per cent) in the five years before.
Despite societal assumptions, new University of pc28find single women to quite happy - and a lot happier than their male counterparts
We’re still raised on a cultural diet of meet-cutes and soulmates. Romance novels have never been more popular: Canadian “romantasy” (fantasy-romance) book sales were year-over-year in 2024. When Taylor Swift — patron saint of anyone who’s had their heart broken a few times over — entered a relationship with NFL player Travis Kelce in 2023, the response was jubilation that she had finally found her “end game.”
The recent “Wicked” movie, about two witches who commune despite their differences, debuted to speculation over whether Glinda and Elphaba are more than friends. Platonic love, it seems, is still not a happy enough ending.
But recently concluded that, well, “spinsters” aren’t the most miserable creatures on the planet. In fact, they found that single women are substantially happier than single men (often seen as cheerful bachelors) in every way, from sexual satisfaction to overall life satisfaction.
“There seem to be these negative perceptions of single women, these lonely spinsters or even cat ladies, who are almost forced into having to forever live alone but they have a strong desire to find a partner or a husband,” said Elaine Hoan, co-lead of the U of T study. “We realized that this has never been tested scientifically.”
Published in October 2024, the study encompassed nearly 6,000 single people from around the world, including Canada, the U.S., the U.K., Mexico and Poland, who were asked to rate their “levels of satisfaction” in various areas of their lives.
Notably, 32 per cent of single women — compared to 20 per cent of single men — put themselves in the highest range of satisfaction with their relationship status, a.k.a. very happy with being single. “We actually found the biggest differences between gender when it came to singlehood satisfaction and desire for a partner,” said Hoan. “Single women wanted a romantic partner less.”
It’s everyone else who wants them to find their match.
A woman’s rightful place is in a relationship
Last September, Swift signed off her endorsement of Kamala Harris for U.S. president as a “childless cat lady,” which was a clapback at single woman stigma. While Swift is a noted owner of Scottish Folds — she has three, which she’s travelled with in a special cat backpack — she was referring to now-Vice President J.D. Vance’s resurfaced 2021 comments blaming the sad state of America on the fact that it was run by Democrats and “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” In doing so, he was leaning on a trope as old as the medieval habit of proclaiming a troublesome woman a witch if she kept a cat.
Indeed, the idea that women belong in a relationship remains the playbook. In advertising, and are twice as likely as men to be shown in a “domestic role.”
It’s a continuation of a long-held belief that women’s primary value in a capitalist society is as the purchaser of diapers, cleaning supplies and products to ensure she’s pleasing to her breadwinning husband’s eye. Never mind that women are projected to control an estimated worldwide by 2030, and that in the U.S. than single men do.
Why is it so surprising that single women are happy?
The U of T research made headlines around the world, including in the U.K., where author Marianne Power took note. “It’s so lovely and gratifying when these kinds of stories come out and go, ‘Oh, look, we’re actually having quite a nice time.’ You sort of know you are, but sometimes the stigma around being a single woman can be so strong,” said Power, who has been single for most of her life. “I’ve thought in the past, ‘Am I fooling myself? Do I just think I’m happy because I’m in denial?’”
Power’s book “Love Me,” published last August, is about her own journey to accepting that she might actually be — gasp — both happy and single. She wrote it in the hopes that we will soon collectively realize that single women “aren’t this great tragedy,” and that to “be single in your 40s doesn’t basically mean that you’ve got life wrong.”
Even in 2025, there’s something radical about celebrating singlehood. “For people my age, we’ve been brought up with stories of The One,” said Power, who is 47. “Particularly for women, we’ve been brought up with the idea that that is our status, in a way, to be desirable and to be wanted — and if you haven’t been picked, there is something wrong with you.”
Power realized that she’d assumed she was single because she hadn’t been picked. “Then I looked back, and I could see that I had in fact been picked quite a few times, and when I had, I ran away,” she said. “It took me so long to realize, you’re not single because you haven’t been picked. You’re single because you seem to really like this life you have as a single woman.”
How single and coupled-up women’s happiness compares
This brings us to paired-up women’s satisfaction levels. “We know that the mere existence of a relationship brings a whole host of benefits to men, but we have other research that shows for women, that isn’t enough; it’s the quality of the relationship,” said relationship expert and sexologist Dr. Jess O’Reilly. “Men tend to get more out of relationships than women.”
For one thing, men tend to get their primary (or even only) connection from their partner rather than multiple sources, as more women do. For another, women typically do more of the labour — emotional and physical — in a heterosexual relationship.
A new University of Alberta study followed 520 Edmontonians over age 25 and found that women “consistently did the majority of the cooking, kitchen cleaning, grocery shopping, house cleaning, laundry and overall housework,” starting in their 20s. This was exacerbated by parenthood, and held steady as the couples hit their 50s.
This can be hard to hear, as Power noticed when U.K. behavioural science professor and found that the happiest demographic of all were single women in their 40s who didn’t have children. (Certain aspects of how Dolan interpreted this data have been questioned since he first presented them, but he stands by the central idea that men get more out of marriage than women.)
“When he presented these findings at a literary festival, people — men in particular — were so outraged at the idea that not only were single women in their 40s happy, they were the happiest demographic,” said Power, describing a 2019 event that coincided with the publication of Dolan’s book, “Happy Ever After.” After his talk, men went up to Dolan, shoving pictures of their wives in his face and saying, “Does she look unhappy to you?”
“It’s quite threatening to men because men often aren’t happier single,” said Power, adding that this is not a case of “single women are happy, married women therefore are miserable.” But there are lessons in here for women in relationships.
Since publishing “Love Me,” Power has received many messages from married women who yearn for aspects of single life. One woman said that she and her husband often take separate vacations. “They just need their time on their own. Even within a marriage, you might need quite a lot of space,” Power said. “Your needs create your union.”
The challenges of single life
Of course, singledom isn’t without its obstacles. “The financial side is obviously difficult,” said pc28writer and editor Charlotte Herrold, who has been single since splitting from a long-term partner a few years ago. “Before my breakup, I was looking at buying a house. As a single person with an above-average salary, I can no longer consider that. You’re not splitting anything, so everything becomes twice as expensive.”
There’s also a feeling of exclusion that Herrold particularly notices in Toronto. “There’s not a sense of community where you don’t necessarily feel like an outlier. Most of my friends are married and have children,” she said. She recently spent some time in Los Angeles, where the “emotional, psychological aspects of being single” felt easier because she found a group of other unattached women in their early 40s to spend time with.
While Herrold still hopes to one day find a partner, she feels less pressure to do so now. “Part of that is probably having crossed the threshold of 40, and no longer being beholden to those societal milestones around getting married and having children by a certain age,” she said.
“As young women, we were sold this idea that being a single, middle-aged woman was the worst possible fate that could befall us. But turns out, it’s maybe the best thing that could happen to a woman. I love my life, I’m healthier than I’ve ever been, I’m more at peace than I’ve ever been.”
How men’s happiness is affected by being single
Platonic bonds play an important role in satisfaction with singlehood, and there is a gender divide here. “Part of the reason why single women are having a better experience than single men is because of their larger and better quality social networks,” Hoan said. “Previous research has shown that women tend to have relationships with non-romantic connections, like their friends, family, even neighbours and acquaintances.”
The fact that “women have the upper hand in that domain could make their single lives a lot more enjoyable if they are still surrounded by many people who they feel love and trust around.”
Single men are also subject to their own set of stereotypes. For instance, they’re often painted as walking red flags purely because they’re in their 40s and haven’t partnered up yet. “Often, men are really lonely, and post-MeToo, I think they are finding it really hard to show interest in women in a way that doesn’t come off as creepy. My single male friends talk about this a lot,” said Power.
“While women are finding ways to celebrate our freedom and our sexuality, I don’t think men have quite found their way,” said Power. On her book tour, a man came up to her and said, “I didn’t realize there were other people like me.” She told him she wished there were a book about single life written from the male perspective. “I asked him, ‘Do you know of any men writing about this?’ And he said, ‘I doubt it. Men don’t talk about anything.’ Women have been so conditioned to talk to each other, and men haven’t.”
This may be why some single men turn to the “manosphere” and the likes of the viral misogynist Andrew Tate to process this experience — he who said, “The happiest women are those who embrace their femininity and submit to a strong, dominant man.” Tate’s gospel blames feminism for all the world’s ills and promises that if men become “unapologetically masculine” they’ll have women falling at their feet.
“We’re all so much more than these cartoon characters that we’ve been told we are,” said Power.
The generational shift
Power admits single life is as imperfect as any other, but she believes hers would have been the envy of many women before her. This is something her mother pointed out. “She’s 78 now, and in her generation you got married and had kids. It almost wouldn’t be a choice. Financial survival depended on getting married,” Power said. “I am one of the first generations able to get a mortgage on our own, get credit cards on our own.”
We haven’t achieved equality — Canadian women still for every dollar men do — but Power feels her financial independence and autonomy would have been “unimaginable” for women of the past. “I can imagine the suffragettes saying, ‘For God’s sake, girl, enjoy yourself!’,” she said, laughing. “It shows you how far the brainwashing went in the fairy tales, that we couldn’t just grab our power and enjoy it.”
The sea change is continuing with younger women, too. “There is a shift toward putting yourself first; Gen Z women in particular value independence in every area of their life,” said O’Reilly. Fifty-one per cent of this group said they are balancing dating around their personal goals and routines, rather than the reverse, in a 2024 survey by the dating app Tinder (O’Reilly is Tinder Canada’s relationship expert). And, notably, “getting married dropped to number 10 on the priority list for 18-to-25-year-olds, versus number four for Millennials.”
Of course, marriage can seem anathema at 21 but could become a deep desire at 35. Still, this is a shift, especially paired with a change in the way younger people see relationships. “Gen Z want connection, but they don’t want it to be rushed or disingenuous,” said O’Reilly. “We know Gen Z daters are turning away from conventional labels and they’re looking at exploring possibilities and connections.” She believes this shows a growing focus on the quality of relationships, not just the fact of being in one.
Moving forward, it’s the expansion of these norms and expectations that will boost happiness levels for all. “I hope to see a bridging of the gap, so that we can all live fulfilling lives regardless of gender, of romantic relationship status,” said O’Reilly. “We know that relationship quality is paramount to life quality, and this actually includes all relationships.”
Power advocates for an “it’s all allowed” approach to building connections and a community, where no one is “weird” for wanting what they want or needing what they need. “It’s lovely when you realize that we can do it however we like.”
Clarification — March 12, 2025
The headline and this article have been updated to better reflect the findings of research into the happiness of single women.
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