The actress says she “never believed the whole ‘I’m happy single’ spiel. I was like, this is totally a spiel. It took me a long time, but I’m very happy.”
The 29-year-old actress says she felt stressed heading into her 30s without a husband or baby, but now she is happy being single. And she isn’t the only one.
According to a 2017 Census Bureau report 55 percent said that getting married was not an important criterion for becoming an adult. The same percentage also said that having a child was not an important milestone of adulthood.
Despite fairy tales telling us that we can only live happily once we find our soul mate, the reality is not true for many singles. With statistics revealing that more than half of 25 to 44 years olds are single, and with more people living in one-person households than in any other arrangement, the wave of “single-positive” people are growing.
And it’s not just in the Western world that people are living alone. In analyses of a half-century of data (1960-2011) from 78 nations around the world, psychology researcher Henri C. Santos and his colleagues found that the popularity of such practices grew significantly for 83 percent of the countries with relevant data. A reason for the decline in marriage rates is the view that marriage entails a “lack of freedom”.
