Majority of one

She stares out the window, watching people pass by on the street. In a little while she’ll warm up some soup, then watch television. From time to time she casts a wistful glance at the telephone, which never rings.

It runs so deep in our culture, that image of the senior on her own, lonely and forgotten, a figure of pity and contempt. The older we get, the more likely we are to be on our own: for women over 65, it’s 33%. By the time we reach 85, it climbs to 43%. But our society tilts heavily in favour of marriage and family life: tax breaks, insurance benefits, travel, grocery packaging, entertainment, media, and on and on. So people on their own get short shrift.

But then along comes Statistics Canada with some startling news from the 2016 Census. For the first time in Canadian history, the number of one-person households has surpassed all other types of living situations. They accounted for 28.2 per cent of all households in 2016, more than the percentage of couples with children, couples without children, single-parent families, multiple family households and all other combinations of people living together. Living on your own is the new normal. But our cultural values and social arrangements haven’t caught up yet.

Ah, you say, but what about loneliness? What about belonging? What about quality of life? It turns out that a lot of the research has bought into the prevailing cultural values, assuming marriage and family life to be the norm, and equating solo living with loneliness. Discard those assumptions, and a new picture emerges. Here’s a sampling from some recent research:

• Women who get married get fatter.
• Women who have always been single have better overall health than currently married women.
• People who have always been single are more attentive to friends, family and neighbors than people who are married.
• Single people have a more diverse set of confidants than married people do.
• Single people are more likely to volunteer for civic organizations than married people are.
• Single people have less debt than married people do, even when the married people do not have kids.
• Single people are less materialistic than married people are.
• The more self-sufficient single people are, the less likely they are to experience negative emotions. For married people, the reverse is true: the more self-sufficient they are, the more likely they are to experience negative emotions.
• Single people are more likely than married people to have regularly looked after someone who was sick or disabled or elderly, for at least three months.
• Solitude brings many rewards to those who value it. People who are single, particularly those whose first choice is to be single, seem especially likely to value solitude and benefit from it.

This is not to devalue the very real challenges that seniors face who age on their own, or the pain of losing a long-time spouse. But don’t take on any excess baggage by buying into stereotypes and received ideas. Emotionally and intellectually, it’s richly rewarding to be alone. Take an inward journey.