The Lesson: The script is officially being flipped on the concept of the ‘bachelor pad’. Nowadays, more and more single women are choosing to live alone, and they’re absolutely loving it. Freed from financial or marital expectations, women of all ages are finding empowerment in the concept of living on their own. According to research, living alone can be socially beneficial as it encourages women to lead socially active lives outside the confines of their homes, meaning they become more actively involved in non-solitary activities, thus happiness skyrockets.
Notable Excerpt: “The research on living alone versus living with others is very interesting. It turns out that people who live alone are more likely to be engaged outside the home in a specific activity whereas married couples, for example, especially with young children are much less likely to have the time and the energy to maintain and create social bonds outside the home. So, there is a little bit of counterintuitive findings there because we think of families as being most connected and integrated but basically … people are social animals, in whatever situation we live in. What matters is that we have strong bonds with other people, are we well cared for, do we have others that we care for, and do we have enough economic support to be able to live well, and the research shows that it really doesn’t matter if you live alone or not, what matters are those other factors and we need to move beyond focusing on people’s marital status and their housing status especially in terms of gender, where it’s no longer the notion that a single woman of old age—women like that we called spinsters, now we call them independent women. What matters is that people have rich social lives regardless of where they live or how they live, and that’s what the research shows.”
The Host: Linda Wertheimer is an American broadcast journalist for NPR. Getting her start as the director of news magazine program All Things Considered, she was soon appointed political correspondent and was the first female anchor of NPR’s coverage of a presidential election night in 1976. Wertheimer has won a DuPont-Columbia Award for excellence in broadcast journalism, and has been named to Vanity Fair’s ‘200 Most Influential Women in America’ list.
The Guests: Wertheimer is joined by Ashley Fetters, staff writer for the Atlantic, Diana Olick, real estate reporter for CNBC and author of the Realty Check column, Kathleen Gerson, professor of sociology at NYU and author of “The Unfinished Revolution: Coming of Age in a New Era of Gender, Work, and Family”, and Michelle Singletary, a personal finance columnist for the Washington Post.
Podcast: You can stream the On Point podcast from NPR on their website or on iTunes.
(LISTEN to the fascinating talk below)
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