Single People Who See Growth Potential Report Happier Solo Lives

Every evening for two weeks, 130 single adults in a daily diary study opened a short survey and answered the same blunt question: did today feel like it stretched you. Some described trying pickleball for the first time, or turning up alone to a work event, or booking a weekend away with no plan and no one to answer to. Others logged nothing new. Just another ordinary day at the flat.

The survey is part of a new set of three pre-registered, peer-reviewed studies in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, and the idea behind it sounds almost too simple to test: that seeing your single life as a chance to grow, rather than a gap to fill, changes how that life actually feels. Psychologists call the belief singlehood self-expansion potential (SSEP).

Self-expansion theory started with couples. Falling in love, the thinking goes, expands your sense of self by folding somebody else’s skills, interests and worldview into your own, and decades of relationship research back that up, as a recent review of the self-expansion literature lays out. Elina Moreno, the study’s lead author and a graduate student at the University of Toronto who ran the project at Simon Fraser University with Yuthika Girme, wanted to know whether solo life could pull off something similar without a partner supplying the raw material.

What the Daily Diaries Showed

To find out whether that belief actually tracks with anything, the team followed people through their real days rather than asking them to reminisce. In two observational diary studies (both drew mainly on undergraduates at one Canadian university, so treat the ages as young), 130 people logged their moods and growth flavored moments for 14 days running, and a separate 146 people did the same across six weeks.

The pattern held up day after day. People who scored higher on SSEP were more likely to actually have a self-expanding experience that day, and their same day reports also showed less fear of being single and greater satisfaction with their single status, all measured on that same day. Some of that link traced back to the growth flavored activities themselves: the diary data suggested that part of the boost to same day satisfaction ran through people actually doing the new thing, not just believing they could.

Behind the numbers is a simple motivation. “Many single people maintain their singlehood because it makes them feel like they have the autonomy and freedom to focus on personal goals, like hobbies, their career, and travel,” says Moreno. “We wondered whether single people who believe that they are able to gain new experiences because of their singlehood status benefit from this mentality.”

Growth Rarely Happens Alone

A second look at what people actually did filled in an important detail: growth for single people is rarely a solitary pursuit. Diarists described trying new sports, celebrating with friends, dining out, taking on ambitious work projects and squeezing in the occasional weekend getaway, and about 82 percent of those moments involved someone else, usually a friend or a family member rather than a romantic prospect, which tracks with other research published in 2021 showing that single people lean especially hard on friendships to meet needs a partner might otherwise fill. Only 18 percent happened alone. Rarely a solo pursuit, in other words. The belief itself was not evenly distributed, either: people with more self-esteem tended to score higher on SSEP, while those who badly wanted a relationship, or who felt single against their will rather than by choice, tended to score lower.

The correlational design cannot say which way the arrow points, and the researchers are upfront about it. It is entirely possible that people who are already thriving and content while single simply find it easier to believe their situation is expansive, rather than the belief itself doing the work.

The Causal Question the Diaries Could Not Answer

A separate, randomized experiment tried to settle the question by nudging people to imagine future novel activities instead of routine ones, and it is here that the tidy story wobbles: the exercise budged people’s short-term mood and their appetite for new experiences, but it left their underlying belief about singlehood’s growth potential essentially unmoved. That gap sits awkwardly next to the press release accompanying the paper, which frames trying new things as advice with a proven payoff, without mentioning that the one experiment built to test causation came up short on its central target, or that the two diary samples were mostly university students in their twenties.

None of which erases the everyday signal sitting in the diary data: people who see their single life as room to grow keep reporting less fear and more contentment about it, whatever produces that link. “If people want to maintain their singlehood, self-expanding experiences could be beneficial for bolstering their well-being over time and providing them with opportunities to get to know themselves,” Moreno says. That framing echoes a broader shift in singlehood research toward describing single life in terms of freedom and psychological richness rather than deficit, a case one prominent researcher on single life has made at length. Moreno is careful to note the finding is not an argument against wanting a partner. “Alternatively, if a single person is seeking a romantic relationship, they could still make the most of their singlehood and experience personal growth along the way,” she adds. Seizing new experiences, she says, “can significantly improve not only the way you feel about being single, but also how you feel about your life in general,” though that particular claim still rests more on the correlational diary data than on any proven cause and effect.

What the team wants next is a proper test of direction: tracking whether nudging someone’s beliefs about singlehood, and not just their activities, can shift wellbeing over months rather than days. Until then, the honest read is narrower than the headline promises. Singlehood looks like fertile ground for growth in the data, but nobody has yet planted anything there and watched it work.

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