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Shu-Sin was the king of Sumer from about 2000 B.C.E. Although his wife’s name is lost to history, her legendary words are not. Carved on a cuneiform tablet is an ode to their love, containing these lines:
Your spirit, I know where to cheer your spirit,
Bridegroom, sleep in our house until dawn,
Your heart, I know where to gladden your heart,
Lion, sleep in our house until dawn.
And down to today, this kind of romantic attachment is one of the best predictors of happiness that social scientists have identified. For example, my review of the General Social Survey finds that although 27 percent of married Americans said they were “very happy” with their lives, only 11 percent of those respondents who were never married, divorced, separated, or widowed answered this way. (Obviously, marriage is not the only romantic arrangement, but it is the one most often studied.) And research in the Journal of Research in Personality has shown that marriage can protect happiness in adulthood.
These findings may help explain the well-documented decline in American happiness, especially among young adults. In a nutshell, the U.S. is moving from a society based on couples to one based on singles. The percentage of adults who are currently married has fallen from almost 70 in 1960 to about 50 today, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The Pew Research Center shows that roughly four in 10 adults ages 25–54 are neither married nor living with a partner, up from 29 percent in 1990.
The solution to the happiness deficit—for the nation as well as among individuals—is simply to encourage more people to pair off, right? Maybe not. A closer look at the singles trend suggests that the problem is not a lack of available partners, but that young adults may inadvertently be avoiding romantic attachment. That is the challenge we face.
Psychologists commonly measure the health of attachment through two dimensions: anxiety and avoidance (the latter meaning a resistance to intimacy). To score lower on each dimension is better: Healthy bonding is neither anxious nor avoidant, hence the phrase secure attachment. In contrast, an insecure bond can involve someone being anxious but not avoidant, avoidant but not anxious, or both. (The terms psychologists use to describe each category are fearful, preoccupied, and dismissing, respectively.)
Unfortunately, insecure attachment is becoming more and more common. According to a 2020 analysis in the journal Emerging Adulthood, over the past two decades, successive groups of studied college students have shown an increasing likelihood of experiencing one of the insecure “styles,” rising from 61 percent of them during 2002–06 to 71 percent during 2016–19. One particular insecure style—avoidance—is associated with a greater preference for singlehood. That tells us that the underlying problem is chiefly one of greater avoidance.
Scholars have found novel evidence of this trend in indirect ways as well. For example, a 2022 study asked 469 adults whose average age was 34 to name their favorite song; the researchers then analyzed the lyrics. They found that people who scored higher in attachment avoidance preferred songs with lyrics that expressed this style. (An example the researchers give is the late Tina Turner’s avoidant masterpiece “What’s Love Got to Do With It,” which features the lyric “Who needs a heart when a heart can be broken?”) They then looked at the 823 most popular songs from 1946 to 2015 and found that avoidant themes appeared on the list more and more over this period.
The prevalence of avoidant attachment is a more plausible explanation for the increase in unhappiness among young adults than their simply being uncoupled. After all, we also know that singlehood can make some people happier, and that a bad romantic partnership is clearly worse than no relationship at all. But in contrast to that mixed picture, many studies show that avoidant attachment is associated with lower satisfaction with life.
So what is provoking this mass romantic avoidance? Two psychologists provided clues in a paper published in 2022 that was based on surveys of university students in Cyprus, including what led them to prefer being single. Strongly predictive of singledom, the researchers found, was not only a preoccupation with work and career but also the pervasiveness of so-called dark-triad personality characteristics (narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy). In other words, people may avoid romantic commitment if they are especially self-centered or work-focused.
Additional findings suggest that young adults are registering higher on both counts. Survey research measuring differences between generations showed that roughly 70 percent of college students scored higher on measures of narcissism than the average student did 30 years prior. And, as my Atlantic colleague Derek Thompson has written, young adults have a growing propensity to follow an ideology he calls “workism,” a belief that work provides one’s sense of identity and purpose. He also cites research showing, for example, that the main effect for young women of attending a selective college is longer work hours. Such dedication is usually regarded as admirable—yet it often comes at the cost of human connection.
I believe romantic-attachment avoidance is the missing link in the research between singlehood and the epidemic of unhappiness among young adults. Happiness is decreased by emotional isolation; we need people who know us deeply and with whom we can be vulnerable. All of this suggests that to get happier, “Pair up” is probably not the right advice. Better to solve the avoidance problem per se.
Some of the causes of avoidance are obvious, such as the way social media encourages an intense focus on oneself rather than others. Research shows that social-media use is associated with greater narcissism (as well as depression and anxiety). In addition, a diminished influence of traditional institutions that provide meaning, including religion and family, can explain why young people are turning to work to find a sense of life’s purpose.
But it is too easy to exculpate ourselves as a society by pointing to technology and trends we can scarcely control, and young adults may not be in a position to address their avoidant behavior. The rest of us can help. As an academic and a parent of young-adult children, I see vividly how people my age and in my position simultaneously encourage young adults to feel at the center of their own universe and set them up to seek as much professional achievement as possible. Modern parents, and universities in loco parentis, bear a lot of responsibility for convincing young adults both that they are No. 1 and that their worth as people can and should be measured by worldly success. We are inadvertently leaving them isolated, lonely, and bereft of what really matters: secure, loving connections with others.
If we want to create a happier future for ourselves and others, we will need to invite more love and romance into life (as well as such downstream delights as families and babies). Or as E. M. Forster put it pithily in his novel Howards End, “Only connect!” The trends are discouraging, but the good news is that a plausible source of our romantic-avoidance problem is not a mystery, and we can combat it by speaking the truth about life and work, as opposed to propagating self-inflating, workaholic nonsense that pushes love away.
To that end, let me propose a place to start, with three simple messages: You are not better or more special than others; you are not alive simply to work; happiness comes from loving and being loved. These three ideas transgress conventional modern thinking—and that’s exactly the point.