Quotes from Bella DePaulo

Historians estimate that up to half of nineteenth-century city residents were either boarding or maintaining a boardinghouse.2 Single

A national survey ongoing since 1974 has shown that Americans have never been less likely to be friends with their neighbors as they are now. The lowest levels of neighborliness were recorded in the suburbs.33

I ask Andrew if he would mind offering some advice to younger people about how to live. He thinks they should ask themselves, What are my values? How do I want to live my life? What do I care about? And then, Does my living situation feed that or does it take away from that? Oh

The freedom to be single, to create a path through life that does not look like everyone else's, can be unsettling to people who feel more secure with fewer choices.

There is another reason ever-single women fare even better than previously married women in later life. They mastered the single life long ago. From structuring social events in a culture that caters to couples, to figuring out how to work and get all the tasks of everyday life accomplished when there may or may not be others readily available to do their unfair share, always-single women have been there, done that. It is not a new or daunting challenge.

Most married people can expect a specific other person to be there for them in a way that a single person typically cannot. Does that make married people more mature than single people? Married people are on training wheels. Singles are riding the bikes for grown-ups.

With initial understanding, Dexter replied, "Trust me, I definitely understand. See, I can't help myself either." Then, his tone swinging toward anger, said, "But children, I could never do that, not like you. Never, ever kids.

Ever since Aristotle described three different kinds of friends—friends of utility, of pleasure, and of virtue—we have known that a set of friends can be a diverse lot. We can have friends we only see at basketball games or book club, friends we see nearly every day at work, and friends who are our confidants. Specialization is fine—we do not expect to like all of our friends in the same way or for the same reasons. At

story. A study of more than seven thousand adults showed that introverts who had moved frequently when they were growing up, compared to those who rarely moved, had more difficulty developing strong personal relationships and maintaining them over time; and those difficulties seemed to undermine their happiness and satisfaction with their lives.

Writing often in the pages of the New York Times, Allison Arieff is a powerful spokesperson. "Bring back the sidewalk!" she urged in one of her articles, explaining: "Community is born from social routine—running into neighbors at the mailbox or while walking down the street. Design for these serendipitous encounters."8

As a career girl in your late twenties, you have been most probably able to surround yourself with certain material assets…to which you shortly become accustomed. Will you then be eager to marry a man who cannot keep you in your customary supply of worldly goods?

Marriage isn't a disease; it isn't catching. You don't have to pass it on to everybody you know. Unlike a woman I once heard admit "I've never been married but I tell people I'm divorced so they are not scared of me

I am tired of these affairs, where no one asks what books I've read, only a handful of relatives are interested in how I'm advancing at my job, and everyone quizzes me about my dating life.

Dr. Hervey Cleckley wrote in The Mask of Sanity

The paradigm experience of solitude is a state characterized by disengagement from the immediate demands of other people – a state of reduced social inhibition and increased freedom to select one's mental and physical activities.

the way coupling is envisioned in contemporary American society is not universal, it is not timeless, and it is not human nature. Instead, the reigning American worldview may well represent one of the narrowest construals of intimacy ever imagined. Where once the tendrils of love and affection reached out to family, friends, and community, reached back to ancestors, and reached up to the heavens, now they surround and squeeze just one other person—sometimes to the point of asphyxiation.

The young adults of the time and their parents and pundits all wrung their hands. But they needn't have. "Those who did best tended to accept change, not to berate themselves for breaking with tradition."41

When other life factors were considered, the people who were happiest were those who were most satisfied with their household finances, and the next happiest were those who had good health. Marriage came in third.

Lethal Predators: Psychopathic, Sadistic, and Sane" in Profilers: Leading Investigators Take You inside the Criminal Mind, 2004.

In one of the buildings where April lived, the girls befriended the kids who lived upstairs. "At first it was nice; but other times, it just felt like every time we got home, they were knocking on the door. And it stopped having that sort of safe-haven feeling to it.

They are people who always dream of living in a particular way, in some far-off gauzy future, and then one day, decided to stop fantasizing and start living the dream. They are people who dared to become the future by living in ways that seem startling even to a nation high on creativity. And there are people whose acts of bravery were to embrace old-fashioned lifespaces fully, joyfully, and unapologetically.

The freedom to be single, to create a path through life that does not look like everyone else's, can be unsettling to people who feel more secure with fewer choices.

Others will forever be scratching their heads and wondering what's wrong with you and comparing notes (he's always been a bit strange; she's so neurotic; I think he's gay).

Home, to many of the people I interviewed, is a good, comfortable feeling about the place where they live, and a sense that their place is going to be theirs for a while....Home is any place, any experience that feeds his soul "in some positive way".