Single in your thirties and beyond: a pressure that isn't yours

Sunday lunch, the soup already on the table. Your aunt announces that your cousin is getting married in the autumn, then turns to you: “And you? Any news?” Everyone at the table knows what “news” means here. You smile, say something about work and hope somebody asks for the salt.

The question itself is not unkind. It stings because of the claim hidden inside it: that your life is a waiting room, and the real thing begins only when someone arrives. If you hear it often enough — at weddings, when babies are born, in colleagues’ jokes, in birthday wishes that end with “and may you find someone soon” — you start repeating the sentence yourself, even when nobody else is in the room.

In this post I would like to separate three things that tend to fuse into one when you are single past thirty: the pressure of the world around you, the expectations of your family, and your own wish. I am not going to tell you that single life is better, nor that a relationship is the answer. Both would be moralising, just from opposite ends. What interests me is something else: how you can tell which part of the weight is truly yours and which part was handed to you.

What research actually shows about happiness and relationships

The belief that people in relationships are happier sounds like a fact. When you look at what it rests on, the picture is more cautious. Researchers followed more than 24,000 people in Germany for fifteen years and looked at what happens to life satisfaction around marriage (Lucas et al., 2003). On average, satisfaction rose a little around the time of the wedding and then returned to roughly where it had been before. That average hides large differences: for some people life improved lastingly with marriage, for others it got worse.

This does not mean relationships are unimportant. Closeness is one of the most reliable sources of support a person has. It only means that marriage or a relationship is not, in itself, a switch that turns an unhappy person into a happy one. The psychologists Bella DePaulo and Wendy Morris (2005) also pointed to a problem in the comparisons themselves: studies often place people who have never married in the same “single” group as the divorced and the widowed, who have been through a loss, while the “married” group contains only those who stayed married. A comparison like that says rather little about how someone who is on their own at thirty-five actually lives.

This is why I cite research in this area carefully. Most of it shows associations, not causes; the differences between groups are smaller than Sunday-lunch conversations would suggest; and none of it can tell you what is good for you.

Singlism: a prejudice we barely notice

DePaulo and Morris coined a term for the way single people are treated: singlism — the stereotyping, stigma and discrimination a person meets simply because they have no partner. The stereotypes are familiar. A single person is supposedly immature, selfish, picky, lonely or secretly unhappy. A married person is rarely assigned the same traits in advance.

What is distinctive about this prejudice is that most people consider it justified. In a series of experiments, participants acting as landlords preferred a married couple to a single person as tenants, and they found that kind of discrimination considerably more acceptable than discrimination based on other personal circumstances (Morris et al., 2007). What would be recognised as unfair elsewhere passes for common sense here.

In everyday life singlism is rarely crude. It shows in small things: at a wedding you are seated at the “singles’ table”, the invitation comes without a plus-one, at work it is taken for granted that you will cover the holidays because you “have no family”. You pay for the flat, the holiday and the bills on one salary, in a world arranged for two. And everywhere there is a polite pity that is hard to refuse because it is delivered kindly.

Having a name for it helps. As long as a prejudice has no word, you experience it as a personal flaw: something is wrong with me. Once you can name it, part of the weight moves to where it belongs — into other people’s expectations.

Family expectations: worry that arrives as a question

The heaviest part of the pressure usually comes not from strangers but from people who love you. Parents who ask rarely mean to hurt. Mostly they are worried, and they voice the worry in the only form they know: “So when will it be your turn?”

It helps to look across generations. Your parents grew up at a time when most people in Slovenia married and had children considerably earlier than they do today, and when a family was also practical security: who would help you build the house, who would look after you in old age. Their map of adulthood has clear stops. When your life skips one or reaches it later, it looks to them as if you were lost, although you are simply taking a different route.

In relational family therapy we are interested in what is passed on in a family without words. Sometimes a parent sees their own failure in your being single. Sometimes they long for a grandchild because it would fill an emptiness in their own marriage. Sometimes they are afraid because they know for themselves what being alone is like. None of this is your job to fix, but it explains why the same question returns every Sunday. How such patterns show up across generations can be seen in a genogram; and I have written about whether the relationship with your parents can shift at all in Adult children and parents: can the relationship still be repaired?

Brothers and sisters are a chapter of their own. When your younger sister already has two children, the comparison needs no words; the seating plan is enough. If that sounds familiar, read “Why can’t you be like your sister?” Sibling comparison and how you see yourself. In December all of this intensifies, which is why the holidays have a post to themselves: Spending the holidays alone: how to get through them without pretending.

Choice or circumstance — and why you owe nobody an answer

Some people are single because they want to be. Others would like a relationship and it has not worked out so far. From the outside it looks the same; from the inside it is very different, and it seems sensible to sort people into these two groups.

In reality the line is soft. A study of young adults in Poland compared those who described their singlehood as voluntary with those who described it as involuntary (Adamczyk, 2017). In general mental health the two groups did not differ substantially; the difference appeared in the kind of loneliness that is specifically about a romantic partner, which was higher among the involuntarily single. It is one study of young people, so I would not draw grand conclusions from it. But it shows something useful: the distress does not come from being single as such, but from the gap between what you are living and what you want.

Most people are somewhere in between, and they move. After a break-up you are content on your own for a few years, then you want closeness again. You would like a partner, but not at any price. You are satisfied with your life and, at the same time, Sunday evenings are hard. These are not contradictions you have to resolve before you are allowed to answer your aunt.

The trap is that the people around you demand a statement, and both options carry a cost. Say you are single by choice and you are seen as selfish or picky. Say it has not worked out and you receive pity and advice. So it is worth knowing: if you owe the category to anyone, it is to yourself. For you the difference matters because it tells you what you need — peace from the questions, or room to be sad that something you want is not here yet.

When the pressure becomes your own voice

Outside pressure becomes truly heavy when you no longer hear it as someone else’s. At three in the morning, the sentence “everyone else has got somewhere and I am standing still” does not introduce itself as your aunt’s opinion; it presents itself as a fact. “I am not in a relationship” turns into “something is wrong with me”. That is the language of shame: it does not speak about what has happened to you, but about what you are.

Shame feeds on comparison. Engagements, pregnancies and family photographs are on the screen every day; bad marriages and silent evenings are not. I have described how this works in Comparing yourself on social media: what constant measuring does to the brain.

One thing deserves honesty. If you want children, time is not merely a social invention; fertility does change with age, and that is a question for a gynaecologist, not for relatives. Even here, though, it is worth separating fact from pressure: the fact tells you what is sensible to find out about in good time, while the pressure tells you that you have missed your chance and it is your own fault. Two posts deal with this decision: Egg freezing: a decision that is hard to make alone and When everyone around you is pregnant: holidays, christenings and birthdays.

Fear of being single gives poor advice

Pressure is not only unpleasant; it also shapes decisions. In a series of studies, the Canadian researcher Stephanie Spielmann and her colleagues showed that people with a stronger fear of ending up alone were more likely to stay in relationships they were not satisfied with, and were prepared to settle for less when choosing a partner (Spielmann et al., 2013). The fear predicted the choice better than whether the person happened to be in a relationship at the time.

That is worth keeping in view when someone tells you that you are “too picky”. A relationship you enter so that the questions will stop does not silence the questions; it replaces them with others. Another study found that the difference in well-being between single and partnered people is not the same for everyone — among those whose main aim in relationships is to avoid conflict and tension, it was very small (Girme et al., 2016). A relationship is not an equally good choice for everybody, or at every stage of life.

What to say at the table

You have more options than silence or a row. The conversation below is a composite, not a real person; but it shows how the question can move from an interrogation to what lies underneath it.

“So when are you bringing someone home? You’re not getting any younger.”
“Mum, I know you worry. When there is something to tell, you’ll be the first to know.”
“I’m only asking.”
“I know. But when you ask every Sunday, what I hear is that what I have isn’t enough. I’d rather you told me what you’re afraid of.”
“That you’ll be alone when we’re gone.”
“Sometimes I’m afraid of that too. But I’m not alone. I have people — they’re just arranged differently from yours.”

A conversation like this does not always work, and not with everyone. For the aunt who asks out of habit, a short, friendly sentence that does not open a debate is enough: “When there’s news, I’ll tell you. How is your garden doing?” A boundary here is not a wall. It is a decision about what you will discuss and with whom. You can tell one person more and another nothing, and you owe nobody consistency in that.

It is useful to have an answer ready in advance. Not because you ought to put on an act, but because it is hard to think in the moment the question lands. A sentence chosen in calm keeps you from defending yourself, apologising, or explaining your life to someone who was really only interested in your cousin’s wedding.

An exercise: whose sentence is this?

The exercise takes twenty minutes, paper and a pen. Its purpose is not for you to decide whether you want a relationship. Its purpose is to sort the voices you carry in your head.

1. Write the sentences down. Write five to eight sentences about being single that go round your head most often — exactly as they sound. For example: “Something is wrong with me.” “All the good ones are taken.” “I’d like someone to cook with in the evening.”
2. Give each one a voice. Next to each sentence, note whose voice you hear when you read it: your mother’s, your father’s, your grandmother’s, your friends’, social media’s, or your own. If you don’t know, put a question mark.
3. Check with your body. Read each sentence slowly and notice what happens. Borrowed sentences tend to tighten the stomach or chest and bring shame. Your own may hurt too, but more like sadness or longing — and something often softens alongside them.
4. Hand back what isn’t yours. Next to each borrowed sentence, add: “This is my mother’s worry, not my verdict.” You do not have to be angry with her. It is enough for the sentence to get its rightful owner.
5. Take your own seriously. What remains are the sentences that really are yours. Next to each, write one small step for this week. If it says “I’d like someone to cook with”, the step could be dinner with a friend on Thursday. It is not a substitute for a partner, but it is an answer to a real need.

If you want to go further, the personal values list helps with the last step: it shows what matters to you whether or not you are in a relationship.

Where this post is wrong

The title says the pressure is not yours. That is not always true, and it would be dishonest to stop there.

First, not every pain is pressure. If you want a partner and there isn’t one, that is the loss of something you have not yet had, and the sadness about it belongs to you, not to your aunt. Declaring it a social construct only forbids you to feel it. Loneliness is a real signal that you are short of closeness, and it deserves a response, not a lecture on singlism.

Second, sometimes the question from outside touches something real. If you notice that you pull away every time a relationship becomes serious, or that you choose people who are not available, this is no longer a story about pressure but about a pattern. That is the subject of Fear of commitment: when closeness is both a wish and a threat.

Third, single life does not need to be prettified either. You pay the rent alone, you go to A&E alone, you make every decision alone. Anyone who tells you this is pure freedom is moralising just as your aunt does, only in the other direction.

And finally: if hopelessness, sleeplessness or the thought that nothing has any point have been showing up around this subject for some time, it is no longer a question of being single. Talk to your GP. In Slovenia, the Klic v duševni stiski helpline is available at night on 01 520 99 00 (7 pm to 7 am), and the Samarijan confidential helpline on 116 123 around the clock.

When talking to a therapist makes sense

Being single is not a problem to be treated, and therapy is not a course in finding a partner. It makes sense when you would like to understand something you cannot untangle alone: why your parents’ question throws you, at thirty-five, into the feelings of a fifteen-year-old; why relationships end at the same point; or why you no longer know whether it is you who wants a relationship or the people who keep asking.

In family theory, the capacity to stay connected to your people while remaining true to yourself is called differentiation. It does not mean you don’t care what your mother thinks. It means you hear her worry as hers. If you would like to look at your family story more closely, you can do so in a longer session with a genogram, A Look into the Past; sessions take place in person in Ljubljana, and I also work with English-speaking clients. More on why therapy is not reserved for crises is in Why choose therapy even when “nothing is wrong with you”.

What to remember

• The pressure has three layers: society’s prejudice, your family’s expectations, and the voice you eventually repeat yourself. Only the last one sounds like yours, and often it isn’t.
• Research does not show that a relationship in itself makes people happy; it shows associations and large differences between individuals.
• Choice and circumstance are not two boxes. Most people are in between and moving — and you owe nobody a statement about it.
• Fear of ending up alone is a poor adviser when choosing a partner.
• The wish for closeness is yours and it is real. Separating it from other people’s pressure does not mean giving it up.