I have long been intrigued by the finding that people who are single are in some ways even more connected to their communities than are people who are married. So when I learned that the eminent personality and social psychologist Mark Snyder was coming to town to give a talk, I was there.

Mark Snyder has spent more than a decade studying the psychology of volunteering. I learned so much from his talk.  I want to share what, to me, was his most intriguing discovery.

Volunteering takes lots of different forms, from the Big-Brother/Big-Sister programs to caring for people who need help to reading to kids to passing out flyers for your favorite candidate or cause and so much more. There is a paradox to volunteering, as Snyder noted at the outset of his talk. Volunteering takes time, it takes you away from other things you could be doing instead, sometimes there are hassles involved and even emotional costs; there can even be financial costs.

On top of all that, you don’t get paid. And yet, Americans do volunteer, in very high numbers. Perhaps as many as 43% do something that counts as volunteering.

So why do they do it? What motivates volunteers to do what they do, despite the costs involved and the absence of any financial reward?

There are so many ways to live and love. The sentimentalized image of Mom, Dad and the kids gathered around the hearth has had its day. A new American experiment has begun. We’re not all going nuclear anymore.

Among the innovators are people of all ages who are single at heart. They are not single because they have issues or because they have not yet found a partner. They are not looking. Single is who they really are. Many are in the market for places of their own. So, too, are plenty of divorced and widowed people and single parents whose children have grown.

An unlikely demographic has also joined the quest for solo living – committed couples. In a trend dubbed “living apart together,” the two people maintain homes of their own not because far-flung jobs demand that but because they want it. A study of married couples at two different points in time showed that even living together under the same roof is not what it used to be. In 2000, the couples were less likely to eat together or work on projects together than they were in 1980. They also had fewer friends in common.

It hurts to be rejected or excluded. Even rejections that might objectively seem impersonal and inconsequential can be upsetting. For example, if you play a ball-tossing game online with two other people and those two others start tossing only to each other and excluding you, that’s upsetting.

In experiments using that ball-tossing game, no one is using real names or photos, and there are no rewards or punishments involved. Still, getting ostracized is unnerving.

How do you feel about walking into a restaurant on your own? I don’t mean just a fast food restaurant, but a real, sit-down-and-take-your-time sort of place. If your answer is not entirely positive, how do you explain your negative feelings? Are you worried about what other people might think of you if they see you eating alone?

When I first started doing research on single life more than a decade ago, one of the first sets of studies I conducted with my colleagues was designed to address the question: What do other people really think of you when you dine alone?

The research was very careful and systematic. It was never published, though, because all of my predictions turned out to be wrong. The ways that solo diners are judged turned out to differ hardly at all from how couples or pairs of friends or groups of three people are viewed.

Many single people lament the pressures from their parents to get married. Recently I read a welcome twist on that old story.

A mother wrote to an advice columnist because her 30-something year old daughter started calling herself an “old maid” in the making. The mother was not asking how she could turn up the heat on her mate-seeking daughter. Instead, she wanted to know how she could be supportive without conveying the impression that she agreed with her daughter’s self-criticism.

“Why marriage isn’t the key to a happy life.” That was the subtitle of a post on another website, written by Buddhist physician Alex Lickerman. I agree that marriage does not transform miserable single people into blissfully happy married people. Research shows that most single people are already happy, and that getting married does not result in lasting increases in happiness. (If you marry and divorce, it may not result in even temporary boosts in happiness.)

Consider, though, Lickerman’s first two paragraphs:

“I remember thinking when I was lying on my bedroom floor, bleeding internally so badly that I’d lost the ability even to crawl, that if I hadn’t been married I would have bled to death. I was home after a laparoscopic appendectomy, had awakened at 3 a.m…and had found myself unable to move (due to rapid blood loss). Luckily, my wife could do so normally and called an ambulance. I was transported to the hospital and ultimately saved by a second operation later that afternoon.

Unless you’re a young adult, many times people look upon the single life as one without or lacking something. After all, the thinking of these people goes, what is life without a partner to share it with?

But that’s a misconception. Life is beautiful whether or not you are in a relationship with another person. The single life is especially exquisite, because you live by your own principles and precepts — not someone else’s.

So I’m happy to introduce our newest blog, Single at Heart, by Bella DePaulo, Ph.D. Dr. DePaulo is an expert on single life, is the author of several books, including Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After and Singlism: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How to Stop It. Dr. DePaulo has discussed singles and single life on radio and television, including NPR and CNN, and her work has been described in newspapers such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, among many others.

You can learn more about Dr. DePaulo here. Please give her a warm Psych Central welcome!