Recently I saw the movie, The Five-Year Engagement. I know, I should have known better. It was pretty funny at times, but honestly, with all the talent and creativity on offer, does Hollywood really have to produce the exact same ending every single time?

I hadn’t read anything about the movie before I went, so I was surprised to discover that my very own field of social psychology had a role. Emily Blunt, playing Violet, heads to the University of Michigan to join a lab group that apparently designs experiments by generating totally silly ideas that have no relationship whatsoever to psychological theory or anything else. All a big game. Also, there is no script for the experiment. The professor and the various students mill around behind the one-way mirror taunting one another about who is going to go into the room with the participants and actually run the study.

I cringed all the way through those scenes.

In my last post, I shared some of the personal accounts of the appeal of solitude, as offered by people who see themselves as single at heart. The single-at-heart typically love their time alone.

It is a different story for those people who say that NO, they are not single at heart. First I will relate some of the ways they talked about time alone. As their comments indicate, that’s not what they enjoy. Yet that hardly means that they do not live happy lives. They appreciate different things than do people who are single at heart. So in the second part of this post, I’ll share some of their descriptions of what they love about their lives.

Last time I posted here, I described the survey I have been conducting, “Are you single at heart?,” and promised to tell you about the results from the first 1200 participants. That’s what I’ll do in this post (Part 2 of the series), a few subsequent posts, and this one.

After the survey, in which participants had answered a number of questions, I asked them to tell me whether they thought that they were, or were not, single at heart. (You can find a description of the questions, and the wording of the question I’m describing here, in my previous post.) Then they had the option of describing, in their own words, why they thought they were or were not single at heart.

Participants sorted themselves into one of four categories:

Results are in from the first 1,200 people to participate in the survey, “Are you single at heart?” There is so much to tell you from this first, exploratory study of people who are and are not single at heart, so I will write several posts on the topic.

In this post, I will mostly describe the kinds of questions that were in the survey and preview the topics of the next posts. So you don’t need to wait for the next post to learn something about the results, here is the most compelling finding so far: People who are single-at-heart love their solitude.

Contemporary society is full of matrimania – the over-the-top hyping of marriage, couples and weddings. There is so much marketing of romantic love, and celebration of marriage-minded lovers, that it can be difficult for people who are single at heart to realize that single life really is the most meaningful and authentic life for them. Doesn’t everyone really want to be married?

When I study single life, I do it from the perspective of a social psychologist – that’s my training. I also read a lot from sociology and women’s studies, and learn a great deal from those disciplines.

Anthropology may not seem like the obvious place to look for insights about singles in the U.S., but to anthropologist Leanna Wolfe, some of the practices of single women in Los Angeles did seem like odd rituals: Going to workshops to learn how to please a man? Transforming your body with fad diets and surgery, and your mind with therapy? What’s all that about?

In 2009, before I was blogging here at PsychCentral, a reader of another blog asked me to address the topic of asexuality. The post I wrote, “Asexuals: Who are they and why are they important?,” immediately became one of my most popular articles, garnering tens of thousands of page views in short order.

I first learned about the Asexual Visibility and Education Network (AVEN) while researching that blog post. Because I reviewed some of the basics back then, I’ll just share the opening sentences of the overview at AVEN before moving on:

“An asexual is someone who does not experience sexual attraction. Unlike celibacy, which people choose, asexuality is an intrinsic part of who we are. Asexuality does not make our lives any worse or any better, we just face a different set of challenges than most sexual people. There is considerable diversity among the asexual community; each asexual person experiences things like relationships, attraction, and arousal somewhat differently.”

The new point I want to make here is how far the asexuality movement has come in just a few years. Dave Jay, who founded AVEN, has made the rounds in the media, from MTV to The View. He has been taken seriously in more intellectual venues as well. Just recently, the Atlantic magazine published, “Life without sex: The third phase of the asexuality movement.”

Third phase? Hey, wait, what were the first two?

From what I’ve read about her, Amanda Dougherty seemed to be a traditional high school student. She’s a 17-year old at a Catholic high school who was so excited about her junior prom that she bought her dress months in advance. She had also bought her ticket to the prom and her shoes and other accessories.

Amanda and her girlfriends started a Facebook page, closed to the guys, so they could share pictures of their prom dresses to make sure no two of them would show up in the same gown.

Then, about a week or so before the prom, her lout of a prom date backed out. Now this is what I love about Amanda: She did not let that deter her. She was going to go to the prom solo.

In my previous post, I reviewed the methods and results of a series of studies that have been in the media lately. The authors claim to have shown that when men are scarce, single women – especially the unattractive ones – lose confidence in their ability to land a man and therefore pursue careers instead.

In this post, I’ll tell you what the authors said about their own research, then point to a few ways that the results have been represented in the media. I’ll end with a link to my own critique.

Usually, I’m proud to be a social psychologist. It is a great field. Today, though, I am ashamed. The most prestigious journal for the publication of empirical research on social psychology just published a paper addressing a question about the sex ratio and women’s career choices: “Does a scarcity of men lead women to choose briefcase over baby?”

I bet you can guess what their answer is – Yes.

It gets worse. There are particular women who are especially likely to pursue a career when there is a scarcity of men – those with “low mate-value.” Can you decode that evolutionary-psychology-speak? You don’t have to. The authors translate for you: “higher mate-value women (e.g., women who are more physically attractive).”

My objection is not that the authors conducted the research, offered their evolutionary psychology interpretation, and published the results in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. It is that they did so little of what is typically mandatory in the very best academic writings: (1) seriously consider alternative interpretations, and (2) acknowledge the major limitations of your work.

Think about your own marital and parental status – say, single with no kids – and imagine writing 20 life lessons for people who share your status. Make your lessons raw, honest, funny, and brief. That’s what Eleanore Wells did in her new book, The Spinsterlicious Life: 20 Life Lessons for Living Happily Single and Childfree.

I am also single and have no kids, yet many of my own 20 life lessons would be different from Eleanore Wells’s. (Not that I’ve actually managed to spell mine out.) That’s the joy of these kinds of imaginative exercises – there are so many ways of being single with no kids (or married with kids, or any other combination).

Eleanore Wells has always been single and she is absolutely not “looking.” Apparently, she never has been. I got a kick out of this reaction of hers that she described, because it is so unexpected (by conventional standards) but I could also totally relate to it: