Going Solo

by Eric Klinenberg

  One striking cultural change related to the rise of private bedrooms concerns the way child psychologists advise parents to help their infants sleep. For most of human history, mothers and infants slept together; today, the great majority of the world’s mothers and children still do. The biological anthropologist James McKenna, who directs the Mother-Baby Behavioral Sleep Lab at Notre Dame University, argues that in the process of evolution mothers developed an innate capacity to attend to the needs of their sleeping children, even when they themselves are in deep sleep. While many cultures have used cradles to support sleeping babies, the crib was not widely marketed to or used by middle-class families until the twentieth century. Initially, babies who slept in cribs were placed near their mothers, close to or right next to the family bed. But in late 1946 a pediatrician named Benjamin Spock published The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, in which (among other things) he advised parents to place newborns in rooms of their own so that they could learn to sleep independently, while also giving Mom and Dad some privacy and peace.37

  It’s hard to measure the impact of a few lines in an advice book, but this, of course, was no ordinary publication. The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care went on to sell more than 50 million copies in thirty-nine languages, placing it among the bestselling books of all time. By the 1950s, “Dr. Spock” had become the modern world’s clear authority on child care and development, and his views on a great variety of issues—including sleep training for infants—commanded the attention of countless doctors and parents. In 2000, the chairwoman of the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission was using her office to advise all parents to avoid sleeping with children under the age of two. And she did so with the full support of Dr. Spock’s successors: “sleep scientists” and child psychologists whose views on the value of individuating sleeping infants could be extreme.

  In the 1986 bestseller Solve Your Child’s Sleep Problems, for instance, Richard Ferber reports, “We know for a fact that people sleep better alone in bed.” Parents, he acknowledges, may be tempted to give in to their infants’ desires to be near them when they slumber, and some may even “feel this is in their children’s best interests.” But he believes they are mistaken: “Sleeping alone is an important part of his learning to be able to separate from you without anxiety and to see himself as an independent individual.” Ferber has tough words for parents who resist his advice: “If you find that you prefer to have your child in your bed, you should examine your own feelings very carefully,” since it’s possible that “instead of helping your child you are using him to avoid facing and solving your own problems . . . If these problems cannot be simply settled, then professional counseling may be required.”38 Some parents were indeed put off by the harshness of the “Ferber method,” but millions of others bought his books and steeled themselves for the experience of “Ferberizing” their children. In the process, they helped acculturate the next generation to the experience of being alone.

  After growing up in a private bedroom with plenty of personal time, an increasing number of young adults want to maintain the condition when they leave home for the first time—even, or perhaps especially, if they are going to college. Housing officers at universities throughout the country report that a great majority of their entering students have never shared a bedroom and that many have trouble adjusting to life with a roommate during their first year. Once that year is finished, they’re willing to pay extra to restore their privacy. On today’s university campuses, the newest dormitories have an ample supply of single rooms, as well as suite-style units where students share a common area but have a private room with a bed and desk. Most colleges developed their housing stock before students began requesting singles, however, and today demand for private sleeping quarters far exceeds the supply.

  For example, in 2006, Miami University housing director Lucinda Coveney acknowledged that the school had been consistently unable to accommodate most requests for single residences and announced plans to build hundreds of new single-room units. “We need to meet the needs of the modern student,” she told the school paper. “A lot of students want that environment and privacy . . . We understand these residence halls were built a long time ago and we’re working to try to make on-campus living more attractive.” In 2008, George Washington University reported that it had received 286 applications for five single-room units in one of its dorms, and promised that it would add three hundred single units to its supply when it completed construction and renovation of new facilities. In 2009, Boston University opened a high-rise with luxurious “apartment-style” dorms for undergraduates, featuring a large number of one-person units (called singles) and suites in which each resident has a private room. In previous eras, graduating seniors packed into communal houses to share their final year of college near close friends. Today, a new spirit is emerging. “I applied by myself because my friends were all too cheap to live here,” a resident of the BU dorm told the Boston Globe.39 Now she could live without them, too.

  AT LEAST ONE MOTHER with a child in BU’s luxury dorm recognized that her son would have a hard time maintaining his lifestyle after he left the university. “You graduate facing a terrible job market and having to live with rats in Brooklyn,” she told him in the fall of 2009.40 She could have added one more thing: Regardless of their preferences, all but the most affluent young adults who move to big cities to make it on their own soon discover that they’ll also have to live with roommates. And this is significant, because the distinction between living with roommates and having a home of one’s own has acquired great cultural significance. For the current generation of young people, it’s the crucial turning point between second adolescence and becoming adult.

  Take Justin,* who was an aspiring journalist with a fresh degree from a Big Ten school when he got recruited to work in New York City at a job that came with transitional corporate housing. On first glance, Justin appears shy and guarded. He’s physically slight, with curly brown hair, deep-set eyes, and a soft, gentle voice that’s often hard to hear. He’s personable, and funny, once he gets comfortable, but since this can take a while he found that meeting people in New York was more difficult than he’d anticipated. Living alone didn’t help. Fortunately, several of his college friends had also moved there, and through them he found a shared apartment where the roommates enjoyed going out together just as they had when they were in school. Justin hadn’t soured on going solo, but he knew he wasn’t ready and that he could try again when the time was right.

  It can be fun to have roommates when you’re young and single, as anyone who’s watched Friends or Three’s Company surely knows. Roommates provide companionship, so you don’t have to feel alone when you wake up in the morning or come home after a rough day. When you move to a new city, they can help you meet people, invite you to parties, and add to your social network. They may share in the cooking, cleaning, and shopping, which means you don’t have to do everything. And they help pay the rent, which means you can live in a better neighborhood or save money for going out. For years, Justin enjoyed all these benefits, so much that he endured a seemingly endless series of transitions—people moving in and out, being forced to search for new apartments, relocating to different neighborhoods—so that he could keep sharing a place with people his age. But after five years Justin found himself focusing on the costs of this situation. For, as anyone who’s watched Friends or Three’s Company also knows, often—too often—having roommates is no fun at all.

  Is there anyone who has lived with roommates and not escaped with tales of woe? Review, among the many stories cataloged in the “trouble with roommates” findings from my research: The roommate, once a friend, who stops paying his rent or his share of the bills. The roommate who steals. The roommate with bad taste. The roommate who never leaves home. The roommate who goes silent. The roommate who blogs about you. The roommate with the TV addiction. The roommate with a drinking problem. The roommate who
eats your food. The roommate who won’t do the dishes. The roommate who smells. The roommate who hates your girlfriend. The roommate who hits on your girlfriend. The roommate who becomes your girlfriend, and then breaks up with you . . . and refuses to move out.

  Justin’s experiences were hardly catastrophic, but he had his share of difficulties. In one apartment, he and a roommate got on each other’s nerves and the atmosphere quickly became stressful. Justin dreaded seeing him in the living room or at the table. He started avoiding home, or rushed straight to his room when he got there. It was awful, he remembers: “When you don’t feel close to your roommates, in some ways that’s lonelier than living alone because your isolation is strikingly in front of you. It totally sucks.” So he moved, again to a place with roommates. The new place was better, but Justin felt himself still longing for more privacy. With roommates, he explains, “When you bring a girl home, not only will the girl notice your roommates, but your roommates will notice her.” The social life at home becomes a burden, sometimes an unbearable one. The conversation the next morning can be even worse. As Justin hit his late twenties, he had plenty of friends and enough money to afford a one-bedroom apartment downtown if he cut out some other expenses and gave up any hope of accumulating savings. The choice was easy. He decided to live alone.

  The experience was transformative. “Now I can’t imagine living with a roommate,” Justin explains. “I would not be happy.” He’s older, and in his social circle, he says, once you’re past your mid-twenties there’s an expectation that you’ll either live with a partner or have a place of your own. There’s a stigma around having roommates as a grown-up, he reports. “I might be embarrassed to admit it. I mean, I feel like an adult now and it’s hard to imagine. Having roommates feels sort of unadult.”

  2.

  THE CAPACITY TO LIVE ALONE

  I HAVE ALWAYS LIVED SINGLE, and never yearned to live any other way,” writes Bella DePaulo, the psychologist, author, and singles advocate. DePaulo grew up in Dunmore, Pennsylvania, a small town where children learned that getting married was all but obligatory. Before she went to college, it never occurred to her that she could opt out, but as an adult she recognized that this was exactly what she wanted. “I don’t think there was a specific moment when I realized I LIKE living single. This is who I am. It’s not going to change,” she explains. “To get to that point, I think I had to understand a bigger point—it is fine (good, even) to live the life that is most meaningful to you, even if your way is not the most conventional one.”1

  One need not grow up in a small town like Dunmore to have trouble imagining the possibility of living alone someday. The ideal of achieving security in a marriage or with an intimate partner remains fundamental to our culture, and it is instilled in the minds of our young. Children in modern societies may well have more private space than they did in previous eras, but they are still raised in homes where there is at least one adult and often other children, too. Our early experiences living with others shape our expectations, establishing the shared household as a norm, if not an ideal. They also form our characters, leading us to develop skills, techniques, and models for sharing domestic space that we carry into adulthood, consciously or not.

  Hardly anyone lives alone until they are grown up, however, which means that those who go solo quickly discover that doing it well requires a lot of learning. Thoreau, Siddhartha, or Helen Gurley Brown may be inspiring, but there is no guidebook for domestic autonomy, at least not the contemporary kind. Living alone is challenging, no matter how excited one is to do so, not only because it entails facing oneself in an intimate setting, but also because it puts people in novel situations and generates a distinctive set of personal needs. Some of these challenges are pragmatic: Learning to shop and cook for one. Balancing solitude and social life. Establishing a healthy relationship with communications media, from the relatively passive consumption of television entertainment to more active engagements through the telephone and Internet. Other challenges are more profound: Dealing with loneliness. Confronting fear that living alone is a sign of social failure. Being discriminated against in the housing market and the workplace. Relating to friends or family who are uncomfortable that someone close to them is unmarried or who presume that this makes them unhappy, too.

  Although each person who develops the capacity to live alone finds it an intensely personal experience, my interviews suggest that some elements are widely shared. Today young singletons actively reframe living alone as a mark of distinction and success, not social failure. They use it as a way to invest time in their personal and, above all, professional growth. Such investments in the self are necessary, they say, because contemporary families are fragile, as are most jobs, and in the end each of us must be able to depend on ourselves. On the one hand, strengthening the self means undertaking solitary projects: acquiring domestic skills, learning to enjoy one’s own company, and establishing confidence that one can set off for adventures on one’s own. But on the other it means making great efforts to be social: building up a strong network of friends and work contacts, and even, as the journalist Ethan Watters argues, forming “urban tribes” that substitute for families by providing community and support.2

  Anchoring oneself in work and a tribe can help make going solo a rewarding experience, but it’s rarely an enduring one. Most people who live alone into their thirties eventually find that their community weakens as close friends get married and have children, and that work, however rewarding, cannot satisfy their deepest needs. This puts them in a predicament. Those who have learned to enjoy their “age of independence” must choose between trying to reproduce it and seeking out a partner and a family. For men this choice is rarely urgent, but for women it’s a different matter, because living alone as they enter their late thirties means spending their nights beside a biological clock that keeps ticking, and they must confront the possibility that they’ll never give birth to a child of their own. It’s this situation that’s prompted writers like Lori Gottlieb to argue that single women should settle on not quite desirable partners. But the argument is hardly persuasive.3 Marriage is hard enough when both parties enter it enthusiastically. Young adults who have learned to live alone doubt that marriage would be easier when it’s a compromise from the start. They are open to discovering the right partner, but if they can’t they think they’re better off in a place of their own.4

  MOST YOUNG ADULTS who live alone see it as a stage, not an end point, and those who try it are usually excited for the challenge. Whether or not they are actively searching for a partner, they expect to find one and eventually to get married. Today 84 percent of American women have been married by the time they reach age forty, and 95 percent have married by the time they reach sixty-five. True, the generations born in, say, 1945 and 1970 have profoundly different views on marriage—just not on the question of whether they will have one. Contemporary Americans may be skeptical of the institution, but about 90 percent of those who have never been married believe that someday they will.5

  The major difference between marriage for those who are now sixty-five and those who are twenty-five is not whether to do it, but when. On average, American men and women born in the 1940s got married at ages twenty-three and twenty-one, respectively, and by the time they’d reached their forties fewer than 6 percent had never wed. Today the median age of first marriage is higher than it has been at any point since the census began recording it: twenty-eight for men and twenty-six for women. In Massachusetts, New York, and Washington, D.C., the median age of first marriage is now over thirty, just as it is in European nations such as Sweden and Denmark. In addition, an unprecedented number of Americans in their forties have never married: 16 percent of men and 12 percent of women.6 They have plenty of time to live alone.

  How do they use that time? In Against Love, Laura Kipnis argues that avoiding binding relationships will free people for more play. She even suggests, pro
vocatively, that such liberation could threaten the status quo. “Free people might pose social dangers,” she writes. “Who knows what mischief they’d get up to? What other demands would come next?”7 Alas, in the interviews conducted for this book, the most ambitious of those who live alone offered a clear and far less barricade-scaling answer: They are spending their “free time” at work.

  In modern economies most of us are free agents, competing against one another for good jobs. In this environment, it’s hard to know what free time really means. Today’s workers, particularly the younger ones, are well aware that there’s no longer a social contract between capital and labor. Instead, each of us works more and more in hope of getting established on our own, especially during the early part of our careers. For a rising generation of aspiring professionals, the twenties and early thirties is precisely not the time to get married and have a family. Rather, it is the life stage when we can pour ourselves into school or work and make an impression. We surrender control of our time to those who educate and employ us, and what remains we give to the task of improving ourselves. We learn new skills. Demonstrate our versatility. Travel. Relocate. Build a network. Develop a reputation. Climb the ladder. Go on the market and find something better. Do it all over again. All of this is easier when you’re not accountable to anyone, and especially when you live alone.

  There is a price for prosperity in the contemporary economy. The work world makes extraordinary claims on the lives of young workers. Give yourself to business during the prime of your life, or give up your hope of achieving any real success. This is true in for-profit corporations, but also in seemingly less exploitative workplaces, including universities and nonprofit organizations that are dedicated to improving our quality of life. When I was in graduate school at Berkeley, for instance, I knew several students in their late twenties whose adviser, a pioneering female scholar, actively discouraged them from entering serious relationships before they had made their mark. Academia has become extraordinarily competitive, she argued. Tenure-track jobs are disappearing everywhere, and teaching jobs that pay the bills are scarce. Relationships are demanding and distracting. They can slow you down or, worse, compromise the quality of your work. What’s more, few of them last. Don’t you owe it to yourself to prioritize work?