Bella DePaulo - Alone: The Badass Psychology of People Who Like Being Alone

A loneliness panic has swept the nation and the world. For years, the popular press and the annals of academia have been spewing out warnings, in increasingly alarmist tones, that loneliness has reached epic proportions, and that it is killing us.

But amidst all the angst about loneliness, something profoundly important has been overlooked: Some people like being alone. They like their time alone. They like living alone.

In many nations all around the world, the number of people living alone has reached record levels. More and more people are also dining alone, traveling alone, and making their way in public places alone. Studies of married couples in the U.S. show that their lives are less enmeshed than they once were. Some couples are even living apart, in places of their own, not because far-flung jobs or other externalities have forced that upon them, but because they want their own space.

For unknown numbers of people, being alone is not just a preference it is a craving, a need. Deprived of their time alone for too long, they begin to fantasize about it. Nothing feels quite right until their need for solitude is replenished.

Who are these people who like being alone? Stereotypically, they are the weirdos and the freaks, the scary loners planning shocking acts of violence. New thinking and fresh research upends those caricatures. We now have a better idea of the true personalities of people who like being alone, and they are, well, totally badass.

In June of 2017, I published a post to my Living Single blog at Psychology Today called The badass personalities of people who like being alone. Immediately, it took off. It was shared and re-shared. It was republished over and over again, with and without permission. It got picked up nationally and internationally.

That made me realize that there is a real hunger for a different story about the time we spend alone, one that acknowledges that not all people who live alone or spend time alone are lonely or doomed to an early death. Some, in fact, are spectacularly happy and healthy.

Ive been writing about people who live single or live alone or like their time alone for decades. In Alone: The Badass Psychology of People Who Like Being Alone , I have collected more than 60 of the articles I have published at places such as Psychology Today , Psych Central , and the Washington Post . Sample what you like or read it cover to cover. Either way, you will come away with a whole new understanding, grounded in research, of what it means to like being alone.

Bella DePaulo

Summerland, CA

October 2017

BellaDePaulo.com

[Note to readers of the print version of this book: Words or phrases that are underlined will show up as links in the e-book version.]