Being Single at 50: Why More Women Are Choosing This Chapter And Thriving

There’s a quiet revolution happening in midlife and it doesn’t involve finding the right person. It involves something more radical: choosing yourself, entirely. More women than ever are single at 50, not because they failed at love, but because they’ve discovered something more compelling: a life built completely on their own terms.

Whether arrived at by choice, circumstance, divorce or simply a slow and honest reckoning with what actually makes them happy, single women over 50 are one of the fastest-growing demographic groups in both the US and the UK and a growing body of research suggests they are also among the most satisfied. Far from feeling like something is missing, many find that being single at 50 means the opposite: you’re already whole. There is no “missing half” to find, because fulfilment can come from within, from friendships, from passions, and from a life designed entirely around your own choices.

This is CrunchyTales’ complete guide to understanding, embracing, and thriving in solo midlife living with the statistics, the science, and the real stories to back it up.

The Rise of Solo Living: What the Numbers Tell Us

Midlife today looks radically different from any previous generation. People are living longer, staying healthier, and fundamentally rethinking what a good life looks like. The result? Being single at 50 is not only more common than ever, it is increasingly a matter of deliberate, informed choice.

The shift is visible in the data and the numbers are more nuanced than they first appear.

Research by Pew and the US Census (2023–2025) states that 42% of American adults are now single — neither married nor living with a partner. Women are more likely than men to be unpartnered (44% vs. 40%) (Pew Research Center / US Census Bureau, January 2025). When the definition broadens to include all unmarried adults (divorced, widowed, and never married), that figure rises to over 46% — meaning nearly every other American adult is single. While the unpartnered share has ticked slightly down from a peak of 44% in 2019, the overall trend over two decades remains one of historically high solo living.

Many are choosing not to remarry or form new long-term relationships simply because they no longer feel compelled to. Instead, they are building rich lives centred on autonomy, friendship, travel, creativity and personal growth. This shift reflects a deeper cultural change: happiness is no longer defined solely by romantic partnership.

“People who are single at heart lead their best, most authentic lives on their own. It’s ridiculous to assume that everyone who is alone is lonely. It’s just as ridiculous to claim that single people are less connected than those who are in relationships. Studies show that the opposite is true. Once people partner up they become less connected to friends and family because they build a life around their partner.”

Bella De Paulo PhD, social scientist, TEDx speaker and author of Single with Attitude

According to De Paulo — whose book Single with Attitude remains the definitive account of single life — time alone for solo dwellers can be relaxing, fulfilling, and rejuvenating. It offers opportunities for self-reflection and creativity, as well as allowing you to expand in every direction you choose.

Single at 50: A Growing Demographic

The grey divorce rate — divorces among adults 50 and older — has roughly tripled since 1990, rising from 3.9 to a peak of 11 divorces per 1,000 married women before stabilising at 10.3 per 1,000 married women in 2023 (Pew Research Center, October 2025). Grey divorces now account for 36% of all US divorces — up from just 8.7% in 1990. Among adults 65 and older, the divorce rate has roughly tripled since 1990.

There’s plenty that shapes who lives alone in midlife and, crucially, how they feel about it — not least the experience of divorce after 50. And when it comes to remarriage, women tell a very different story from men.

Who wants to remarry? The gender gap

Among women who are currently divorced or widowed, 54% say they are simply not interested in a new partner — while only 43% say they might want one. Among men in the same situation, 65% remain open to remarriage and only 30% say they don’t want to remarry. The gender gap on this question is one of the most consistent findings in relationship research: women, far more than men, are actively choosing to remain unpartnered or are not remarrying after divorce.

The picture in the UK is equally striking.

According to the Office for National Statistics (2024), 8.4 million people live alone in the UK — up from 7.6 million a decade ago, an increase of over 800,000 people. Three in ten UK households now consist of a single person. Among women aged 65 and over, 41% live alone compared with 27% of men — a figure that has increased steadily since 2014.

What’s more, the research on how single people actually feel about their lives cuts against almost every cultural assumption.

A landmark study by Boger and Huxhold in The Journals of Gerontology confirms that single life satisfaction grows with age — and that having a romantic partner becomes progressively less relevant to loneliness over time. A 2025 study of nearly 6,000 people goes further, finding that single women report higher life satisfaction than single men, with lower desire for a partner and greater contentment with their relationship status — suggesting women are, as a group, genuinely thriving in singlehood.

Why Being Single in Midlife Feels Different and Better

Ask women who are single at 50 what surprised them most, and you hear a recurring theme: the profound sense of lightness. Of space. Of time that belongs entirely to them.

Think of all those hours of sleep you’ve already got on the rest of humanity. All the nights no partner or child has kicked you awake. Holidays will also be better. No compromise destinations, no make-the-best-of-it camping, no hours of enforced boredom in the café of a soft-play centre. You won’t be hamstrung by your partner’s reluctance to go out or the complex tapestry of kids’ extra-curricular activity.Emma John, award-winning author of Self-Contained: Scenes from a Single Life

In her book Self-Contained: Scenes from a Single Life, John captures these freedoms with wit and precision. Beyond sleep and compromise-free travel, DePaulo points to deeper structural shifts: women are no longer economically tethered to marriage in the way previous generations were. Children born to single mothers now have the same legal rights as those born within marriage. The structural case for marriage — which once bundled together economics, parenting, sex and identity — has quietly dissolved.

When sex, parenting, and economic viability were all wound up together in the tight knot that was marriage, the difference between single life and married life was profound. Now, the institution of marriage remains ensconced in our laws, our politics, our religions, and our cultural imagination. But it is of little true significance as a meaningful life transition.Bella De Paulo

The quality of relationships predicts happiness — that’s the central finding of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, now spanning 85 years and the longest-running study of adult life ever conducted. As its current director Robert Waldinger wrote in his 2023 book The Good Life: “It’s not how many people we know, but how safe and truly connected we feel.” Deep friendships and chosen community count as much as and — often more than — a spouse.

The solitude that single life offers isn’t emptiness. For many women over 50, it is one of the most generative conditions they have ever experienced.

Being Single at 50 Is Often a Deliberate Choice

It’s important to name something that doesn’t get said often enough: for many women, being single at 50 is not something that happened to them. It is something they chose.

After years of relationships, compromises, responsibilities and personal reflection, many women reach midlife and decide — clearly and deliberately — that they are happier on their own. They choose independence over obligation, self-fulfilment over societal expectation, and freedom over the performance of coupledom. Rather than waiting for a partner to complete their life, they choose to design a life that already feels complete.

This doesn’t mean closing the door to love. It means refusing to treat its absence as a deficit.

Over a third of us are now single in the UK, with the single camp growing at ten times the rate of the actual population. But nobody seems to have told society, romcom makers, songwriters, marriage-hungry mothers, ‘tick-tock’ uncles, our mates or us that. Let’s start the reverse brainwash and locate our happily single sanity, for good. What is being single, really? It’s freedom, space, financial independence, emotional autonomy, mastery of all the tasks, and sourcing love and romance in your friends and family. Being single for an extended period gives you a set of skills that make you feel slightly invincible, so to ever put those down just because you have a ring is madness.Catherine Gray, author of The Unexpected Joy of Being Single

As the population of never-married women expands, we should be honest about what it meant, and means, to be one. We should celebrate our identity and the life experience that has been given to us. We should reclaim our history and stop being defined by others. Why not start by taking back that dread word, spinster?Emma John

Gray’s The Unexpected Joy of Being Single is one of the most widely read books on this topic in the UK — and the title says it all. If your friends or family don’t understand? People who’ve never experienced the choice not to remarry often project their own assumptions onto those who have. Ignoring those projections is not dismissiveness. It is clarity.

Letting Go of the ‘Happily Ever After’ Script

Part of choosing to be single in midlife is recognising — and actively dismantling — a cultural script that most women absorbed long before they were old enough to question it. The idea that a woman’s life is incomplete without a romantic partner isn’t biology. It’s narrative. And narratives can be rewritten.

Some of the most powerful voices dismantling this script are women in public life who have chosen, loudly and unapologetically, to stand in their singlehood. TV presenter Carol Vorderman has spoken warmly about being happily single, saying she was finally revelling in doing her own thing and running on her own “clock”.

Actress Kim Cattrall, 65, puts it plainly:

You know so much more about what you want and what you don’t want and what you’ll put up with. I feel in that area, romantically, retired.Kim Cattrall

Drew Barrymore have also been candid about how empowering it is to stand on your own:

The truth is, most likely, one day you will meet someone and it will be gone. And once it’s gone, it’s really gone! Why does no one tell us how important it is to enjoy being single and being by yourself?Drew Barrymore

It’s a question worth sitting with.

What a Fulfilling Solo Life Actually Looks Like

One of the most common misconceptions about being single in midlife is that it means being alone. It doesn’t. In fact, many women who are single at 50 report richer, deeper social connections than they ever had within a relationship.

Ten years as a single woman, me. I’ve been in relationships since I was fourteen. I’ve gone from one person’s arms to another’s, sometimes messily overlapping. My friends have divorced and met new men, or stayed with the same man for thirty years. There aren’t many people around me who are single, actually, and it doesn’t hurt me at all. The first five years, it hurt to see others in relationships and happy in them. Today, I’m happy for them if they are happy. Friendship has come to mean so much, and life itself. Previously, a relationship equalled happiness. Today, a good life equals happiness.Shama Persson, founder of Golden Age Models

That reframe — from romantic love as the source of happiness to a good life as the source of happiness — is at the heart of what thriving solo in midlife looks like. Here’s what it tends to involve in practice:

• Deep female friendships as the emotional centre of life
  Building meaningful friendships after 50 is one of the most important investments a solo woman can make. Research consistently shows that strong social ties — not romantic ones — are the most reliable predictor of wellbeing and longevity in women over 50.
• Solo travel as a form of self-discovery
  The best solo holidays for women over 50 aren’t just about destinations — they’re about reclaiming the experience of moving through the world entirely on your own terms, at your own pace, with nobody else’s preferences to negotiate.
• Financial independence as empowerment, not consolation
  Managing your finances as a single woman over 50 deserves dedicated attention — and brings with it a particular kind of confidence that no relationship can replicate.
• Creativity and purpose as daily practice
  Many solo women over 50 describe a creative flourishing that wouldn’t have been possible while negotiating the rhythms of coupledom. Whether it’s rediscovering analog hobbies or learning something entirely new, the space of solo living creates the conditions for making things.
• Chosen family and community
  Co-housing communities like the New Ground — shared by 26 women in North London — represent one of the most innovative answers to solo living after 50: not isolation, but intentional community built around mutual care and shared values. The future of ageing, for many women, looks less like a couple and more like a village.

And for those who find the power of solitude genuinely nourishing, solitude is not a gap to fill — it is a resource to protect.

The Questions People Ask (and What You Can Actually Say Back)

Being single at 50 comes with an unofficial questionnaire, administered by well-meaning friends, relatives and the occasional stranger at a dinner party. You know the questions. Here’s how to think about answering them, or simply how to hear them differently.

• “Aren’t you lonely?“
  The research says otherwise. Women who are single at heart tend to maintain broader and more diverse social networks than their partnered counterparts. And the 2025 Social Psychological and Personality Science study found that single women report higher life satisfaction than single men. Loneliness is a function of the quality of connection, not its romantic status.
• “Don’t you worry about getting older alone?“
  Many women who have been caregivers to partners know that partnership doesn’t automatically guarantee care or security in later life. Building a strong support network — friends, community, chosen family — is a far more reliable investment than partnership alone.
• “Isn’t it selfish to choose to be alone?“
  Choosing a life that genuinely suits you is not selfishness — it is the precondition for showing up authentically in every relationship you do have. As DePaulo notes, single people are often more connected to friends and family than those in romantic partnerships, not less.
• “Have you tried dating apps?“
  If you’re curious, here’s our guide to dating apps for women over 50. But choosing not to actively pursue a partner is not the same as being closed to love. It is, more often, choosing to prioritise the life you already have.

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