It’s better to be single, study finds

It turns out that if you're single, you probably hold stronger social bonds that help people.

Marriage can constrain people socially, and is not always the happy ending we perceive it to be – and a study, published in 2015, has supported that notion.

The study, published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationshipsfound that:

Single individuals are more likely to frequently stay in touch with, provide help to, and receive help from parents, siblings, neighbours and friends than the married.

The study found that being single increased the social connections of both men and women, a trend that remained even when taking into account structural explanations of social relationships.

The researchers concluded that instead of promoting marriage, public policy should "acknowledge the social constraints associated with marriage and recognise that single individuals have greater involvement with the broader community".

The 2015 study was advanced upon by a TEDx talk in May 2017, in which Bella DePaulo argued that society undervalues the lives, relationships and stories of single people; that so often the told story is the romantic one, of how two married people met, than the lives of people independent of others.

After all, studies have shown that people who get married do not end up happier or psychologically healthier than when they were single.

You can watch the full TEDx talk below.

How interesting.