Is singlehood good for work-life balance?

One issue that comes up somewhat regularly in singlehood advocacy spaces is the demands that can be placed on single employees because of their relationship status. For example, if the company needs someone to stay late at work, managers might reflexively turn to their single employees with the assumption that they have “nothing better to do.” So the life part of singles’ work-life balance doesn’t always get respected.

Your faithful narrator engaging in some work-life balance

But might singlehood nevertheless come with structural advantages in terms work-life balance? Whatever the benefits of partnership, being romantically entangled comes with a degree of non-negotiable time commitment. For a single person, their time is moreso their own, so they should have more flexibility in how they spend their non-work hours. That flexibility outside of work might translate into a better sense of work-life balance.

My former Ph.D. student Yoobin Park and I tested this idea along with my colleague Emily Impett a number of years ago. One thing I always loved about working with Yoobin is that she is an absolute stickler with precise methodology. For example, although we could have sent this paper to a social psychology journal where the lack of workplace psychology experts might have made acceptance easier, Yoobin pushed for us to send it to an organizational psychology journal to make sure it got the most thorough vetting possible.

And it was methodological issues that primarily got Yoobin interested in this question. One issue I’ve discussed before, an issue that was put on the map by Bella DePaulo, is the importance of longitudinal methodology in understanding the link between relationship status and well-being. There’s nowhere I’ve seen that issue come to the fore more than in our paper on work-life balance.

Previous research had shown that if you just survey partnered and unpartnered individuals, partnered individuals report higher satisfaction with work-life balance. In fact, in our own paper, we replicate this finding. We also add a couple of other potentially interesting findings. First, we show that singles report more interference of their work life in their personal life. We also show that partnered people, moreso than single people, report that their work life enhances their personal life, and their personal life enhances their work life.

So all of this might suggest that singlehood is bad for work-life balance. It also seems to support the idea that these demands that single employees report being placed on them might in fact be interfering with their ability to enjoy their personal life. Given the synergies partnered people are reporting between their work lives and their personal lives, maybe it’s partnered people who have the advantage here.

But what Yoobin recognized is that these cross-sectional data, where you compare two groups at one point in time, are limited in what they can tell us about causation. For example, as I’ve discussed before, selection effects are an issue when it comes to comparing single and partnered people. We have good reason to believe, for example, that people who are more extraverted are more likely to become partnered. Because extraverted people are just happier in general, well-being benefits for partnered people might show up because they were happier even before they got partnered, not because partnership caused them to be happier.

So, using a German data set where we could track the same people over time as they transitioned from single to partnered and vice-versa, we looked at what happened to people’s satisfaction with their work-life balance when their relationship status changed. So what did we find?

First, it’s worth noting that one thing we found was that people’s life satisfaction was higher when they were partnered versus single. So, as is being increasingly shown in other longitudinal research, becoming partnered does seem to be associated with increases in life satisfaction. As I’ve discussed before, the increase in life satisfaction isn’t statistically huge, but it does seem to be very reliable.

But as far as work-life balance is concerned, we found that people were happier with their work-life balance when they were single as opposed to when they were partnered. This seemed to be true both when they got into a new relationship and when they got out of an old relationship. So here we have a case where the cross-sectional data show an advantage for partnership, but the longitudinal data show an advantage for singlehood.

This seems to suggest that there might well have been some selection effects at play in the cross-sectional data. If partnered people are for some set of reasons dispositionally happier, then we would expect them to feel better about all kinds of things including work-life balance.

In many ways, the idea that there may well be work-life balance advantages to singlehood makes sense. Typically, people’s work hours are not flexible. So adding a romantic partner adds another set of non-negotiable demands to one’s time, and subtracting a romantic partner increases your flexibility in your non-work hours. That might lead people to feel like they are able to balance their work and personal time better when they are single.

I do think there’s an important caveat to these findings, which we didn’t think of at the time we published the paper. Because our longitudinal analyses only track someone for one year into their new relationship, or for one year after their breakup, it’s not clear whether these effects would hold over the longer term. For example, the early stages of a partnership may involve unusual demands on personal time because partners don’t typically live together and haven’t much integrated their lives. Maybe once the relationship “settles in” (e.g., you don’t have to travel to spend time with your partner), managing the time demands could get easier. Similarly, research on relationship termination suggests that, because late stage relationships are typically marked by stress and conflict, people often have a well-being rebound after leaving relationships. As such, the first year of regained singlehood might be marked by a sense of relief from stress that doesn’t necessarily persist.

In fact, this distinction between short-term and long-term effects of changes in relationship status suggests the possibility that the cross-sectional effects are causally true (in long-term partnerships, partnership facilitates satisfaction with work-life balance) and the longitudinal effects are also causally true (in short-term relationship status changes, singlehood facilitates higher work-life balance). It’s impossible to know for sure with the kind of data we have. This points to the importance of not just conducting longitudinal research, but conducting longitudinal research with long-term followups.

More generally, I think these findings reinforce the perspective I’ve expressed multiple times that singlehood scholars would be best off changing the question from whether singlehood or partnership causes higher well-being to in what domains do singlehood and partnership have advantages. I’ve said before that if sexual satisfaction is an important focus for you, partnership seems to be (on average) where it’s at. But if things like having a broad circle of friends – and maybe having better work-life balance – are your focus, singlehood might well have more advantages.

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