Single at Heart: What if You Don't Need Someone Else to “Complete” You | Bella DePaulo, PhD

Single at Heart: What if You Don't Need Someone Else to “Complete” You | Bella DePaulo, PhD

September 10, 2026 · 49 min

About this episode

Bella DePaulo discusses her research on the happiness of single individuals and the societal perceptions surrounding it.

Bizarre fact, if you tell people you’re genuinely happy being single, they don’t believe you. You, in fact, may be among the doubters when it comes to your single-at-heart friends.  Bella DePaulo has spent more than three decades studying what happens when someone is genuinely, unapologetically happy being single, and one thing keeps showing up in her data. People don't believe them. In studies where participants read identical biographies, differing only in one line, single or married, the single people who said they were happy were assumed to be exaggerating. The married people were taken at their word. Bella is a social psychologist (Ph.D., Harvard) and the author of Single at Heart: The Power, Freedom, and Heart-Filling Joy of Single Life . Her TEDx talk on what no one tells you about single people has been watched more than 1.8 million times, and The Atlantic has called her America's foremost thinker and writer on the single experience. She's been writing the Living Single blog at Psychology Today since 2008, and she founded the Foundation for the Empowerment of Single People.  In this conversation, Jonathan and Bella dig into what her research, drawn from more…

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