Bella DePaulo > Quotes

“The other side of mental blanketing - the buffing and puffing up of marriage to keep it seeming shiny and magical - is up against a formidable fact. Statistically speaking, the act of marrying is banal. Even though many Americans wait longer than ever to marry, and often do not stay long in the marriages they do enter, most Americans - close to 90 percent - still do marry at some point in their lives. Some try it over and over again. Marrying, then, does not make people special; it makes them conventional.”
― Bella DePaulo, Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After

“The freedom to be single, to create a path through life that does not look like everyone else's, can be unsettling to people who feel more secure with fewer choices.”
― Bella DePaulo, Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After

“There is another reason ever-single women fare even better than previously married women in later life. They mastered the single life long ago. From structuring social events in a culture that caters to couples, to figuring out how to work and get all the tasks of everyday life accomplished when there may or may not be others readily available to do their unfair share, always-single women have been there, done that. It is not a new or daunting challenge.”
― Bella DePaulo, Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After

“Each time our understanding of human nature becomes more expansive, we all become freer to live our best and most authentic lives.”
― Bella DePaulo, Single at Heart: The Power, Freedom, and Heart-Filling Joy of Single Life

“Most married people can expect a specific other person to be there for them in a way that a single person typically cannot. Does that make married people more mature than single people?

Married people are on training wheels. Singles are riding the bikes for grown-ups.”
― Bella DePaulo

“With initial understanding, Dexter replied, “Trust me, I definitely understand. See, I can’t help myself either.” Then, his tone swinging toward anger, said, “But children, I could never do that, not like you. Never, ever kids.”
― Bella DePaulo, The Psychology of Dexter

“As much as I find the soulmate concept sappy and silly, I also understand its appeal. The soulmate promises an all-in-one solution. Find that one perfect person and you have—for starters—your best friend, your sexual partner, your comforter and caretaker, your cheerleader, your escort to every social function, your consultant on matters large and small, and the one and only teammate you will ever need in home management, money management, and vacation planning. And that list doesn’t even include any of the potential coparenting possibilities. The soulmate mythology is the ultimate seduction: Find that one right person and all of your wishes will come true.”
― Bella DePaulo Ph.D., Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After

“I want to mull over the bad stuff or savor the good stuff, then look to the important people in my life.”
― Bella DePaulo, Single at Heart: The Power, Freedom, and Heart-Filling Joy of Single Life

“Dr. Hervey Cleckley wrote in The Mask of Sanity”
― Bella DePaulo, The Psychology of Dexter

“In the 1980s, worried professionals began to come together to compare notes and create visions of new ways of living that would offer a better quality of life.5 Although many of the professionals were architects, their focus was on people and human interactions, more than on buildings. They imagined neighborhoods where people would be out on the streets, walking to stores and school and work, running into each other, and stopping to chat. They envisioned streets that would be safe for joggers and bicyclists, and be visually interesting. They thought that communities should have a sense of place unique to their history and environs rather than a monotonous, prefabricated replicability.6 The architects also had some ideas about the kinds of features that would encourage the neighborliness and civic-mindedness to which they aspired. Homes, they thought, should be fronted by porches instead of garages. The houses should be close enough to the streets to invite conversations with passersby. Streets should be narrow enough to discourage drivers from speeding. In”
― Bella DePaulo, How We Live Now: Redefining Home and Family in the 21st Century

“Marriage isn’t a disease; it isn’t catching. You don’t have to pass it on to everybody you know. Unlike a woman I once heard admit “I’ve never been married but I tell people I’m divorced so they are not scared of me,”
― Bella DePaulo, Singlism

“When other life factors were considered, the people who were happiest were those who were most satisfied with their household finances, and the next happiest were those who had good health. Marriage came in third.”
― Bella DePaulo, Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After

“I am tired of these affairs, where no one asks what books I’ve read, only a handful of relatives are interested in how I’m advancing at my job, and everyone quizzes me about my dating life.”
― Bella DePaulo, Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After

“At every phase in your life, look at your options. Please, do not select the boring ones.288 —Barbara Hillary”
― Bella DePaulo, Single at Heart: The Power, Freedom, and Heart-Filling Joy of Single Life

“A national survey ongoing since 1974 has shown that Americans have never been less likely to be friends with their neighbors as they are now. The lowest levels of neighborliness were recorded in the suburbs.33”
― Bella DePaulo, How We Live Now: Redefining Home and Family in the 21st Century

“I ask Andrew if he would mind offering some advice to younger people about how to live. He thinks they should ask themselves, What are my values? How do I want to live my life? What do I care about? And then, Does my living situation feed that or does it take away from that? Oh,”
― Bella DePaulo, How We Live Now: Redefining Home and Family in the 21st Century

“Tell new acquaintances that you are single and often they think they already know quite a lot about you. They understand your emotions: You are miserable and lonely and envious of couples. They know what motivates you: More than anything else in the world, you want to become coupled. If you are a single person of a certain age, they also know why you are not coupled: You are commitment-phobic, or too picky, or have baggage. Or maybe they figure you are gay and they think that’s a problem, too.”
― Bella DePaulo, Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After

“Lethal Predators: Psychopathic, Sadistic, and Sane” in Profilers: Leading Investigators Take You inside the Criminal Mind, 2004.”
― Bella DePaulo, The Psychology of Dexter

“Ever since Aristotle described three different kinds of friends—friends of utility, of pleasure, and of virtue—we have known that a set of friends can be a diverse lot. We can have friends we only see at basketball games or book club, friends we see nearly every day at work, and friends who are our confidants. Specialization is fine—we do not expect to like all of our friends in the same way or for the same reasons. At”
― Bella DePaulo, How We Live Now: Redefining Home and Family in the 21st Century

“Writing often in the pages of the New York Times, Allison Arieff is a powerful spokesperson. “Bring back the sidewalk!” she urged in one of her articles, explaining: “Community is born from social routine—running into neighbors at the mailbox or while walking down the street. Design for these serendipitous encounters.”8”
― Bella DePaulo, How We Live Now: Redefining Home and Family in the 21st Century

“Others will forever be scratching their heads and wondering what’s wrong with you and comparing notes (he’s always been a bit strange; she’s so neurotic; I think he’s gay).”
― Bella DePaulo, Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After

“As a career girl in your late twenties, you have been most probably able to surround yourself with certain material assets…to which you shortly become accustomed. Will you then be eager to marry a man who cannot keep you in your customary supply of worldly goods?”
― Bella DePaulo, Singlism

“The freedom to be single, to create a path through life that does not look like everyone else’s, can be unsettling to people who feel more secure with fewer choices.”
― Bella DePaulo, Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After

“The paradigm experience of solitude is a state characterized by disengagement from the immediate demands of other people – a state of reduced social inhibition and increased freedom to select one’s mental and physical activities.”
― Bella DePaulo, Alone: The Badass Psychology of People Who Like Being Alone

“Historians estimate that up to half of nineteenth-century city residents were either boarding or maintaining a boardinghouse.2 Single”
― Bella DePaulo, How We Live Now: Redefining Home and Family in the 21st Century

“Maybe the point is that only people who are married with children have the proper “perspective on life” that enables wise judgments on matters such as schools or obscenity. If so, then should it also follow that the court needs to be packed with women to weigh in on matters such as abortion or reproductive technologies, or with gay men, lesbians, African Americans, and Arab Americans to make richly informed decisions about matters pertaining to discrimination, due process, and civil rights?”
― Bella DePaulo, Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After

“The young adults of the time and their parents and pundits all wrung their hands. But they needn’t have. “Those who did best tended to accept change, not to berate themselves for breaking with tradition.”41”
― Bella DePaulo, How We Live Now: Redefining Home and Family in the 21st Century

“the relationship that I think is the most significant one in twenty-first-century American life: it is friendship. The”
― Bella DePaulo, How We Live Now: Redefining Home and Family in the 21st Century

“story. A study of more than seven thousand adults showed that introverts who had moved frequently when they were growing up, compared to those who rarely moved, had more difficulty developing strong personal relationships and maintaining them over time; and those difficulties seemed to undermine their happiness and satisfaction with their lives.”
― Bella DePaulo, How We Live Now: Redefining Home and Family in the 21st Century

“In one of the buildings where April lived, the girls befriended the kids who lived upstairs. “At first it was nice; but other times, it just felt like every time we got home, they were knocking on the door. And it stopped having that sort of safe-haven feeling to it.”
― Bella DePaulo, How We Live Now: Redefining Home and Family in the 21st Century