Revealed: Why you should stay SINGLE in your 20s, according to scientists

There might be something to having some fun in your 20s before you settle down, at least according to a new study.

Researchers have found that people who couple up as soon as they move out of their parents’ home are less prepared to deal with heartbreak later in life than those who remain single for some time in adulthood.

They suspect this may be because single people are developing more life “skills, networks and resources” to help them deal with the pain and distress of the end of a relationship.

Another idea is that being single in your 20s can promote more flexible expectations about relationships.

While people who enter into committed partnerships when they are young may believe that their relationships will last forever, people who remain single for some time may be less likely to make such assumptions and thus be less hurtful when the relationship ends.

“The impact of the crisis… may be smaller for individuals who were previously single,” the study authors from the Dutch Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute wrote.

Researchers say this doesn’t mean you should move on and end a happy, healthy relationship if you’re in your 20s.

The team reached its conclusions by looking at 36 years of data from a German study that followed the same group of people from 1984 to the present.

The German Social and Economic Panel (SOEP) is a household study that asks people every year about income, housing, life satisfaction and family life.

In the new study, the team used SOEP data on 1,000 people — 190 women and 151 men who were single when they moved out of their parents’ homes, and 400 women and 262 men who were “immediately coupled.”

For each of these people, the scientists looked at how satisfied they were with their lives for three specific periods: the first time they lived with a romantic partner, then the breakup, and after the breakup.

Women who moved out of their parents’ home to live with a romantic partner had lower life satisfaction when they experienced their first major breakup, and their levels of life satisfaction did not improve much over the following three years.

For women who were single when they moved away from home, there was still a decline in life satisfaction after their first major breakup – how could there not be?

But the difference was that over the next two years their outlook improved and they returned to the level they had been at the year before the separation.

For men, the results were a bit different, but still show the benefits of being single in your 20s.

The men who coupled up immediately had a significant decline in life satisfaction at the time of separation, but they improved over the following year.

However, those who were initially single showed barely any change in life satisfaction upon breakup, and this number rose over the following two years.

The pre-breakup period only includes time spent with your partner, not the time before the relationship begins, the researchers wrote. Likewise, the post-breakup period only includes the time a person was single, not the time they were with a new partner.

“The differences between the four groups cannot therefore be attributed to different partnership processes before or after separation,” they wrote.

the Stady Featured this month in Marriage and Family Magazine.

The study reflects some changes in societal expectations about relationships, as there is less assumption that young people will move directly from their parents’ home to live with a spouse.

For example, only about 30% of American women and 20% of American men born between 1990 and 1994 were married before the age of 25, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. statistics. This is a significant decrease compared to the approximately 65% ​​of men and 80% of women born between 1940 and 1944.

Researchers note that societal expectations play a major role in these relationship dynamics.

Since singleness in German society is “relatively common and acceptable,” the study authors wrote, young people in the study community have the advantage of living in a society that does not place excessive pressure on them to marry — which means they can enjoy higher life satisfaction as single young people than those who live In places where this choice is not tolerated.

Therefore, subsequent studies on this individual effect in the 20s could examine this difference, they write:

“Future research could explore whether differences in the effects of separation on life satisfaction are indeed larger in countries where singleness is more common (such as Scandinavian countries) and smaller in countries where singlehood is less common (such as southern European countries).”