In a 14-day diary study, the single adults who saw singlehood as room to grow were still more satisfied with being single the next day, while the activities they had done no longer showed up in those numbers — and in a separate weekly diary, half of those activities were done with friends

Four researchers asked 130 single adults at a Canadian university to rate five sentences from one to seven, one of which read “Being single has the potential to make me grow as a person in the future,” and then asked them to file a diary entry every day for two weeks. A second group of 146 rated the same five sentences and filed one entry a week for six weeks.

Elina Moreno, Yuthika U. Girme, Anastasiia Burik and Sarah C. E. Stanton report in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, open access on August 6, that agreement with those sentences went with more satisfaction with being single, less fear of being single, and, more weakly, with two broader measures of wellbeing. That much reads like the familiar advice about mindset. The diaries say something narrower, and what they say depends on when you look.

The same-day result and the next-day result

In the fourteen-day diary, the belief measured once at the start predicted the day’s singlehood satisfaction (B = 0.70), lower fear of being single (B = −0.39), and, more faintly, psychological need fulfillment (B = 0.15) and life satisfaction (B = 0.18). It also predicted how much self-expanding experience people reported that day (B = 0.67), though that particular measure was collected from a subset of 58 of the 130, so every Study 1 result below involving what people reported experiencing rests on the smaller group.

Put the day’s experiences into the same model and the picture splits. Satisfaction and fear stay significant. Need fulfillment and life satisfaction do not. The two outcomes that survive are the two about being single; the two that vanish are the two about life in general, which is at least consistent with the wider wellbeing riding on what people did more than on what they believed, though the comparison is between a model on all 130 and a model on 58 and cannot carry much weight.

Then comes the next day, in analyses the authors label exploratory rather than preregistered. Controlling for the same day’s scores, the belief still predicted the following day’s experiences, lower fear, higher satisfaction with being single, and a little more need fulfillment (B = 0.10). The experiences did not significantly predict any of those things, and the mediation that worked within a day did not survive across days: all four indirect effects had confidence intervals containing zero.

The weekly diary’s own exploratory lag tightened it further. There the belief did not significantly predict the following week’s experiences at all (B = 0.01, t = 0.14), and by the next week only the two singlehood-specific outcomes were still moving. Life satisfaction was not, in either study, at either lag.

So the two halves have different half-lives in this data. The doing pays, and it pays today. The believing keeps predicting, and what it keeps predicting is mostly how a person feels about being single. Study 1’s next-day need fulfillment is the exception, which the authors note appeared in Study 1 only, and it did not replicate into the following week.

A prime that moved mood but not the belief

Diaries cannot separate cause from correlation, so the authors ran a third preregistered study on 324 single adults recruited through CloudResearch in June 2025, ranging in age from 18 to 76. One group of 153 listed and described three routine, regular or predictable activities they might do in future as a single person. A group of 171 listed three novel, exciting or spontaneous ones.

The manipulation check did not clear. Belief scores came out at 5.16 in the control condition and 5.36 in the treatment condition, a gap the authors report at p = .128, which is not enough to say the belief moved. Fear of being single showed no significant difference. Nor did singlehood satisfaction (p = .082), need fulfillment, or negative mood. The paper’s own heading for its discussion of this result is “SSEP is Difficult to Prime.”

Two things did shift, both small: reported self-expanding experiences, 5.29 against 5.59 (d = 0.26), and positive mood, 2.86 against 3.08 (d = 0.26). The authors read this as the prompt priming people’s sense of their own experiences and giving a short-lived lift with no significant movement in the belief underneath.

Their exploratory coding of what people listed complicates even that. Across 972 written activities, 459 from the control group and 513 from the treatment group, the two conditions overlapped heavily on physical activity, hobbies and self-care. But they diverged sharply elsewhere: basic needs and chores made up 22.44 percent of the control lists and 0.20 percent of the treatment lists, while getaways and holidays ran the other way, 3.70 percent of the control lists against 30.60 percent of the treatment lists. The prompt clearly changed what people wrote down. It just did not measurably change what they believed.

Everything above arrives as a coefficient. Nobody writing this has met a participant or read a diary entry that had not already been turned into a number, and none of it is clinical.

The causal claim stays unmade, and the authors say so. They also put the opposite arrow on the table themselves: people who are already happily single and already doing interesting things may be the ones who come to believe singlehood has room in it, and they cite earlier work by Hughes and colleagues finding that happier people are more motivated to seek out new experiences. Separately, and for a different purpose, their exploratory analyses found that the people less likely to hold the belief were those single against their wishes, those who wanted a committed relationship, those who thought nobody is complete without a partner, and those with lower self-esteem, and the authors suggest such people may also be more resistant to a prompt like this one.

If being single is a source of real distress, a therapist or counselor is the place for that, and there is nothing in this paper to suggest a questionnaire item would do instead.

Half of it happened with friends

The weekly study asked people to describe one self-expanding activity and say who was there. Two of the authors sorted thirteen kinds of activity with 98 percent agreement, and coded the company with 96 percent agreement.

The activities were unglamorous. Physical activity accounted for 19.65 percent, parties and celebrations 15.33 percent, ordinary socializing 15.12 percent, dining out 9.29 percent, work or coursework 8.86 percent, hobbies 7.34 percent, holidays 6.70 percent, shopping 6.48 percent. Watching television came in at 4.10 percent. The category for activities aimed at a romantic interest came second from last, at 1.51 percent.

The company table is where the piece’s own claim sits, and it needs an accounting note. Table 6 counts activities, not people: friends 50.11 percent, family 21.51 percent, alone 18.28 percent, acquaintances 6.88 percent, strangers 1.72 percent, a romantic interest 1.51 percent.

Two other figures for roughly the same thing appear elsewhere in the paper on different denominators. The Study 2 results text says 83 percent of participants did these activities with another person and puts the alone figure at 18. The general discussion says 82 percent of single participants did them with non-romantic close others, where the table’s friends-and-family rows come to 71.62 percent, and gives the alone figure as 18.12 percent, which the authors gloss as approximately one in five. Three numbers, two stated denominators, one underlying question. This piece uses the table throughout, because it is the only version whose rows can be checked against each other.

On the table’s own count, then, the solitary version of single-life flourishing is something under a fifth of what these single people described. Half of it happened with friends. Another fifth happened with family. The growing that gets done during singlehood, in this sample, is mostly done in the company of people the person is not dating.

Which raises the question the diaries were never built to answer. If the benefit lives in the doing, and the doing no longer measurably predicted anything by the following morning, and most of the doing happened with friends and family anyway, how much of what gets filed under thriving at being single is about being single at all?