The stickiness of singlehood: Single women and the accumulation of affect

Abstract

While social research has long centred on the heterosexual couple, singlehood has become a focus for sociology, particularly as intimacy research continues to shift with an increased emphasis on alternative intimacies and relationship diversity. In this article, I argue that singlehood is becoming increasingly complex as young women in Australia and elsewhere must navigate compounding conditions of an extended young adulthood and the perceived dominance of heteronormative couple ideals in their social lives. Drawing on a temporal lens that attends to the affective circulation of feelings, this article examines how stigma both shifts and ‘sticks’ over time. To justify this, I explore how young Australian heterosexual women have negotiated being single through young adulthood and into their thirties. Employing a novel biographical approach that analyses two case studies of young women based on survey data collected over 17 years by the longitudinal Life Patterns Project and interview data, this article conceptualises the stigma of being single as a temporal and affective process that attaches unevenly to single women across the life course. In my analysis, a distinct form of emotion work emerges from navigating societal expectations around heteronormativity and relationships, which can result in a ‘sticky’ accumulation of feelings over time. These feelings coalesced when the research participants reached their thirties as they faced the material and tangible consequences of singlehood. The ‘stickiness’ of singlehood represents the invisible burden or stigma that women must carry through young adulthood.

Introduction

While scholars have provided a wealth of research around dating, relationship formation and ‘couple culture’, a growing area within intimacy research is the study of singlehood and how it is experienced by women. Research into singlehood has highlighted the experiences of single adult women since the early 2000s (DePaulo & Morris, 2005), yet there is a lack of empirical research into singlehood among young women in an Australian context. Further, emerging scholarly attention has begun to analyse how singlehood operates affectively (Kolehmainen et al., 2022a), particularly focusing on the stigma it produces. To address these gaps, in this article, I explore the affective experience of singlehood among young adult women in their early thirties in Australia, whose intimate lives tend to be under-investigated as this age group is often perceived to be older than the younger age focus of traditional youth research, such as the mid-teens to the mid-twenties. Although scholars have noted the negative stigma attached to single women, I argue that this manifests from a young age and coalesces in one’s thirties because of the accumulation of societal expectations that become internalised.

It is important to acknowledge that singlehood is not a new concept or experience, but rather it has been largely overshadowed by research on couple culture (Budgeon, 2008; Roseneil & Budgeon, 2004; Roseneil et al., 2020). Research into singlehood has largely focused on psychological perspectives. For example, almost two decades ago, DePaulo and Morris (2005) explored singlehood from the experience of single Americans, coining the term ‘singlism’ to encapsulate the negative sentiment and stereotype associated with the experience of being single. We have since seen an increasing body of social and sociological research on singles around the world as critiques of couple culture started to emerge (e.g. Budgeon, 2016; Gilchrist, 2021; Kolehmainen et al., 2022a; Roseneil et al., 2020). Singlehood is slowly becoming a focus for sociology, particularly as we have seen intimacy research shift and change with an increased emphasis on ‘alternative intimacies’ (Kolehmainen et al., 2022b; Roseneil et al., 2020). This article contributes to research from a sociological perspective and centres on the emotional and affective elements of singlehood.

Extending this field, this article has three main aims: firstly, to examine the experiences of young single women in an Australian context; secondly, it adopts a novel longitudinal and biographical approach that seeks to highlight how the experience of singlehood ‘sticks’ over time; and finally, it develops the concept of affective stigma through demonstrating the emotion work involved in negotiating singlehood.

Tracing ‘singlehood’ in research

Heterosexual relationships have remained at the centre and forefront of social lives and research agendas for some time now. But it is the tracing of small shifts in society that has led us to illuminate the experience of alternative intimacies beyond the boundaries of heteronormativity. A few decades ago, Giddens’ (1992) work on the changing nature of relationships and intimacies provided a move to individualisation and concepts such as plastic sexuality, allowing for a more nuanced analysis of single intimacies. However, the main emphasis in research remained on romantic relationships, rather than friendship or sexual relationships, as a source of meaning in people’s lives. While an increasing openness to alternative intimacies is evident in the research agendas and foci of the friendship paradigm (Spencer & Pahl, 2006), families of choice (Weeks et al., 2001), decentring the family (Roseneil & Budgeon, 2004) and digital intimacies (Dobson et al., 2018), we still see heteronormative couple ideals continue to dominate the structures of public social life in places like Australia and Europe (Roseneil et al., 2020).

Further, the negative stereotype of singlehood has been analysed by critiquing couple culture and gendered expectations. For example, Budgeon (2008) has argued that a long-held bias in the sociology of family and gender privileges heterosexual, cohabiting relationships, rendering all intimacies that sit outside of this structure ‘invisible’ (p. 302). Researching singlehood, she argued, allows us to reflexively critique normative definitions of intimacy and couple culture. DePaulo and Morris (2005) affirmed that the stigma of singlehood is distinct from other stigmas within the life cycle. For instance, in Irish culture single stigma was a result of those close to single women critically commenting on their marital status, childlessness and sexuality (Byrne, 2000). From a psychological perspective, Addie and Brownlow (2014) found that childless single women in Australia over 30 were positioned by others as having a deficit identity. Elsewhere, late singlehood is considered a problem in Israel, in which women faced ‘triple discrimination’ based on a combination of their age, gender and single status (Lahad, 2017, p. 52). Other researchers have highlighted that to understand contemporary singlehood, we must account for the changes in meanings attached to marriage and motherhood, and how these are bound up with the concept of singlehood (Macvarish, 2006). What this research continues to show is that despite the norms of intimacy and personal life becoming more varied, the negative stigma attached to singlehood remains strong (Budgeon, 2016; Sharp & Ganong, 2007). However, little research has sought to explore how singlehood has been affectively or emotionally experienced over time.

While studies have sought to explore singlehood in a way that challenges long-held stereotypes, most of these focus on older women. Research in Canada found midlife single women (aged 35–44), who resisted the deficit identity of singlehood, drew on a transformative midlife narrative which positioned them as comfortable in their single status, although it was a continuous struggle to create and maintain this position (Moore & Radtke, 2015). Employing a feminist psychology of singlehood, Reynolds and Wetherell (2003) found their participants constructed singlehood as a positive experience through repertoires of choice and independence. Although some expressed a desire for a relationship, there was a risk of being defined as desperate. Other research that focused on midlife and older women aged 30–60, demonstrated how representing oneself as powerful and in control of her relationships was not straightforward and required drawing on various repertoires (Reynolds et al., 2007). Lahad (2017) argues that the transition from a young single woman associated with ‘normative singlehood’ to a woman who has ‘passed their prime’ is not a straightforward transition and one that is highly ‘unstructured and unscheduled’ (p. 44). She argues that late singlehood is not afforded the symbolic privileges or profits associated with nuclear heteronormative ideals. Other scholars found that older women viewed their singlehood as a personal failure as opposed to a choice (Sandfield & Percy, 2003); this contrasts with research focused on older men’s experiences, where bachelorhood does not hold the negative connotation of ‘old maid’ (Budgeon, 2008, p. 308). Here we can see how research has emphasised age and temporality as core elements of singlism, yet few studies have explored singlehood longitudinally or biographically, nor how affect influences experiences of singledom.

Theorising the stickiness of stigma

Affect is increasingly being used as a theoretical tool for understanding relationship dynamics and identities (Kolehmainen et al., 2022b). However, affect remains an elusive concept, with scholars taking on various stances and definitions over time. In its most basic form, affect can be theorised as that which arises in the ‘midst of in-betweenness: in the capacities to act and be acted upon’ (Gregg & Seigworth, 2010, p. 1). Therefore, affect is useful in that it bridges the gap between our intentions and what we perceive (Pybus, 2015).

In this article, I take on Spinoza’s approach to affect, that is affectus (the force of an affecting body) and affection (the impact it leaves on the one affected). According to Spinoza (1989), affect is more than just emotion, affect is the potential of the body, or ‘power of action of the body’ (p. 131). Every encounter we have with the world around us involves some sort of transfer of affect, it is a transfer of power, capacities of action potential between bodies (Spinoza, 1989). Affect does not reside in the body or place, but affect is relational in that it resides in the in betweenness of life, between body and place (Massumi, 2002). This conceptualisation of affect brings into focus the everyday moments, the feelings imbued within them, and the consequences of such moments. The focus on the body and emotions allows us to uncover the in-betweenness of our relationships, whether that be our relationship status, our socialities, how we respond to expectations, norms, unspoken rules and the often forgotten or hidden moments within the rhythms of our everyday lives.

Therefore, I would like to consider how stigma operates affectively, as a kind of ‘stickiness’. While stigma has been historically conceptualised as a physical demarcation, sociologist Erving Goffman (1963) noted that the term is more widely used to refer to the ‘disgrace itself than to the bodily evidence of it’ (p. 10). More recently, scholars have noted that stigma is ‘embedded within the social relations of capitalism, and as a form of power entangled with histories of capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy’ (Tyler, 2022, p. 16). Scholars have begun to discuss how stigma operates in relation to singlehood (Samanta, 2021), however situating stigma affectively allows an understanding of how singlehood operates both inwardly and outwardly.

Drawing on Ahmed (2010), we can see how affect is sticky, that is, ‘what sustains or preserves the connection between ideas, values, and objects’ (p. 29). Ahmed (2004) suggests emotions are more than psychological dispositions that work in ways to mediate the relationship between the individual and the collective. She argues that emotions ‘move us’, but they can also ‘hold us in place’ (Ahmed, 2004, p. 27). While stickiness has been theorised in relation to the sociology of families, it is useful in relation to understanding singlehood in that it is hard to ‘shake free’ from it, and it can impact both our emotions and practices (Smart, 2007, p. 45). While Davies (2019) has theorised how sibling relationships can be sticky, in this case, it can reveal how singlehood sticks, shifts and slides over time as women negotiate their work, study, travel and relationship status. The stickiness of singlehood can hold women in place, as they try to move through the collective, that is, move past/through the societal expectations of couple culture. But it is also interesting to note how they can slide and manoeuvre around this at different times depending on the affective intensities of their work, study and health. Through paying attention to their broader life concerns, this reveals how stigma can be resisted and rendered invisible at certain times.

Temporality is used as both a theoretical and methodological tool to examine singlehood longitudinally. Temporality has been explored in depth in relation to singlehood, as it sits as a core element of how we make sense of singlehood (Lahad, 2013, 2017). Bridging together the conceptual resources of affect and temporality to analyse the experiences of singlehood of Australian women, we can understand how some women resist the temporal urge to settle down and marry, through focusing on their personal and professional self-realisation, via education, work and travel. They make sense of their experiences through a temporal awareness whereby they are in a constant state of alertness of their single status. Lahad (2017) describes this as part of how singlehood and intimacy have become ‘commodified’ (p. 73). What has not yet been considered whilst untangling singlehood and temporality is the emotion work that is involved over time, as women negotiate their single status. Emotion work refers to the management of one’s own feelings in private life, to meet social expectations (Hochschild, 1979). Therefore, this article shifts attention from Hochschild’s emphasis on emotional labour in employment settings to the forms of emotion work that occur in personal, everyday relationships. Hochschild (1979) theorised three types of emotion work that can occur, including: cognitive, changing how we think to change how we feel: bodily, changing our physical symptoms; and expressive, managing our external expression of emotions.

Considering how stigma operates affectively enables critique of the power and privileging of couple culture. It helps unpack the emotion work (Hochschild, 1979), such as the justification of being single and managing others’ expectations, that manifests over time, through everyday internalised stigma.

Research methods

To explore singlehood in relation to affect and emotion work, my analysis draws on data from an ongoing mixed-method longitudinal study of young Australians (Life Patterns Project), which follows successive cohorts of young people from the time they are in high school into adulthood. It uses survey and interview data from participants who were recruited in 2005 and 2006 when they were aged 16–17 years and who continue to participate to date (Wyn et al., 2020). Within the broader project, I draw on a sub-sample of 13 survey participants who were purposely recruited to participate in additional interviews conducted between 2023 and 2024 to explore their intimate practices. This project received ethics approval in 2023 by Humanities and Social Sciences (HASS 1) at the University of Melbourne (HREC 2023-20882-40816-8).

To leverage the existing longitudinal data collected with the participants in the project, the analysis draws on survey responses and on in-depth semi-structured interview data. This provides a unique opportunity to combine survey responses and follow-up interview data to document their reflections on their relationships and socialities in the context of their unfolding biographies. To do justice to the depth of individual stories, I focus on two participants, Susy and Gabriella, whose accounts are presented as case studies. I selected these participants because they capture in striking, yet not exceptional ways (McLeod & Wright, 2009) how the affective stigma of singlehood comes alive and manifests at different times in their youth. They were also selected because each one emphasises a different manifestation of the stickiness of singlehood, which I set out below as ongoing accumulation for Susy and delayed accumulation for Gabriella.

For each case study, alongside the core data from interviews, responses to over 300 closed and open-ended survey questions from the available surveys were analysed, using these as rich longitudinal sources for constructing biographies, narrating their lives and contextualising their interview data. For this article, the choice is thus to privilege depth over breadth. Focusing in detail on Susy and Gabriella illuminates how qualitative longitudinal research can draw out the nuances of everyday life and affects. Thus, a small number of in-depth stories enables an exploration and platform for relationships, places, events and choices for which one seeks to understand (Kelly et al., 2023). Case studies illustrate key relational dynamics, particularly the everyday labour and affective intensities of singlehood.

Like other case study approaches, the one used here seeks to capture young lives in ‘movement rather than as a snapshot in one time and place’ (Cook & Cuervo, 2019, p. 1108). Case study research ‘allows investigators to focus on a case and retain a holistic and real-world perspective’ (Yin, 2014, p. 60). Scholars have long called for incorporating biographies into sociological research, especially in the areas of family and relationships. Smart (2007) argues that it gives a recognised status to the explanatory value of the case study approach and gives much greater agency for the individual to influence culture and structure. Whilst past research on singlehood has tended to focus on specific periods in women’s lives, such as their early thirties or later adulthood, this article captures singlehood across a transitional period of life, as these women traverse youth and young adulthood.

This type of longitudinal research seeks to contribute to affective methods through capturing ‘processes, entanglements and encounters’ over a period of time to rethink traditional intimacies (Kolehmainen et al., 2022b, p. 6). Longitudinal research such as this serves two main purposes: to describe patterns of change and patterns of continuity (Cuervo & Cook, 2020; Menard, 2022). According to Cuervo and Cook (2020), longitudinal research focuses on how change occurs in time and place, but also continuity in relationships and practices among and between individuals. As the stigma of singlehood is built and shaped over time through emotions and feelings, as will be discussed, longitudinal research renders itself useful to examine it.

This article adopts a phenomenological approach (Berger & Luckman, 1990; Schutz, 1972), which sees individuals’ stories as meaningful accounts of their lived social realities. Therefore, this perspective means viewing participant narratives as more than just linguistic constructions but as windows into their lives in which social experience is understood. Consistent with phenomenological approaches in sociology, the analysis sought to remain close to participants’ descriptions of feeling and meaning while exploring what lies beneath them (Merleau-Ponty, 2012).

Between 2006 and 2022, Susy returned nine surveys, Gabriella returned 15 surveys, and interviews were conducted over six months, occurring in June–July 2023 and then February–March 2024. Participants were assigned pseudonyms of their choice. Although both participants identified as heterosexual, explicit discussions of sexuality were not prominent in their accounts. Instead, their narratives were structured by heteronormative assumptions about relationships, life course timing and gendered expectations, which this article takes as its central analytic focus.

At the time of the interviews, Susy was a primary school teacher who was changing careers to become a nutritionist. She was living in a shared house with friends and was about to undergo egg freezing. Gabriella was a marketing professional who was still living at home with her parents.

Susy

Susy grew up in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) with her parents and younger brother. In 2006, at 17 years old, Susy was asked about her goals in life, she rated several of them as very high, including to care and provide for a family and to have a special relationship with someone. Between 2007 and 2008, Susy was a full-time student studying a Bachelor degree in primary (elementary) education, living at home with her parents and working several casual jobs.

Five years after leaving school, Susy was still living at home with her parents, was studying full-time and working casually as a museum educator. When thinking about broader issues affecting her life, she commented in a survey:

I am worried about being alone, not having anyone to live [with] because I cannot live with my parents forever. Even though I know I am still young at 22, and I am not ready to settle down, I feel that others see me as a spinster and that I am already off the shelf. I thought things had changed nowadays.

This is the first time that Susy mentions the affective intensity of being single. It is imbued with the traditional narrative of the old spinster who will die alone, often associated with older single women (Sandfield & Percy, 2003). She also expressed her own desire to travel, but those around her expected her to ‘settle down’. Her comment demonstrates the continuing tenacity of the couple norm (Roseneil et al., 2020), and how the affective stigma of singlehood can manifest from a much younger age than previous research suggests (Budgeon, 2016).

In 2013, Susy was working full-time as a primary school teacher. When asked to comment on her work, she said: ‘tired and very busy, but I’m in a better financial situation’. When she was asked to comment on how life was at that time of the survey, she stated:

Feeling social pressure to ‘grow up’ (as in buy a house, settle down, etc.) when I’m not ready for that, I want to travel more and enjoy my youth.

This corresponds to youth studies perspectives that view biographies as non-linear and de-traditionalised, where achieving markers of adulthood for youth are postponed, but at the same time, pressures to settle down (e.g. buy a house, start a family) are still present (Wyn, 2020).

The following year, Susy was still in full-time work, but she was also studying overseas. Regarding relationships, she commented in the survey:

Many of my friends are now settling down, getting married, having children, etc., and I feel pressured by people to settle down when I am planning more travelling, exploring the world and not at all ready to settle. I have had many people who are in relationships ask me why do I not have a boyfriend/what is wrong with me? When I don’t know the answer myself. These people also love to dish out dating advice and seem to live vicariously through my love life even though I would rather them butt out of my love life and worry about their own.

Susy frames her single identity as a deficit or wrong, revealing how single women must justify or answer to such questioning, including the emotion work of defending their relationship status and life choices (Chan et al., 2023). This highlights the interplay between affective stigma, choice and the identity work involved in being a single woman.

A few years later, in 2021, Susy was living in a shared house and had completed her Graduate Certificate in Nutrition that year. She had decided to undertake further study, a Master of Human Nutrition full-time while working as a casual primary school teacher. When we asked her how satisfied she was with her overall life, she said, ‘very dissatisfied’. Later in the survey, she commented:

As a 32-year-old single woman, I feel judged, pitied, disrespected and an outsider because I have not met society’s ridiculous expectations that we find a partner at a young age, get married, have children, buy a house and become successful in our working life.

Susy highlights the gendered element of the stigma attached to singlehood (Budgeon, 2016), and how women are expected to follow long-held expectations around child-rearing. Research has documented how women experience greater pressure to conform to marriage and family due to the gender construction that emphasises caring and dependence as central to femininity (Budgeon, 2016; Sharp & Ganong, 2007). She also highlights how loneliness can manifest, as she highlights the feeling of being alienated or isolated from peers, through judgement. This demonstrates how the emotions that arise due to affective stigma can emanate from the ‘out in’ instead of something that is experienced as private or ‘in out’ (Schmitz & Ahmed, 2014).

The following year, Susy was still studying her Master’s full-time and working part-time as a casual primary school teacher. When asked about her wellbeing in a survey, she said: ‘I had a mini crisis because I struggled with the fact that I have not met the milestones and any of society’s expectations of a woman in her thirties.’ Her experience reveals the pressure on women to conform to normative social patterns that are largely taken for granted as natural (Budgeon, 2008, 2016; DePaulo & Morris, 2005). Susy attempts to invoke emotional reflexivity through resisting the gendered emotional regimes that result in feelings of failure or disillusionment (Holmes et al., 2021); however, she struggles to rectify her success with societal expectations. When interviewed in 2024, Susy described the struggle of continuing to justify her singlehood:

[People ask] ‘Oh, why are you still single?’ And I guess just implying, ‘What’s wrong with you?’ And I never really know how to answer that in a way that isn’t going to cause drama by me saying something really sassy back, or in a way that doesn’t make me feel or look like I’m real sad.

Susy demonstrates the emotion work of being single, which includes managing others’ expectations. She does this through employing expressive emotion work, which involves managing the external expression of emotion (Hochschild, 1979). Affect manifests in questioning one’s identity, as Susy does not want to be ‘sassy’ or appear ‘sad’. Research has documented how women in different cultures have adapted over time to manage such emotion work (Lahad, 2013, 2017). Further, Susy reflected on the way single women must always negotiate a deficit identity of singlehood (Addie & Brownlow, 2014; Moore & Radtke, 2015). This highlights the ongoing stigma attached to being a single woman, both emotionally and embodied in the way it is carried as a social burden. The pressure to maintain a positive and fulfilled image of life (positive identity) can be a challenge (Addie & Brownlow, 2014), and women must constantly grapple with their own feelings of fulfilment but also disappointment (Kolehmainen et al., 2022a).

In both her 2023 and 2024 interviews, Susy was hyper aware of how important time was to her relationships, as she shared that she was currently undergoing egg freezing. She noted this was a ‘big expense’ and that she was relying on her parents to help fund this. Susy reflected on her last failed relationship, in which she admitted she could have stayed with that partner so she would not have to go through the stress of ‘running out of time’ to have kids. Although she acknowledged that having kids was not something she was overly committed to, she was aware of the constraints of her biological clock. Societal expectations for Susy seemed to be more powerful than her own agency, as she spoke about trying to employ strategies from other successful couples that go ‘against my [her] morals’. She was also struggling to juggle work, study and online dating, which she felt was filled with ‘timewasters’. She also mentioned that she now found events particularly frustrating:

Going to weddings and that as a single person’s hard when they’re like, your name and a plus one, and it’s like, ‘Don’t have a plus one.’ And then, you’re surrounded by all these couples, and they talk about all their couple stuff, and then you don’t have anything to add. And I think it’s more they just don’t see you as an equal as a grownup, you’re still seen as a child.

Susy mentioned several moments, such as this, when the affective stigma was most salient. Particularly, she spoke about how attending weddings affected her mental health due to her feelings around being infantilised and excluded by friends and colleagues, which has been found in other research (Macvarish, 2006). Other examples included when her colleagues would ask about her dating life, in which she felt they would pity and shame her, resulting in her wishing she had never opened up and spoken to them at all. For Susy, the affective intensity of her singlehood was felt, shaped and accumulated throughout her young adulthood, but materialised in her thirties in more tangible ways.

Gabriella

Gabriella grew up in New South Wales (NSW), with her twin brother, older sister and parents. In 2006, Gabriella was completing year 12 (the final year of formal education in Australia), wanted to continue with her studies and felt positive about her life. From a young age, Gabriella expressed a low priority for traditional markers of couple culture (e.g. marriage). Two years after leaving school, Gabriella was working full-time during the week but also had a part-time job on the weekends. When asked in a survey what most of her time was spent on, she selected: ‘work/career’; and when asked what gave her the most satisfaction in life, she selected: ‘work/career’.

In 2011, Gabriella was living at home with her parents. She was working full-time at a marketing not-for-profit. When asked to elaborate on her work, she said:

My career is very important to me, and I will work as hard as I can for career development and satisfaction.

When asked about the most positive aspects of her life since leaving school, she rated the following most positive: support from her closest friend, what she had learnt about herself, social life and travel experiences.

A few years later, in 2014, Gabriella was living in a shared house and was on a working holiday overseas. When asked about her current progress in a survey, she selected: ‘I feel real fulfilment in what I’m doing.’ Thinking about broader issues in life, Gabriella stated:

One year ago, I made the bold decision to quit my job and leave all I know, for long term travel. I chose to break the cycle and live the path of an unconventional lifestyle (much to the confusion of my parents) and it has been the best decision I made. I have been travelling solo for a year.

This represented Gabriella’s mindset from a young age: that she was very independent and wanted to prioritise travel and work.

Three years later, Gabriella was living at home with her parents, working full-time as an event manager. However, she was looking for another job due to ‘poor pay’. When asked about her wellbeing in a survey she said:

It was very hard for me last year to be happy. I just came home after 2.5 years travelling Europe, and I was coming from a massive high, and struggled to find meaning and connection with family and friends and struggled to find purpose everyday. . . I feel like society create[s] a path that we must lead on, instead of following our ultimate happiness.

Gabriella begins to hint at societal expectations and gendered expectations of women in Australia that expects them to follow a certain linear path.

In 2021, she was living at home with her parents, working full-time as a digital marketing professional. She described how she was feeling confident that she was setting herself up financially for her future. When asked in a survey to comment on her health, she said:

I eat well, go to the gym, walk my dog, follow stoicism and work from home – I believe ALL these help me live a happy and healthy life. I went on a road trip solo in April [from Sydney to Brisbane] – the adventure was great for my soul! I am lucky to have the flexibility in my life to do that!

Unlike many of her peers in her cohort, Gabriella prided herself on her ability to manage her work–life balance (Cuervo & Wyn, 2016). However, she again highlights the importance of solo endeavours as core to her sense of happiness and maintaining this balance. Later, in 2022, Gabriella was living on her own and expressed she was ‘very satisfied’ with her life overall, but commented: ‘as we get older, friends move on, have babies etc. and sometimes it does feel lonely’. When I spoke to Gabriella in an interview in 2024, she expanded on this loneliness:

But now I think I’m in this phase of my life in my mid-thirties now, where I think it’s accumulated and now I feel really lonely. . . I used to be able to defy it, never really let it get to me, and I was always very positive and stuff, but now I’m just a bit more sensitive, a bit more conscious of it. So just trying to do things to just get me out of that feeling of loneliness or getting out of my thoughts. So, surrounding myself around people that, again, are meaningful people and doing things that I love. I think because relationships are changing, people are prioritising their own little families, and I’ve tried to build intimate relationships that haven’t been successful either.

This accumulation of loneliness can be broken down into various practices that reveal ongoing emotion work. Firstly, she talks about the importance of surrounding herself with people who support her and doing things she loves to manage the feelings of loneliness. Past research on single women has documented the importance of social support, including exploring family dependency and responsibility, and how this can affect singlehood (Maeda & Hecht, 2012). Secondly, she speaks about recognising and acknowledging the shift in relationships around her and how couple culture restructures lives. Thirdly, she mentions coming to terms with the perceived impact of her own failed relationships. This can be theorised as cognitive emotion work (Hochschild, 1979), in which she attempts to change how she thinks about the situation to manage her feelings of loneliness.

For both participants, there was a sense of an internal failure and that they had not expected to be single in their thirties. Together, these processes and practices demonstrate how singlehood can create a sense of statis or stickiness as underlying processes that were once invisible when they were younger, become embodied and harder to ignore.

Similar to Kolehmainen et al. (2022a) and their argument of the affective inequalities of singlehood, single women are left without traditional markers (marriage, etc.) to guide them through this period, which can result in periods of loneliness and confusion. Although Gabriella explained to me that she did not feel the loneliness when she was younger and she enjoyed being on her own, now that she had reached her thirties, there was suddenly an embodied aspect of being an ‘outsider’ without a partner or children. Gabriella also described how she now longed for the ‘white picket fence’ home or the Australian dream that the traditional nuclear family would aspire to. She explained:

And so, I’m finding myself wanting to just have the childhood [dream] and just [be] in my own place and have those traditions and invite friends over and entertain. And I haven’t really been able to do that, being at my parents and then being single. . . But everyone that I know is in a couple, and I think their success in building their house and their nest and all that stuff, has happened because they’ve been able to leverage each other. Whereas I don’t have those same opportunities. I almost feel like when you’re a single person, there is a lot of. . . There is a bit of an inequality in opportunity and all that.

Through self-reflection on how her living situation and single status have impacted her over time, Gabriella explicitly identifies some of the economic inequalities that accompany being single long-term. Growing up in what she called a ‘typical Italian family’, which largely replicated a nuclear family, Gabriella yearns to reproduce this for her own adult life but struggles with the fear that this may not happen, as she only has her own income to rely on. This disrupts Gabriella’s sense of ontological security, and therefore she experiences this affectively, materially and emotionally. Although independence and self-development have been emphasised in relation to the modern-day woman (Reynolds & Wetherell, 2003), research continues to show that single women rarely are able to ‘fully’ attach a positive narrative to their self-identity (Budgeon, 2016, p. 413). In contrast to Susy, Gabriella’s experiences with the stigma of singlehood were delayed until she reached her thirties, when she felt an accumulation of feelings now being brought to her awareness.

Discussion

These biographies unfurl the complexities of women’s experiences of being single and how affective stigma can manifest from a couple-normative society, but also how it can stick and shift over time. Susy and Gabriella both share the stigma of singlehood; however, for Susy, stigma was an enduring narrative, whereas for Gabriella, she found stigma had accumulated over time and had a delayed intensity. However, they both demonstrated the complex emotion work of managing the stigma of singlehood.

Managing the stigma

This article attends to how young women negotiate the emotion work of dealing with the stigma of singlehood alongside their broader life contexts. While Susy embodied the frustration of navigating the negative stereotype of singlehood more strongly, both women felt the lack of guidance singlehood is afforded in terms of a social script, unlike couples (Lahad, 2017). The experience of being a single woman continues to be a challenge, as women must negotiate and navigate moments of intense scrutiny by others (Budgeon, 2016; Sharp & Ganong, 2007), but also by themselves, as there is a sense that, especially for Susy, these narratives eventually become internalised over time. Affective stigma renders visible these moments, and how they can take on different affective intensities over time, as they balance their work, study and health alongside their relationships. Both participants demonstrated a sense of affective stasis in their lives, which was realised in their thirties. Gabriella acknowledged a delayed transition in terms of having not yet moved out of her parents’ home, and Susy noted how she felt infantilised when attending social events. By tracing their youth, the labour of singlehood is revealed, as it is felt and carried through their lives as an often unacknowledged burden or weight that they must navigate and work around alone.

Both women enact a temporal awareness of their singlehood – that is they are in a constant state of alertness of their single status (Lahad, 2017) – demonstrated through acknowledging when significant others began getting married and settling down. However, this manifested earlier for Susy, as she often noted in her surveys that her singlehood was a concern growing up. In contrast, Gabriella rarely mentioned her singlehood in her surveys, but it featured prominently in her later interviews. This awareness can be theorised as an emotional tool which results in a temporal accumulation (Lahad, 2017) where long-term relationships are positioned as a positive use of time, reinforcing couple culture and familial relations. However, their stories show how stigma arises. That is, while they have had rich experiences of travel and continued to update their educational credentials and employment experience, these are not afforded the same positive affective charges. Like Lahad’s (2017) work, this reveals how over time singlehood becomes negatively pathologised, and how women enter ‘chronic singlehood’ (p. 78).

The two biographies share similarities but also differences. The two women demonstrated differing priorities when they were younger: whilst Susy rated ‘having a special someone’ in her life high when she was 17, which remained an ongoing priority for her, Gabriella reported more of a focus on career at a young age. However, both women’s biographies express the impact on relationship formation, because of other competing priorities such as their education and careers. For Susy, her need to continue studying and being in and out of casual and full-time work, provided a unique temporal hindrance; as she emphasised, she was often time poor and had little energy to pursue dating. In contrast, for Gabriella, her focus on her career and her love for her work–life balance meant that she was able to enact the empowered choice (Budgeon, 2016) of being single during her twenties. Over time, they both reveal the sentiment that they are somewhat happy but feel unfulfilled in terms of the unrealistic expectations they perceive society to harbour toward them. This highlights how women take account of others’ feelings in their life choices (Holmes et al., 2021). Their comments often demonstrate an emotional reflexivity as they navigate the gendered and heteronormative expectations of a single woman, as they admitted their own success but also sometimes their own continuing desire for a relationship. This can be seen as a form of labour that is marked by emotional reflexivity that involves negotiating the constraints of structures such as gender and heteronormative ideals alongside agency to pursue the futures they wish for (Holmes et al., 2021).

Stickiness of singlehood

Drawing on Ahmed’s idea of ‘surfacing’, it can be seen how the two women become somewhat alienated through their singlehood (Schmitz & Ahmed, 2014, p. 99). The individual experience of singlehood results in a surface through ‘what is not asked’, which allows for the negative emotions to then land on this surface and stick (p. 99). Susy first commented on her singlehood that at age 22, people already saw her as a ‘spinster’. Given this is a much earlier age than past research has suggested for stigma to emerge (Budgeon, 2016; Lahad, 2013), it highlights how stigma can manifest in relation to women who choose not to follow a couple normative trajectory regardless of age. In 2013, Susy was again feeling social pressure ‘to grow up’ specifically citing buying a house and ‘settling down’, thus this pressure began to grow and then stick. Schmitz and Ahmed (2014) challenge the notion of emotion as something that is private and simply comes within and moves outward. The negativity towards being single emanates from relationships and young women’s social environment and sticks with Susy as it continues to manifest as she reaches the age when women are expected to marry and settle down (typically their thirties). What makes singlehood so sticky is the ‘embeddedness’ (Davies, 2019; Smart, 2007) of couple culture and linear narratives hidden amid everyday life. The complexity of affective stigma is compounded by financial worries and a temporal shift, as these women seemingly have more time, as they do not have a family to care for. Yet, the concept of ‘open time’ theorised by Kolehmainen et al. (2022a, p. 14) is further nuanced by considering individuals’ broader life concerns. Open time is conceptualised as an openness to alternative ways of living everyday life without normative temporal constraints on how time is used (Kolehmainen et al., 2022a). In this case, participants talk of constrained time due to the demanding nature of their jobs, and the emotional reflexivity involved in trying to date within a technological environment. Over time, the negative affectivity of singlehood sticks, slides and shifts, with the competing priorities of work, finances and other relationships. This was particularly critical for Gabriella, as the stickiness of singlehood was rendered invisible for much of her youth and was more prone to sliding around as she was fulfilled by her work and travel. However, when she entered her thirties, this made visible the sedimentation of singlehood in a way that she had never experienced before.

The participants described two different types of ways in which the stickiness of singlehood manifests. Firstly, for Susy, her experiences demonstrated an ongoing accumulation of both societal expectations, as well as her own feelings of inadequacy. Budgeon (2016) argues that the choice to be single is constrained by the time period of normative singlehood, in which women can make ‘good choices’, until that time ‘has passed’ (p. 410). This is supported by neoliberal themes of self-responsibility and self-governance, which continue to frame singlehood as a problem to be solved (Lahad, 2013). Susy demonstrated how singlehood is felt and experienced as an invisible social burden that follows her around over time, marked by feelings of inadequacy, infantilisation and failure. Therefore, affective stigma is built into the stickiness of singlehood, as the everyday emotion work accumulates over time.

Gabriella instead demonstrates a delayed accumulation as she noted that she had spent much of her life being independent, focusing on her career, travelling solo and even noting that she would sit alone at school and that it ‘never used to bother her’. However, now that she had entered her thirties, in which her friends were forming families and coupling up, she was faced with the embodied and tangible realisation of her non-normative lifestyle. This demonstrates how singlehood is experienced affectively, as underlying processes of heteronormativity are always present but come alive in the thirties as women feel the pressures, particularly of the biological clock, to partner up and start a family. Thus, she found herself facing more affective triggers than ever before, as she negotiated freedom on long weekends, a lack of ‘feminine energy’ in her life and realising she could not live her ‘dream’ due to the inequalities built into being a single woman. This builds on research that argues that women continue to be denied the empowered choice to be single, because they are faced with tangible inequalities, including constraints on wealth building due to limits of a single income household (Budgeon, 2016; Lahad, 2013). Susy’s experiences were marked by the everyday experiences of justifying being a single woman, demonstrating the stigma that one can carry from a young age. In contrast, Gabriella demonstrated how tangible and material inequalities can manifest later for single women.

Conclusion

The stickiness of singlehood is marked by a unique affective experience in which women must negotiate their own happiness alongside society’s continued expectation for them to follow a gendered linear trajectory. This article argues that affective stigma can manifest at a young age for women, and then continue to stick, and slide over time, as one negotiates increasingly challenging social conditions of updating educational credentials, navigating a precarious labour market and rising housing costs. These social conditions complicate and compound the conditions of entering one’s thirties, where gendered pressures take on a particular affective intensity that unsettles women’s ontological security. Through centring the emotional and affective elements of singlehood, it reveals how stigma operates on gendered and temporal levels.

In this article, I demonstrate how longitudinal research can capture the nuances of relationships and socialities over time. Particularly in transitional periods such as between young adulthood and adulthood, bringing together affective and temporal approaches is valuable for researchers to understand the interplay between subjective feelings and experiences, alongside societal expectations and structures. Through conceptualising how singlehood can be sticky, it reveals how the invisible burden of singlehood is actualised as an everyday labour that is part of a broader fluid emotional economy. That is, it disrupts notions of stigma operating as purely ‘inward to outward’ or ‘outward to inward’ and acknowledges how feelings stick, slide, manoeuvre over time, as well as coming alive with certain intensities at different time points. Paying attention to the layering of temporal experiences, affective intensities and emotionality helps us understand how stigma is built over time, especially in non-normative relationships and contexts.