It’s curious that Cleveland, Cincinnati, Toledo, and Akron would all be in the top 20 loneliest cities in America. It’s also curious, if you check out the Chamber of Commerce’s report, that almost all of the least lonely cities are in California. It was interesting to me that the Washington, DC area has 4 of the top ten loneliest cities. DC, Alexandria, and Baltimore are all in the DC metro area and Richmond isn’t too far out of it. A lot of federal government workers would predictably mean a lot of single households as large numbers of people would only be in that area temporarily, as well as the kinds of people involved in government employment may be more likely to be single.
But I didn’t know how relevant these data were, so I compared the numbers for Cleveland with those of Fulton and Williams counties. And while Cleveland, has about 46% of all households only having one person living there, Fulton county has about 21%, and Williams has 24%, and both of those include about 10% of those single-occupant households being held by householders over 65. So realistically Fulton and Williams counties likely have less than 10% of their households filled with single people who are at marriage and childbearing ages.
So that’s a big statistical difference. And the difference isn’t just between cities and counties today, but throughout history. Single-family homes have been a rising statistical trend since about 1940. When you look generally at historical trends, even going back to the 1500s, around the world, the percentage of single-occupant households was at ofrbelow 10%. Today there’s hardly a place in the world that’s that low.
Now, obviously, there have been a lot of social changes over the past 100 years. There have been a lot of social changes over the past 300 years. And these changes often impact eachother. Forces coalesce. The rise of capitalism, and late-stage capitalism, industrial and post-industrialism, urbanization, 3rd wave feminism, the sexual revolution, secularization, and individualism have all joined their forces to encourage living alone. This conjunction of forces has been noticed and commented upon and lamented and the alarm has been sounding in sociological circles for quite some time.
Now, I’ve talked many times on this show about the problems of low birth-rates. Because low birth-rates are a problem for any society that seeks to be successful. But while that is a favorite hobby horse of mine, that’s not the one we’ll ride today.
Today I simply wish to talk about the human cost of so many people living alone.
Genesis 2:18 says: It is not good for man to be alone.
After God creates and creates and creates and everything he does is evaluated and declared to be good we get this comment that breaks the pattern. It is not good for the man to be alone.
Why not?
Well the answer, theologically, is quite simple. We are social beings. We are made in the image of God and God exists as the community of the Trinity. Now, while some are uncomfortable with social Trinitarianism, the reality is that the Godhead exists as one God in three Persons. The Godhead is a community of personality. Therefore, if we are made in His image, it would stand to reason that other persons would be desirable and even necessary for our flourishing.
And I, in fact, believe that other people are desirable and necessary for our flourishing. And when I talk about this, I not only mean that it’s better for our mental and emotional health to not live alone—which I do mean and believe and we’ll talk about in a second—but I also mean that living alone is bad for your spiritual development and maturation.
Now, please don’t mishear me. I’m not saying that single Christians are second-class Christians. If anything, married Christians are second-class Christians; that’s not the case, but historically and biblically, virginity, celibacy, and singleness, even to the point of hermetic singleness, has been placed on a pedestal. I think that historically these trends have perverted the call-to-singleness. But I’m simply saying that it’s a LOT easier to make the case, biblically and historically, that married believers are second-class Christians, not the other way around.
What I mean, rather, is that living alone causes people to develop certain habits and tendencies that, if they lived with another person, even a friend or a servant, not necessarily a spouse, but simply living with another person would prevent certain habits from forming or becoming concrete.
And I, of course, am not the first to notice this. In fact, John Wesley makes a great example of this. Because for all the good and great things John Wesley was, he was an old bachelor when he got married and everyone knew it was a mistake at the time and his better biographers have never shied away from that truth. John Wesley was a bad husband and his wife was a bad wife. Luke Tyerman, a 19th Century biographer of Wesley wrote this:
It was one of the greatest blunders he ever made. A man who attains to the age of forty-eight, without marrying, ought to remain a bachelor for life, inasmuch as he has, almost of necessity, formed habits, and has acquired angularities and excrescences, which will never harmonize with the relationships and the duties of the married state. Besides, if there ever was a man whose mission was so great and so peculiar as to render it inexpedient for him to become a benedict, was such a man. His marriage was ill advised as well as ill assorted. On both sides, it was, to a culpable extent, hasty, and was contracted without proper and sufficient thought. Young people entering into hurried marriages deserve and incur censure; and if so, what shall be said of Wesley and his wife? They married in haste and had leisure to repent. Their act was, in a high degree, an act of folly; and, properly enough, to the end of life, both of them were made to suffer a serious penalty. It is far from pleasant to pursue the subject; but perhaps it is needful. In a world of danger like this, we must look at beacons, as well as beauties.
It is simply and truly the case that marriage has a sanctifying power that singleness does not have. Marriage changes people. Living alone allows people to become more like themselves without anyone ever pointing out their flaws or without the example of godliness in another in a domestic setting.
Again, I’m not saying that unmarried Christians are second-class. I don’t believe that. I am saying that they have not experienced the sanctifying power of marriage. Some have experienced the incredible blessing of living with a close and dear brother or sister in the Lord in a deep friendship. And for people whom God has called to singleness I cannot imagine a more blessed situation than to live in a shared home with another or several other deeply dedicated Christians.
I think the monasteries were on to something. I am not promoting monastic living, but I think that Christians living a life of deliberate singleness to serve Christ would do well to share their roofs and their food with other believers.
And I think that living together is not only a great blessing in that it sanctifies us, but it also fills us with joy. Let me speak frankly right now, and many of you may think I sound like a cold-hearted fool right now, but allow me to say that friendship, just plain-Jane friendship with another believer who truly gets us comes with blessings that marriage lacks.
Right now, in our society, the constant message is to “marry your best friend.” I don’t think that’s good advice. And I don’t think it’s good advice for a lot of reasons, but not least of which is the simple fact that men and women are different. Let me give you an example.
I had lunch with a pastor a few months ago. I’d never spent time with him, but he was new to the area and as the president of our local ministerial associate I thought buying him lunch was the least I could do. Well, I sat and talked with this man for almost 3 hours. We had a blast.
When I got home my wife asked how it went and I said that it was great that it was fun and I hoped to get to know him better. My lovely wife then asked me about his family—his wife’s name, how many kids he had, and what their ages were.
I looked at her and said, “I know he has a wife, and I’m fairly certain she has a name…and he has kids, and I bet they have names too!” She just shook her head and muttered something about “men.” She said, “what did you even talk about you were gone for 3 hours!?” I said we talked about theology!
Men and women are just different. And men can have friendships with other men that offer men things that women simply cannot. Similarly, women can offer my wife things in friendship with her that I can’t give my wife. And you know what. I don’t want my wife to try and she doesn’t want me to try. She needs a husband, not a soul-sister or a sob-sister. And I need a wife, not a buddy or a bro. And I’m not saying that men and women can’t be friends and close friends. I’ve had a lot of close women friends throughout my life. But it isn’t the same and expecting a spouse to be your bestie is unrealistic, unfair, and unhealthy.
Now, I said all that because I want to point out that friendship is one of the most glorious and wonderful blessings that God gives us. And for unmarried people to live with a friend and to not live alone is a good and godly thing. Living with other people is good because it forms us into the kind of person that you might be able to tolerate spending eternity with.
But I not only wanted to talk about the spiritual blessings that are character formative, but the lived experience of living alone. Now, one of the common refrains mentioned in the research on the rising trend of single-occupant households is that living alone is a poor predictor of loneliness. That these are conflated and that that’s just not accurate. Researchers argue that self-report data of those who live alone claim that they don’t experience loneliness at a statistically significantly higher rate. Now, I’ll be honest. I don’t buy that argument.
Saying that living alone is a poor predictor of feeling lonely is like saying that living underwater is a poor predictor of feeling wet. I’m sure it is. That doesn’t mean that it’s reliable. And external data such as the rise in depression, especially among urban women would be a fairly good indicator that it is not good for woman to be alone.
And in his excellent essay on the topic K.D.M. Snell writes:
Situational aloneness, or being in solitude, let alone desiring privacy, needs to be differentiated from subjective or temperamental feelings of loneliness, and these concepts themselves have many variants and cultural forms. Nevertheless, being alone often becomes loneliness: many modern studies of self-rated loneliness (widely using the UCLA Loneliness Scale or its European equivalents) and much historical evidence highlight a frequently close association between alone-ness and loneliness. In quantitative studies of subjective loneliness, lone living is almost always the strongest explanatory variable when analysing loneliness, often linked to allied conditions (for example, divorce or bereavement).
OK, so a lot of that was jargon, but I hope you got the gist of it. The fact is that whether or not science can agree, statistically the best predictor of experienced loneliness is whether or not you live alone. I was reading this essay to my wife and she rolled her eyes and said, “how many millions of taxpayer money did they get to do that study?”
And I laughed and you might be laughing to because, thank heaven we have science, otherwise we wouldn’t have known that people who are alone are lonely! Good work, gang, high-fives, all around!
But here’s the point and it’s a serious point that I hope people will take seriously. Our society is changing and not for the better. This rising tide of living alone is just one more indicator that something is wrong.
Now. If you live alone, I’m not saying something is wrong with YOU. I’m saying that the high statistical rate of people living alone show that something is wrong with our society. People aren’t getting married; people don’t have friends; people are getting divorced; and something else to consider, is the high number of people over 65 who live alone. Why do they not live with family? I think that these are all indicators and pretty reliable indicators that our society is disintegrating. And there are a whole lot of reasons why. But one of the reasons and the most important reason is that our society has forgotten God and insoforgetting we have forgotten what is good. We have forgotten not just what’s good for society and how we can fulfill social and civic duties, but also what’s good for ourselves, for the development of our souls, of developing character and virtue and godliness and becoming the kinds of people God wishes us to be.
As we enter this new year, I would encourage us to consider what’s happening in our nation and our community and ask if this is really the way it’s supposed to be. And if not, then let’s seek to change it. Let’s seek to build our lives and our households and our communities on God’s vision of humanity and life.