Men and Women Transitioning to Singlehood in Young Adulthood and Midlife

Research has long shown that men suffer more from romantic break-ups than women. We predicted that men would on average be less inclined to initiate separation, decline with the separation more on well-being and increase more in loneliness, are less satisfied with singlehood, and desire a new partner more than women. We theorized that these gender differences in separation adaptation could be linked to men's higher reliance on their partners for emotional support. Because socioemotional selectivity theory suggests that with age people shift towards more fulfilling social connections, we also expected men's dependency on their partners for emotional support to be smaller in midlife than in young adulthood. To examine our hypotheses, we analyzed multi-year within-person longitudinal change data from 1,530 mostly unmarried participants from the annual German pairfam study who had experienced a relationship dissolution. We applied propensity score matching to compare separation-related changes in well-being and loneliness to case-matched controls who remained in a romantic relationship. Results showed that men relative to women were less likely to initiate separation, less satisfied with singlehood, and wished for a partner more. In contrast to our expectations, the gender differences observed did not differ by age, and no gender differences were found in separation-related changes in well-being and loneliness. Dissolution-related effects on well-being were only evident for marital relationships, while dissolution-related effects on loneliness were equally strong for marital and non-marital dissolutions. Our study suggests that previous findings on gender-specific divorce-induced changes in well-being may not generalize to nonmarital dissolutions.