Going Solo

by Eric Klinenberg

  More pragmatically, those who caution against the shift toward living alone need to grapple with the fact that the social changes driving it—the emergence of the individual, the rising status of women, the growth of cities, the development of communications technologies, and the expansion of the life course—are unlikely to be reversed. At this point in history it’s clear that living alone will be an enduring feature of the contemporary developed world. States and societies that recognize this, and particularly those that give singletons the kinds of support that they now offer to those who are married, will be better able to meet their citizens’ needs.

  CONSIDER SWEDEN, where about 47 percent of all households have just one resident (compared to about 28 percent in the United States), or more specifically Stockholm, where a staggering 60 percent of all dwellings are occupied by someone who lives alone. Like the United States, Sweden has a deep-seated cultural legacy of individualism and self-reliance. But it’s the nation’s ongoing commitment to collectivism, not its problems with atomization or social isolation, that most impressed me when I traveled there to learn about how and why so many Swedes live alone today.1

  For decades, scholars of the modern world—and of the family in particular—have turned to Sweden for a preview of trends (the bad as well as the good) that may emerge in their own societies. In the 1980s, the American sociologist and marriage proponent David Popenoe noted that Sweden had made a “world-leading move away from the nuclear family.” Popenoe highlighted the fact that Swedish marriage rates were down and nonmarital cohabitation was up, as well as the fact that family dissolution, whether from divorce or nonmarital separation, happened more frequently than before. But he also called attention to another surprising social change: that the number of one-person households had more than doubled between 1960 and 1980, with young adults leading the way. Popenoe questioned what would happen when the once universal human experience of living in groups was no longer assured. He worried about whether the rise of living alone would change the quality and character of social relationships, resulting in more loneliness or anomie. But he also acknowledged that this seemed unlikely: “It is not that Swedes are misanthropes, living their adult lives with no intimates. The evidence suggests that the propensity of adult Swedes to form a dyad with another person, at least for part of their lives, is as strong if not stronger than elsewhere . . . Nor is it that Swedes necessarily lack intimate social contacts, even if many of these contacts are outside of their immediate household.”2

  The intensity of Swedish social life is most evident in Stockholm, a prosperous city that is also the global capital of living alone. I arrived there during a damp and cloudy week in the fall of 2010, but the weather did nothing to diminish the vitality of the city’s sidewalks, waterways, parks, restaurants, and cafés. More remarkable than the crowds of people, though, was the density of the city’s handsome, functional residential buildings, including prewar complexes designed specifically to promote communal living among singletons and postwar high-rises that, if not especially attractive, created an abundant supply of decent places to live.

  These buildings were not developed by commercial realty companies for which success is measured solely by revenues. They were designed to meet the needs of quite specific populations, including the ranks of those who live alone. In the 1930s, for instance, a group of modern architects, social planners, and feminists conceived a new style of collective housing, one that offered single women (young and old) a private residence within a building that also supplied services such as cooking, cleaning, and child care. The “collective house,” designed by architect Sven Markelius and social welfare champion Alva Myrdal (who won the 1982 Nobel Peace Prize), opened its doors to single women and single mothers in 1935. Located in central Stockholm’s Kungsholmen district, the building contained a restaurant (with a small elevator system that could deliver meals into every unit), a communal kitchen, a laundry (with chutes for sending down dirty clothing and a paid staff of launderers), and a nursery. It was a resounding success, perhaps too much so, because demand for a place there has always exceeded the modest supply of fifty-seven units (eighteen with one room, thirty-five with two rooms, and four four-room “mansionettes”). Fortunately, there are several similar buildings in the same neighborhood, some catering to single mothers, others to all singletons regardless of sex or age. And while in some the services are no longer available, the restaurant and pastry shop in the Markelius and Myrdal collective house remain extremely popular. After I sampled the fare there, the outgoing staff delighted in showing me that the meal delivery elevator still works.

  Between 1965 and 1974, Sweden embarked on a far more ambitious housing project: the Miljonprogrammet, or Million Program. At the direction of the Social Democratic Party, the government invested in the construction of roughly one million new residential units (and the demolition of about 350,000 others), including high-rise apartment complexes, many of which were packed together in inner suburbs, as well as less conspicuous, small-scale developments scattered throughout the city. The Social Democrats initiated the program because Swedish cities lacked sufficient housing for the continuous stream of migrants who had abandoned their rural and small-town communities in the previous two decades. Social planners believed that the massive construction project would assure Sweden its role as an ultramodern nation, a place where citizens would benefit from their nation’s collective prosperity and the privileges it afforded.3 Thereafter, one of those privileges would be the chance to live alone.

  The abundance of small apartments available in cities like Stockholm is just one reason that going solo is so pervasive. Like the other Scandinavian nations, all of which have unusually high rates of people who live alone, Sweden has both a dynamic market economy and a strong welfare state, and citizens can pursue their autonomy with confidence that the safety net will catch them if they fall. “Do you know why so many of us live alone?” a Swedish statistician I interview in the charming Old Town district asks me. He quickly answers his own question: “Because we can.”

  For middle-class Swedes who came of age after the Million Program, moving into a place of their own after leaving their childhood home has become a rite of passage into adulthood, a luxury that sometimes feels like a social right. Until recently, when the government changed the system for allocating apartments, parents would register their newborn children on the waiting list for a small apartment (in the same way that Manhattan parents sign up their infants for nursery schools), to assure that there would be one available when they graduated from gymnasium (high school). What’s more, Swedish parents will often exchange their own family-size apartments for a smaller, “empty-nest” unit so that they can help pay for their child’s first go at domestic autonomy. “It’s our responsibility,” the father of a teenager who’s approaching graduation tells me. “And we’re trying to figure out how to make it work.”

  During my visit to Stockholm I interviewed a dozen middle-class men and women between the ages of twenty-nine and forty-seven. It was by no means a large or random or remotely scientific sample, but I was still impressed and surprised by what I learned from them. Not only had every single one of them begun living alone in their late teens or early twenties, but nearly all of their friends and family members had, too. Under these conditions, going solo is a tremendously social experience. “I got my first apartment when I turned twenty,” a forty-three-year-old man in Stockholm recounts, “and so did just about all of my friends. That was one of the best times of my life. Most nights we’d meet up at someone’s apartment and drink for a while, because we didn’t have enough money for more than one drink in a bar, then go out somewhere to meet women and other friends.” A thirty-year-old woman who’s studying anthropology reports a similar experience. “We all kept our own places, even when we were dating someone seriously and spending a lot of nights together. It’s only recently, now that we’re all turning thirty and moving in with partners, that my fr
iends are starting to sell or give up their apartments. But even that’s hard, because so many of the people who are just a little older than us have already divorced or separated. And we all want a place that’s ours.”

  Just as Swedish social planners like Alva Myrdal built special housing complexes for female singletons in the 1930s, contemporary planners are designing new collective dwellings for the growing ranks of young people, divorcés and divorcées, and seniors who live alone. In Stockholm, I spent one afternoon with Ingela Lindh, the CEO of Stockholmshem, which manages more than 25,000 residential units from the city’s public housing stock, and her colleague Björn Ljung, who is also a liberal (of the free-market variety) representative in the municipal government. (He is a distinctively Swedish free-market liberal, though, which means he says things such as “We pay a lot of taxes and we think that’s a good thing, because it allows us to take care of each other.”)4 Lindh is petite but has a commanding presence, which she honed during her ten years’ tenure as Stockholm’s chief urban planner. Since taking over Stockholmshem, she has pledged to develop more housing for young adults and students, as well as for the growing number of elderly Swedes who have aged in place but now seek a more communal way to live alone. “Housing has gotten too expensive here in the past decade,” Lindh tells me. “Stockholm residents used to spend a quarter or a third of their income on their apartment. Now people who are getting into the market are paying 40 or 45 percent, and a lot of young and old people won’t be able to afford it unless we do something.”

  As we sit around her conference table, Lindh and Ljung show off the architectural plans for a number of projects, including an office tower they’ve converted into an apartment building full of “starter” units for young singles. “We want to make sure that young people have the chance to get their own apartment,” Lindh says. “Because if they have that experience, they’ll have a fuller life, a more social life, and they’ll develop closer connections to friends.” Sweden’s Social Democrats, who until recently controlled the national government as well as many municipal ones, took the same position in a report issued before the 2010 elections. The party called for the immediate construction of 50,000 units of housing, including 3,000 apartments for students and 11,000 one- and two-room apartments for young adults. The housing shortage, it claimed, is “a serious problem for young people who are prevented from moving away from home, and for students who are not infrequently forced to abstain from studying in the Stockholm region.”5

  Stockholm’s municipal government has also acknowledged that it lacks enough housing for the poor and the sick, as well as for the rising population of immigrants and refugees. Stockholmshem is trying to build some. Lindh and Ljung pull out the design for the Swedish equivalent of an SRO, as well as a complex designed and located to allow the children of Somali refugees to move into their own places without leaving their family’s neighborhood. “It’s not a very Swedish idea, because it treats the Somalis as if they are different from all others. And at first we didn’t like it,” Lindh acknowledges. “But when they explained how important it was for the families to be connected, I understood that it was the right thing to do.”

  Lindh seems most excited about a building that she doesn’t manage: Färdknäppen, a community-owned facility for Stockholm residents who are above age forty, with no children living at home, and an interest in being alone together during the second half of their lives. “You can move into Färdknäppen when your needs are no longer dictated by family and children,” the building’s Web site explains. “How much social contact and ‘togetherness’ one desires varies, from person to person and from one period to another.”6 “It’s important that someone can move in at forty, not sixty-five,” Lindh adds, “because that means there’s real age diversity, with middle-age adults who work full-time as well as retired people. You can see how different it is from a retirement home the moment you walk in.” I tell her I’d like to see it sometime, perhaps on another visit. “How about now?” she asks me. “We can visit my mother, who’s lived there for fifteen years.”

  A few minutes later we’re in a taxi heading to Stockholm’s Södermalm district, a leafy, densely populated area where Färdknäppen, with seven floors and forty-three residential units, blends in neatly. The building, which was designed in 1989, is clean and modern, with large windows, a brick exterior at street level, and white walls with red trim above. The ground floor is spacious and inviting. Lindh’s mother, Siv, who’s lively at eighty-five, greets us at the front door and offers me a tour. We begin in the bright dining room, with seating for sixty people, where on most nights the majority of the residents eat together (for about four dollars), next to the large, open kitchen where four people are busily preparing dinner. There’s also a library and television room, a computer room, a laundry room, a weaving area, a carpentry and hobby room, and an entry to the communal garden and outdoor seating area. We take the elevator to the top floor, where there’s a roof deck and a party room; then we descend to the basement, which features an exercise room large enough for group classes as well as a sauna, before we head up to a residential floor, where a group photograph of the floor’s residents hangs prominently in the hall. Siv lives in an airy corner unit, with a bedroom, a living room, and a compact kitchen. “I have enough space to cook for myself,” she tells me. “But usually I eat downstairs in the dining room and spend an hour or so after dinner talking with friends. Of course I don’t have to, which is what makes being here so nice.”

  Residents of Färdknäppen are obligated to participate in some activities, however. Every six weeks each resident must help with the cooking and cleaning. “This doesn’t mean, though, that everyone must be a good cook or that everyone must do exactly as much as everyone else,” the building’s Web site explains. “‘From each according to their ability’ as it’s stated in the rules of the association.” Occasionally, residents may experience these tasks as onerous, but there’s little question about whether they detract from or enhance the appeal of the place. Today there is a long waiting list of Stockholm singles who are eager for a spot in the building. “We obviously need a lot more places like this,” Lindh tells me. “It’s a great model for bringing people who live alone into a real community. Now the question is whether it can be replicated on a bigger scale, because more and more of us are going to want what it offers.”

  Lindh, who’s divorced, has two children, and as they reach the age where they expect to move into their own apartments, she is thinking more about what kind of arrangement will suit her best. “They will both be out of my apartment soon,” she explains. “But I’ve realized that the way we live is never permanent. Sometimes we’re with a partner, sometimes with children, sometimes alone. In Sweden we know that the family is always changing, and so are our own lives. We’re not especially lonely—not at all. We’re actually quite social, and we’ve learned how to be okay when we’re on our own.”

  IN SWEDEN, as in many other nations where singletons are now ubiquitous, living alone is not merely a condition to be okay with. It’s an arrangement that people have come to appreciate, value, and even pursue. Young people believe that moving into a home of their own is essential for becoming an adult, because the experience will help them grow more mature and self-reliant. Middle-age adults believe that living alone is important after a divorce or separation, because it helps them regain their autonomy and self-control. The elderly believe that living alone allows them to maintain their dignity, integrity, and autonomy, and to determine how they will live.

  One reason that so many find living alone appealing is that the choice is hardly binding. Most people could find roommates, from strangers on Craigslist to friends, family, prospective romantic partners, or coresidents in a group-living facility. But the fact is, most of us prefer living alone to these other options, and—since we’ve all been shaped by the cult of the individual—we’re unlikely to change our minds.

  What if, in
stead of indulging the social reformer’s fantasy that we would all just be better off together, we accepted the fact that living alone is a fundamental feature of modern societies and we simply did more to shield those who go solo from the main hazards of the condition? Isolation and insufficient care for frail, old, or impoverished singletons. Disconnection for those who want to participate in social activities but have lost their companions and don’t know how or where to find others. Stress and anxiety for single women who want a child but are nearing the limits of their reproductive years. Economic insecurity for those who lose a job and have no partner to support them. These are practical problems for which there are good solutions, not causes for vague and fuzzy proclamations—the death of community! the collapse of civil society!—which are notoriously difficult to assess.

  One reason that singletons are so prevalent in the Scandinavian countries is that their welfare states protect most citizens from the most difficult aspects of living alone. Consider one of the issues that makes going solo so much more stressful for young women than it is for young men: planning one’s life around the biological clock. In my interviews, American women in their late thirties and early forties consistently reported that their anxieties around reproduction led them to wonder whether they had made good decisions about their personal and professional lives. They tear themselves up asking questions that few young American men who live alone ponder: Should they have settled, or settled down, earlier? Would they have been happier if they had lowered their professional ambitions and invested more time in their personal lives? Young Swedish women who live alone share some of these anxieties, but for them finding the right partner feels less urgent or consequential, because they know that if they have a child on their own they are entitled to meaningful support: sixteen months of paid parental leave, with costs shared by employers and the state; heavily subsidized child care, for which no family can pay more than 1 to 3 percent of their income; and public health care that ranks among the finest in the world.