5 health benefits of being single

Bella DePaulo is 63 years old and she's been single her entire life.

"I never wanted to get married. Living single was my happily ever after," DePaulo, a psychologist at the University of California Santa Barbara and a pioneer for the single life, said at a TEDx Talk this spring.

DePaulo has studied singles like herself for more than a decade, and her findings suggest that being single has a range of benefits, from the psychological to the physical.

"The beliefs that single people are miserable, lonely, and loveless, and want nothing more than to become unsingle are just myths," DePaulo wrote on the blog PsychCentral in 2013.

In 2016, she combed through more than 800 studies of single and married people and found that her own work isn't the only research to suggest that being single could have some tangible health benefits - from stronger social networks to a healthier body. Read on to find out about the other advantages you might reap from singledom.