Across cities from London to Seoul, the number of single-person households is rising — not because people are failing to pair off, but because they’re choosing to live alone. For some, it’s financial independence; for others, a form of emotional or creative freedom. The timeline of life milestones — marriage, children, home ownership — has stretched or collapsed entirely. In its place, a new model is emerging: adulthood defined not by settling down, but by settling into oneself.

This shift challenges a powerful cultural script. For decades, the ideal adult life was imagined as a couple’s project: shared bills, shared bed, shared future. Living alone was framed as either a prelude or a failure — waiting for someone, recovering from someone, mourning the absence of someone. But what if solo living isn’t a lack, but a form of presence?

There is, of course, ambivalence. Loneliness does visit, especially on quiet evenings or holidays. There’s a tension between the romanticism of solitude and the human need for connection. But there’s also relief — from compromise, from social performance, from the psychic clutter of other people’s routines. In solo living, one encounters the radical possibility of a self unmediated by constant companionship.

What’s striking is how deeply people invest in their solo spaces. These are not crash pads, but curated environments — filled with art, plants, habits. They become sanctuaries, extensions of identity, places where one can rest without vigilance. For many, especially queer people or those estranged from traditional norms, the solo home is a kind of soft rebellion: a statement that life doesn’t have to orbit around a partner to be full.

This isn’t to glorify isolation. Nor is it to suggest that relationships are obsolete. But it is to question why being alone is still so often read as a problem to solve. In reality, those who live alone often develop a nuanced relationship with selfhood — they learn how to be bored, how to make joy alone, how to listen to their own mind without constant distraction.

Solo living might just be one of the most adult decisions there is: to choose your space, shape your time, and risk intimacy not as escape from aloneness, but as a complement to it. In a world that still equates maturity with marriage, it may be time to recognise that solitude, too, can be a home.