Bella DePaulo, PhD., is the leading expert on single life and is described by The Atlantic as “America’s foremost thinker and writer on the single experience.” Dr. DePaulo coined the term “Single at Heart” and gave a TEDx talk on the topic in 2017, and today, the talk has had more than 1.6 million views. She is the author of Singled Out, The Psychology of Dexter, and How We Live Now, among other titles; has written the column “Living Single” for Psychology Today since 2008; and has been published by the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time magazine, and other outlets, and been interviewed on shows including The Today Show, CNN American Morning, CBS This Morning, Good Morning America, CBS Sunday Morning, Anderson Cooper 360, and Hardball with Chris Matthews. Dr. DePaulo has a BA from Vassar College and a PhD from Harvard University. After two decades as a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, Dr. DePaulo moved to the West Coast, where she is currently an academic affiliate in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She lives in Summerland, CA.

John Edmonds Kozma is a highly experienced professional with 20 years of expertise in the entertainment industry. He is the CEO and founder of Bang Productions. This company specializes in creating short and long-form content, managing talent, and producing live shows through technology. Bang Productions is a Meta Media Partner and a TikTok LIVE Creator Network Agency, which gives it a massive social media reach of over 100 million monthly viewers and 1.2 billion annually. As a result, it is one of the largest publishers in the entertainment industry.

He hosts the Unimpressed Podcast, interviewing people from all walks of life to develop new insights about life, starting from the foundation. John believes that we are all connected through the Quantum Field by God, which eliminates biases when we understand the structure of life. John is also the author of “Finding A Perfect Audience,” which outlines a system for businesses to develop a pure source of clients. Due to his unique personality, many people refer to him as “The Reluctant Shaman.” He is passionate about innovation and discovery, constantly exploring new ideas and perspectives. While collaborating with numerous talented individuals such as Nick Cassavetes, Claudia Katz, Armin Van Buuren, and Travis Pastrana, he discovered and fostered the careers of Southern Momma and Ginger Billy.

John graduated from Charleston Southern University, where he played baseball and majored in Business Administration while minoring in economics. He lives with his wife and daughter in Mt. Pleasant, SC. When he is not busy with work, he enjoys spending time at the beach, playing golf, or pursuing his education in the spiritual space.

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Hope everybody’s paying attention because we have someone calling in from California and she is the leading specialist on single life so if you’re out there and you’re single you definitely need to listen to this podcast I want to welcome Dr Bella doollo to the unimpress podcast how you

Doing today great thanks so much for inviting me I love talking about this so I see you’re the the expert in single life how did you dive so deep into this passion of yours I’m 70 years old I’ve been single my entire life because I love being single it’s what I want what

I choose I never knew there was such a thing as being happily single and wanting to stay single I didn’t I just didn’t know that was a thing and yet I found that I never wanted to marry myself I was happily single except for all the ways that single people are

Stereotype stigmatized so I first started kn noticing those ways that I thought I was being um kind of marginalized because I was single or treated unfairly so for example when I taught at the University of Virginia the person who organized the class schedule said that she wanted me to come in at

Night to teach because it would be too hard for the married faculty and that was before they even had kids and then another example was you know during the week um I would go out to lunch with my colleagues but then on the weekends the couples would go out with each other and

I wouldn’t be included so was that because they didn’t like me or because I was single is that so I started asking other single people if they ever had experiences like this where they felt that they were being treated as lesser than as not quite adult as not worth

Including because they were single and wow I just kept getting one story after another after another and that’s when I realized that this was this was striking a neres there were stories about being single that weren’t out there and they included both the ways in which single people are not treated totally fairly

And the ways in which single life can be a joyful meaningful feeling life not just as it’s usually portrayed as something you’re stuck with if you’re unlucky in life in love or if you have issues so do do you think there’s a a law of attraction Factor here you know

Because I’ve always thought about marriage and if you think about you know was God thinking about marriage when he created human being you know what I mean I don’t know no tell me more well when you think about that you think about the sensitivities of what human

Beings have you know you can be in a marriage but you can still you know be a good person at marriage and so forth but you can still be attracted to other people you know why aren we attracted to other people being married if this is the only person we’re supposed to be

With the rest of our lives yes you know and the people I’m talking about who love being single and who want to stay single and find it their and are joyful and flourishing because they’re single not in spite of I call them single at heart and one of the characteristics of

People who are single at heart is that they instead of putting one person at the center of their lives they tend to lots of different kinds of people so instead of having the one they have the ones and they might be close friends or relatives or mentors or teammates or

Anyone from any face of life and there is a certain um advantage to tending to a number of different people and having a circle of friends and family rather than just putting one person at the center of your life and saying you are the one I want to be your everything and

So yeah well I I think I think in some ways what the position gives you a choice if you are single you have a choice to do different things if you are married you don’t that choice but if you took at it if if you break it down I’m a

Big big believer in in the quantum field and and things like that so if you if you understand tone like your friends probably are very similar tone as you you know we’re a tone attracts tone so from a natural point of view the positions are a choice but if we

Understood things like that in a way where our attraction you know leads us down a certain path cuz you know you could can marry the wrong person in my opinion if you don’t have a similar tone to them is there any thought processes you have about anything like that as

Well well yeah you know I in in 2015 I started this online face group Facebook group called The Community of single people and it’s for people who want to be single and like it um not every single person in the group is wants to stay single but we talk about every

Aspect of single life accept the ones that other people expect single people to be obsessed with like dating and how do we be how do we un single ourselves and so I think that people in this group share a certain sensibility a certain sense of values you might call it tone

And and that is really validating especially for groups like us who are not considered part of the mainstream the assumption is that everyone wants to be married or at least romantically coupled and yet here we are now there’s over 8,000 of us from Orland a hundred

Different countries and we get a lot of validation from each other and good advice and good cheer and and I think it it is important so let’s walk this down let’s look at age range you know you’re in your 20s it’s it’s fairly easy to

Date like if you want to you can be single but you want to go out you you know and and and hang out with someone you know you go to 30s easy to date you go out and hang out with someone get into 40s Playing Fields starts getting a

Little different 50s starts getting a little different so if you choose a single life how does that look in your 40s and 50s you know what I’m saying like how do you how do you purvey the landscape I have never been on a dating app in my life I am proud to

Say but let me tell you about single life and satisfaction and happiness over the course of single life there are three big National studies that look at how happy single people are how satisfied they are with their lives over the course of their lives and contrary to all the stereotypes on average single

People are happy every year of their lives and when they get to those years when everyone expects them to be to be getting miserable and lonely and and despairing about not being married say your 40s and Beyond single people just keep getting happier and happier and the

Single people who are not pining for the for a partner people like the single at heart who invest in their single lives they are especially likely to be getting happier interesting if you’re getting happier being single cuz I guess I guess in that scenario you know um you know

When you get married to somebody somebody and then you’re with them several years sometimes people change yes you know Le you only have to worry about your changes for yourself you know what your changes are internally is there any contrast there that that oh yes and because single people don’t or

People who are single at heart don’t take one person and try to make them the center of their life and try to make them their everything they instead often have a circle of people and those people different people might feel different needs so there might be someone who’s

Always happy for you when something good happens and someone who’s really good at at being um reassuring when something awful happens and and what that does is it takes away some of the unfair burden of expecting one person to be able to fulfill all your needs to be able to be

There for you no matter what you need or how you feel so a single person can mentally break down someone as a specialist all right I have I have Bobby I’m gonna call if I’m heartbroken I have Sally I’m gonna call if I want a recipe

I have yeah Susan I want to call uh tell me how to cut the grass whatever yeah whatever it is you know there’s a is is that what you mean as far as linear thought process yes exactly this lifestyle of being single what does I mean what’s the approach and you have

This you know you have a book out you know what was your approach if you want to tell us a little bit about the book and and so forth in the approach of the book the book is called single at heart the power freedom and heart filling Joy

Of single life and what I wanted to show in this book is there are more people than we ever realized who are single at heart that means they love being single they want to stay single they are happy and and flourishing because they are single not in spite of it by Living

Single they have their most meaningful fulfilling psychologically rich and authentic life and what I do in the book is show using examples from people’s lives all around the world as well as social science data based on uh sometimes dozens or hundreds or sometimes even hundreds of thousands of participants what single people

Especially the single at heart are getting out of their single lives that other people often don’t realize so a lot of times single people are characterized as like a pile deficiencies here’s all the things that are wrong with you here’s what you don’t have and what I show is what single

People do have what their special advantages are what their special strengths are so an obvious one is freedom everyone who is single at heart when I ask them what they like about Freedom about single life they say they like their freedom and they use their freedom to create a single life that is

True to themselves true to their values their interests and that means they get to live authentically another thing they do is use their freedom to to create a circle of friends and family that they really care about and they can pay as much attention as they want to that

Circle of friends and family without a romantic partner um insisting that they want more of that time to themselves another really big one and I didn’t realize how important this would be you know I really enjoy having time to myself to myself I have friends and I

Like being with friends and family but I also really really like being alone and when I asked people who are single at heart how important if at all it was to them to have time to themselves I thought that on average they would say yeah that’s important but every single one of

Them said that having time to themselves was absolutely important three people said it was like breathing and one of the implications of that is that people who are single at heart who Savor their Solitude are largely protected from feeling lonely so if you get out a lot out of your time

Alone you find it relaxing or you find it productive or you find it energizing you find it anything but scary then you are not going to be what other people think single people are going to be which is lonely and isolated and sad the first thing I come up with and trying to

Understand that is pocket narratives right because I’m a very firm believer in data uh I create a too social scientist yeah so I I create a process with content um on how to eliminate unconscious bias and I could I could rebirth or birth something the right way

And build a build a pure Foundation by law of attraction right and and so if you had a question if we build a if we build a customer base for you it’d be a a pure fan base and I and it’s basically would eliminate this process would

Eliminate marketing So when you say you have data to back up what you’re saying about single people being happy and then you think about marriage and where marriage came from and this is just kind of blowing marriage up a little bit is pocket narratives that are put out in

Society to push a negative connotation towards the single life yes because they want people to marry for control absolutely yes and it’s considered part of our conventional wisdom maybe that’s the equivalent of what you you’re calling pocket narratives that if you get married you’ll be happier and

Healthier and live longer and in fact as a social scientist I went to the original research studies to see what they really do show and there are now dozens of studies that follow people over the course of their lives and ask them like every year are you happy are

You married are you single Etc and what they find is that when people get married they become a little happier at first you know it’s kind of exciting you have this wedding you get all these presents it’s new and and interesting but then they go back to being as happy

Or as unhappy as they were when they were single and the only people who get that um little increase in happiness we sometimes call it the honeymoon effect are the people who get married and stay married the people who are headed to divorce and we know about them from

These studies take because they go on for years and years and years so we we have a record of what happened to them um people who go on to divorce are already becoming less happy as the day of their wedding approaches instead of becoming happier and getting that little

Honeymoon effect of of extra happiness around the time of the wedding I want to and I want to apply this this this second part to the qu to the quantum field I’m I’m a CLA sentient can feel I can feel people I can get into people’s heads sometimes and can you do it

Remotely yeah you be in the same room I can I can if I if I get a tone and a feel for someone I can start to really dive in you know yeah do you think you have a tone and a feel for me I think

It’s very witty and crisp it’s a very up upward uplifting vibration like like your mind is very witty and crisp is what I what is kind of what I sense I mean I could sense more the more thank you the more I talk you know because you’re carrying a certain vibration that

A lot of people don’t have yeah you know that upbeat vibration be you know that first 10 seconds of here instead of here or here right yeah I can see that imediately that sounds right to me yeah that’s yeah that’s uh but you know when you think about you know feeling and

Quantum field first of all people can be married and have no law of attraction you know and they wonder why they don’t like each other that’s that’s the first part but even if you have a law of attraction and you are supposed to be together and there’s similar tone and

And I can really go open that ball wax up where if you think about fun in creation of four and fun there’s four pillars in fun suway and everybody has a direction and each Direction aligns with another Direction so you could almost break that down that part of it but I I

Don’t want to get too deep in that but if if you’re with somebody and their energy changes and you absorb that energy and you start to feel how they feel because we’re all connected on the quantum field that speaks to you going and being alone because sometimes for me

Because I feel everybody I pick up everybody’s energy in the room until I’m by myself and I think through things by myself and there’s no other energy around me that’s when I’m myself yes yes and there is research showing that that when people are by themselves they are

More authentic and I think that’s really important and also the Assumption people have is that the people who like being alone the most are introverts and of course some introverts really do like being alone but some extroverts do too what really is a a stronger predictor of whether someone is going to be

Comfortable in solitude is whether they are an authentic person if they are living according to their values and I think well that’s finding thyself right yeah exactly I think it really fits with what you’re saying well that’s another part of the finding thyself is I have this thing and I’m on

My daughter all the time about it I’m like you need to quit worrying about everybody else you know you need to start putting value in yourself doing things for yourself building value within yourself because if you build value within yourself you can survive off that value such an important lesson

And it’s very hard when you’re younger I think it gets easier as you get older and more confident and single people I think are especially good at that and in part the people who choose to be single almost have to be good at that because they are going against the Assumption

What you might call the pocket narrative that you can only be truly happy if you’re romantically coupled and that everyone wants wants to be romantically coupled but you’re happier healthier you are and so a a person who is single at heart who invests in their single life

Who Embraces it is is going against the grain and um and so they have that strength that skill to be true to themselves even when it kind of costs them and it can cost them in terms of other people looking down on them well when I say pocket narratives too it’s

It’s I just came up with this thought process of you know there’s a lot of pocket narratives in society that drive Society uh and I’ll give you example like the calorie so if you take the calorie narrative and you push that in society that’s a absolute and absolutes

Don’t work you cannot live based on absolutes I mean if you watched Star Wars you would know what what the absolutes don’t work that’s that’s what I’m talking about these pocket narratives drives people’s positions and and just like the calorie system system could drive someone down a certain Road

On what to eat but they become unhealthy because it’s not catered to who they are so you can apply this really the same way with these pocket narratives about what’s around being single and it’s an absolute but it doesn’t work for everybody because everybody’s not the

Same and a lot of people make themselves miserable by trying to live the life they think they’re supposed to live that they’re expected to live and they’re never really truly comfortable or truly happy until they give themselves permission to live their best life in The Crossroads of the younger people too

The other part of that I say that going back to finding thyself is I think a lot of the technology that we have out in the world is somewhat a distraction like we’re always you know you know we live through a visual that looks very very pretty which creates apprehension and

And things like that I don’t know what the right form formula would be but if you if you started looking at this thought process within the younger people and understand how they give themselves away based on technology and then they’re going to try to find a relationship it kind of speaks to

Whether’s the communication between female and male are is not really on the same page as it was maybe when I was in school does that make sense there’s a little lot of delu there the communication is is off so yes maybe if you technology has just transformed

Everything about how we live and it’s especially created a whole different world for um young people today than someone like me who was born in 1953 and was not um introduced to technology till very late in the game but I guess what I’m saying too when people are in that

That diluted process or they’re giving themselves away you know they think they got to look like this they think they got to find this you know all these thought processes of apprehension you know if you define maybe if you define the relationship World better and gave more Outlets instead of creating a

Negative pocket narrative around certain Outlets it would help maybe these younger people make better decisions on which way they should go as a person if it was defined categorically you know like hey I don’t have to be married I don’t need to be pressured into getting

Married I can go here and be single you know what I’m saying if each one had equal weight of opportunity yes you know maybe it would help that situation with the young people because they are so distracted was kind of it took me a minute to get there but that’s kind of

Where I was going yeah yeah that’s one of the key goals of my single at heart book which is to bring singlehood into the open and make it Mak make people understand that it can be just as fulfilling as romantically coupled life and for some people more fulfilling than any other

Way of life so so one thing I did mention is the needs you know people got needs I mean what do we what is that like in in you know in the bedroom situation for for the singl minded person it has still has needs what does that look like well some well some

Single people uh have casual relationships with other people or they might have a a special person uh for those needs but the difference is that they don’t try to create a whole life around that person so they’re very um honest at the beginning of a romantic relationship that they’re not looking to

What some people call ride the relationship escalator where you go up from casual dating to more serious involvement to moving in together and you know maybe having kids and um so that’s one possibility um another is that some um some people really aren’t that interested in sex you know there’s

This finding from 25 years of data studying um adult sexual behavior in the United States and it found over this 25 years of of um study that people in the US I have been having less and less sex over time and the person who wrote about well several people wrote about it but

The explan ations that are often offered are things like oh well you know they’re too obsessed with their screens and you know things like that of which may be true but what is rarely acknowledged is that some people just aren’t that interested and maybe now as Society progresses more people feel more um

Willing and able to live their the life they want so even though there’s a greatly sexualized culture that has as its conventional wisdom that everybody wants sex and more sex is better than less sex that some people are saying No actually that’s not true I’m good well there’s another pocket narrative pushing

The sex agenda yes exactly you know so let’s take that one step further how about singles who may want kids but want to stay single oh yes there are actually many of them that that trend is growing of single people who have kids and and complimentary to that there are more a

Couple people who are not having K but the when I talk to single parents who are not just single but single at heart what they tell me is that they develop a special bond with their children and that they often are not raising their children singlehandedly um but to use what I

Guess is become a cliche they have a village they create a village for their children where they have people who um care about them they might be friends they might be relatives and they also say that their children are spared from what children in married families married parent families often come up

Against which is you know the battles the parents have with each other and when they get cold or distant or and and that their kids never have to worry about their parents divorcing and um and so in instead of the usual narrative that oh these core single kids of single

Parents they’re doomed in fact in some ways they do really well well how do we how do we put all this data together to make to kind of re reclassify this thought process oh well in my book single at heart I have these examples which I call flipping the script so you take

Something that someone says about single people and then what if you what if you turned it around what would that look like and I also do something called fixed it where I take something that someone says that is you know is not so great and I rewrite it so an example is

Um something that our Surgeon General vivc mury said in his book called together he’s talking about a single man and he said something like although he is single he has a group of friends that he likes well although he is single so I rewrote that as like many other single

People he has a group of friends that he likes and there is research behind that too there are National studies showing that people who are single are more likely to uh tend to their friends relatives colleagues neighbors um exchange moral support emotional support practical help with them so they are

Actually more connected to more different people whereas um in contrast there are these studies that follow people over the course of their lives and what they find is that when couples move in together or when they get married they become more insular now there are always exceptions it’s not

Like every couple does this but on average they pay more attention just to each other they see their friends less they stay in touch with their parents less so it’s like they’re building their own little world but people who stay single especially if they’re single at heart and and invest in their single

Lives invest in their friends they don’t do that they are still maintaining their relationships with the people who are important to them so where does where does Dr Bella come from and where does is is your whole family very high vibrational family umly yeah I mean I grew up in um

A married parent household my mom and dad were married for 42 years until my dad died so no divorce no nothing so very happy conventional 1950s childhood and so it’s kind of ironic that I would grow up to be the person who U absolutely loves single life but

There you have it that’s Italian yes it is it’s spelled wrong when my grandparents came over here it was written down as what it is now d p a u l o but the correct spelling would be d i p a o l o it’s never been correct tell

Us a little bit about your career and what that exactly looks like yeah well I started out interested in something else in enely I used to study the psychology of lying and detecting lies and that was interesting you know there’s there’s always an interesting thing to follow up

In that area and never gets stale right but when I first started studying single people that wasn’t just an interest that was a passion so I’m a social scientist so I started doing studies of um how single people are regarded I did studies of how people are perceived

When they’re alone in a restaurant which is much more positively than you would ever imagined um I and then I started writing about single life I wanted to get my ideas out Beyond just um academic scholarly journals that hardly anyone reads so that’s when I wrote my first

Book called singled out how singles are stereotyped stigmatized and ignored and still live happily ever after and now my single heart book The Power freedom and heart filling Joy of single life and I’ve also been blogging I’ve been writing the living single column at Psychology today since

2008 and I have written lots of other articles for other Publications like the Washington Post and the New York Times and I just wrote something in the Huffington Post earlier in December that was called something like I’m 70 and I’ve lived alone my entire adult life here’s what people get wrong about

Single people and that essay went fire wow and I think it did in part because it was so joyfully and unapologetically single and I talked about what I loved about my single life and how I feel so fortunate to be able to get to live single this time in his history in this

Place you know other times and places it’s not so easy you know maybe it would be harder to afford to live on your own uh so I just feel so uh grateful that I get to live my single life I don’t see it as a plan b or as a default or

Something I’m stuck with it’s something I’m joyful about well I mean if you whatever you’re passionate about you’ll never you know and you do that passion you’ll never work a day your life yeah and and I think a lot of things are innate so when you look at Social

Scientists do they ever isolate the non-conscious of people I mean how much deeper do you want to go in this thing yes there’s a whole area of social science on unconscious bias it’s a thriving area and there is you know there’s this test called the implicit bias test where you can determine

Whether people have these biases to see certain people more negatively than others and those implicit biased tests do show that people are implicitly bias to view single people more negatively and married people more positively but what single people you know you don’t have to look at the unconscious things

You can hear what people say deliberately you know let you poor thing let me fix you up as if you’re broken so I guess what I’m saying if you wanted to stay take that one step F further when you go to n un conscious unconscious is you know you take emotions away right

This is when you’re born it’s What You’re Made Of it’s what is inat in you yeah so if you identified characteristics within a non-conscious when each person is is based on four pillars and has a direction maybe there’s some mathematical data there in that Foundation like I said you take away the

Emotion people are born they’re born in an environment and it’s the non-conscious cuz I I have this thing about there were four humans before that were created instead of two because every there needed to be four different directions each human being needed to go four different directions so if you if

You put a put that non-conscious in an environment with no emotions you could predict where that non-conscious would go so maybe there’s an innately non-conscious piece or mathematical piece that is that if you went deeper into this Foundation right would give you an answer hey if you’re innately

This and this is your makeup your Tendencies could be this because that’s one that’s onethird of a law of attraction that people don’t realize that’s possible um I I think it goes to a question that’s I get asked sometimes which is is being single at heart is

That hardwired and I don’t know there aren’t any data to establish whether it is or not but my sense is that it’s more than just a lifestyle choice that people who are single at heart are powerfully drawn to single life just like many people are powerfully drawn to coupled

Life so it’s it’s more than a lifestyle whether it’s hardwired I can’t say but well the reason I say that is is you’re if you’re the number one example yeah you’re the pure you’re the Pure Source like if you had one if you’re the number one example you’re the Pure Source here

And then there’s a Pure Source of being married here yeah so whatever is in between whatever is between that Pure Source and your Pure Source I’m sure there’s innate stuff in each of those individuals that could determine where you may lean in your life and maybe that

Would El some pressure on some of these younger people on making a decision or not letting their parents say Hey you have to be married you have to have three kids you understand you see where I’m going with this it’s not in my nature yeah yeah so so if we want to

Find Dr it’s been a great conversation if if we want to find the book where do we get the the book at oh you should be able to find it at Barnes & Noble at your local bookstores your library if you want to check it out instead of

Buying it and just about everywhere and if and if you go to a library or bookstore and they don’t have it ask them to get it awesome awesome well I love your energy and I love your your your vibrational self is very very high and positive and that’s a good thing we

Need to see more of that from more people appreciate you coming on the show talking to you yes I’m I get a little deep sometimes but I like to push the envelope you know what I mean I appreciate it uh this has been Dr Bella uh doollo and I am John Edmunds cosma

The CEO of bang Productions thank you

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