After reading the book “About a Boy” which deals with a boy whose mother lives as a single and a 36-year-old man who lives on his own, we decided to write something about this social phenomenon in the world of today.
In the book nearly all the characters live as singles, with or without children. This has a very big impact on reality today. In fact today more and more people live in single households. The more inhabitants a town has the more people live alone.

In German cities with over 500,000 inhabitants nearly half of the people (exactly 48%) live in one-person-households. In towns with less than 2,000 inhabitants the percentage is only 26. Mostly the younger people at the age between 25 and 35 decide for this way of life. The number of households with two or more people is 3,5% lower than three years ago. This has economical consequences. There are for example more differences in the distribution of expenditures than in bigger households. In the single households less people belong to religious communities than in other households. On average they don’t live very long at the same place, and the amount of foreigners is higher. The percentage of children in single households (14,1%) are nearly the same as in households with a couple (15,1%).

There are different reasons for this development. First there are the persons whose partner died and whose kids have already begun their own life. Second there are the people who live alone because of their work. But then there are many people who live alone of their own free will, because of their big desire for personal independence.

And this trend will probably go on. Experts think that the number will increase to 38,7 million till the year 2010.In the following chart you can see the number of household members from 1900 till 2010.

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Source:
1. www.intrinet.de/news/wirtschaft/ bauen_wohnen/135621.php3
2. www.cdu.de/politik-a-z/wohnungsbau/kap122.htm
3. www.statistik.nuernberg.de/stat_inf/mb/mb200201_t.htm

Another point we thought about is the increasing rate of  single households and marriages which get divorced. We found some statistics about New Zealand.
 
In this country there were 27,199 marriages in 1971. In the next 26 years the rate decreased to 19,953 in 1997. This is a decrease of 26%. In the next two years the number raised to 20,135 in 1998 and 21,085 in 1999. 
 
In New Zealand the people who get divorced are more likely to marry a divorced person than a never-married person or a widowed person. In 1971 there where about 4,300 marriages which involved the remarriage of one or both partners. In 2000 the number was about 7,500. This is a increase of about 42%. Another fact is that in 1971 only 4 per cent of not-married people were divorced but in 1996 there was a rate of 14 per cent.

Furthermore, there is an increasing proportion of New Zealand’s men and women who are unmarried in their thirties and because of this it seems that less people want to marry. 
 
Not only in New Zealand do men and women live together without marrying. Australia and North America have the same situation. In 1996 about 25% men and women aged 15 to 44 years who had relationships were not married.