Despite the litany of complaints you’ll hear from 20-something year old girls about the woahs of their “Sex and the City” life, research shows being single isn’t a thing to complain about. In fact, being single has its fair share of advantages.

The widespread assumption that living alone is negative is a flawed one, said Eric Klinenberg, author of Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone. There’s a distinction between being single, isolated and feeling lonely.

“People who live alone tend to spend more time socializing with friends and neighbors than people who are married,” he said. “Living alone is not an entirely solitary experience. It’s generally a quite social one.”

Although past studies have indicated married couples were happier and healthier, distinctions are made between happy marriages and bad ones.

“A bad marriage can make a person feel more isolated than being single,” Klinenberg said in an interview with the New York Times.

Until about the 1950s there hadn’t been any society that supported large populations of singles living alone, he said. There are more than 32 million Americans who are single, compared to 4 million in the 1950s.