After then-Sen. JD Vance went viral last year over a 2021 clip for labeling Democrats as “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives,” the future vice president felt remorseful over the glibness of his remark, later conceding it was “dumb,” and that he wished he “had said it differently.”

But last month’s release of the 2024 American Time Use Survey reveals that Vance may have had a point after all. The study confirms that although the nation as a whole is atomizing in a way that makes us all lonelier, the childless cat ladies — as well as the infecund feline fellows — are indeed worse off in this regard than married couples and parents.

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According to the ATUS, which surveys Americans aged 15 years and older, the average citizen spent 6.66 hours alone per day while awake last year. But married Americans and parents with minor children in the house spent an hour fewer alone, while those without minor children or a spouse in the house spent an hour more. This is true across both genders in fairly equal measure.

The devil, of course, is in the details.

It would be easy to write off the fact that parents and married partners spend more time with people because they literally must live with them under the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ definition in order to count. In BLS parlance, the childless are those without minor children in the house, which means they may include a minority of those with adult children or those not in their custody. The unmarried are those not living with a spouse, including separated, divorced, and widowed Americans. There is a subset of single folks who intentionally are the least lonely and best socialized people in the data, even if they are dragged down by the averages. Yet overall, married people and parents are still more social than the unmarried and the childless, even if you exclude the people they live with.

Married people with minor children in the house spend more than half an hour each day with non-household members compared to married people without kids in the house. Worse, this alone time is not productive. People without minor children spend three hours per day watching television — nearly twice as much as those with minor children. But those without minor children spend an hour less each day working. Even when you select the number of hours worked to include only those formally in the labor force to exclude the population’s growing share of retirees, there’s no evidence that childless women are actually beating moms at the girl-boss game. Moms in the labor force now actually spend a hair more of their days on work and work-related activities than fellow working women without minor children, a reversal of the historic trend.

But it’s specifically when we look at cat ladies (and gentlemen) that the odder story emerges.

The average adult pet owner spends 0.74 hours per day caring for their pet. The average parent of a minor child spends nine minutes fewer, while the average “childless cat lady” spends 0.79 hours, and the average “childless cat man” spends 0.75. Both genders of childless pet owners report spending more time on their pets than they spend socializing with other people.

Married people and people with minor children spend more time socializing and communicating in person than unmarried and childless people overall. But here’s where gender comes into play.

When the BLS created the ATUS nearly a quarter-century ago, unmarried women spent more time socializing than her married counterparts and men more generally. While daily time spent socializing has fallen for just about everyone, unmarried men have seen the most precipitous decline at -36%. Time spent socializing for unmarried women has decreased by 33%, but they are the only demographic that has not remotely rebounded since the pandemic.

Moms of minor children actually spend more time today hosting or attending social events such as parties on the weekends and holidays than they did in 2003, whereas women without minor children now spend half as much time hosting or attending such events during their weekends, and barely a third as much time as moms today.

The average American older than 14 spends an hour more alone each day than we did 15 years ago, a 19% increase. This isn’t because of work: only moms of minor children have precipitously increased her working hours by 18% since 2010. By contrast, fathers and childless adults of both genders spend less of their days working on average.

No demographic has bucked the trend of more time spent alone, but the divides tell a story.

The average unmarried woman now spend fewer than 4 hours a week socializing, compared to 4.5 hours enjoyed by the average married woman, reversing the dynamic of 15 years ago, when single women were the most social. If she owns pets, this average unmarried woman who spends fewer than 4 hours per week socializing spends over 5.5 hours per week on her pets.

When Vance lampooned childless cat ladies, he struck a nerve not because he was invoking the Sex and the City style of singles of the past, but specifically because everyone understands today’s singles are under-socialized rather than the reverse. Carrie and Samantha were too busy partying in nightclubs and penning book deals to settle down and have children. Statistically speaking, the singles forgoing family formation are doing so to, what end, exactly?

Unmarried adults haven’t had as little sex as they do today since the start of this century, and as we’ve already addressed, mothers and wives are the workers who have dramatically increased their hours and employment over the last 15 years. At least within the data, the dominance of the single, childless #girlboss does not actually exist. Moms getting off work for the week are more likely to hit the town than the childless cat lady.

The misery invoked by Vance has more to do with partisanship than position in life, however. In his aggregation of 2022 CES data, polling guru Nate Silver found that on a scale of zero to 100, the average liberal reports their own mental health as 53 (“good”), whereas the average conservative says they are a 68 (“very good”).

Within the crosstabs, the trends align with the loneliness we can deduce from our ATUS analysis. Married people and parents report better mental health than the single and childless overall. Still, partisanship comprises the larger statistical divide. There’s only a two-point gap in reported mental health scores between Republicans with minor children (65) and childless Republicans (63). But there’s a double-digit gap between the reported mental health scores of childless Republicans (63) and childless Democrats (47). The same is true for married Republicans (71) versus married Democrats (58) and unmarried Republicans (68) versus unmarried Democrats (53).

The data can only take us so far, so here is my totally baseless explanation to bring us to a conclusion. While on average, marriage and children will make you less lonely and likely happier than you would be otherwise, your own state of mind and sense of agency in the world matter more than being single. Liberal mental health was in somewhat of a decline before the pandemic, but I suspect that the rigor and fomenting of fear during the lockdowns broke the muscle memory of socialization disproportionately among liberals.

Based on my 100% anecdotal data, my right-leaning single friends (including myself, once upon a pandemic) used the moment to rebound and party, socialize, and make up for lost time twice as hard as we would have otherwise. Many liberals, by contrast, literally were not allowed to resume formal social events, which led to the banal friction that keeps communities cohesive — running into a neighbor at a dinner, making plans after church — to dissipate.

If anything, this data should provide some consolation to single and childless readers who lament their current situations. Yes, spouses and children are indeed worthy goals that will likely make you somewhat happier, but the bulk of your margin to be less lonely belongs to your own agency. If you want to change your own life, start by physically leaving the house: book a yoga class, find a book club, or even text a friend to grab a drink. Leaving behind loneliness simply starts with someone else.