Revealed: Why you should stay SINGLE in your 20s, according to scientists

There might be something to having a bit of fun in your twenties before settling down, at least according to a new study.

Researchers found people who couple up as soon as they move out of their parents' home are less equipped to cope with heartbreak later in life than those who stay single for some time in young adulthood.

They suspect this could be because singletons develop more life 'skills, networks, and resources' to help them deal with the pain and disruption of a relationship ending.

Another idea is that being single in your 20s can foster more flexible expectations about relationships.

Whereas people who get into committed partnerships when they're young may think their relationships will last forever, ones who are single for some time could be less likely to make such assumptions, and therefore be less hurt when a relationship ends.

'The crisis effect...may therefore be smaller for individuals who have previously been single,' wrote the study's authors, from the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute.

This doesn't mean you should go ahead and end a happy, healthy relationship if you're in your 20s, the researchers say.

The team came to their conclusions by looking at 36 years of data from a German study that followed the same group of people from 1984 to present. 

The German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) is a household study that asks people each year about income, housing, life satisfaction, and family life.

In the new study, the team used SOEP data on around 1,000 people - 190 women and 151 men who were single when they moved out of their parents' homes, and 400 women and 262 men who were 'immediately coupled.'

For all of these people, the scientists looked at their life satisfaction for three specific periods: their first time living with a romantic partner, breaking up, and after separating.

Women who moved out of their parents' home and in with a romantic partner had a  drop in life satisfaction when they had their first major breakup, and their levels of life satisfaction did not improve much over the following three years.

For women who were single when they moved away from home, there was still a drop in life satisfaction after their first big breakup - how could there not be?

But the difference was that over the following two years their perspective improved and they had bounced back to about the level they were at the year before the breakup.

For men, the results were a bit different, but they still showed the benefits of being single in your 20s.

Men who were immediately coupled had a major drop in life satisfaction at the time of breaking up, but they did improve over the following year. 

Those who were initially single, though, barely showed any change in life satisfaction upon breaking up, and that number went up over the next two years. 

The researchers wrote that the pre-breakup period only included time with the partner, not the time before a relationship began. Similarly, the post-breakup period only included time that the person was single, not time when they were with a new partner.

'Differences between the four groups can thus not be attributed to different partnering processes before or after separation,' they wrote.

The study appeared this month in the Journal of Marriage and Family.

The study reflects some changes in society's expectations about relationships, as there is less of an assumption that young adults will move right out of their parents' home and in with a spouse. 

For example, only about 30 percent of US women and 20 percent of US men born between 1990 and 1994 were married by age 25, according to US Census Bureau statistics. This is a huge drop compared to about 65 percent of men and 80 percent of women who were born between 1940 and 1944.

The researchers note that societal expectations play a major role in these relationship dynamics.

Since being single in German society is 'relatively common and accepted,' the study's authors wrote, young people in the study population have the benefit of living in a society that doesn't put excessive pressure on them to couple up - meaning they can enjoy higher life satisfaction as single young adults than those who live in places where this choice is not as well tolerated.

Therefore, later studies on this single-in-your-20s effect could examine this difference, they wrote: 

'Future research could explore whether differences in the effects of separation on life satisfaction are indeed larger in countries where singlehood is more common (e.g., Scandinavian countries) and smaller in countries where singlehood is less common (e.g., Southern European countries).'