Independent Perspective News

They live in small places and have their fridge covered with food delivery magnets. They wear their phones and the Internet off and live their lives giving explanations to nobody. They are whimsical and get edgy when some intruder changes their clothes' lay out in the closet.

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Just glancing at the figures one can see that living alone in the 21st century is no longer a stigma or a disgrace - now it's a choice: according to the last survey by the Indec, 26% of homes in the city of Buenos Aires is made up by just one person. Most of them are women over 65, but the interesting point of this phenomenon is that the quantity of people between 25 and 44, especially men, grew in the last decade. Only in Buenos Aires, they have outnumbered the homes of lone women of the same age group.

"Although the data from the census 2001 haven't been evaluated regarding the error of omission yet, they still show two things -explains Alfredo Lattes, a demographer and researcher of the Center of Population Studies (Cenep)-. First, that the proportion of individual homes grew in the city, and second, that the only group that increased in proportion to that growth was that of people under 45, which among men rose from 26% to 29%".

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According to Guillermo Oliveto, the director of the consultancy CCR, that monitors the consume market, "the abrupt growth of the number of individual homes stems from the mortgage credits which in the 90s used to offer installments whose sum was similar to that of a rent. (...)"

But there was also the obsession for the personal fulfillment through work and the "encounter with oneself", which completed the change in the scale of values. Perhaps that contributed to the fall in the rate of marriages: in 1999, 20.455 went through the county clerk's office of the City of Buenos Aires. In 2000, only 16.782 did.

Sleeping apart

According to the CCR survey, 70% of loners plan their future less and enjoy their present more. They seek comfort and a healthy diet, and they believe love lasts when the couple sep apart.

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In Paris, loners are 50%

According to data from the survey carried out in 2001 by the National Institute of Statistics and Censuses (Indec), 17% of the Argentine population live by themselves.

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Meanwhile, in Paris, 50% of the people downtown live alone. In Madrid and Barcelona they are 20% of the urban population.

In Holland, also, it's customary that after turning 18 teenagers emigrate from the family nest to live by themselves, just like in Sweden, where one-person homes represent 50% of the total population.