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Survey research typically marks relationship status within a small number of boxes: “Never married,” “widowed” and “divorced” are often grouped together into the category treated as “single,” while federal household surveys like the Census measure only marriage and cohabitation. Hannah Tessler is interested in everything those boxes leave out.

Tessler, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Sociology and a Population Studies Center affiliate, works with Elizabeth A. Armstrong on questions at the intersection of gender, sexuality, and relationship formation. 

She approaches singlehood as a life course stage in its own right, one that, as she puts it, may be “a more stable state for some than others.” Her qualitative research provides an entry for understanding variation in the population and the nuances of today’s relationships. 

She interviewed 84 single adults in 2022 for her dissertation, spoke with 72 of them in 2024, and returned to follow up with 60 of them again in 2026, with the sample split between heterosexual and LGBTQ+ respondents. 

Following the same people across years surfaces movement that a single snapshot would flatten. Identities shift and settle: someone who once wondered whether they might be asexual now feels certain, or has concluded otherwise. Relationship status can be shifting or stagnant; among the youngest respondents, roughly 20 to 25, Tessler finds notably “slow transitions to adulthood.”

Tessler pairs this qualitative work with survey data on singles she collected during her PhD, moving between population-level patterns and the finer question of how people make meaning and decisions. This summer, with support from the Population Studies Center through a Population Dynamics and Health Program (PDHP) Pilot Project Seed Grant, she and her research team completed roughly 40 interviews with young adults aged 20 to 29 about their marriage and family preferences.

Two early themes stand out. The first is technology. “The role of technology is bigger than we anticipated,” Tessler said, pointing to how differently individual algorithms and online exposures shape the way young adults think about relationships. The second is risk. Rather than the familiar commentary about what “Gen Z is doing,” her interviews surface a striking wariness: marriage sounds wonderful in the abstract, but respondents worry about infidelity, financial vulnerability, and loss of autonomy. Risks around pregnancy, childbirth, and financial security also figured into fertility preferences; interviewees said they wanted to have a stable job and be able to pay the bills before having children, Tessler said.

Tessler’s longitudinal work is building toward a larger book project; findings from the new interviews will be submitted to this year’s Annual Meeting of the Population Association of America (PAA) in Seattle. Armstrong and Tessler presented their shared work on these topics in 2026 at the PAA and the 2026 American Sociological Association Annual Meeting.

Tessler earned her PhD in sociology at Yale and moved to Ann Arbor from New Haven last year. Continuing her demography training at the Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research, Tessler also completed the Annual Workshop on Formal Demography at UC Berkeley this past summer.

This post was written by Tevah Platt, communications manager for the Population Studies Center.