What would the world be like if everyone was single?

Are you that guy that hangs around Maynooth with the two Asian girls?

I dont think I know any asians personally. We are all Irish here.

People would have less money, not more. There are considerable economies to living as a couple.

On the whole, a significant number of people would be less happy than they are now. A lot of people — probably a majority — prefer to be in relationships for the social, emotional and psychological support that relationships bring. Not unrelated (and not really all that surprising) is the fact that people in relationships have more sex than people not in relationships.

On the whole, being in a relationship is good for us. On average, people in relationships enjoy better health, and live longer, than people not in relationships.

So, yeah, the world the OP envisages would be quite a stressful world.

On the economics issue - two adults sharing the expenses of a common home is always going to be hugely more efficient than two adults maintaining separate homes. There is no way of squaring that particular circle.

Of course, if everyone is single then you can experiment with different living arrangements that don't involve one-person households - group homes, dormitories, whatever. But that's a separate issue - you can experiment with those right now, if you like, with couples, or couples and singles, living in group homes or dormitories. Things like that have indeed been tried, e.g. with communes. There haven't been very many successful experiments, though.

As for communal child-rearing — this isn't a simple binary, where you either raise children in a nuclear family or raise them as children of the village. This is a spectrum. What many societies do is raise children in the context of an extended family - grandparents, uncles, aunts are all involved, though parents still retain the primary role. For the extended family to be constantly closely involved, however, they pretty much have to live as an extended family - sharing a compound, or at least all in the same village.

There are also many societies — often hunter-gatherer societies — where people live in groups of 30 to 80, and raising children is a very communal exercise. But this does seem to be linked with very rigid gender roles - raising the group's children is the responsibility of the women, and fathers often have little to do with their children until they reach adolescence, at which point they are responsible for arranging husbands for their daughters, and for training and initiating their sons. I'm not sure that this model would catch on in 21st-century Ireland.

SFAIK none of these groups have done this in the context of all the adults being single — men and women continue to form committed conjugal relationships (which may be polygamous) and both mothers and fathers continue to have a unique relationship with their children. These groups tend to attach considerable importance to family relationships, and status is closely linked to who your parents and other relatives are.

Marriage of one kind or another seems to be pretty universal — we don't know of any culture that doesn't give a central place to some form of committed conjugal relationship, and that doesn't link this to the begetting and raising of children. But types of marriage are very varied and include polygamy and (although quite rare) group marriage.

Wedding planners would become extinct.

Well, there are lots of sexless singles our there too. Or, more to the point, singles who aren't completely sexless, but who don't get a lot of sex. Sex surveys pretty consistently show people have more sex when in relationships which, on the whole, is what you'd expect.

As for prostitution, it is not illegal in Ireland (though other aspects of sex work are). But, legal or illegal, it's not a substitute for a relationship that involves meaningful sex, emotional support and intimacy. Whatever health and welfare impacts people suffer from not being in relationships, they are not likely to be remedied by engaging the services of sex workers.

And, as for your own situation, you may be one of those people who is not suited to being in a relationship. It seems to me that arguing that everyone should be in a relationship is just as misguided as arguing that nobody should be; the truth is that people are different and they want different things. There's a good argument that we live in an excessively romantic culture that assumes that everyone's goal should be settled coupledom and those who don't achieve this are failures, while those who don't want it are weird or repressed. I suspect most people, most of the time, are better off in conjugal relationships; we are social animals, after all, and this particular mode of living and raising children seems to be almost universal, so its a good strategy for the species. But it doesn't follow that everyone has to fit into that mould, and a help culture should accommodate and sustain both.

It seems you're projecting your view, or experience(?), of relationships on the general population. I sense most people in relationships don't suffer stress or pressure any more than those who are single.

You don't have kids do you? So you're spouting rubbish :) Families, children are what drive human society.

As to the OP question - human population would be decimated very quickly.

Of course you can have an opinion. But without direct experience of taking responsible care of children born to you, your opinion is limited.

Why would you want to be single anyway? Can't see the attraction. Each to their own but I think if you look about you, you'll see that the norm in human society is for couples and families. For good reason over millennia.

It could look something like this.