Not being part of a relationship obviously frees up more time for work (actually the same applies to being in a bad relationship but lets not go there) and Christopher Orlet has written an interesting article on this topic:
“The bachelor’s very capacity to avoid marriage is no more than a proof of his relative freedom from the ordinary sentimentalism of his sex, in other words, of his greater approximation to the clearheadedness of the enemy sex. He is able to defeat the enterprise of women because he brings to the business an equipment almost comparable to their own.” Who can argue that a brief catalog of famous bachelors reads like a roll call of the architects of Western Civilization?:
Pierre Bayle, Robert Boyle, Johannes Brahms, Samuel Butler, Robert Burton, Ludwig van Beethoven, Johannes Brahms, Giacomo Casanova, Frederic Chopin, Nicolaus Copernicus, Eugène Delacroix, Rene Descartes, Gustave Flaubert, Galileo Galilei, Edward Gibbon, Vincent van Gogh, Oliver Goldsmith, Thomas Hobbes, Horace, David Hume, Washington Irving, Henry James, Franz Kafka, Immanuel Kant, Soren Kierkegaard, Charles Lamb, T. E. Lawrence, Meriwether Lewis, Philip Larkin, Gottfried Leibniz, John Locke, Michelangelo, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sir Isaac Newton, Blaise Pascal, Alexander Pope, Marcel Proust, Maurice Ravel, George Santayana, Jean Paul Sartre, Franz Schubert, Benedict de Spinoza, Arthur Schopenhauer, Herbert Spencer, Adam Smith, Stendhal, Jonathon Swift, Nikola Tesla, Henry David Thoreau, Henri De Toulouse-Lautrec, Leonardo da Vinci, Voltaire, Ludwig Wittgenstein
Similarly the contributions of the many (ostensibly) celibate medieval monks and theologians (Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, Desiderius Erasmus, Michael Servetus) were essential in dragging Europe out of the dark Age of Faith and paving the way for the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.
But bachelorhood is not enough – you have to be willing to sacrifice to time and energy. On my part I have decided not to sacrifice everything anymore. In the final period of writing my thesis I was prepared to do anything to finish. I remember thinking, after working ludicrously long hours, not sleeping, eating crappy food that everything was ok as long as I got my heart attack – after I graduated. Today I will not do this. I work but I also exercise and attempt to enjoy life outside work. So I read the list of bachelors with interest but still see them as a long list of failures… I hope they were happier than I think they were.