My experience with several brands has been that 1-person tents work just fine for one individual, a 2-person for two people and so on. I am speaking of decent to high quality tents used for the purpose for which they were designed - typically backpacking, mountaineering, ski or bike touring or the like. In these activities you generally use the tents only for sleeping and you are out of them most or all of the daylight hours, retiring to the confines of the tent only to pursue blissful sleep.

In these tents, light weight is highly desirable, so they are designed to be minimalist. If you are car camping at the beach or lake, you want something entirely different. There are plenty of spacious, relatively heavy tents that work well for those situations.

If you are employing tents in a work situation, say scientific research or construction, you may well want something much bigger, and you may prefer to give everyone their own personal tent. I was involved in a project where we were in the field ten days at a time for a four month field season over the space of three years. Each crew member got a 3-person tent - it worked out quite well.

It is indeed an excellent idea to rent or borrow before plunking down the fairly serious cash required for a workable tent these days. Don't waste your money on the really cheap junkers - the ones with tent flys the size of handkerchiefs. They will not give good service.

Do learn to set it up properly in various circumstances. A good erection is not always easy to achieve.

When bad weather strikes, you hunker down and endure - that is all part of the fun.

There are a lot of different models available today, from large manufacturers as well as some really excellent offerings from cottage industries - lots of choices among a bunch of really fine models.