The economic milestone that's making women less likely to get married
Kimberly Elliott for BI
When "Sex and the City" debuted in 1998, the series captured public fascination for more reasons than what its title might imply. It wasn't just that the show's central foursome were women having lots of sex; they were women over 30 having lots of sex, and they were single. A "mid-30ish crowd of bed-hopping, hedonistic female night crawlers," a Los Angeles Times critic pointedly wrote. Their singlehood painted a picture of a titillating, and even threatening, new woman.
Through the '90s and '00s, American women "pioneered an entirely new kind of adulthood, one that was not kicked off by marriage, but by years and, in many cases, whole lives, lived on their own outside matrimony," the journalist Rebecca Traister wrote in her 2016 book, "All the Single Ladies." Now, unmarried women are no longer part of an edgy cultural vanguard — they're the official status quo. As of 2021, a record 52% of American women were either unmarried or separated, according to a report by Wells Fargo Economics. Single women also have single men outnumbered: A Census Bureau analysis of 2019 data found that for every 90 unmarried men in the US, there were 100 unmarried women.
While some women feel cornered into being single, citing a lackluster dating pool or the demoralizing experience of trawling apps, a growing share, call them Samantha Nation, are happy being on their own. In a 2019 survey from the Pew Research Center, only 38% of single women reported looking for dates or a relationship, compared with 61% of single men.
The rise of happily unmarried women has steadily shifted standards for what American adulthood looks like. But it hasn't come without a fuss from people who hold to a specific vision of the family. When JD Vance, now the vice president-elect, drew ire this summer over a years-old remark about "childless cat ladies," he doubled down on his insinuation that single women were symptomatic of Democrats' "anti-family and anti-kid" platforms; they were opting into a lifestyle that was fueling the erosion of the nuclear family, making them deviant by association. But research suggests it's misguided to pin the trend on shifting social mores. Women's newfound freedom to choose — not just whom they marry, but whether they marry at all — is due less to a cultural shift and more to a shifting economy. As men drop out of the workforce, American women have hit a new milestone: In August, the share of prime-age (25 to 54) women in the labor force hit a record high of 78.4%. Meanwhile, the median age of American women's first marriage has crept steadily upward, from 20.8 in 1970 to 28.3 in 2023.
The shift toward the single life has been a great development for women; for men, though, things aren't as peachy.
The way people feel about women's relationship patterns has a lot to do with a false cultural memory of what was normal in the past. The Rockwellian poster family of mid-20th-century Americana, with its happily married husband and stay-at-home wife raising 2.5 children in the picket-fenced suburbs, sank its hooks so deeply into the American imagination that it's easy to forget it was a historical fluke. In the immediate aftermaths of World War I and World War II, the nation saw momentary spikes in the proportion of single-income, male-breadwinner US households. The booms were over nearly as soon as they began. By 1970, 40% of the nation's married women, and more than half of its unmarried women, had jobs outside the home, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
Even before 1970, it was far from unusual to see American women working for a living. The economist Claudia Goldin, who won a 2023 Nobel Memorial Prize for her work unpacking gender differences in the labor market, has noted that the gender gap in US labor-force participation steadily shrunk between 1890 and 1990. As more and more women were working for pay, deindustrialization in the '80s and '90s drove scores of men out of the labor market, shrinking the pool of those who could support a family.
Jess Carbino, a relationships researcher who formerly worked as a sociologist for Tinder and Bumble, told me that many people ascribed to a model of the family popularized by the economist Gary Becker in the early '80s, which said that single people were looking for partners whose market strengths complemented their own. By applying economic theory to the prevailing cultural ideas of the time, he concluded that because men were good at earning money and women were good at having babies and raising them, it's only logical that the two should join forces in the household.
The problem with that arrangement (besides its blatant sexism) is that men today are losing their economic footing.
"We're seeing men's labor-force participation rates really plummet, since the 1990s especially," said Elizabeth Crofoot, a senior economist and principal researcher at the labor-market-analytics firm Lightcast. "That gives women greater impetus to actually work on their careers and put in more time and effort to make themselves financially stable and not have to rely on someone else."
Of course, women's relative workforce gains have not translated into equal earning power; on average, US women still earn $0.84 per every $1 earned by men, according to the Census Bureau. However, a 2021 Pew survey found women were outpacing men in educational attainment. And a Pew analysis of government data found that in 2019, women began outnumbering men in the college-educated labor force. There's evidence that these shifts are fueling the move away from marriage. In a 2023 survey from the American Enterprise Institute's Survey Center on American Life, almost three-quarters of single, college-educated women cited "not being able to find someone who meets their expectations" as a reason they were romantically unattached. Only 54% of single women with no college degree said the same.
Against this backdrop, it makes sense why a growing share of Americans are single simply because they enjoy being single. Carmindy Bowyer is one of them.
"I'm very independent," Bowyer, a makeup artist and beauty entrepreneur in New York City, said. "I don't want to live with somebody. I don't want to have children. People out there don't realize that they have a choice."
Bowyer, who is 53, didn't always feel this way. While she always knew she would never have children, she caved to social pressure to marry in her 30s. Even her parents — who were happily married for over 50 years — questioned whether she was cut out for married life. "We were walking down the aisle, and my dad was like, 'You can always get divorced.' And I was like, 'Thanks,'" she recalled. "Sure enough, marriage didn't work out for me. And I was happy about it." Bowyer said she realized that she felt truer to herself when she was making day-to-day decisions about how to live her life entirely on her own terms. She just needed to give herself permission to do it.
If you are a man, you should probably get married; if you are a woman, don't bother.
For other women, the dating market has become a major turnoff. "Single women that I work with can feel very compromised by the whole process of trying to find a partner," said Stephanie Manes, a licensed psychotherapist who works with individuals and couples in New York City. "It can mean being treated in ways that are totally at odds with how these women see themselves — as smart, self-sufficient, empowered grown-ups. It can require them to lower their standards in pretty fundamental ways and force them to suffer through some really bad behavior."
Cultural attitudes have been slow to catch up to the not-so-new normal of singlehood. Traister's book quotes a passage from 1997 in which the writer Katie Roiphe, then 28, described her cohort of unmarried 20-something professionals as evidence of Americans' widespread failure to achieve adulthood on schedule. And being single today still generates some social stigma. A 2020 analysis published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology found that prejudice toward singles was viewed as more acceptable than prejudice toward other groups.
For women, however, the societal sense that they should be married has slowly but surely waned. In Pew's 2019 survey, just 35% of single women said they felt pressure from society to be in a relationship — a slightly larger share of single men said they felt the same.
Singledom also appears far more beneficial for women than men on average: Numerous studies have found that single women tend to be happier and healthier and live longer than married ones, while unmarried men have been found to experience markedly higher rates of depression, addiction, and loneliness than those with spouses. "If you are a man, you should probably get married; if you are a woman, don't bother," the author and behavioral scientist Paul Dolan quipped in a 2019 interview.
There are many hypotheses on why single men fare so much worse. Theories put forward by economists such as Richard Reeves and Nicholas Eberstadt suggest that male gender roles have been slow to catch up to labor-market realities, perhaps at the expense of many men's ability to thrive in the soft-skills-based 21st-century knowledge economy. Others theorize that men's loneliness starts in childhood and stems from societal pressure to keep their feelings hidden. While there are likely many factors at play, a common thread lies in the asocial and infantilizing mores of a patriarchal society that, in some crucial respects, may harm men even more than women.
Women, meanwhile, are finding joy and purpose in discovering new ways of living outside the nuclear-family norm. Platonic coparenting and cohousing arrangements between friends and the return of the multigenerational family home are just two recent examples of the changing face of the American household.
"In my book, I make the case that people who are single at heart are happy and flourishing because they are single, not in spite of it," Bella DePaulo, a social psychologist and the author of the 2023 book "Single at Heart," said. She has said that even within the past decade, there has been traction in what some call "a singles positivity movement." Now 71 (and still single), DePaulo said that current attitudes toward single professionals, in particular, are a far cry from her experience as a single 30-something woman in the workplace.
"Single people are still stereotyped, for sure, but now there is a greater awareness that some single people choose to be single and are happily single," she said.
Bowyer believes that social media plays a significant role in moving the needle. When she recently posted on TikTok about enjoying being single and child-free, the video attracted more than 4 million views and a flurry of positive feedback. It's a radical departure from the cultural feedback she and her Gen X peers received as young adults.
"We're so much more open and compassionate now — a more elevated society in some ways," Bowyer said. "You can find your tribe and be inspired by people that came before you."
Kelli María Korducki is a journalist whose work focuses on work, tech, and culture. She's based in New York City.