Perpetually Single
I'm sure if my parents were to read this, they'd think that something is STILL wrong with me.
THEY HAVE NAMES FOR THEMSELVES NOW: Quirkyalone, Modern Spinsters, Marriagefree, and Spinsterellas. Couplists depress them, and even worse are the Perkytogethers, the sort who feed each other in public or make out in movie theaters or hold hands while riding bicycles. "Yes," wrote one Quirkyalone in an online chat room after recently spotting such a four-wheeled spectacle, "I wanted to see the Tyranny of Coupledom take a tumble."
This message launched dozens of responses. "I had to vent," wrote the woman who started it all. And who can blame her? Singles can feel subjected to an endless stream of Couplists riding bicycles while holding hands and asking as they pedal by: "So, when are you going to get married?"
It is the question that has dogged single people - perhaps more than any other - ever since the invention of the prying mother. But now, tired of being marginalized and scrutinized by a wedded society, unattached Americans are throwing a cultural curveball. They're announcing they're happy just as they are. They're buying houses on their own, having children on their own, and even planning to retire on their own. Single folks today have what one advertising executive calls a feeling of "growing militancy." And they've got numbers. More than ever before, men and women are living single well into their 30s, 40s, and beyond. It's been estimated that, as early as 2008, a majority of US households will be headed by an unmarried person - a shift that has already taken hold in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and 15 other states. People continue to marry later in life, especially in this state, and some are opting out altogether, posing Couplists a question of their own: "Why bother?"
In 1970, only 7.8 percent of Americans aged 30 to 34 had never married, and 65.4 percent of all men were hitched, as were 59.7 percent of all women. By 2003, the number of never-marrieds aged 30 to 34 had exploded to 27.9 percent. The number of all men who were married had dropped to 55.4 percent, and barely half of all women were wed.
Few places are as single-minded as Boston. According to the US Census, a stunning 53.6 percent of all men here have never married, tops in the nation. And the city's women are close behind; more than 45 percent have never walked down the aisle, a figure that trails only Newark and Washington, D.C. In other words, Boston isn't a city that never sleeps; it's a city that sleeps alone or sleeps around, depending on how you look at it.
How we got here is the result of countless cultural shifts: the feminist movement, the jump in the divorce rate, the decline of the loveless marriage, and the rise of a soulmate society born of a quaint, high-minded ideal called love. One recent poll found that almost all young adults believe there is someone special out there for them, and they will not settle just to be married. They will wait. And that decision is changing how we define happiness and the need for partners, and it's transforming the look of our neighborhoods. Less than 50 years removed from Leave It to Beaver, everyone wants to know what will happen if the tyranny of coupledom finally tumbles.
THIS STORY, like all good stories about the single life, begins in a cafe, three days before Valentine's Day on the night of the biggest snowstorm of last winter. Nancy Howell couldn't have counted on the blizzard, which by morning would bury Boston in snow. But everything else she could have predicted. Here she was, once again, alone and soon to be without a date on the Couplists' favorite holiday.
Howell, a textbook proofreader and Brighton resident, had not planned her life this way. "Thirty," she tells me, "kind of meant I should be settling down. Maybe buying a house, buying a condo." But that milestone birthday came and went in June 2005, and Howell was still unattached and renting. She thought about how, when she was a kid, 30 seemed so old. And how, when her mother was 30, she wasn't only married, she was pregnant. Then Howell thought about her parents' divorce just a few years ago, and she remembered something else about herself: "I have never felt like I needed to be with someone."
Howell is not alone in this regard. Hollywood would have us believe that single people are falling over themselves to find a mate, yet the Pew Internet & American Life Project reported in February that 55 percent of single people nationwide have no active interest in seeking a partner. While Pew found that 26 percent of singles are in committed relationships, it also discovered that just 16 percent are actively looking for love - a number that would seem to contradict everything we've ever been told about being single. Happy, uncommitted singles were suddenly everywhere, and not just in the survey. Boston has them. The suburbs have them. Even rural Pittsfield has them. They are men and women, gay and straight.
read the rest of the story here
THEY HAVE NAMES FOR THEMSELVES NOW: Quirkyalone, Modern Spinsters, Marriagefree, and Spinsterellas. Couplists depress them, and even worse are the Perkytogethers, the sort who feed each other in public or make out in movie theaters or hold hands while riding bicycles. "Yes," wrote one Quirkyalone in an online chat room after recently spotting such a four-wheeled spectacle, "I wanted to see the Tyranny of Coupledom take a tumble."
This message launched dozens of responses. "I had to vent," wrote the woman who started it all. And who can blame her? Singles can feel subjected to an endless stream of Couplists riding bicycles while holding hands and asking as they pedal by: "So, when are you going to get married?"
It is the question that has dogged single people - perhaps more than any other - ever since the invention of the prying mother. But now, tired of being marginalized and scrutinized by a wedded society, unattached Americans are throwing a cultural curveball. They're announcing they're happy just as they are. They're buying houses on their own, having children on their own, and even planning to retire on their own. Single folks today have what one advertising executive calls a feeling of "growing militancy." And they've got numbers. More than ever before, men and women are living single well into their 30s, 40s, and beyond. It's been estimated that, as early as 2008, a majority of US households will be headed by an unmarried person - a shift that has already taken hold in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and 15 other states. People continue to marry later in life, especially in this state, and some are opting out altogether, posing Couplists a question of their own: "Why bother?"
In 1970, only 7.8 percent of Americans aged 30 to 34 had never married, and 65.4 percent of all men were hitched, as were 59.7 percent of all women. By 2003, the number of never-marrieds aged 30 to 34 had exploded to 27.9 percent. The number of all men who were married had dropped to 55.4 percent, and barely half of all women were wed.
Few places are as single-minded as Boston. According to the US Census, a stunning 53.6 percent of all men here have never married, tops in the nation. And the city's women are close behind; more than 45 percent have never walked down the aisle, a figure that trails only Newark and Washington, D.C. In other words, Boston isn't a city that never sleeps; it's a city that sleeps alone or sleeps around, depending on how you look at it.
How we got here is the result of countless cultural shifts: the feminist movement, the jump in the divorce rate, the decline of the loveless marriage, and the rise of a soulmate society born of a quaint, high-minded ideal called love. One recent poll found that almost all young adults believe there is someone special out there for them, and they will not settle just to be married. They will wait. And that decision is changing how we define happiness and the need for partners, and it's transforming the look of our neighborhoods. Less than 50 years removed from Leave It to Beaver, everyone wants to know what will happen if the tyranny of coupledom finally tumbles.
THIS STORY, like all good stories about the single life, begins in a cafe, three days before Valentine's Day on the night of the biggest snowstorm of last winter. Nancy Howell couldn't have counted on the blizzard, which by morning would bury Boston in snow. But everything else she could have predicted. Here she was, once again, alone and soon to be without a date on the Couplists' favorite holiday.
Howell, a textbook proofreader and Brighton resident, had not planned her life this way. "Thirty," she tells me, "kind of meant I should be settling down. Maybe buying a house, buying a condo." But that milestone birthday came and went in June 2005, and Howell was still unattached and renting. She thought about how, when she was a kid, 30 seemed so old. And how, when her mother was 30, she wasn't only married, she was pregnant. Then Howell thought about her parents' divorce just a few years ago, and she remembered something else about herself: "I have never felt like I needed to be with someone."
Howell is not alone in this regard. Hollywood would have us believe that single people are falling over themselves to find a mate, yet the Pew Internet & American Life Project reported in February that 55 percent of single people nationwide have no active interest in seeking a partner. While Pew found that 26 percent of singles are in committed relationships, it also discovered that just 16 percent are actively looking for love - a number that would seem to contradict everything we've ever been told about being single. Happy, uncommitted singles were suddenly everywhere, and not just in the survey. Boston has them. The suburbs have them. Even rural Pittsfield has them. They are men and women, gay and straight.
read the rest of the story here
posted by Bludlust at 12:52 PM
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