By 2030, 45% of prime working age women in the US, defined as women aged between 25 and 44, will be single according to Census Bureau historical data and Morgan Stanley forecasts – the largest share in history.
Hundreds of those women, from across the US, shared with the Guardian why they were single, how they felt about it and what they would be looking for in a future partner if they were still in the market for one.
“I hated being single after my last relationship broke down,” said Sarah, 43, a sales representative from California. “I miss having someone to cook for, to share things with. But now, my motto is: ‘My alone feels so good, I’ll only have you if your presence is sweeter than my solitude.’”
I do note that among those lists of requirements in the article, “provider” is among them, “financial independence is a popular requirement.” And yet, one girl says she’s living with her parents because of how expensive things are. Women simultaneously demand to be equal to men in status and pay, and yet only accept men in stronger financial positions than themselves.
College education is cited, women want a man with a degree. Women have very successfully made college outright hostile to men. You cannot offer a scholarship only to men, but you can offer scholarships only to women. The gender of “I should be able to compete with him, but he should not be able to compete with me” wants their men to have equal or better degrees than them.
Women have demanded that their roles in society change, and yet that men’s role remain the same. Women go on and on about commitment, still to this day making big deals about engagement rings and the like…while demanding jobs and bank accounts and no-fault divorces so they can leave whenever they want. Women still want the big, strong, reliable protector and provider, while replacing their own role as the caring and nurturing homemaker with…nothing. Demanding that men take on more household chores and childrearing duties while still holding up the same career commitments. That his pay should go to bills and necessities while her pay goes to luxuries for herself, with some money set aside for a divorce lawyer. A husband is still a husband, but a wife is a bad roommate that might let you knock her up. Before she gets bored and burns your life down.
“Why should he be perfect” indeed.
Yikes. Lemme guess: You can’t get a girl despite being a self proclaimed nice guy.
You’ve guessed very wrong. I’ve never really had a problem getting girls.
Twice in my life now, a decade apart, I’ve walked onto some technical college campus, both in the aviation industry so complete sausage fests, and came out of there with a girlfriend. I’ve gotten a girl in an environment with 47:1 odds. By talking to her. I said hi.
Also, funnily enough, the last girl I dated made a point to tell me she went out with me because I wasn’t nice.
Sure buddy.
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Demanding jobs and bank accounts and no fault divorce?
What world do you want to live in? What the actual fuck, dude?
I work, husband works, we both do housework but also have some of it outsourced to a professional.
I was a single mom, which was an easier life than with my deadbeat ex, so yes of course I want a man who works, and husband was a single dad who used to also support a deadbeat wife, so yeah he wants a woman who works. Both of us can tell that our life is better together. It’s not wrong to want someone who makes your life better. Not wrong for me, not wrong for you. But the only way you can imagine that happening is by disadvantaging women legally again?
The “your check is ours, my check is mine” girls are outliers, like I hope you are. Most of us are working to survive. And even in our situation where we have together enough to have more than survival, it’s all one budget, everything in then we pay the bills. Then figure out what is left, if anything.
We both work.
We both do housework.
We are a couple, a family, we support each other.
My boss at work had to pay alimony to her deadbeat husband, who she had supported for years, and who didn’t do much work at home either. And my husband got custody of his kids AND step kids, because he was the more competent parent. So don’t think the change in the laws is one sided. It’s just less unequal.
I want to live in the world my father does, where the people around you uphold their end of the bargains they make. I don’t live in that world.
My father’s schools upheld their end of the bargain, they built for him a brand new high school, in fact it was still under construction his freshman year. State of the art school, brand new facilities, it was the first school in the state to have a computer. They taught computer programming classes, which my father took. The man had a job working for the school system programming computers before he even graduated. They actually bent a lot of rules for him. He’s worked that career ever since, getting regular pay raises, retirement and healthcare benefits, paid sick leave and vacation time.
I was sent to a 45 year old high school, the budget was slipping and class sizes were increasing. The computer classes offered to me in the 2000s were basic usage of MS Office. I took carpentry and auto shop classes, and employment prospects out of high school were all poverty level; I had to go find a job, and the job I got was changing oil and tires at a locally owned garage for $7.25 an hour. Minimum wage at the time was $5.15. I was an hourly employee and the only benefit I had was they issued and cleaned uniforms. I’d been very strongly told a high school education is next to useless these days, and that if I wanted to live above the poverty line I’d have to go to college. I went to college, majored in aeronautics, emerged as a licensed pilot…in the spring of 2008. The bottom fell out of the economy and there were no jobs to be had, the news was talking about people with master’s degrees working at Subway. I was back to living at home transcribing auto insurance phone calls for $8 an hour. Two years worth of additional training at my own expense later I managed to land a job teaching flight lessons for $12,000 a year.
My father met a girl, dated for a bit, got married in his mid-20’s. He was the sole breadwinner, she tended the house. A few years in, they have their one and only child. He goes to work, she does the child rearing. By the time I was in middle school, she gets a job as a secretary mostly out of boredom, her paycheck is a small fraction of my father’s who is effectively still the provider. For both of them, this is their one and only marriage, they’re happily married to this day.
I never married. Had several girlfriends through high school and college, working at the flight school occupied nearly all of my time for not a living wage, I didn’t even try to date during that time because I was focused on work. I looked up, and the scene had changed. Since then, I’ve dated three women, all three lasted about six months, all three of them outright lied to me about who they were, what they wanted, telling me what they thought I wanted to hear and agreeing with everything I said, and they were each able to keep up the lie for about 6 months. The most recent one was a nurse, she disappeared into the pandemic and I never saw or heard from her again. I haven’t tried to date in 5 years, because why bother? I’m a bachelor. Never married, no children.
It’s become popular feminist nonsense to refuse to take her husband’s name. Keeping separate finances, spending his money on essentials. A lot of women are very vocal about planning to escape a marriage before you’ve even met the man. And yet I’m supposed to stand at an altar listening to some chick say “til death do us part?” When I went out into the workforce and practically all of the men older than me have some horror story about their “First wife?”
I’m supposed to be her protector? Hear broken glass in the middle of the night and it’s my happy ass getting up in my boxer shorts, getting the shotgun out of the safe in the closet and going downstairs while she stays in bed? While seeing me sad is more than she’s willing to put up with?
I can’t trust anybody on this world because they’d rather collapse the economy than allow me to earn a living. Women expect me to behave like my father, renovating a house and buying new cars as a single breadwinner straight out of high school, when that is not the economic reality us millennials live in.
They most certainly are not. It is not uncommon to find a woman who, when asked “What do you bring to the table” will respond “I am the table.” Hell, the girls in the original article say they’re living at home with parents because life is too expensive, but their bare minimum standards for a man is financial independence and ability to be a provider. What’s a provider other than someone who pays most or all of the bills? They’re not rare and they’re not shy about it.
Maybe I run in a different crowd. My mom & dad both worked, my mom’s mom didn’t, my mom’s dad beat his wife (never my mom) when Grandma was 60 she divorced him. I don’t want to live in that world. She really had no options for a long time. My dad’s parents were rich, plenty of the women in his family worked but it wasn’t out of need, they just had opportunities most women didn’t back then, because money. My mom’s grandmother did work, she had a farm and was a midwife. I think her husband died young. I guess if you go back far enough everybody worked unless they were rich enough not to, right? Just like now.
I will say I would not personally date anyone who said “feminist nonsense”, you do seem unpleasant (relevant username) - I understand you are probably just venting but you seem to have some idealized version of the past that you are comparing the present to, it was not really good for most people. Your mom & dad were lucky. You aren’t going to get that by regressing the laws to make women less free.
Both sets of my grandparents and all of the great grandparents I’d met were the same way. Married once, raised a family on one or pretty much one income, remained married until one passed away. My great grandmother, her son my grandfather, the last thing I heard either of them say was they missed their departed spouses.
Every male ancestor of mine I’ve met went out into the world, found employment that paid enough to support a family, found a faithful woman, married her, took care of her, kept her safe, made sure she had what she needed, and in return, she took care of him. I go out in the world, I don’t find employment like that, or women like that. I don’t get to own a farm like my great grandfather, I don’t get to work a union job in a factory like my grandfather, I don’t get given a government job in a brand new high tech field while I’m in school like my father. I get to pay back student loans on poverty level wages and women who are just as demanding but not at all supportive and somehow I’m the one in the wrong?
Is it possible you attract women who “want to be taken care of” because you don’t want them to work? I dunno, but do agree the subset of women who are willing to gamble away their own earnings potential on a guy is getting smaller. I do plenty of unpaid work at home, of course. But two incomes give us so much more, and now the kids are grown too, we have to catch up. I just have never been in a position to not work - stayed home with my first set of kids a few years, homeschooled for the first couple years, but went to college at night and worked part time, so when they did go to school I got a professional job and improved our lives. When I offered the same deal to my ex with the second set of kids, he stayed home and did cook, but just got radicalized on the Internet, wouldn’t go to school or anything to try to improve his chances at a job, then he got abusive verbally, then physically abusive and I left.
I do hope for you first a good job, with good pay.
I don’t feel particularly demanding, and my kids all seem to be in good relationships, some got good jobs in their field others didn’t, (I understand about graduating at the wrong time) but are making it work, two people working does make a difference.
And to be fair - before I went to school we lived with 2 other couples to make ends meet, house stuffed full of people working minimum wage jobs, so even though not in parents’ basement we did have no chance of making it on our own.
As with all things in life, relying on others in any way only invites incompetence, so if it is to be done, I must do it myself from scratch.
Why wouldn’t no fault divorce be an inherent good for all why should you be able to trap someone who doesn’t want to stay for whatever reason?
Also in todays economy you don’t want a home maker you want another income
So let me fully clarify: I’m not an opponent of no-fault divorce. I cite women being strong proponents of it as evidence they don’t view their marriages as permanent from the very beginning.
I believe people enter into marriage waaaaay too casually. It’s a contract structured to last the rest of your life, a lot of the consideration in that contract has to do with estate, inheritance, insurance, power of attorney. Some stuff that’s really hard to make a contract for outside of marriage law. So why are so many people in the habit of signing a contract about all this stuff that they don’t intend to actually be around for? Is it because they’ll throw you a big party and you get to wear a big frilly dress if you go through with it?
Entry into a marriage, and on a related note the decision to have children, should be taken way more seriously than it is.
Also: IN TODAY’S ECONOMY, YOU DON’T WANT TODAY’S ECONOMY. Worker productivity is at an all-time high, wages are at an all-time low, by all accounts we should be working fewer people fewer hours, but somehow the exact opposite of that has happened. And yet there isn’t an armed revolt?
I don’t disagree with any of this. Didn’t ever marry my ex, told him no, it was never my dream anyway. We were together a long time but in the end I was glad we hadn’t.
My husband wanted to more than I didn’t want to, and since we both had kids it did work out better, also I like his parents, so it’s just nice, & our kids like having more brothers and sisters. Still, told him if we were together 2 years we could move in together, if we were happy living together for 2 years he could ask about marriage.
But I’m only doing this once. We are about a dozen years in and it’s still so good, sex every day, both working, healthy and active which is not a certainty at this age.
I still think divorce (and abortion for that matter) need to be easy, we are better off as a society when people have more choice and aren’t forced into relationships. Just because I don’t want to do either of them I’d still “demand” they be legal. We are all in this together.
Marriage shouldn’t be permanent if it is wrong for either party. In fact the idea that once you convinced someone to marry you they are stuck with you no matter how shitty a person you become is a disincentive to positive change that might benefit all.
You wish it was but it just isn’t. It’s a contract that exists so long as both parties remain invested that can and should be dissolved if its harmful to either party. This is actual reality. The overwhelming majority of women even those who are staunchly committed to their own marriages aren’t willing to subject women to a life sentence with a shithead if she doesn’t agree.
You might just be a moron
You then proceed to say all the reasons you are against no fault divorce. Also if you weren’t against it why would you have such a problem with women being proponents of it?
Let me ask you this: Would you get married to someone if they outright told you they intend to divorce you?
That seems to be the attitude that women approach marriage with these days, so why would any man be stupid enough to marry a woman?
Where? In your fantasies? Back in reality marriage is a big risk to both parties if it doesn’t work out and people mostly marry people they intend to stay with long term
Yeah, marriage is a big risk. Which is why I haven’t done it, and my certainty that I never will only increases with time because the basis I have to trust any given woman only decreases with age.
Like, my high school girlfriend? I grew up with her. I remember seeing her in diapers. I remember how much of a bully she was in first grade and how obsessed with puppies she was in middle school. I knew the contents of her character because I was there to see them installed. Didn’t marry her because I went to college and she joined the navy, I saw her maybe three more times in my life. Well I’m fresh out of women I grew up with, so now I’m supposed to meet a stranger and take her word for who she is?
The last three women I dated, collectively why I have given up on dating and on women, all three spent most of six months pretending to like everything I liked, telling me what she thought I wanted to hear, only to go through a personality change about the time she got tired of living the lie.
Not getting married, believe it or not, is a thing you can do.
So you have bad judgement AND little motivation and the problem is all women.
You who have no interest in marriage and have never had a serious relationship obviously are raging about women being able to just up and leave when you have never and will never be in that position. What do you know about women, relationships, or marriage? This is sounding more and more like typical incel shit.
Would you like to start talking about how hard you have been hitting the gym and you still can’t meet your “looksmatch”
Were you able to get a job with your level of reading comprehension?
Lay off those red pills bro.