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.’”
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?
Normally people accept the inherent inability to judge another human soul from the inside as the price of interaction with other human beings. What you are describing as some sort of pathology is in fact the human condition.
In brief yes you are supposed to meet people talk to them. See them live their life and adjudge how their speech and claims line up with their actions. This is what literally most people on the planet are doing most of them with at least SOME success. You are uniquely bad at this like worst 10% and you ascribe this somehow to a feature of the universe instead of admitting it is 100% your own cowardice. Basically its unlikely that you are uniquely bad just following a uniquely bad strategy that you will come to regret.
Dude, more than half of marriages in the United States end in divorce. I don’t think I’d celebrate that as “at least SOME success.” If six out of ten airplane flights ended in a crash, there would be no aviation industry.
The “human condition” is being lied to, and it’s getting worse with time. You go to the hardware store to by a power drill, there’s eight different brands of them on display, those brands are all held by a maximum of two companies one of which is almost certainly Stanley Black & Decker, and they’ve got dubious shit on the box like power and torque specs that the tool just can’t do. Like, they’ll calculate motor power from inrush current and claim that it’s somehow pulling 5.5 horsepower from a standard American wall socket. No the fuck it isn’t, the breaker says so. Within living memory, DeWalt and Porter Cable went from being companies founded by entrepreneurs who invented and patented new or improved products manufactured at high quality…to brands leveraged as intellectual property by shell companies owned by private equity corporations to capitalize on brand loyalty while distancing assets from liability. The question “Where is the DeWalt factory?” used to have a concrete answer, now it doesn’t. DeWalt was a company you could know. It kind of isn’t now. Like, at Lowe’s right now, you can buy a Craftsman brand table saw for $200. Craftsman.com phases in and out of featuring this table saw among their products, and if you call the number in the manual for warranty service on the thing they’re like “Table saw? OH RIGHT! That thing.” They pay Sum Fuk Ltd. in Shenzhen to paint a cheap bullshit tablesaw red and grey and distribute it to Lowe’s. SB&D has nothing to do with it; they don’t offer parts or service for it, but it’s got a badge on it that generations of Americans associate with strong warranty support. Why do we allow this?
The dating market has trended exactly the same way. I mean, it’s perfectly natural to market yourself a bit. Who hasn’t run around their place cleaning up before a date shows up, right? 20 years ago, when I was in high school, you’d ask out someone in your community. I was in high school 20 years ago, so that meant I’d ask out a girl from school. I probably knew her at least a little, we grew up in the same town, our parents knew each other, we had personal brands you’d rely on. So maybe you’d put your best foot forward, brush your hair, wear your nice shirt, put on cologne, but you were you. There’s only so much of a lie you could tell about yourself before the community would land on it. Nowadays you’re expected to pick from complete strangers based on an altered photograph and they’re incentivized to lie about who they are as much as they can in order to impress you. From experience I can say that lie lasts about 6 months, that’s about how long they’re willing to pretend to like everything you like. Apparently there’s something about me women want enough to spend months of their lives living a lie to get at. It’s probably my house.
I’ve been lied to enough.
Most other people can function outside small stone age sized groupings just fine. A risk of marriage ending years or perhaps decades later leaving you alive well wiser and richer than when you begun having raised children and started a career is pretty obviously not the same as a risk of ending up in many small burned pieces on a field somewhere 2 hours from now. People still do it because it still makes sense.
Women want no fault divorce not because they are morally bereft but because nobody should be trapped against their will.