The current cultural elite narrative that being single and childless is great is contradicted by every credible study ever done.
Single women, it has consistently been found, are about half as likely to report being “very happy” as married women.
Not that you would know this if you read Women’s Health Magazine. In fact, being single gives women “joy,” so quit dating and enjoy your freedom, gals!
This is about as smart as all those magazines that adopted the “Healthy at any size” mantra, arguing that being morbidly obese is a great lifestyle choice, and little problems like being unable to wipe your ass or fit into an airplane seat are caused by society’s unwillingness to ditch heteronormative misogyny and embrace the lived reality of people of size.
The truth is, when we begin to listen—really, truly listen—to single women, it quickly becomes evident that society has gotten it so very wrong. Single women, by and large, are actually quite happy, quite fulfilled, and quite content, thankyouverymuch. And as their numbers continue to grow, their experiences and wisdom could help shape the way we all approach our mental and emotional well-being. We just have to listen, as the whispers grow to a roar.
Cue Beyoncé because, yes, single ladies are having a moment. Between the years 2018 and 2030, the number of unmarried women is projected to increase by 1.2 percent annually, compared with just 0.8 percent for the overall U.S. population, according to a 2019 Morgan Stanley forecast and U.S. Census Bureau data. What’s more, 45 percent of women ages 25 to 44 (which, one could argue, are prime marrying ages) will be single by 2030—the largest share in history—up from 41 percent in 2018. Experts say there are a host of factors spurring this uptick.
Of course, all this ignores the fact that the single largest cohort of people diagnosed with mental health disorders is…single women, who seem to spend an awful lot of time complaining that the rest of us don’t appreciate how oppressed they are.
What makes being single so great?
“It’s more doable to be single,” says Bella DePaulo, PhD, a social scientist and the author of Single at Heart. “If you don’t want to cook, there’s takeout. If you don’t want to do your laundry, there’s laundry service. If you don’t want to do repairs in your house, you can go online and find people.”
Our interconnected world also means we don’t need to rely on a live-in partner for socializing or emotional support. “Communication technologies have made it much more fulfilling to be single,” DePaulo says. “If you’re single and you live alone, you’re not isolated. You are one text message, email, chat room away from the rest of the world.”
Actually, all of those options are available to everybody, of course, as long as you have money. I am pretty sure that laundry services and takeout food aren’t exclusively available to single women. They are, instead, available to wealthy people.
As for socializing? Gee, you can fulfill your need for human companionship with an email or text!
No wonder these people are mentally ill.
For people who are living out their joy, one thing becomes clear—they are single because they can’t find a man they want to be with. And, ironically, they don’t sound at all joyful when discussing being without a partner:
In anticipation of reporting this story, I sent messages to a number of single women (all of whom date men) in my contacts, asking them to describe the “current dating landscape” in one word. Their responses:
“Confusing.”
“Dreadful.”
“Depressing.”
“Bleak.”
Two wrote back that they hadn’t been on a date in years—that they’d essentially given up trying.
Yep, that screams Happy Happy Joy Joy!
So why can’t they find a partner? SURPRISE! It’s political ideology.
these very surface-level, unfulfilling interactions that don’t go anywhere. For women, especially, they feel like they cannot find partners that are aligned with their values.”
Indeed, for heterosexual couples, the ideological divide between the sexes only grows. Among Gen Z in particular, that gap has widened significantly, with women becoming more liberal and men becoming more conservative—making common ground that much more elusive. Aguirre is seeing that dynamic play out in her clients’ experiences.
“I work with a lot of liberal, educated, very open-minded, progressive women, and it’s a struggle to find liberal, open-minded men,” she says. And even if a man identifies as a liberal, he may still lack basic empathy about the current state of the world and/or his date’s lived experiences. “People are engaging with men who don’t seem upset or disturbed by the political climate,” she says. “That’s frustrating and concerning for these women.”
You see the pattern here? This article boils down to this: “Hey, AWFLs, you are HAPPY, and everybody else sucks because they aren’t liberal enough!”
Another dating stumbling block for a lot of the women Aguirre works with is finding a man with the same level of emotional intelligence. “A theme I’ve been seeing as a therapist in the last 10 years or so is women saying, ‘He didn’t ask about me’ or ‘I don’t think he really knows me.’ It’s these declarations of love or interest without really knowing the woman.” Can it hardly be coincidental that #makemencuriousagain has been popping up on social media?
Of course, women are not wholly blameless for lackluster dating experiences. We ghost and breadcrumb and orbit too. But when researchers deem it necessary to create terms like mankeeping to explain the burden placed upon partnered women to facilitate their husband’s or boyfriend’s social interactions, it’s easy to see why a woman might opt to stay single rather than take on the extra emotional labor. Especially if she isn’t getting much in return.
Obviously, it never occurs to anyone involved in this article that the problem here might be them. What man wants to spend his life apologizing for their gender and being lectured about “emotional labor?” For that matter, what sane woman wants to be around these people?
A high level of attunement to mental and emotional needs was a defining characteristic of the single women of color whom researcher Kimberly Martinez Phillips, PhD, a visiting scholar at the Centre for Feminist Research at York University in Toronto, spoke with for her 2024 study titled “The Feminization of Freedom: An Analysis of Love, Happiness and Freedom from the Perspective of Childfree, Never-Married Single Women of Color.”
“Many of them talked about being in therapy, talked about understanding the connection that they need to space, and to privacy, and to peace, and that they need to allot time for themselves to find that grounding,” Phillips says. In many cases, it was because of their singlehood that their mental health thrived, not in spite of it. “These women really carved out their own fortresses of solitude,” she says. “It was more important to them and their health and their mental health than having a partner.”
These joyful women all seem to be in therapy, don’t they?
Happy indeed!
It’s striking how little reference there is to children in this piece. It’s all solipsistic slop about how living entirely for oneself is the true goal of our lives.
At least they have email, texting, Uber Eats, and a laundry service.
Editor’s Note: The Schumer Shutdown is here. Rather than put the American people first, Chuck Schumer and the radical Democrats forced a government shutdown for healthcare for illegals. They own this.
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