If you are a woman who feels you can’t find a worthy mate, or if you are a single man who feels women are out of reach, you are not alone. Well, you know what I mean.
A record number of U.S. residents are unmarried, according to a new paper by the Pew Research Center. Almost 40% of adults aged 25 to 54 did not live with a partner in 2019, compared to just 29% in 1990.
The retreat from marriage is the story here. In 1990, two-thirds of adults between 25 and 55 were married. By 2019, barely more than half were married. Divorce isn’t the culprit. The issue is that more than a third of adults have never been married.
So, why aren’t millennials and Gen Xers getting married? You get different answers when you ask the different sexes — but all the data tell one story.
Most single women (56%) cited the difficulty of finding someone who meets their expectations, while this answer was rare among men. Most men said it was hard for them to approach people (and this was before social distancing mandates!).
Women don’t see any keepers, and men don’t see many opportunities. These are the subjective data. The objective data on single men reinforce this whole storyline.
Pew split men and women into “partnered” and “unpartnered,” the latter being the group that was neither married nor in that semi-almost-pretend-marriage stage that sociologists call “cohabitating.”
The unpartnered had far lower incomes, were more likely to be unemployed, more likely to be financially vulnerable, and pretty likely to be living at home with their parents. That gap between the partnered and the unpartnered is far more significant among men. Partnered men make more than $20,000 more on average than the unpartnered, according to Pew.
Given that 71% agree that a man should support a family, these bad economics of single men could explain why they are single.
The cruel irony is that the causality seems to go both ways. Being married seems to increase men’s wages and decrease the likelihood of bad behavior and bad outcomes, such as criminality and drugs.
The result is fewer men with their life in order and thus more women without a man.
