Singles Awareness Day is fast approaching, which will probably be news to those of you who are already dragging the old ball and chain. On February 14—though some authorities cite February 15—single people across the globe will pause to contemplate their sorry, pathetic lives or to celebrate their liberation, according to taste.
With the big day in mind, the dating website WhatsYourPrice.com decided to do a survey. The website claims to have more than a million members, but don’t they all. The survey was conducted online from a non-random, self-selected pool of 6,842 respondents. By the standards of statistical science, in other words, the survey’s validity is shaky. It’s better than a Ouija board but not exactly Nate Silver.
According to the website’s press release, sent out by the magnificently named Hannahmae Dela Cruz, the survey asked members to cite the cause of their most recent romantic break-up. This was done in light of the 2016 election and at the dawn, if you want to call it that, of the Trumpian Era. Fully one-third of the women, according to Dela Cruz, said that “political differences” had driven them away from their partners and led to a relationship’s demise. (Partners is the de-sexed, antiseptic term we are now supposed to apply to boyfriends, husbands, wives, and girlfriends). She notes that “2016’s political discourse was particularly divisive and women’s rights were front and center.”
For women, the corrosive power of today’s politics on romance is even greater than that of “bad sex,” the survey found. A relatively paltry 24 percent of women cited bad sex as the “final nail in the coffin,” Dela Cruz writes, in an unfortunate choice of words. She then adds a bit of gratuitous editorializing: “Women are anatomically harder to please.” As they used to say in the ’90s: Talk to the hand.
But what about men, you ask? The survey asked, too. “The biggest relationship deal breaker for men was more superficial,” writes Dela Cruz, editorializing again. The number one reason men cited for their most recent break up was “weight gain.” We can assume the weight gain that disturbed the men was not their own. “Bad sex,” meanwhile, fell to fourth in the list of causes, registering a scant 12 percent. This confirms an ancient and well-established scientific finding: The vast majority of men hold to the belief that “bad sex” is a phenomenon that simply doesn’t exist in nature, like poltergeists or Bigfoot.
We should look for more surveys like this one as the Trumpian Era progresses. The findings can only get worse as marriages and romances collapse in a steamy implosion of political rancor. Our culture today is dominated by a twice-divorced swordsman whose sexual adventures, at least by his own account, make Don Juan look like Emily Dickinson. Given the president’s worsening gender gap in the polls, more and more women will be repulsed by the political opinions of their husbands and boyfriends, even as the guys, true to their own kind of principle, keep a wary eye on the bathroom scales.
