Lone Stars: Being Single

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While polls show that men are warming to the idea of marriage, women are increasingly in a financial, emotional and professional position to weigh carefully all the trappings that come with the institution. Because they are more conscious of the tradeoffs—women still do more of the housework and childcare—they are increasingly unwilling, Coontz finds, "to put up with something that violates their sense of fairness."

Married-couple households have dominated America's demographic landscape since the country's founding. In the 1950s, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, they comprised 80 percent of all households. But married couples make up only 50.7 percent of households today. Any moment now, 86 million single adults will define the new majority, some by design and some by default. While many are actively looking for Ms. or Mr. Right, most are also busy leading full lives, including having children. Today, unmarried Americans make up 42 percent of the workforce, 40 percent of home buyers, 35 percent of voters. There is even an official holiday dubbed "National Singles Week."

HOLY "MATRIMANIA"

DePaulo believes the growing number of singles is the hidden force behind what she calls "matrimania," the glorification of marriage and, especially, the cultural obsession with weddings. "Americans feel insecure about the place of marriage," she observes. "It no longer appears to be the only path to happiness."

Even as singlehood is becoming the de facto norm, people who choose to go through life solo are deliberately kept in a state of confusion about their own motives by a culture that clings to the marriage standard. Typically, says DePaulo, singles are told that they are selfish for pursuing their own life goals. If you're single and you have a great job to which you devote energy, you're typically told your job won't love you back. Of course, singles are always suspect as tragic losers in the game of love. But most of all they are told through commercials, images and endless articles that they will never be truly happy and deeply fulfilled unless they are married.

"The battlefield is now psychological," says DePaulo. Single women today have work opportunities, economic independence and reproductive freedom. "The things that can be legislated are all done," she notes. "The last great way to keep women in their place is to remind them that they are incomplete. Even if you think you're happy, the messages go, you don't know real happiness." There's a hunger out there for a new view of singles.

Still, we've come a long way since the 19th century, when unmarried women were labeled spinsters or old maids and relegated to an inferior status. In the 1970s, a single Mary Tyler Moore bounced into America's heart with her professional ambition, dream of independence—and an endearing faux-family of coworkers and neighbors. Today television singles like Carrie Bradshaw lead such full, active lives that, like their real-life counterparts, they are sometimes ambivalent about marriage. As a 26-year-old account executive puts it, "I don't need a man in my life. I don't need or want a relationship because I am lacking anything. I want it only to add or enrich."