Why Are There So Many Single Men and Women?

There are 4x as many unmarried 40 y/os today than there were just 3 decades ago. What’s happened, and why are so many men and women single and alone?

In the same forum thread that inspired my last article about men who resent women, a separate forum member commented to ask:

Does this still apply when women reject all of their suitors to end up single? Many of the women who rejected me over a year ago are still single. This description could well apply to many single women above 33, say. Can we then declare that the woman's standards were unrealistic or that the criteria that she used to reject were unreasonable and harmful (to her own happiness)? Or would you still argue that she rejected all of those guys and ended up single because she has expectations for men based on her experiences with men the past and she didn't see comparable quality with any of her suitors? This could be a past chad boyfriend but even if she's a virgin it could be male figures in her family e.g. a woman might want a guy to be taller than her baby brother. In that case, would you make the argument that the suitors who got rejected failed to effectively compete with the guys/male figures of the past or would you concede that the women can be blamed here for their standards?

It's true; there are lots of single older women, and more all the time. There are also lots of single older men. There are lots of people in general who are not having committed long-term relationships, and even more of them (single and attached) who do not reproduce.

All this – people remaining single, even while older; people eschewing committed relationships; people remaining childless – are part of a broad sociological trend throughout modern societies. It is not just a Western phenomenon; the same phenomenon is occurring in East Asia, which has a very different society but the same exact issues.

If we want to understand the explosion of older single and childless people, we need to look beyond individual cases and examine broad civilizational trends to grasp what is really happening in human societies.