The uplifting/crappy truth about being a single woman

So I finally read the much-talked-about article in The Atlantic called "All the Single Ladies," which has even inspired a TV series. Holy cow, I need to have a cigarette and schedule having a drink at a dive bar with a smart female friend who will listen to me talk about this article all night. OK, I'm back. So the summary is this: "Recent years have seen an explosion of male joblessness and a steep decline in men’s life prospects that have disrupted the 'romantic market' in ways that narrow a marriage-minded woman’s options: increasingly, her choice is between deadbeats (whose numbers are rising) and playboys (whose power is growing). But this strange state of affairs also presents an opportunity: as the economy evolves, it’s time to embrace new ideas about romance and family—and to acknowledge the end of 'traditional' marriage as society’s highest ideal."

First of all, any single woman should read this piece, especially if you're fascinated by the sociology of marriage and family. Men should read it too. It's not threatening, though some parts are the uncomfortable truth for both men and women. We have to face facts: Marriage and mating is evolving -- producing questions we don't have the answer to yet.

I could obviously write a lot of personal reflection about how this article hits home, especially for a "single white female" in her 20s with a professional job in New York City (gawd, could I be any more cliche?). At first I was afraid to read this, because, like the author (Kate Bolick, a decade older than me) and most women of my generation, I always kinda reckoned I'd like to get married and pop out some babies at some point. But, also, like the author and many women, I have already rejected the traditional road to marriage several times, pretty much thwarting the obvious path at every opportunity. It makes me go, wow, where am I going to be in 10 years and will anyone be there to make babies with me?

At first I felt depressed that she pointed out the truth I kinda noticed among single men in my appropriate age group: They don't want to commit and they also seem to be held back by some sort of absolute confusion about what the role of men in society really is and freaked out by confusing women like myself who want traditional things but are also very independent. Poor men! It's confusing for all of us! But, by the end of the article, I realized it doesn't have to be so confusing. I felt liberated and ready to face my strange love/hate relationship with Disney princesses. Hey, isn't it great to be a single woman who doesn't have to rely on marriage? That's not a rejection of men at all. Actually, it means that women like me who plan to be economically independent don't have to rely on men and be forced into marriage. Instead, we can seek out loving and supportive relationships with men that intrigue us and make good partners...Ideally...We won't get into that.

The article is interesting, honest, soul-crushing and uplifting all at once. Mostly I just feel refreshed.

So, if you're still intrigued, here are a few of my favorite passages that I copied and pasted while reading. (Also, can I just add how funny it is that two creepy old men are looking at me strangely while I type this in Starbucks? Classic!!!)

• Today, a smaller proportion of American women in their early 30s are married than at any other point since the 1950s, if not earlier. We’re also marrying less—with a significant degree of change taking place in just the past decade and a half. In 1997, 29 percent of my Gen X cohort was married; among today’s Millennials that figure has dropped to 22 percent. (Compare that with 1960, when more than half of those ages 18 to 29 had already tied the knot.) These numbers reflect major attitudinal shifts. According to the Pew Research Center, a full 44 percent of Millennials and 43 percent of Gen Xers think that marriage is becoming obsolete.
• Today 40 percent of children are born to single mothers.
• Do I want children? My answer is: I don’t know. But somewhere along the way, I decided to not let my biology dictate my romantic life.
• Even as women have seen their range of options broaden in recent years—for instance, expanding the kind of men it’s culturally acceptable to be with, and making it okay not to marry at all—the new scarcity disrupts what economists call the “marriage market” in a way that in fact narrows the available choices, making a good man harder to find than ever.
• In societies with too many women, the theory holds, fewer people marry, and those who do marry do so later in life. Because men take advantage of the variety of potential partners available to them, women’s traditional roles are not valued, and because these women can’t rely on their partners to stick around, more turn to extrafamilial ambitions like education and career.
• The early 1990S witnessed the dawn of “hookup culture” at universities, as colleges stopped acting in loco parentis, and undergraduates, heady with freedom, started throwing themselves into a frenzy of one-night stands. Depending on whom you ask, this has either liberated young women from being ashamed of their sexual urges, or forced them into a promiscuity they didn’t ask for. Young men, apparently, couldn’t be happier.
• Once, when my father consoled me, with the best of intentions, for being so unlucky in love, I bristled. I’d gotten to know so many interesting men, and experienced so much. Wasn’t that a form of luck?
• Intending a parallel with terms like racism and sexism, DePaulo says singlism is “the stigmatizing of adults who are single [and] includes negative stereotyping of singles and discrimination against singles.”
• Some even believe that the pair bond, far from strengthening communities (which is both the prevailing view of social science and a central tenet of social conservatism), weakens them, the idea being that a married couple becomes too consumed with its own tiny nation of two to pay much heed to anyone else.
• Now that women are financially independent, and marriage is an option rather than a necessity, we are free to pursue what the British sociologist Anthony Giddens termed the “pure relationship,” in which intimacy is sought in and of itself and not solely for reproduction.