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Throughout much of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s in the U.S., midlife (ages 30-49) was married life. Just about everyone was married or had been at some point. In 1970, if you were between the ages of 30 and 49 and had never been married, you really were unusual: only 7 percent of midlife U.S. adults fit that description.
Things are dramatically different now. As of 2020, 29 percent of midlife U.S. adults have never been married, a report by Francesca A. Marino of Bowling Green State University has shown. When you sail past 30—maybe long past it—and you have been single the whole time, the experience of single life is likely to be a whole lot different when about 3 out of every 10 adults your age are also life-long single people than when fewer than 1 in 10 are.
Fourteen years ago, when I interviewed a psychotherapist who had worked with many single women, she said that the years leading up to the age of 30 were often the most difficult for them. Even the women who were happily single had exasperating experiences that, even today, will still sound familiar:
“Some women feel that no one believes them if they say they enjoy being single. 'You're just being defensive!' It is difficult to feel supported and affirmed in being a single woman at 30.”
The age of 30 still looms large for some single people who want to marry, and perhaps especially for single women who want to have kids but not without a spouse. And yet, I do see signs that the goalposts are moving, and it is the age of 40 that now seems especially meaningful.
For example, in several contemporary memoirs, women who started out fully expecting to marry and thought that staying single would be shameful came to realize that single life suited them. For example, one of them said, “It has taken me a very, very long time to realize that I’m probably single because I really like being on my own.” Such revelations were coming as they approached the age of 40 or even 50. I’ve never wanted to be married, but when I first started taking notes on single people, a first step toward studying single life and not just living it, I was 39.
Even more impressive than the revelation memoirs are the memoirs of single people who own their single lives from the outset. My favorite is Keturah Kendrick’s No Thanks: Black, Female, and Living in the Martyr-Free Zone. The appeal of single life did not come as a revelation to Kendrick at age 30 or 40 or 50—she knew it all along, and, to her everlasting credit, she did not pretend to be interested in marrying or wanting children in order to seem more like the person other people expected and wanted her to be. That got even easier as she grew older:
“The great gift of aging is the ability to release yourself from responsibility for others’ reaction to you. The relinquishing of such burden comes with an additional prize: finding people’s disapproval or shock about who you are ridiculous.”
Some people live their best lives by being single. That’s how they feel most authentic and most fulfilled. I call them “single at heart.” Once the concept becomes more widely known, people who really are most likely to flourish by living single will be spared the pain of thinking there is something wrong with them and of spending decades of their adult lives trying to be someone they are not.
At the same time, people who are powerfully drawn to coupled life can continue to pursue that life path. Romantic relationship status will become something closer to a choice than a cultural mandate.
There are constraints and obstacles in everyone’s lives—some people’s much more than others’—so no one is totally free to live exactly as they choose. But an easing up on the cultural pressures to organize your life around a romantic partner is a big step toward freeing people to live authentically.
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