Editor’s Note: Jill Filipovic is a journalist based in New York and author of the book “OK Boomer, Let’s Talk: How My Generation Got Left Behind.” Follow her on Twitter. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely her own. View more opinion on CNN.
The percentage of Americans living alone has hit a record high: Nearly 30% of all US households are comprised of just one person, according to the US Census Bureau. This shift suggests significant feminist progress – and, if our policies and institutions don’t adapt, significant pitfalls.
In 1940, just about 8% of American households were made up of “solitaires.” By 1970, it was nearly 18%, and by 2022, it had skyrocketed to close to 30%.
Part of this shift reflects an expanding universe of opportunities for young people and for women in particular. With more women going to college and participating in the workforce, the old model of female dependence on a male earner has largely fallen by the wayside. As a result, most women don’t have to marry in order to find financial security or social approval.
Partly as a result of this decades-long surge of women into higher education and the workforce, Americans are marrying later than ever before, and less often than ever before. While the average woman in 1950 married at age 20 and the average man at 23, by early 2021 those ages were around 28 and 30, respectively. And the more educated a woman is, the later she weds: The average woman with a graduate degree now marries in her 30s, according to Bowling Green’s National Center for Family & Marriage Research.
But, perhaps contrary to stereotypes, the more education a woman has, the more likely she is to tie the knot – she’ll do it later, but her marriage may also be more egalitarian and it is statistically less likely to end. According to a recent Pew study, one-third of American 40-year-olds with a high school degree or less have never married, compared to fewer than one in five Americans with a bachelor’s degree or more. This education gap in marriage is now well-documented by researchers, and cause for some concern: What happens when marriage becomes a class privilege?
These later marriages (or no marriages at all) mean more years as a single person. While many American young adults spend at least some of these single years living with their parents or with roommates, many also live alone.
For many Americans – especially those with college degrees – this period of less-fettered young adulthood brings myriad benefits. People who spend their 20s and even 30s single often enjoy all kinds of opportunities that were far less available to previous generations: opportunities to make deep friendships the center of one’s social and emotional life, to travel and adventure, to explore our own needs and desires, to live alone, to pursue our passions and careers without the weight of multiple dependents, to date around and figure out what it is we actually want, like and need in a partner.
The economic self-sufficiency that so many women now enjoy means that far fewer women have to settle for abusive or unkind partners – or even those who are perfectly decent, but just not the right fit for them.
I suspect that most Americans would not want to return to a time when it was normal for girls to get married as teenagers. But the rise of single American households is not all ascendant girl bosses and brunches with friends.
If this radical rise of American singles brought along with it a radical reshaping of community ties, family structures and opportunities for human connection, it might be an unqualified good. Instead, though, an increase in singles has coincided with an increase in disconnection, isolation and loneliness, all of which are associated with poorer mental, physical and financial health. Those “deaths of despair” we hear about so often – deaths from suicide, drug overdoses and alcohol – are more concentrated among unmarried men, and men are much more likely than women to live by themselves (women, notably, are much more likely to live with their children).
The typical American living alone is less likely to be the 30-year-old career woman and more likely to be a 70-year-old divorced man: A study found that while 9% of 25-to-34-year-olds in 2015 live alone, more than a quarter of those over 65 do.
This relatively new and seemingly growing mass of singles, though, don’t seem particularly well-served by American policy and our institutions. If we want more Americans to thrive regardless of whether or not they’re partnered, we need those policies and institutions to change in line with the public they’re supposed to benefit.
Despite the fact that our lives and family make-ups have undergone transformational changes in the last few decades, our political policies, support systems and workplaces stay stuck in the past, and still operate under the false presumption that nearly all Americans live in traditional nuclear families. For many Americans, health insurance is tied to employment, or a spouse’s employment, putting singles at a disadvantage; while a couple has two shots at enjoying the benefit of employer-sponsored health insurance, a single person can only rely on themselves for what should be a universal benefit.
Single people who live alone are also, by definition, on their own when it comes to housing – and stuck in a nation where housing is increasingly expensive, particularly in the large cities where single people tend to congregate and find community.
There are few options for deeply integrated, more community-oriented ways of living. Much of the United States has been parceled off into single-family homes built for nuclear families and connected by vast expanse of roadway navigable primarily by car; this has the effect of isolating us from each other, making it harder to meet other people, decreasing casual day-to-day interactions and making many of our lives smaller and lonelier. As The Washington Post’s Emily Badger put it almost a decade ago, “We’re increasingly a nation of single people, but we’re still living, quite literally, in a world built for families.”
Many men who marry enjoy a significant pay bump, and married people generally enjoy tax breaks and the discount of sharing household expenses. As other prosperous and developed nations have expanded their social safety nets and given their citizens benefits including universal or affordable childcare, paid parental leave, paid vacation, paid sick days, extensive job protections, reasonable retirement plans and generous unemployment insurance, the US has made women the safety net. This is hard enough for women who are partnered. For women who aren’t, it’s a set-up for failure.
And while people are single longer, conservative states are restricting or banning abortion and thereby making it harder for women, single or not, to decide whether and when to have children – forcing a great many single women into parenthood to their physical, emotional and financial detriment. The number of elderly singles is also on the rise, and they’re also imperiled by the lack of a social safety net, which puts more pressure on younger women who disproportionately become caregivers for parents.
American household demographics have changed significantly in the past half-century. Those changes demand that our policies and institutions change, too, in order to meet people where they are and to lay the foundations for human well-being.
Most people thrive when they have connection, community, material stability, and a life that feels meaningful, but few of us can build these things on our own. We need communities with the infrastructure to foster relationships, not more suburban sprawl and isolation in cars. We need policies that allow people to access to the basics – healthcare and days off when they’re sick; support for children and the elderly – without assuming that women, and often mothers and single women, will pick up the slack. We need cultural and legal shifts that allow for a variety of relationships to be affirmed, recognized, celebrated and rewarded.
Single life can be joyful or lonely, empowering or demoralizing. For many people, it’s all of those things. What it doesn’t have to be, though, is politically ignored and culturally marginalized, especially as the number of single households continues to rise.
