Why So many Singles?

The tip-offs are everywhere, from the grocery store to the newsstand.

Stouffer’s alone now makes 86 different frozen foods designed to feed just one person. Want ads in search of relationships are so pervasive they’ve even reached the august New York Review of Books. And dating services have proliferated to the point they are targeted to such subgroups as the physically handicapped and the astrologically inclined.

The U.S. Census Bureau confirms it: Singleness is the highest it’s been since the early part of the century. According to Steve Rawlings, a Census Bureau family demographer, about 41% of all adults of marriageable age (15 and older) are now single. That includes the never-married, the divorced and the widowed.

The numbers are so high that “we’ve begun to accept the idea of non-traditional households as being normal,” said Susan Hayward of the Yankelovich Clancy Shulman market-research company.

It’s what demographers call a “glacial” trend--one that creeps up on us. In the case of singles, their percentage of the total population has been inching upward since about 1960, when it hit a 20th-Century low of 32%.

The rise of singlehood in recent years, particularly among people in their 20s and 30s, has led Rawlings and others to predict that the percentage of people who will never marry--now about 5%--is likely to double by the end of the century.

Why are so many opting for the single life? Or, to put it another way, why does it seem so difficult for people to get and stay married these days?

There are nearly as many explanations as there are single people. But among the theories most frequently cited are the growing economic independence of women; the high divorce rate; an increase in longevity, and thus more widows and widowers; more reliable birth control; the acceptance of cohabitation without marriage; the emphasis on career achievement.

Some experts also suspect that, as society becomes more accepting of alternative life styles, fewer homosexuals feel the need to marry to hide their sexual orientation. But these experts could cite no studies to support their suspicions, and whether such a trend would make a statistical difference is uncertain.

Perhaps the most often-heard explanation is simple economics. As women have received more education, moved into the workplace and become capable of supporting themselves in greater numbers, the theory goes, they have felt less pressure to marry for economic security.

“The financial gains to marriage have been going down,” said economist Thomas Espenshade, senior fellow at the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C. “Women have less and less of an incentive to get married. . . . Their earning power is approaching parity with men, at least it is for black women . . . as female education has risen, wage rates for women have risen.”

Louise Bernikow, author of “Alone in America,” sees “a social and emotional thing” that goes with that freedom.

“If you don’t need a man to support you,” she said, “you’re much freer to judge a man as a companion. A lot of women, who used to put up with certain kinds of male behavior, don’t do it anymore.”

Like many observers of trends in marital status, Espenshade said that the current level of singlehood is not unusual if you consider the patterns of the last century. Around the turn of the century, he said, the percentage of single adults was slightly higher than it is now--about 46%. In that sense, the marriage boom of the 1950s was an aberration, and only now are things getting back to normal.

But if the improved financial status of women accounts for fewer marriage vows in recent decades, what explains the similarly high level of singles in the late-19th and early 20th centuries?

“You have to look at it through the eyes of the man,” Espenshade said. “The man was saying to himself, ‘Can I afford to support a whole family?’ ” As living standards gradually rose, “men could say to themselves that it’s easier to take on the responsibilities of a family.” Reliable birth control has also meant that children aren’t necessarily a fact of married life.

University of Minnesota historian Elaine Tyler May, who chronicled marriage and divorce patterns from 1880 to 1930 in “Great Expectations: Marriage and Divorce in Post-Victorian America,” said that being single was once “a much more legitimate option.”

“In the 1930s, ‘40s and especially the ‘50s, the percentage of women getting married increased, and by the 1950s there were powerful stigmas against men and women who weren’t married, both political and sexual,” she said.

May doesn’t buy the notion that improved economic status for women sent the rate of unmarried adults back up after the ‘50s. “There are more women who manage to survive on salaries today than there were in the ‘50s,” she said, “but women are still desperately underpaid. There are a lot of other historical and political issues that have a very powerful effect on behavior.”

She pointed to the Cold War--”when people needed security and didn’t risk deviating from a consensus life style”--as a major factor in the postwar marriage boom that continued through 1960.

“The generation that grew up in the homes of the 1950s saw the tensions in them. They rejected the premises of the Cold War, the containment, both politically and domestically,” she said. “The movements that followed--the women’s movement, the anti-war movement, the gay liberation movement and the civil rights movement--are all reactions against the era of the Cold War.”

As May sees it, children of the baby boom era are far more similar to their grandparents than to their parents.

“In the early 20th Century, we had a powerful women’s movement, we had a lot of single people, we had a lot of grass-roots political activism, we had a spirit of social reform, we had movements on behalf of black people and we had a huge burst of new popular culture modes: dancing, music, amusement halls. In the 1960s we had the same things. . . .

“It’s the generation in between that stands out as different. They married very young in huge, huge numbers and conformed to middle-of-the-road consensus politics.”

Now, she said, “it’s much more legitimate to be single, but it still isn’t economically viable, especially for women.”

Or perhaps men either. Warren Farrell, the author of “Why Men Are the Way They Are,” believes men are increasingly reluctant to marry because of what they perceive as numerous inequalities in modern wedlock.

“Men are finding more incentive to be single because they feel commitment creates an unequal promise,” said Farrell. “Let’s say a successful woman meets a successful man. From his perspective, the successful woman is saying, ‘I would like three options once we commit: to continue my success as a career woman, to be involved full-time with my family, or some combination of the two.’ He sees he has only one option: work full time, work full time or work full time.”

Economic Reason

Farrell accepts the notion that before the 1960s, couples married primarily for economic stability and that today’s couples marry mostly for personal fulfillment. But he claims it is economics that still keeps many men from signing on the dotted line.

“Once there is a family, the man intuitively knows that a woman is far more likely to leave the workplace than he is . . . . The crucial thing is that marriage means she will be paid by his paycheck for focusing on intimacy and he will be paid for being away from the very intimacy he hoped to create.”

Los Angeles therapist Barbara de Angelis, a relationship specialist who appears on Cable News Network and KABC-TV Channel 7, also finds today’s men more reticent about marrying because of economic uncertainties.

“I can tell you many stories of men who are resisting getting serious with somebody because their fantasy was: I’ll have a house and I’ll have it made by the time I’m at least in my 30s,” said De Angelis, author of “How to Make Love All the Time.”

“They’re finding out that’s often not the case, especially in Southern California. They think marriage means ‘I’m a success’ and they don’t feel successful. A lot of them are having to let go of that idea.”

To postpone dealing with commitment issues, many singles have decided simply to live together.

Paul Glick, a 40-year U.S. Census Bureau veteran who is now an adjunct professor of sociology at Arizona State University, sees a huge increase in activities that “replace marriage,” such as cohabitation.

“People are going to school longer, they’re becoming more independent in their thinking, they are less likely to be tradition-minded,” he said. “They are likely to accommodate the (marital status) situation to their own interests and preferences. There’s more tolerance of variation from the norm, and this is one demonstration of that.”

Larry Bumpass, a demographer who teaches in the sociology department at the University of Wisconsin, has been looking at cohabitation as part of a major federally funded study of families.

“We find that it (cohabitation) has almost become the majority pattern,” said Bumpass, who expects to publish his findings later this year. “In virtually half of all recent marriages, people lived together before they were married and about half of all people in their early 30s have lived with someone outside of marriage.”

Bumpass also found that only about 60% of those in cohabitation arrangements will go on to marry their partners. He cites industrialization and shifts in society brought about by the changing economy as largely responsible for the fact that single people--and to some extent married people--generally depend less on family relationships for their social needs.

Instead of relying on a spouse and children, singles may develop many sources for such experiences. “I see people who choose singlehood as developing a viable alternative life style where the focus may be on career, education, relationships, political activities, community involvements--a number of other issues,” said Peter Stein, a professor of sociology at William Patterson College. “Marriage may be No. 6 on the agenda, not No. 1.”

Multiple Sources

Social psychologist Jerald Jellison, a USC psychology professor, agreed:

“Instead of having one person to turn to to provide all of the different resources and satisfy all your different needs, (a single person) may have one person to turn to for recreation and entertainment, another person who provides intellectual stimulation, someone else for sexual activities or for shopping or for sharing personal problems.

“You have multiple sources of supply--smaller, partial commitments to a lot of different people . . . . You don’t have the benefits of total commitment, but on the other hand, if one of those relationships breaks off, you’re not left high and dry.”

One result of having so many options is frequently ambivalence about marriage, says Susan Page, author of “If I’m So Wonderful, Why Am I Still Single?”

“There are many competing priorities in our lives that make it very appealing to be single and very scary for some people to be in intimate relationships. And yet people who are alone feel like they’d like to have intimacy in their lives,” said Page, a former management consultant who now conducts seminars for singles. “The result is real, genuine ambivalence and people not making a goal and a systematic plan about getting married the way they would if they were looking for an apartment.”

Author Bernikow, who notes that modern conveniences make it easier for individuals to care for their own needs without help, sees a decline in human interaction across the board. “You used to need people to do everything,” she said. “Now many people have jobs where they stare at computer terminals all day.”

She sees the prevalence such technologies as just one of many factors working to the detriment of personal relationships. “We’re encouraged by everything in our culture to be entirely selfish,” said Bernikow, who lives with her boyfriend. “Relationships have less visible rewards than working 18 hours a day and getting promotions. Relationships are messy. People don’t want to put up with them or take the time. We live in a very now culture. Relationships require sticking with something, which we’re not acculturated to do.”

‘Relationship Burnout’

Therapist De Angelis has found a lot of what she calls “relationship burnout”--the feeling, after several serious relationships, that people can’t trust love. “Many of them are relearning how to be in relationships and they’re opting to not be with anybody unless it’s the right person,” she said. “That means getting rid of those in-between relationships. . . . It’s finally hit people of our generation that they’re looking for quality instead of quantity.”

Whatever the reason for being single these days, it’s apparently viewed with less suspicion. “Thirty years ago, 80% of Americans said people were strange if they were single,” said Hayward of the Yankelovich firm. “Now, 80% of Americans say there’s nothing wrong with that choice at all.”

The future of singlehood is hard to predict, the experts agreed. Peter Morrison, director of the Rand Corp.’s Population Research Center, said that its popularity may continue to slowly increase. But he said there could be a renaissance in family life, though “never to the levels of 25 years ago.”

Hayward said individuality probably has hit its peak: “We got pretty far out on that limb and it got pretty lonesome out there. It doesn’t necessarily mean a return to marriage, but it does mean more emphasis on lasting human relationships.”

A few see a major change coming, if only in the way single people interact and arrange their households. “People are very lonely being single,” said New York market research analyst Faith Popcorn of the BrainReserve. “They are forming family units of non-blood relations. They’re into multiple cocooning--living together with friends have having Thanksgiving meals together and doing all the things to insulate themselves from the very tough world that’s coming.”