Demography and the single girl

LAST WEEK, THE Census Bureau released data from 2000 showing that single, childless households are now the largest segment of the population.

I was so surprised by this that I nearly spilled my Chinese takeout into the sink I was standing and eating over. Could it be that single people, the perennial icons of cat-owning, dirty-sock-wearing pathos, are finally getting their due?

Well, numbers don’t lie. According to the report, individual households (that’s people living alone without children) represent 31.6% of the population. That’s a 21% increase since 1990. Married or unmarried couples with children accounted for a mere 31.3%.

As personally validating as these figures are for single people like me and many of my friends and neighbors -- who have mastered such solo arts as doing laundry in the nude -- I suspect many of us are also feeling a bit smug. The advent of speed dating and online personals has fostered a climate of marriage mania. When it’s possible to make the New York Times wedding pages without even being heterosexual, you might think the institution of singleness has gone the way of disco.

But despite our culture’s obsession with finding love, or at least having the opportunity to register for dessert spoons, we now learn that single people are on the top of the demographic heap. Granted, some of the increase is surely because of divorce. But the divorce rate is roughly the same now as it was in 1990. So what accounts for these figures? Could it be inspiring role models like Bridget Jones, the Seinfeld gang and those pillars of emotional stability known as the women from “Sex and the City”?

Actually, yes. At first glance, their lives seem like odes to consumer debt-ridden loneliness, the emotional equivalent of a very expensive collection of unmatched shoes. But when you think about it, singleness is actually looking pretty good. It’s not just that characters like Carrie Bradshaw seemed to have infinitely better lives than their partnered counterparts on “The Sopranos.” It’s that, even in real life, living alone can be a whole lot easier than sharing square footage with others. And that’s never been truer than it is today.

I’m not just talking about a decrease in social stigma. Sure, people of my parents’ generation probably could not have remained single into their 30s or 40s without being regarded as misfits or (even if they happened to be accountants) “bohemians.” However, the necessity back then for a household to be self-sufficient brought on other challenges, which were generally met by having a spouse.

As a single householder, I can admit that sometimes the only thing standing between me and any number of health and safety violations is my reliance on, and ability to pay for, a corps of capable and often underpaid people who clean my gutters, keep the rats out of my yard and tell me that if I don’t get my trees trimmed, those tiki torches I use for all my parties are going to create more than just ambience.

That might sound like a particularly grating and bourgeois way of lamenting my lack of a power-tool-owning significant other, but I’ve been on enough dates in wine bars to know that a lot of men my age don’t know gutter cleaning from grout work. And if you’ll forgive me while I indulge this (purely hypothetical) sexist line of reasoning, let me say that a lot of women don’t know how to clean a bathroom or hem a pair of pants. In my parents’ generation, such deficiencies were usually compensated for by a spouse. Today, there are plenty of us who can’t do much besides earn the money to hire extra help.

Last week’s report did not specify how many of the 31.6% of single householders were middle or upper-middle class. But I’d bet what little money I have left at the end of the month that the vast majority earn considerably more than the average per capita income, which in 2003 was just over $23,000. And one thing I don’t have to bet money on is the fact that the majority of single dwellers are women. In 2003, women represented 57.5% of single householders.

As for purchasing homes, the National Assn. of Realtors reports that women are twice as likely as single men to own their own homes. Of those women, three-fourths are childless.

That’s bad news not only for single mothers but for single men, who seem to be suffering an image crisis lately. If the weekend box-office receipts for “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” are any indication, bachelors who collect action figures have replaced Haagen-Dazs-gorging Miss Lonely-hearts as the punch line/cautionary tale du jour.

It’s women -- now more interested in real estate than in shoes -- who are leading the pack. But before we start congratulating ourselves for edging past all those happier-than-thou couples, we’d do well to recognize that living alone doesn’t come cheap. Our cultural preoccupation with matchmaking may be on the wane, but only for those who can afford it.