A Singles' Epidemic?
It's Valentine's Day when the spotlight is on couples in love. But like 59 million others in this country, I've caught a bug. It's called the "never-ever been married virus." Its symptoms give you a delirious feeling that you're the only single left on the planet.
It now looks as if I I'm not alone but a part of either an epidemic or an emerging "in" crowd. I recently read an article in Business Week that said it very poignantly, "We're on the verge of becoming - at least in the legal sense - a nation of singletons."
This article goes on to say, "Families consisting of breadwinner dads and stay-at-home moms now account for just one-tenth of all households." Could married folks be on their way to becoming an endangered species?
With all the pink hearts hanging from stores' ceilings today, you'd never know that singles are becoming the giants in this land. Apparently, this epidemic has never hit the country so hard. The U.S. Census Bureau (2004) says that the number of never-married women ages 30 to 34 during the period 1970 to 2000 increased more than three times (from 6 to 22 percent). Men experienced a similarly dramatic increase in singleness, from 9 to 30 percent.
Another article I bumped into (I'm not a geek or anything like that; I was just doing research for a project...seriously) said that for probably the first time, more American women are living without a husband than with one. According to this New York Times article "In 2005, 51 percent of women said they were living without a spouse, up from 35 percent in 1950 and 49 percent in 2000."
I should add that the majority of these women interviewed in the article enjoyed being single!
What about the guys? They can't stay divorced or widowed for too long. This article says that "over all, a larger share of men are married and living with their spouse - about 53 percent." Looks like they have been immunized for this virus.
On one hand, I'm glad that I'm not alone in this crowd of 59 million never-marrieds (89,000 million total singles), but I can't help wonder how and why this virus is spreading?
But.....then.....who is getting all the roses today?
Happy Valentine's Day!
It now looks as if I I'm not alone but a part of either an epidemic or an emerging "in" crowd. I recently read an article in Business Week that said it very poignantly, "We're on the verge of becoming - at least in the legal sense - a nation of singletons."
This article goes on to say, "Families consisting of breadwinner dads and stay-at-home moms now account for just one-tenth of all households." Could married folks be on their way to becoming an endangered species?
With all the pink hearts hanging from stores' ceilings today, you'd never know that singles are becoming the giants in this land. Apparently, this epidemic has never hit the country so hard. The U.S. Census Bureau (2004) says that the number of never-married women ages 30 to 34 during the period 1970 to 2000 increased more than three times (from 6 to 22 percent). Men experienced a similarly dramatic increase in singleness, from 9 to 30 percent.
Another article I bumped into (I'm not a geek or anything like that; I was just doing research for a project...seriously) said that for probably the first time, more American women are living without a husband than with one. According to this New York Times article "In 2005, 51 percent of women said they were living without a spouse, up from 35 percent in 1950 and 49 percent in 2000."
I should add that the majority of these women interviewed in the article enjoyed being single!
What about the guys? They can't stay divorced or widowed for too long. This article says that "over all, a larger share of men are married and living with their spouse - about 53 percent." Looks like they have been immunized for this virus.
On one hand, I'm glad that I'm not alone in this crowd of 59 million never-marrieds (89,000 million total singles), but I can't help wonder how and why this virus is spreading?
But.....then.....who is getting all the roses today?
Happy Valentine's Day!
1 Comments:
I had your blog sent to me by a (recently ex-Christian single) woman friend - I hope you don't mind your first comment here being from a guy (that's me) - hey, it might be a good sign, think about it ;-)
I have been thinking of starting a blog for Christian singles in general (never being one that thought that isolating the sexes is a valuable thing), and your topic here went along with a blog I wrote at my myspace page a while ago, so I have quoted from it a bit here:
Have you ever thought about the fact with with all the blizzard of books, movies, TV shows and general discussion there has been on how to have a successful man / woman relationship that has been written since the "sexual revolution" that started in the 1960's; that there are more and more people WITHOUT those relationships than before the whole thing started? Why is that? I was married for 15 years (and divorced for almost 7 now) and led a singles group for about 4 years of my "current singleness" period and I have spent long discussions on this subject with both men and women.
As a result, I have got to be one of the most "metrosexually evolved" (if that isn't a current cultural buzz name group, it will be soon, you heard it here first and you can use it free) guy that most of the women I know say they have met. That's all well and good, but it does take TWO to make this whole thing work - at least until they get the bugs out of that holographic thing, and it still doesn't sound like something that will replace "the real thing", although I'm sure many will tryo to do that - overall, I'm pretty sure that at least some of the real purpose behind all the technology out these days is to isolate people even more than they are already.
So, why is it so hard for everyone to connect if everyone has spent so much time preparing and improving themselves to be ready for that great relationship that always seems to be just around the corner that you never seem to get to before the person this is around it goes around the next corner?
I'm wondering if it's because we've been taught to demand so much from this nirvana place in the clouds that we are really fast to write people off as not having enough of the things on our check list in a possibly 2 second glance over that we spend most of our time in a constant state of rejection of everyone we see before have any idea whatsoever of who they even are. And why wouldn't we? We wizz by people in our cars with not much more than a blurred picture in our minds of their faces, we watch news and 30 minute TV shows formatted for about 22 minutes of "face time" after commercials with charatcters that we evaluate and think we "know" and have decided if we "like" or not in the first minute of the show. We know so much that we think we can make decisions on everyone and everything around us in seconds - and we feel that we HAVE to because if we DON'T, we won't have time for getting to and finding "the good stuff".
And I am in that just as much as anyone - I have this radar that won't shut up in me that tells me yes or no everytime I meet anyone - and I'm talking not just single women, anyone. Overall, I do think a lot of this is an intuition that has proven to be pretty much reliable in recent years, but part of me constantly wonders if there may have been a baby thrown out with the bathwater somewhere along the road here.
So - yes, isolation and lack of relationship is a growing problem, and I think it is a worldwide problem as well, not just in the US.
Still - I want to sign off on a happier note - out of my core group of single friends from the singles group I was in, about 3/4 have married in the last 3 years, and some for the first time - see Susan Isaac's "Gray Matter Blog" here at http://susanisaacs.blogspot.com/ for she and my best friend Larry's diary of their journey from intenet meeting to wedding - that aught to make you feel a little better after all the stuff I just wrote ;-)
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