Stories from the 1% in India: Women Who Stay Single for Life
What is it like to stay single for life in a place where 99% get married?
In many places around the world, staying single for life is becoming more commonplace. In Australia and New Zealand, for example, as of 2010, 14% of women — 1 out of every 7 — got to their late forties without ever marrying. In Latin America and the Caribbean, it was 13%, and in Europe and North America, around 11%.
In central and southern Asia, though — including places such as India, Iran, and Afghanistan –that number is just 1%. Marriage is nearly universal.
The differences among different regions of the world are not just demographic. There are also enormous cultural differences between, say, India and the United States.
Writings about single life are overwhelmingly based on Western nations — particularly the writings that get attention in those nations. But the experience of living single can be strikingly different in different places. That’s one of the reasons why voices from all around the globe are so very important.
In Single by Choice: Happily Unmarried Women, edited by Kalpana Sharma, 13 happily single women in India describe their experiences. They have very different backgrounds and life stories, so each…
