The Rise of the Singletons
Has the rise of individualism made marriage obsolete?
In the 1990s, my father taught a course on engineering at Boston University. The class was almost all men. But every semester, a few token women would show up for the first day of class and never return.
My dad used to joke they were “husband hunting.”
One of his one-day-only students went on to marry the owner of the Boston Red Sox. She did not become an engineer.
Although women still lag in STEM fields, taking an engineering class to nail a husband would be laughable to most women today. Sure, the pressure to get married and have kids is still there, but it is far less.
But lately, all those women choosing singlehood are terrifying conservatives.
You might have seen the splashy headlines in the last few months — “Study Predicts 45% of Women Will be Single by 2030.” The “study” was released four years ago, but its grim warning recently got a second wind on incel boards, Reddit, and conservative influencers’ social media channels.
The study was conducted by Morgan Stanley Research — a research institution under the investment bank Morgan Stanley. Unlike any nonpartisan research group, Morgan Stanley does not disclose their data sets but claims to base their…
