All the single ladies...

Another day, another story about how many women will never marry, or are sabotaging their relationships by being too forward, or are going to be single mothers because men are fickle and flighty ... And the main thing that struck me was this: In a country with a fairly even gender split (As both Canada and the USA have) there should be the same number of single men as single women. And, of course, every child has a father (biologically at least). So where are all the stories about single, childless men?

Most of these articles don’t claim that all women are miserable and with they were married, in fact many dwell on the role personal choice plays in the trend, so why wouldn’t we write about when men are getting married, whether they’re getting married and why they might not be getting married in the same numbers as previous generations?

I actually struggled to find clear articles on this issue, and no well set out statistics (unlike about single women where there is a lot of information) but here are some trends I found online:

-In the UK single men aged 30 to 39 outnumber single women

-In Japan 61% of unmarried men don’t have a girlfriend, compared to the 49% of unmarried women who don’t have a boyfriend. (I am unclear on whether this actually just means “someone they’re seeing” and therefore includes LGBT people, or if straight people’s dating lives are all that matter to statisticians.)

-In the USA there are 88 unmarried men for every 100 unmarried women – so there is a difference, and probably a significant one, but it doesn’t seem so drastically different that we shouldn’t worry about those poor single men.

Double standards are ripe across the world, so no surprises there, unfortunately. I just don’t agree with this idea that single women are miserable and single men are happy. It’s one of those core myths that feeds into the notion that women trap men into long term relationships.

Feminist rant over, expect a life update tomorrow that will apparently have to cover three weeks of information because I’m a rubbish blogger ;)