Is coupledom the end all be all? Or can a person thrive in this season of singleness and grow where they are?
According to a businesswire.com article, 2.5 million couples around the nation are getting ready to say “I do.” And according to The Knot Real Weddings Study 2022 marks the height of the wedding boom.
While the wedding bells are going off for so many brides, that leaves a huge segment of the population who are charting out their own paths.
According to Pewresearch.org, women are the most likely to be single later in life with about roughly half of women ages 65 and older remaining unpartnered (49 percent), while those ages 30 to 49 are the least likely to be single (19 percent). Roughly three-in-ten women ages 18 to 29 (32 percent) and 50 to 64 (29 percent) are single.
Men’s singleness range is quite different, according to Pew, which reveals that men younger than 30 are typically the most likely to be single. Research also notes that nearly half of men in this age group (51 percent) are single, in comparison to only 27 percent of those ages 30 to 49 and 50 to 64 and 21 percent of men 65 and older.
“The fact that men and women tend to be single at very different stages of life reflects both men’s shorter life expectancy and their tendency to marry later in life than women,” according to the article.
What is a single woman to do in the meantime if it’s not their time yet to date or marry?
According to an article from, The Strategic Singlehood of Black Women, being in a season of singleness is not a death sentence but rather a time to live your best life, sis.
According to the article, a growing rate of single people has continued to be an ever-increasing trend over the decades in the United States and around the world.
Even more interesting is why unmarried Black women are at the head of their peers including Latinx, white, and Asian American women.
“If you were to guess why so many Black women in the U.S. were not married, what would you say?” The article notes. “If you pointed to rates of incarceration and mortality for Black men, or if you said that Black women earn more college degrees than Black men, you would be citing the kinds of factors that most often get discussed by social science researchers and opinion writers. And those factors are not irrelevant, but they leave out something important.”
That important piece is what Wayne State University assistant professor Jessica D. Moorman said in the article is, “Black women’s agency in their single status.”
Black women have a choice in the matter and are not “just pushed by external forces.”
Mass media at times makes it seem that Black women are all desperate for a mate, but, “Sometimes they choose to be single.”
“Even if they want to marry eventually, these women often lead a purposeful single life in which they pursue goals that are important to them,” according to the article.
Moorman completed in-depth interviews with 24 Black women from Detroit (varying in ages from 25 to 46) who never married, were divorced or were widowed.
The findings, reported in Socializing singlehood: Personal, Interpersonal, and Sociocultural Factors Shaping Black Women’s Single Lives, in Psychology of Women Quarterly, show that the women led robust single lives marked by intentionality and were extremely “beneficial.”
“Singlehood is in and of itself a strategy for managing one’s broader life goals and responsibilities, one that afforded participants more control over their time, resources and relationships to men,” according to the article, which adds that while some of the women did “express frustrations” with their singleness, it stemmed from desiring more opportunities for companionship or for expressing their sexual frustration.
“They worried about staying single if they wanted to marry. They also recognized that people who marry are rewarded with substantial social and economic benefits, just for being married; even the single women who liked being single were unhappy about that singlism,” the article said.
The lives of the single Black women were being lived out on purpose, however, with their time being spent on:
- Obtaining an education
- Traveling
- Employment and entrepreneurship
- Financial planning, money management and property ownership
- Emotional growth and self-discovery
- Spiritual growth
- Community involvement
“Singlehood was complex, enacted strategically, preferred over misogynistic partners and restrictive gender roles, and filled with infinite possibility,” according to the article. “Collectively, these findings upend dominant notions of Black women’s singlehood as unwanted or evidence of dysfunction.”
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