After a handful of underwhelming relationships and dozens of disappointing first dates, Andrea Vorlicek recently called off the search for a husband.
The 29-year-old always thought she’d have found her life partner by now. Instead, she’s house hunting solo and considering having kids on her own.
“I’m financially self-sufficient enough to do these things myself,” said Vorlicek, a Boston-based accountant. “I’m willing to accept being single versus settling for someone who isn’t the right fit.”
She sees her plans for an independent future as making the best of a lousy situation. “I don’t want to sit here and say I’m 100% happy,” Vorlicek said. “But I feel happier just accepting my reality. It’s mentally and emotionally a sense of peace.”
American women have never been this resigned to staying single. They are responding to major demographic shifts, including huge and growing gender gaps in economic and educational attainment, political affiliation and beliefs about what a family should look like.
“The numbers aren’t netting out,” said Daniel Cox, director of the survey center at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a conservative think tank. He ticked off the data points: More women than men are attending college, buying houses and focusing on their friendships and careers over dating and marriage.
Stories of women complaining about the lack of quality men have long infused pop culture—from “Pride and Prejudice” to Taylor Swift’s oeuvre. Yet women throughout history rarely questioned whether finding and securing a romantic partner should be a primary goal of adulthood.
This seems to be changing. Over half of single women said they believed they were happier than their married counterparts in a 2024 AEI survey of 5,837 adults. Just over a third of surveyed single men said the same.
A 2022 Pew survey of single adults showed only 34% of single women were looking for romance, compared with 54% of single men, down from 38% and 61% in 2019. Men were also more likely than women to say they were worried that nobody would want to date them.
A rise in earning power and a decline in the social stigma for being single has allowed more women to be choosy. “They would rather be alone than with a man who holds them back,” Cox said.
For young women especially, who tout their “boy sober” and off-the-market status on TikTok and other social media, the focus has shifted toward self-improvement, friendship and the ability to find happiness on their own. Surveys show a decline in teenage relationships, and Gen Z is having less sex than previous generations, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Crisis of connection
The share of women ages 18 to 40 who are single—that is, neither married nor cohabitating with a partner—was 51.4% in 2023, according to an analysis of census data by the Aspen Economic Strategy Group, up from 41.8% in 2000.These numbers don’t specify whether women are looking for love or swearing it off, but more-nuanced surveys show that single women appear less interested in getting married now than they used to be. They also seem less keen on getting hitched than their male peers.
In a 2023 Pew Research Center survey of 5,073 U.S. adults, 48% of women said that being married was not too or not at all important for a fulfilling life, compared with 39% of men—up from 31% and 28% in 2019. In a 2024 Wall Street Journal/NORC poll, 58% of women aged 18 to 29 said marriage was at least somewhat essential to their vision of the American dream, compared with 66% of men.
Marriage rates for both men and women are in decline, in part owing to less pressure to pair off and higher expectations for a would-be match. “Dating apps make people feel like there might always be a better option,” said Melissa Kearney, an economist at the University of Maryland. “They view looking for a marriage partner the same way that you view looking for a job candidate.”
But men seem more satisfied with their options than women. A 2023 AEI survey of college-educated women found that half blamed their singlehood largely on an inability to find someone who meets their expectations. Less than a quarter of single men said the same.
“To the extent that some women are staying single because this is what they want, that’s great,” said Kearney. “But we have to take seriously the likelihood that many are doing it as a Plan B because they’re not finding what they’re looking for, and that should make us concerned.”
‘Boyfriends by Christmas’
Last year, Michele Kirsch told her three adult daughters she wanted them to have “boyfriends by Christmas.” She had a dream, she had told them, that each of them was standing in front of the lit-up tree next to “a hunk who liked to ski and went to a good school.”This dream went unfulfilled, admitted Katie Kirsch, who is 30 and runs Lume, a leadership coaching startup, out of New York City. “Maybe we’re doing it wrong.”
Katie spent the first half of 2024 going on three or four dates a week with men she met on apps, such as Hinge and Bumble, in the hopes of finding a husband before turning 30. By the end of the year, she had ramped down the search, calling it “the only thing you can put 10,000 hours into and end up right where you started.”
Many of the men Katie met, she said, either seemed turned off by her ambition or weren’t career-oriented enough for her. She felt discouraged by just how many of her male friends similarly said they expect their future wives to prioritize their families over their jobs.
Yet Katie’s luck may be changing. She recently started dating a man she was set up with who seems both interested in starting a family and supportive of her career. She admitted she was wary at first: “I thought it was too good to be true.”
The challenges of finding a romantic partner have been made more complicated by a growing divide in education and career prospects between men and women. In 2024 47% of American women ages 25-34 had a bachelor’s degree, according to Pew, compared with 37% of men. A bachelor’s degree increases net lifetime earnings by an estimated $1 million, according to a 2024 report from Georgetown University.
“Women are doing comparatively well when it comes to education and their early years in the labor force, and men are doing comparatively badly,” said Brad Wilcox, a fellow at the conservative Institute for Family Studies and a sociology professor at the University of Virginia. “That creates a mismatch, because people prefer to date in terms of comparable education or income.”
Men’s economic struggles seem to be having the biggest effect on women without a college degree, whose marriage rates by age 45 have plummeted from 79% to 52% for those born between 1930 and 1980, according to research by Cornell University economist Benjamin Goldman. “Young men without a degree are struggling so much as a group that there simply aren’t enough with steady jobs and earnings for non-college women to date,” said Goldman.
For Christina Ralstin, a 31-year-old wildland firefighter in rural Republic, Wash., who didn’t go to college, buying a house was confirmation she didn’t need a partner to be content. She paid $90,000 for a two-bedroom on half an acre of land in 2022.
“I’ll have it paid off in the next two years, so I don’t feel like I need to be tied financially to somebody,” Ralstin said. After her last relationship ended in 2023—when she discovered he was still on Tinder—she doubted she would find someone else who aligned with her progressive views in her conservative town. So she stopped looking. “If I need companionship, I volunteer at the dog shelter.”
Single people in large cities where home prices have surged in recent years are finding that their marital status has hampered their finances. Although the wealth gap between single men and women appears to be shrinking, real-estate prices have helped drive a near doubling of the wealth gap between singles and couples from 2010 to 2022.
Married couples had $393,000 in median wealth in 2022, according to the St. Louis Federal Reserve, while unmarried people, including those who were partnered but not married, had $80,000. Economists say married couples are more likely to have assets such as homes and cars, which have grown in value faster than wages in recent years.
Different world views
For Alicia Jones, not having anyone else to financially depend on—or split rent with—is the worst part of being single. “Especially with the threat of layoffs, it’s much more stressful being a single person,” said Jones, who is 38 and works in communications for a real-estate company in Washington, D.C.Her last long-term relationship ended two years ago over conflicting views of their shared future. “He wanted the white picket fence and me at home with the kids,” Jones said. This despite the fact that her salary was nearly 50% higher than his.
Jones, who identifies as politically moderate, thinks couples with kids should split household and child care responsibilities equally. She was surprised by just how few of the men she has encountered in D.C. share this view. Either they held traditional ideas about marriage or “were extremely crunchy liberal and wanted to live in a van and drive across the country.”
Before she pulled back from dating last year, Jones tried her luck at a singles event. She left with three numbers—all belonging to women who became friends, whom she now meets for drinks or dinner multiple times a month. The men at the event, the four women agreed, seemed more interested in the brewery’s board games than in the people in the room, so they spent the night getting to know one another instead.
A growing political divide between men and women has compounded the challenges of finding love. Around 39% of women ages 18 to 29 identified as liberal in 2024, according to Gallup, compared with 25% of their male peers. This gap has more than tripled in a decade: 32% of women and 28% of men called themselves liberal in 2014.
These differences aren’t merely about preferences or votes, explains University of Denver psychology professor Galena Rhoades, who researches romantic relationships. Rather, politics have become an expression of one’s “core values” about everything from economic inequality to bodily autonomy. “They are reflective of people’s world views,” said Rhoades.
The latest presidential election and the first months of the Trump administration have intensified this ideological rift.
Rachael Gosetti, a 33-year-old real-estate agent in Savannah, Ga., said she broke up with her boyfriend, with whom she shares a 5-year-old son, over a year ago because she was tired of doing most of the child care, cooking and scheduling while also earning almost double her boyfriend’s salary. She has yet to date anyone else in part because she worries about living in a red state with a six-week abortion ban. “I have a child that I can’t leave behind to drive to Virginia if I had a pregnancy scare, and I definitely can’t afford another child as a single mom,” she said.
Others are intentionally heading into motherhood solo.
Tina Noohi, who is 34 and works for a health startup, still hopes that one day she’ll be swept off her feet. But she says she has spent much of the past year trying to talk herself out of her fantasies of a romantic happy ending.
Realizing she was rushing into relationships out of fear of running out her biological clock—and that her favorite part of dating had become debriefing with her friends the next day—she decided to separate her desire to find a partner from her desire to become a mom.
Noohi, who splits her time between New York City and San Diego, has lately spent hours researching the “Single Mothers by Choice” movement and started saving for a baby with a high-yield savings account. “Parenthood and romantic love don’t have to be intrinsically linked,” she said.
The only hurdle: Getting her traditional family on board.
“At first they tried to convince me that I still had plenty of time to find somebody,” said Noohi. “But they seem to have come around.”
Rachel Wolfe is a reporter covering the economy for The Wall Street Journal.
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Appeared in the March 22, 2025, print edition as 'American Women Are Giving Up on Marriage Women Without Men'.
