HEALTH

All the Single Ladies

Recent years have seen an explosion of male joblessness and a steep decline in men’s life prospects that have disrupted the “romantic market” in ways that narrow a marriage-minded woman’s options: increasingly, her choice is between deadbeats (whose numbers are rising) and playboys (whose power is growing). But this strange state of affairs also presents an opportunity: as the economy evolves, it’s time to embrace new ideas about romance and family—and to acknowledge the end of “traditional” marriage as society’s highest ideal.

KATE BOLICK

NOVEMBER 2011 ISSUE

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IN 2001, WHEN I was 28, I broke up with my boyfriend. Allan and I had been together for three years, and there was no good reason to end things. He was (and remains) an exceptional person, intelligent, good-looking, loyal, kind. My friends, many of whom were married or in marriage-track relationships, were bewildered. I was bewildered. To account for my behavior, all I had were two intangible yet undeniable convictions: something was missing; I wasn’t ready to settle down.

The period that followed was awful. I barely ate for sobbing all the time. (A friend who suffered my company a lot that summer sent me a birthday text this past July: “A decade ago you and I were reuniting, and you were crying a lot.”) I missed Allan desperately—his calm, sure voice; the sweetly fastidious way he folded his shirts. On good days, I felt secure that I’d done the right thing. Learning to be alone would make me a better person, and eventually a better partner. On bad days, I feared I would be alone forever. Had I made the biggest mistake of my life?

Also see:

The End of Men

Earlier this year, women became the majority of the workforce for the first time in U.S. history. A report on the unprecedented role reversal now under way—and its vast cultural consequences. By Hanna Rosin

Delayed Childbearing

Though career counselors and wishful thinkers may say otherwise, women who put off trying to have children until their mid-thirties risk losing out on motherhood altogether.

Marry Him!

The case for settling for Mr. Good Enough. By Lori Gottlieb

In Search of Mr. Right

Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, the author of Why There Are No Good Men Left, on the challenges facing today's single women

Let's Call the Whole Thing Off

The author is ending her marriage. Isn't it time you did the same? By Sandra Tsing Loh

The Wifely Duty

Marriage used to provide access to sex. Now it provides access to celibacy. By Caitlin Flanagan

Sex and the College Girl

"This is clearly a mess and not one that is going to clear up with magic speed on the wedding night." By Nora Johnson

A Successful Bachelor (June 1898)

"More interest should be taken in bachelors. Their need is greater, and their condition really deplorable. It comes near to being a disgrace not to be married at all."

Ten years later, I occasionally ask myself the same question. Today I am 39, with too many ex-boyfriends to count and, I am told, two grim-seeming options to face down: either stay single or settle for a “good enough” mate. At this point, certainly, falling in love and getting married may be less a matter of choice than a stroke of wild great luck. A decade ago, luck didn’t even cross my mind. I’d been in love before, and I’d be in love again. This wasn’t hubris so much as naïveté; I’d had serious, long-term boyfriends since my freshman year of high school, and simply couldn’t envision my life any differently.

Well, there was a lot I didn’t know 10 years ago. The decision to end a stable relationship for abstract rather than concrete reasons (“something was missing”), I see now, is in keeping with a post-Boomer ideology that values emotional fulfillment above all else. And the elevation of independence over coupling (“I wasn’t ready to settle down”) is a second-wave feminist idea I’d acquired from my mother, who had embraced it, in part, I suspect, to correct for her own choices.

I was her first and only recruit, marching off to third grade in tiny green or blue T-shirts declaring: A WOMAN WITHOUT A MAN IS LIKE A FISH WITHOUT A BICYCLE, or: A WOMAN’S PLACE IS IN THE HOUSE—AND THE SENATE, and bellowing along to Gloria Steinem & Co.’s feminist-minded children’s album, Free to Be … You and Me (released the same year Title IX was passed, also the year of my birth). Marlo Thomas and Alan Alda’s retelling of “Atalanta,” the ancient Greek myth about a fleet-footed princess who longs to travel the world before finding her prince, became the theme song of my life. Once, in high school, driving home from a family vacation, my mother turned to my boyfriend and me cuddling in the backseat and said, “Isn’t it time you two started seeing other people?” She adored Brian—he was invited on family vacations! But my future was to be one of limitless possibilities, where getting married was something I’d do when I was ready, to a man who was in every way my equal, and she didn’t want me to get tied down just yet.

This unfettered future was the promise of my time and place. I spent many a golden afternoon at my small New England liberal-arts college debating with friends the merits of leg-shaving and whether or not we’d take our husband’s surname. (Even then, our concerns struck me as retro; hadn’t the women’s libbers tackled all this stuff already?) We took for granted that we’d spend our 20s finding ourselves, whatever that meant, and save marriage for after we’d finished graduate school and launched our careers, which of course would happen at the magical age of 30.

That we would marry, and that there would always be men we wanted to marry, we took on faith. How could we not? One of the many ways in which our lives differed from our mothers’ was in the variety of our interactions with the opposite sex. Men were our classmates and colleagues, our bosses and professors, as well as, in time, our students and employees and subordinates—an entire universe of prospective friends, boyfriends, friends with benefits, and even ex-boyfriends-turned-friends. In this brave new world, boundaries were fluid, and roles constantly changing. Allan and I had met when we worked together at a magazine in Boston (full disclosure: this one), where I was an assistant and he an editor; two years later, he quit his job to follow me to New York so that I could go to graduate school and he could focus on his writing. After the worst of our breakup, we eventually found our way to a friendship so deep and sustaining that several years ago, when he got engaged, his fiancée suggested that I help him buy his wedding suit. As he and I toured through Manhattan’s men’s-wear ateliers, we enjoyed explaining to the confused tailors and salesclerks that no, no, we weren’t getting married. Isn’t life funny that way?

I retell that moment as an aside, as if it’s a tangent to the larger story, but in a way, it is the story. In 1969, when my 25-year-old mother, a college-educated high-school teacher, married a handsome lawyer-to-be, most women her age were doing more or less the same thing. By the time she was in her mid-30s, she was raising two small children and struggling to find a satisfying career. She’d never had sex with anyone but my father. Could she have even envisioned herself on a shopping excursion with an ex-lover, never mind one who was getting married while she remained alone? And the ex-lover’s fiancée being so generous and open-minded as to suggest the shopping trip to begin with?

What my mother could envision was a future in which I made my own choices. I don’t think either of us could have predicted what happens when you multiply that sense of agency by an entire generation.

But what transpired next lay well beyond the powers of everybody’s imagination: as women have climbed ever higher, men have been falling behind. We’ve arrived at the top of the staircase, finally ready to start our lives, only to discover a cavernous room at the tail end of a party, most of the men gone already, some having never shown up—and those who remain are leering by the cheese table, or are, you know, the ones you don’t want to go out with.

IN THE 1990S, Stephanie Coontz, a social historian at Evergreen State College in Washington, noticed an uptick in questions from reporters and audiences asking if the institution of marriage was falling apart. She didn’t think it was, and was struck by how everyone believed in some mythical Golden Age of Marriage and saw mounting divorce rates as evidence of the dissolution of this halcyon past. She decided to write a book discrediting the notion and proving that the ways in which we think about and construct the legal union between a man and a woman have always been in flux.

What Coontz found was even more interesting than she’d originally expected. In her fascinating Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage, she surveys 5,000 years of human habits, from our days as hunters and gatherers up until the present, showing our social arrangements to be more complex and varied than could ever seem possible. She’d long known that the Leave It to Beaver–style family model popular in the 1950s and ’60s had been a flash in the pan, and like a lot of historians, she couldn’t understand how people had become so attached to an idea that had developed so late and been so short-lived.

For thousands of years, marriage had been a primarily economic and political contract between two people, negotiated and policed by their families, church, and community. It took more than one person to make a farm or business thrive, and so a potential mate’s skills, resources, thrift, and industriousness were valued as highly as personality and attractiveness. This held true for all classes. In the American colonies, wealthy merchants entrusted business matters to their landlocked wives while off at sea, just as sailors, vulnerable to the unpredictability of seasonal employment, relied on their wives’ steady income as domestics in elite households. Two-income families were the norm.

Not until the 18th century did labor begin to be divided along a sharp line: wage-earning for the men and unpaid maintenance of household and children for the women. Coontz notes that as recently as the late 17th century, women’s contributions to the family economy were openly recognized, and advice books urged husbands and wives to share domestic tasks. But as labor became separated, so did our spheres of experience—the marketplace versus the home—one founded on reason and action, the other on compassion and comfort. Not until the post-war gains of the 1950s, however, were a majority of American families able to actually afford living off a single breadwinner.

All of this was intriguing, for sure—but even more surprising to Coontz was the realization that those alarmed reporters and audiences might be onto something. Coontz still didn’t think that marriage was falling apart, but she came to see that it was undergoing a transformation far more radical than anyone could have predicted, and that our current attitudes and arrangements are without precedent. “Today we are experiencing a historical revolution every bit as wrenching, far-reaching, and irreversible as the Industrial Revolution,” she wrote.

Last summer I called Coontz to talk to her about this revolution. “We are without a doubt in the midst of an extraordinary sea change,” she told me. “The transformation is momentous—immensely liberating and immensely scary. When it comes to what people actually want and expect from marriage and relationships, and how they organize their sexual and romantic lives, all the old ways have broken down.”

For starters, we keep putting marriage off. In 1960, the median age of first marriage in the U.S. was 23 for men and 20 for women; today it is 28 and 26. Today, a smaller proportion of American women in their early 30s are married than at any other point since the 1950s, if not earlier. We’re also marrying less—with a significant degree of change taking place in just the past decade and a half. In 1997, 29 percent of my Gen X cohort was married; among today’s Millennials that figure has dropped to 22 percent. (Compare that with 1960, when more than half of those ages 18 to 29 had already tied the knot.) These numbers reflect major attitudinal shifts. According to the Pew Research Center, a full 44 percent of Millennials and 43 percent of Gen Xers think that marriage is becoming obsolete.

Even more momentously, we no longer need husbands to have children, nor do we have to have children if we don’t want to. For those who want their own biological child, and haven’t found the right man, now is a good time to be alive. Biological parenthood in a nuclear family need not be the be-all and end-all of womanhood—and in fact it increasingly is not. Today 40 percent of children are born to single mothers. This isn’t to say all of these women preferred that route, but the fact that so many upper-middle-class women are choosing to travel it—and that gays and lesbians (married or single) and older women are also having children, via adoption or in vitro fertilization—has helped shrink the stigma against single motherhood. Even as single motherhood is no longer a disgrace, motherhood itself is no longer compulsory. Since 1976, the percentage of women in their early 40s who have not given birth has nearly doubled. A childless single woman of a certain age is no longer automatically perceived as a barren spinster.

Of course, between the diminishing external pressure to have children and the common misperception that our biology is ours to control, some of us don’t deal with the matter in a timely fashion. Like me, for instance. Do I want children? My answer is: I don’t know. But somewhere along the way, I decided to not let my biology dictate my romantic life. If I find someone I really like being with, and if he and I decide we want a child together, and it’s too late for me to conceive naturally, I’ll consider whatever technological aid is currently available, or adopt (and if he’s not open to adoption, he’s not the kind of man I want to be with).

Do I realize that this further narrows my pool of prospects? Yes. Just as I am fully aware that with each passing year, I become less attractive to the men in my peer group, who have plenty of younger, more fertile women to pick from. But what can I possibly do about that? Sure, my stance here could be read as a feint, or even self-deception. By blithely deeming biology a nonissue, I’m conveniently removing myself from arguably the most significant decision a woman has to make. But that’s only if you regard motherhood as the defining feature of womanhood—and I happen not to.

Foremost among the reasons for all these changes in family structure are the gains of the women’s movement. Over the past half century, women have steadily gained on—and are in some ways surpassing—men in education and employment. From 1970 (seven years after the Equal Pay Act was passed) to 2007, women’s earnings grew by 44 percent, compared with 6 percent for men. In 2008, women still earned just 77 cents to the male dollar—but that figure doesn’t account for the difference in hours worked, or the fact that women tend to choose lower-paying fields like nursing or education. A 2010 study of single, childless urban workers between the ages of 22 and 30 found that the women actually earned 8 percent more than the men. Women are also more likely than men to go to college: in 2010, 55 percent of all college graduates ages 25 to 29 were female.

BY THEMSELVES, THE cultural and technological advances that have made my stance on childbearing plausible would be enough to reshape our understanding of the modern family—but, unfortunately, they happen to be dovetailing with another set of developments that can be summed up as: the deterioration of the male condition. As Hanna Rosin laid out in these pages last year (“The End of Men,” July/August 2010), men have been rapidly declining—in income, in educational attainment, and in future employment prospects—relative to women. As of last year, women held 51.4 percent of all managerial and professional positions, up from 26 percent in 1980. Today women outnumber men not only in college but in graduate school; they earned 60 percent of all bachelor’s and master’s degrees awarded in 2010, and men are now more likely than women to hold only a high-school diploma.

No one has been hurt more by the arrival of the post-industrial economy than the stubbornly large pool of men without higher education. An analysis by Michael Greenstone, an economist at MIT, reveals that, after accounting for inflation, male median wages have fallen by 32 percent since their peak in 1973, once you account for the men who have stopped working altogether. The Great Recession accelerated this imbalance. Nearly three-quarters of the 7.5 million jobs lost in the depths of the recession were lost by men, making 2010 the first time in American history that women made up the majority of the workforce. Men have since then regained a small portion of the positions they’d lost—but they remain in a deep hole, and most of the jobs that are least likely ever to come back are in traditionally male-dominated sectors, like manufacturing and construction.

The implications are extraordinary. If, in all sectors of society, women are on the ascent, and if gender parity is actually within reach, this means that a marriage regime based on men’s overwhelming economic dominance may be passing into extinction. As long as women were denied the financial and educational opportunities of men, it behooved them to “marry up”—how else would they improve their lot? (As Maureen Dowd memorably put it in her 2005 book, Are Men Necessary?, “Females are still programmed to look for older men with resources, while males are still programmed to look for younger women with adoring gazes.”) Now that we can pursue our own status and security, and are therefore liberated from needing men the way we once did, we are free to like them more, or at least more idiosyncratically, which is how love ought to be, isn’t it?

My friend B., who is tall and gorgeous, jokes that she could have married an NBA player, but decided to go with the guy she can talk to all night—a graphic artist who comes up to her shoulder. C., the editorial force behind some of today’s most celebrated novels, is a modern-day Venus de Milo—with a boyfriend 14 years her junior. Then there are those women who choose to forgo men altogether. Sonia Sotomayor isn’t merely a powerful woman in a black robe—she’s also a stellar example of what it can mean to exercise authority over every single aspect of your personal life. When Gloria Steinem said, in the 1970s, “We’re becoming the men we wanted to marry,” I doubt even she realized the prescience of her words.

But while the rise of women has been good for everyone, the decline of males has obviously been bad news for men—and bad news for marriage. For all the changes the institution has undergone, American women as a whole have never been confronted with such a radically shrinking pool of what are traditionally considered to be “marriageable” men—those who are better educated and earn more than they do. So women are now contending with what we might call the new scarcity. Even as women have seen their range of options broaden in recent years—for instance, expanding the kind of men it’s culturally acceptable to be with, and making it okay not to marry at all—the new scarcity disrupts what economists call the “marriage market” in a way that in fact narrows the available choices, making a good man harder to find than ever. At the rate things are going, the next generation’s pool of good men will be significantly smaller. What does this portend for the future of the American family?

EVERY SO OFTEN, society experiences a “crisis in gender” (as some academics have called it) that radically transforms the social landscape.

Take the years after the Civil War, when America reeled from the loss of close to 620,000 men, the majority of them from the South. An article published last year in The Journal of Southern History reported that in 1860, there were 104 marriageable white men for every 100 white women; in 1870, that number dropped to 87.5. A generation of Southern women found themselves facing a “marriage squeeze.” They could no longer assume that they would become wives and mothers—a terrifying prospect in an era when women relied on marriage for social acceptability and financial resources.

Instead, they were forced to ask themselves: Will I marry a man who has poor prospects (“marrying down,” in sociological parlance)? Will I marry a man much older, or much younger? Will I remain alone, a spinster? Diaries and letters from the period reveal a populace fraught with insecurity. As casualties mounted, expectations dropped, and women resigned themselves to lives without husbands, or simply lowered their standards. (In 1862, a Confederate nurse named Ada Bacot described in her diary the lamentable fashion “of a woman marring a man younger than herself.”) Their fears were not unfounded—the mean age at first marriage did rise—but in time, approximately 92 percent of these Southern-born white women found someone to partner with. The anxious climate, however, as well as the extremely high levels of widowhood—nearly one-third of Southern white women over the age of 40 were widows in 1880—persisted.

Or take 1940s Russia, which lost some 20 million men and 7 million women to World War II. In order to replenish the population, the state instituted an aggressive pro-natalist policy to support single mothers. Mie Nakachi, a historian at Hokkaido University, in Japan, has outlined its components: mothers were given generous subsidies and often put up in special sanatoria during pregnancy and childbirth; the state day-care system expanded to cover most children from infancy; and penalties were brandished for anyone who perpetuated the stigma against conceiving out of wedlock. In 1944, a new Family Law was passed, which essentially freed men from responsibility for illegitimate children; in effect, the state took on the role of “husband.” As a result of this policy—and of the general dearth of males—men moved at will from house to house, where they were expected to do nothing and were treated like kings; a generation of children were raised without reliable fathers, and women became the “responsible” gender. This family pattern was felt for decades after the war.

Indeed, Siberia today is suffering such an acute “man shortage” (due in part to massive rates of alcoholism) that both men and women have lobbied the Russian parliament to legalize polygamy. In 2009, The Guardian cited Russian politicians’ claims that polygamy would provide husbands for “10 million lonely women.” In endorsing polygamy, these women, particularly those in remote rural areas without running water, may be less concerned with loneliness than with something more pragmatic: help with the chores. Caroline Humphrey, a Cambridge University anthropologist who has studied the region, said women supporters believed the legalization of polygamy would be a “godsend,” giving them “rights to a man’s financial and physical support, legitimacy for their children, and rights to state benefits.”

Our own “crisis in gender” isn’t a literal imbalance—America as a whole currently enjoys a healthy population ratio of 50.8 percent females and 49.2 percent males. But our shrinking pool of traditionally “marriageable” men is dramatically changing our social landscape, and producing startling dynamics in the marriage market, in ways that aren’t immediately apparent.

IN THEIR 1983 book, Too Many Women? The Sex Ratio Question, two psychologists developed what has become known as the Guttentag-Secord theory, which holds that members of the gender in shorter supply are less dependent on their partners, because they have a greater number of alternative relationships available to them; that is, they have greater “dyadic power” than members of the sex in oversupply. How this plays out, however, varies drastically between genders.

In societies where men heavily outnumber women—in what’s known as a “high-sex-ratio society”—women are valued and treated with deference and respect and use their high dyadic power to create loving, committed bonds with their partners and raise families. Rates of illegitimacy and divorce are low. Women’s traditional roles as mothers and homemakers are held in high esteem. In such situations, however, men also use the power of their greater numbers to limit women’s economic and political strength, and female literacy and labor-force participation drop.

One might hope that in low-sex-ratio societies—where women outnumber men—women would have the social and sexual advantage. (After all, didn’t the mythical all-female nation of Amazons capture men and keep them as their sex slaves?) But that’s not what happens: instead, when confronted with a surplus of women, men become promiscuous and unwilling to commit to a monogamous relationship. (Which, I suppose, might explain the Amazons’ need to keep men in slave quarters.) In societies with too many women, the theory holds, fewer people marry, and those who do marry do so later in life. Because men take advantage of the variety of potential partners available to them, women’s traditional roles are not valued, and because these women can’t rely on their partners to stick around, more turn to extrafamilial ambitions like education and career.

In 1988, the sociologists Scott J. South and Katherine Trent set out to test the Guttentag-Secord theory by analyzing data from 117 countries. Most aspects of the theory tested out. In each country, more men meant more married women, less divorce, and fewer women in the workforce. South and Trent also found that the Guttentag-Secord dynamics were more pronounced in developed rather than developing countries. In other words—capitalist men are pigs.

Also see:

The Return of the Pig

The revival of blatant sexism in American culture has many progressive thinkers flummoxed. By David Brooks

Are We not Men?

Down the ladder from Playboy to Maxim.

I kid! And yet, as a woman who spent her early 30s actively putting off marriage, I have had ample time to investigate, if you will, the prevailing attitudes of the high-status American urban male. (Granted, given my taste for brainy, creatively ambitious men—or “scrawny nerds,” as a high-school friend describes them—my sample is skewed.) My spotty anecdotal findings have revealed that, yes, in many cases, the more successful a man is (or thinks he is), the less interested he is in commitment.

Take the high-powered magazine editor who declared on our first date that he was going to spend his 30s playing the field. Or the prominent academic who announced on our fifth date that he couldn’t maintain a committed emotional relationship but was very interested in a physical one. Or the novelist who, after a month of hanging out, said he had to get back out there and tomcat around, but asked if we could keep having sex anyhow, or at least just one last time. Or the writer (yes, another one) who announced after six months together that he had to end things because he “couldn’t continue fending off all the sexual offers.” And those are just the honest ones.

To be sure, these men were the outliers—the majority of my personal experience has been with commitment-minded men with whom things just didn’t work out, for one reason or another. Indeed, another of my anecdotal-research discoveries is of what an ex calls “marriage o’clock”—when a man hits 35 and suddenly, desperately, wants a wife. I’ll never forget the post-first-date e-mail message reading: “I wanted to marry you last night, just listening to you.” Nor the 40-ish journalist who, on our second date, driving down a long country road, gripped the steering wheel and asked, “Are you The One? Are you The One?” (Can you imagine a woman getting away with this kind of behavior?) Like zealous lepidopterists, they swoop down with their butterfly nets, fingers aimed for the thorax, certain that just because they are ready for marriage and children, I must be, too.

But the non-committers are out there in growing force. If dating and mating is in fact a marketplace—and of course it is—today we’re contending with a new “dating gap,” where marriage-minded women are increasingly confronted with either deadbeats or players. For evidence, we don’t need to look to the past, or abroad—we have two examples right in front of us: the African American community, and the college campus.

IN AUGUST I traveled to Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania, a small, predominantly African American borough on the eastern edge of Pittsburgh. A half-century ago, it was known as “The Holy City” for its preponderance of churches. Today, the cobblestoned streets are lined with defeated clapboard houses that look as if the spirit’s been sucked right out of them.

I was there to spend the afternoon with Denean, a 34-year-old nurse who was living in one such house with three of her four children (the eldest is 19 and lived across town) and, these days, a teenage niece. Denean is pretty and slender, with a wry, deadpan humor. For 10 years she worked for a health-care company, but she was laid off in January. She is twice divorced; no two of her children share a father. In February, when she learned (on Facebook) that her second child, 15-year-old Ronicka, was pregnant, Denean slumped down on her enormous slate-gray sofa and didn’t get up for 10 hours.

“I had done everything I could to make sure she didn’t end up like me, and now this,” she told me.

It was a clear, warm day, and we were clustered on the front porch—Denean, Ronicka, and I, along with Denean’s niece, Keira, 18, and Denean’s friend Chantal, 28, a single mother whose daughter goes to day care with Denean’s youngest. The affection between these four high-spirited women was light and infectious, and they spoke knowingly about the stigmas they’re up against. “That’s right,” Denean laughed, “we’re your standard bunch of single black moms!”

Given the crisis in gender it has suffered through for the past half century, the African American population might as well be a separate nation. An astonishing 70 percent of black women are unmarried, and they are more than twice as likely as white women to remain that way. Those black women who do marry are more likely than any other group of women to “marry down.” This is often chalked up to high incarceration rates—in 2009, of the nearly 1.5 million men in prison, 39 percent were black—but it’s more than that. Across all income levels, black men have dropped far behind black women professionally and educationally; women with college degrees outnumber men 2-to-1. In August, the unemployment rate among black men age 20 or older exceeded 17 percent.

In his book, Is Marriage for White People?, Ralph Richard Banks, a law professor at Stanford, argues that the black experience of the past half century is a harbinger for society at large. “When you’re writing about black people, white people may assume it’s unconnected to them,” he told me when I got him on the phone. It might seem easy to dismiss Banks’s theory that what holds for blacks may hold for nonblacks, if only because no other group has endured such a long history of racism, and racism begets singular ills. But the reality is that what’s happened to the black family is already beginning to happen to the white family. In 1950, 64 percent of African American women were married—roughly the same percentage as white women. By 1965, African American marriage rates had declined precipitously, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan was famously declaring black families a “tangle of pathology.” Black marriage rates have fallen drastically in the years since—but then, so have white marriage rates. In 1965, when Moynihan wrote with such concern about the African American family, fewer than 25 percent of black children were born out of wedlock; in 2011, considerably more than 25 percent of white children are.

This erosion of traditional marriage and family structure has played out most dramatically among low-income groups, both black and white. According to the sociologist William Julius Wilson, inner-city black men struggled badly in the 1970s, as manufacturing plants shut down or moved to distant suburbs. These men naturally resented their downward mobility, and had trouble making the switch to service jobs requiring a very different style of self-presentation. The joblessness and economic insecurity that resulted created a host of problems, and made many men altogether unmarriable. Today, as manufacturing jobs disappear nationwide (American manufacturing shed about a third of its jobs during the first decade of this century), the same phenomenon may be under way, but on a much larger scale.

Just as the decline of marriage in the black underclass augured the decline of marriage in the white underclass, the decline of marriage in the black middle class has prefigured the decline of marriage in the white middle class. In the 1990s, the author Terry McMillan climbed the best-seller list (and box-office charts) with novels like Waiting to Exhale and How Stella Got Her Groove Back, which provided incisive glimpses of life and frustrated romance among middle-class black women, where the prospect of marrying a black man often seemed more or less hopeless. (As she writes in Waiting to Exhale: “[Successful black men have] taken these stupid statistics about us to heart and are having the time of their lives. They do not hold themselves accountable to anybody for anything, and they’re getting away with murder … They lie to us without a conscience, they fuck as many of us at a time as they want to.”) Today, with the precipitous economic and social decline of men of all races, it’s easy to see why women of any race would feel frustrated by their romantic prospects. (Is it any wonder marriage rates have fallen?) Increasingly, this extends to the upper-middle class, too: early last year, a study by the Pew Research Center reported that professionally successful, college-educated women were confronted with a shrinking pool of like-minded marriage prospects.

“If you’re a successful black man in New York City, one of the most appealing and sought-after men around, your options are plentiful,” Banks told me. “Why marry if you don’t have to?” (Or, as he quotes one black man in his book, “If you have four quality women you’re dating and they’re in a rotation, who’s going to rush into a marriage?”) Banks’s book caused a small stir by suggesting that black women should expand their choices by marrying outside their race—a choice that the women of Terry McMillan’s novels would have found at best unfortunate and at worst an abhorrent betrayal. As it happens, the father of Chantal’s child is white, and Denean has dated across the color line. But in any event, the decline in the economic prospects of white men means that marrying outside their race can expand African American women’s choices only so far. Increasingly, the new dating gap—where women are forced to choose between deadbeats and players—trumps all else, in all socioeconomic brackets.

THE EARLY 1990S witnessed the dawn of “hookup culture” at universities, as colleges stopped acting in loco parentis, and undergraduates, heady with freedom, started throwing themselves into a frenzy of one-night stands. Depending on whom you ask, this has either liberated young women from being ashamed of their sexual urges, or forced them into a promiscuity they didn’t ask for. Young men, apparently, couldn’t be happier.

Also see:

Love, Actually

How girls reluctantly endure the hookup culture. By Caitlin Flanagan

Are You There, God? It's Me, Monica

How nice girls got so casual about oral sex. By Caitlin Flanagan

According to Robert H. Frank, an economist at Cornell who has written on supply and demand in the marriage market, this shouldn’t be surprising. When the available women significantly outnumber men, which is the case on many campuses today, “courtship behavior changes in the direction of what men want,” he told me recently. If women greatly outnumber men, he says, social norms against casual sex will weaken. He qualifies this by explaining that no matter how unbalanced the overall sex ratio may become (in either direction), “there will always be specific men and women who are in high demand as romantic partners—think Penélope Cruz and George Clooney.” But even Cruz and Clooney, Frank says, will be affected by changing mores. The likelihood increases “that even a highly sought-after woman will engage in casual sex, even though she would have sufficient market power to defy prevailing norms.” If a woman with the “market power” of a Penélope Cruz is affected by this, what are the rest of us to do?

Whether the sexual double standard is cultural or biological, it’s finding traction in the increasingly lopsided sexual marketplace that is the American college campus, where women outnumber men, 57 percent to 43 percent. In 2010, The New York Times ran a much-discussed article chronicling this phenomenon. “If a guy is not getting what he wants, he can quickly and abruptly go to the next one, because there are so many of us,” a University of Georgia co-ed told The Times, reporting that at college parties and bars, she will often see two guys being fawned over by six provocatively dressed women. The alternative is just to give up on dating and romance because “there are no guys,” as a University of North Carolina student put it.

Last year, a former management consultant named Susan Walsh tried to dig a little deeper. She applied what economists call the Pareto principle—the idea that for many events, roughly 20 percent of the causes create 80 percent of the effects—to the college dating market, and concluded that only 20 percent of the men (those considered to have the highest status) are having 80 percent of the sex, with only 20 percent of the women (those with the greatest sexual willingness); the remaining 80 percent, male and female, sit out the hookup dance altogether. (Surprisingly, a 2007 study commissioned by the Justice Department suggested that male virgins outnumber female virgins on campus.) As Walsh puts it, most of the leftover men are “have nots” in terms of access to sex, and most of the women—both those who are hooking up and those who are not—are “have nots” in terms of access to male attention that leads to commitment. (Of course, plenty of women are perfectly happy with casual, no-strings sex, but they are generally considered to be in the minority.) Yet the myth of everyone having sex all the time is so pervasive that it’s assumed to be true, which distorts how young men and women relate. “I think the 80/20 principle is the key to understanding the situation we find ourselves in—one in which casual sex is the cultural norm, despite the fact that most people would actually prefer something quite different,” Walsh told me.

I became aware of Walsh this past summer when I happened upon her blog, HookingUpSmart.com, and lost an evening to one of those late-night Internet binges, each link leading to the next, drawn into a boy-girl conversation to end all boy-girl conversations. A frumpy beige Web-site palette and pragmatic voice belie a refreshingly frank, at times even raunchy, dialogue; postings in the comments section can swell into the high hundreds—interestingly, the majority of them from men. I felt as if I’d stumbled into the online equivalent of a (progressive) school nurse’s office.

A Wharton M.B.A. and stay-at-home mother of two, Walsh began her career as a relationship adviser turned blogger six years ago, when her daughter, then a student at an all-girls high school, started dating. She began seeking counsel from Walsh, and liked what she heard, as did her friends when she told them; in time, the girls were regularly gathering around Walsh’s kitchen table to pick her brain. Soon enough, a childhood friend’s daughter, a sophomore at Boston University, started coming over with her friends. Walsh started thinking of these ’70s-style rap sessions as her own informal “focus groups,” the members of one still in high school, those of the other in college, but all of them having similar experiences. In 2008, after the younger group had left home, Walsh started the blog so they could all continue the conversation.

In July, I traveled to Walsh’s home, a handsome 19th-century Victorian hidden behind tall hedges in a quiet corner of Brookline, Massachusetts, to sit in on one of these informal roundtables. I came of age with hookup culture, but not of it, having continued through college my high-school habit of serial long-term relationships, and I wanted to hear from the front lines. What would these sexual buccaneers be like? Bold and provocative? Worn-out and embittered?

When Walsh opened the door, I could immediately see why young women find her so easy to talk to; her brunette bob frames bright green eyes and a warm, easy smile. Once everyone had arrived—five recent college graduates, all of them white and upper middle class, some employed and some still looking for work, all unmarried—we sat down to a dinner of chicken and salad in Walsh’s high-ceilinged, wood-paneled dining room to weigh in on one of the evening’s topics: man whores.

“How do you all feel about guys who get with a ton of girls?,” Walsh asked. “Do you think they have ‘trash dick’?” She’d run across this term on the Internet.

One of Walsh’s pet observations pertains to what she calls the “soft harem,” where high-status men (i.e., the football captain) maintain an “official” girlfriend as well as a rotating roster of neo-concubines, who service him in the barroom bathroom or wherever the beer is flowing. “There used to be more assortative mating,” she explained, “where a five would date a five. But now every woman who is a six and above wants the hottest guy on campus, and she can have him—for one night.”

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Hard Core

The new world of porn is revealing eternal truths about men and women. By Natasha Vargas-Cooper

As I’d expected, these denizens of hookup culture were far more sexually experienced than I’d been at their age. Some had had many partners, and they all joked easily about sexual positions and penis size (“I was like, ‘That’s a pinkie, not a penis!’”) with the offhand knowledge only familiarity can breed. Most of them said that though they’d had a lot of sex, none of it was particularly sensual or exciting. It appears that the erotic promises of the 1960s sexual revolution have run aground on the shoals of changing sex ratios, where young women and men come together in fumbling, drunken couplings fueled less by lust than by a vague sense of social conformity. (I can’t help wondering: Did this de-eroticization of sex encourage the rise of pornography? Or is it that pornography endows the inexperienced with a toolbox of socially sanctioned postures and tricks, ensuring that one can engage in what amounts to a public exchange according to a pre-approved script?) For centuries, women’s sexuality was repressed by a patriarchal marriage system; now what could be an era of heady carnal delights is stifled by a new form of male entitlement, this one fueled by demographics.

Most striking to me was the innocence of these young women. Of these attractive and vivacious females, only two had ever had a “real” boyfriend—as in, a mutually exclusive and satisfying relationship rather than a series of hookups—and for all their technical know-how, they didn’t seem to be any wiser than I’d been at their age. This surprised me; I’d assumed that growing up in a jungle would give them a more matter-of-fact or at least less conventional worldview. Instead, when I asked if they wanted to get married when they grew up, and if so, at what age, to a one they answered “yes” and “27 or 28.”

“That’s only five or six years from now,” I pointed out. “Doesn’t that seem—not far off?”

They nodded.

“Take a look at me,” I said. “I’ve never been married, and I have no idea if I ever will be. There’s a good chance that this will be your reality, too. Does that freak you out?”

Again they nodded.

“I don’t think I can bear doing this for that long!” whispered one, with undisguised alarm.

I REMEMBER EXPERIENCING THAT same panicked exhaustion around the time I turned 36, at which point I’d been in the dating game for longer than that alarmed 22-year-old had, and I wanted out. (Is there an expiration date on the fun, running-around period of being single captured so well by movies and television?) I’d spent the past year with a handsome, commitment-minded man, and these better qualities, along with our having several interests in common, allowed me to overlook our many thundering incompatibilities. In short, I was creeping up on marriage o’clock, and I figured, Enough already—I had to make something work. When it became clear that sheer will wasn’t going to save us, I went to bed one night and had a rare dream about my (late) mother.

“Mom,” I said. “Things aren’t working out. I’m breaking up with him tomorrow.”

“Oh, honey,” she said. “I am so sorry. We were rooting for this one, weren’t we? When something doesn’t work, though, what can you do?”

This, I found irritating. “Mom. I am getting old.”

“Pwhah!” she scoffed. “You’re fine. You’ve got six more years.”

Six more years. I woke up. In six more years, I’d be 42. All this time, I’d been regarding my single life as a temporary interlude, one I had to make the most of—or swiftly terminate, depending on my mood. Without intending to, by actively rejecting our pop-culture depictions of the single woman—you know the ones—I’d been terrorizing myself with their specters. But now that 35 had come and gone, and with yet another relationship up in flames, all bets were off. It might never happen. Or maybe not until 42. Or 70, for that matter. Was that so bad? If I stopped seeing my present life as provisional, perhaps I’d be a little … happier. Perhaps I could actually get down to the business of what it means to be a real single woman.

It’s something a lot of people might want to consider, given that now, by choice or by circumstance, more and more of us (women and men), across the economic spectrum, are spending more years of our adult lives unmarried than ever before. The numbers are striking: The Census Bureau has reported that in 2010, the proportion of married households in America dropped to a record low of 48 percent. Fifty percent of the adult population is single (compared with 33 percent in 1950)—and that portion is very likely to keep growing, given the variety of factors that contribute to it. The median age for getting married has been rising, and for those who are affluent and educated, that number climbs even higher. (Indeed, Stephanie Coontz told me that an educated white woman of 40 is more than twice as likely to marry in the next decade as a less educated woman of the same age.) Last year, nearly twice as many single women bought homes as did single men. And yet, what are our ideas about single people? Perverted misanthropes, crazy cat ladies, dating-obsessed shoe shoppers, etc.—all of them some form of terribly lonely. (In her 2008 memoir, Epilogue, a 70-something Anne Roiphe muses: “There are millions of women who live alone in America. Some of them are widows. Some of them are divorced and between connections, some of them are odd, loners who prefer to keep their habits undisturbed.” That’s a pretty good representation of her generation’s notions of unmarried women.)

Famous Bolick family story: When I was a little girl, my mother and I went for a walk and ran into her friend Regina. They talked for a few minutes, caught up. I gleaned from their conversation that Regina wasn’t married, and as soon as we made our goodbyes, I bombarded my mother with questions. “No husband? How could that be? She’s a grown-up! Grown-ups have husbands!” My mother explained that not all grown-ups get married. “Then who opens the pickle jar?” (I was 5.)

Thus began my lifelong fascination with the idea of the single woman. There was my second-grade teacher, Mrs. Connors, who was, I believe, a former nun, or seemed like one. There was the director of my middle-school gifted-and-talented program, who struck me as wonderfully remote and original. (Was she a lesbian?) There was a college poetry professor, a brilliant single woman in her 40s who had never been married, rather glamorously, I thought. Once, I told her I wanted to be just like her. “Good God,” she said. “I’ve made a mess of my life. Don’t look to me.” Why did they all seem so mysterious, even marginalized?

Back when I believed my mother had a happy marriage—and she did for quite a long time, really—she surprised me by confiding that one of the most blissful moments of her life had been when she was 21, driving down the highway in her VW Beetle, with nowhere to go except wherever she wanted to be. “I had my own car, my own job, all the clothes I wanted,” she remembered wistfully. Why couldn’t she have had more of that?

When I embarked on my own sojourn as a single woman in New York City—talk about a timeworn cliché!—it wasn’t dating I was after. I was seeking something more vague and, in my mind, more noble, having to do with finding my own way, and independence. And I found all that. Early on, I sometimes ached, watching so many friends pair off—and without a doubt there has been loneliness. At times I’ve envied my married friends for being able to rely on a spouse to help make difficult decisions, or even just to carry the bills for a couple of months. And yet I’m perhaps inordinately proud that I’ve never depended on anyone to pay my way (today that strikes me as a quaint achievement, but there you have it). Once, when my father consoled me, with the best of intentions, for being so unlucky in love, I bristled. I’d gotten to know so many interesting men, and experienced so much. Wasn’t that a form of luck?

All of which is to say that the single woman is very rarely seen for who she is—whatever that might be—by others, or even by the single woman herself, so thoroughly do most of us internalize the stigmas that surround our status.

Bella DePaulo, a Harvard-trained social psychologist who is now a visiting professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara, is America’s foremost thinker and writer on the single experience. In 2005, she coined the word singlism, in an article she published in Psychological Inquiry. Intending a parallel with terms like racism and sexism, DePaulo says singlism is “the stigmatizing of adults who are single [and] includes negative stereotyping of singles and discrimination against singles.” In her 2006 book, Singled Out, she argues that the complexities of modern life, and the fragility of the institution of marriage, have inspired an unprecedented glorification of coupling. (Laura Kipnis, the author of Against Love, has called this “the tyranny of two.”) This marriage myth—“matrimania,” DePaulo calls it—proclaims that the only route to happiness is finding and keeping one all-purpose, all-important partner who can meet our every emotional and social need. Those who don’t have this are pitied. Those who don’t want it are seen as threatening. Singlism, therefore, “serves to maintain cultural beliefs about marriage by derogating those whose lives challenge those beliefs.”

In July, I visited DePaulo in the improbably named Summerland, California, which, as one might hope, is a charming outpost overlooking a glorious stretch of the Pacific Ocean. DePaulo, a warm, curious woman in her late 50s, describes herself as “single at heart”—meaning that she’s always been single and always will be, and that’s just the way she wants it. Over lunch at a seafood restaurant, she discussed how the cultural fixation on the couple blinds us to the full web of relationships that sustain us on a daily basis. We are far more than whom we are (or aren’t) married to: we are also friends, grandparents, colleagues, cousins, and so on. To ignore the depth and complexities of these networks is to limit the full range of our emotional experiences.

Personally, I’ve been wondering if we might be witnessing the rise of the aunt, based on the simple fact that my brother’s two small daughters have brought me emotional rewards I never could have anticipated. I have always been very close with my family, but welcoming my nieces into the world has reminded me anew of what a gift it is to care deeply, even helplessly, about another. There are many ways to know love in this world.

This is not to question romantic love itself. Rather, we could stand to examine the ways in which we think about love; and the changing face of marriage is giving us a chance to do this. “Love comes from the motor of the mind, the wanting part that craves that piece of chocolate, or a work promotion,” Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist and perhaps this country’s leading scholar of love, told me. That we want is enduring; what we want changes as culture does.

OUR CULTURAL FIXATION on the couple is actually a relatively recent development. Though “pair-bonding” has been around for 3.5 million years, according to Helen Fisher, the hunters and gatherers evolved in egalitarian groups, with men and women sharing the labor equally. Both left the camp in the morning; both returned at day’s end with their bounty. Children were raised collaboratively. As a result, women and men were sexually and socially more or less equals; divorce (or its institution-of-marriage-preceding equivalent) was common. Indeed, Fisher sees the contemporary trend for marriage between equals as us “moving forward into deep history”—back to the social and sexual relationships of millions of years ago.

It wasn’t until we moved to farms, and became an agrarian economy centered on property, that the married couple became the central unit of production. As Stephanie Coontz explains, by the Middle Ages, the combination of the couple’s economic interdependence and the Catholic Church’s success in limiting divorce had created the tradition of getting married to one person and staying that way until death do us part. It was in our personal and collective best interest that the marriage remain intact if we wanted to keep the farm afloat.

That said, being too emotionally attached to one’s spouse was discouraged; neighbors, family, and friends were valued just as highly in terms of practical and emotional support. Even servants and apprentices shared the family table, and sometimes slept in the same room with the couple who headed the household, Coontz notes. Until the mid-19th century, the word love was used to describe neighborly and familial feelings more often than to describe those felt toward a mate, and same-sex friendships were conducted with what we moderns would consider a romantic intensity. When honeymoons first started, in the 19th century, the newlyweds brought friends and family along for the fun.

But as the 19th century progressed, and especially with the sexualization of marriage in the early 20th century, these older social ties were drastically devalued in order to strengthen the bond between the husband and wife—with contradictory results. As Coontz told me, “When a couple’s relationship is strong, a marriage can be more fulfilling than ever. But by overloading marriage with more demands than any one individual can possibly meet, we unduly strain it, and have fewer emotional systems to fall back on if the marriage falters.”

Some even believe that the pair bond, far from strengthening communities (which is both the prevailing view of social science and a central tenet of social conservatism), weakens them, the idea being that a married couple becomes too consumed with its own tiny nation of two to pay much heed to anyone else. In 2006, the sociologists Naomi Gerstel and Natalia Sarkisian published a paper concluding that unlike singles, married couples spend less time keeping in touch with and visiting their friends and extended family, and are less likely to provide them with emotional and practical support. They call these “greedy marriages.” I can see how couples today might be driven to form such isolated nations—it’s not easy in this age of dual-career families and hyper-parenting to keep the wheels turning, never mind having to maintain outside relationships as well. And yet we continue to rank this arrangement above all else!

Now that women are financially independent, and marriage is an option rather than a necessity, we are free to pursue what the British sociologist Anthony Giddens termed the “pure relationship,” in which intimacy is sought in and of itself and not solely for reproduction. (If I may quote the eminently quotable Gloria Steinem again: “I can’t mate in captivity.”) Certainly, in a world where women can create their own social standing, concepts like “marrying up” and “marrying down” evaporate—to the point where the importance of conventional criteria such as age and height, Coontz says, has fallen to an all-time low (no pun intended) in the United States.

Everywhere I turn, I see couples upending existing norms and power structures, whether it’s women choosing to be with much younger men, or men choosing to be with women more financially successful than they are (or both at once). My friend M., a successful filmmaker, fell in love with her dog walker, a man 12 years her junior; they stayed together for three years, and are best friends today. As with many such relationships, I didn’t even know about their age difference until I became a member of their not-so-secret society. At a rooftop party last September, a man 11 years my junior asked me out for dinner; I didn’t take him seriously for one second—and then the next thing I knew, we were driving to his parents’ house for Christmas. (When I mentioned what I considered to be this scandalous age difference to the actress Julianne Moore after a newspaper interview that had turned chatty and intimate, she e-mailed me to say, “In terms of scandalously young—I have been with my 9-years-younger husband for 15 years now—so there you go!”) The same goes for couples where the woman is taller. Dalton Conley, the dean for the social sciences at New York University, recently analyzed data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and found a 40 percent increase, between 1986 and 2003, in men who are shorter than their wives. (Most research confirms casual observation: when it comes to judging a prospective mate on the basis of looks, women are the more lenient gender.)

Perhaps true to conservative fears, the rise of gay marriage has helped heterosexuals think more creatively about their own conventions. News stories about polyamory, “ethical nonmonogamy,” and the like pop up with increasing frequency. Gay men have traditionally had a more permissive attitude toward infidelity; how will this influence the straight world? Coontz points out that two of the hallmarks of contemporary marriage are demands for monogamy on an equal basis, and candor. “Throughout history, there was a fairly high tolerance of [men’s] extramarital flings, with women expected to look the other way,” she said. “Now we have to ask: Can we be more monogamous? Or understand that flings happen?” (She’s also noticed that an unexpected consequence of people’s marrying later is that they skip right over the cheating years.) If we’re ready to rethink, as individuals, the ways in which we structure our arrangements, are we ready to do this as a society?

In her new book, Unhitched, Judith Stacey, a sociologist at NYU, surveys a variety of unconventional arrangements, from gay parenthood to polygamy to—in a mesmerizing case study—the Mosuo people of southwest China, who eschew marriage and visit their lovers only under cover of night. “The sooner and better our society comes to terms with the inescapable variety of intimacy and kinship in the modern world, the fewer unhappy families it will generate,” she writes.

The matrilineal Mosuo are worth pausing on, as a reminder of how complex family systems can be, and how rigid ours are—and also as an example of women’s innate libidinousness, which is routinely squelched by patriarchal systems, as Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá point out in their own analysis of the Mosuo in their 2010 book, Sex at Dawn. For centuries, the Mosuo have lived in households that revolve around the women: the mothers preside over their children and grandchildren, and brothers take paternal responsibility for their sisters’ offspring.

Sexual relations are kept separate from family. At night, a Mosuo woman invites her lover to visit her babahuago (flower room); the assignation is called sese (walking). If she’d prefer he not sleep over, he’ll retire to an outer building (never home to his sisters). She can take another lover that night, or a different one the next, or sleep every single night with the same man for the rest of her life—there are no expectations or rules. As Cai Hua, a Chinese anthropologist, explains, these relationships, which are known as açia, are founded on each individual’s autonomy, and last only as long as each person is in the other’s company. Every goodbye is taken to be the end of the açia relationship, even if it resumes the following night. “There is no concept of açia that applies to the future,” Hua says.

America has a rich history of its own sexually alternative utopias, from the 19th-century Oneida Community (which encouraged postmenopausal women to introduce teenage males to sex) to the celibate Shakers, but real change can seldom take hold when economic forces remain static. The extraordinary economic flux we’re in is what makes this current moment so distinctive.

IN THE MONTHS leading to my breakup with Allan, my problem, as I saw it, lay in wanting two incompatible states of being—autonomy and intimacy—and this struck me as selfish and juvenile; part of growing up, I knew, was making trade-offs. I was too ashamed to confide in anyone, and as far as I could tell, mine was an alien predicament anyhow; apparently women everywhere wanted exactly what I possessed: a good man; a marriage-in-the-making; a “we.”

So I started searching out stories about those who had gone off-script with unconventional arrangements. I had to page back through an entire century, down past the riot grrrls, then the women’s libbers, then the flappers, before I found people who talked about love in a way I could relate to: the free-thinking adventurers of early-1900s Greenwich Village. Susan Glaspell, Neith Boyce, Edna St. Vincent Millay—they investigated the limits and possibilities of intimacy with a naive audacity, and a touching decorum, that I found familiar and comforting. I am not a bold person. To read their essays and poems was to perform a shy ideological striptease to the sweetly insistent warble of a gramophone.

“We are not designed, as a species, to raise children in nuclear families,” Christopher Ryan, one of the Sex at Dawn co-authors, told me over the telephone late last summer. Women who try to be “supermoms,” whether single or married, holding down a career and running a household simultaneously, are “swimming upstream.” Could we have a modernization of the Mosuo, Ryan mused, with several women and their children living together—perhaps in one of the nation’s many foreclosed and abandoned McMansions—bonding, sharing expenses, having a higher quality of life? “In every society where women have power—whether humans or primates—the key is female bonding,” he added.

Certainly letting men off the hook isn’t progress. But as we talked, I couldn’t help thinking about the women in Wilkinsburg—an inadvertent all-female coalition—and how in spite of it all, they derived so much happiness from each other’s company. That underprivileged communities are often forced into matrilineal arrangements in the absence of reliable males has been well documented (by the University of Virginia sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox, among others), and I am not in any way romanticizing these circumstances. Nor am I arguing that we should discourage marriage—it’s a tried-and-true model for raising successful children in a modern economy. (Evidence suggests that American children who grow up amidst the disorder that is common to single-parent homes tend to struggle.) But we would do well to study, and to endorse, alternative family arrangements that might provide strength and stability to children as they grow up. I am curious to know what could happen if these de facto female support systems of the sort I saw in Wilkinsburg were recognized as an adaptive response, even an evolutionary stage, that women could be proud to build and maintain.

I definitely noticed an increase in my own contentment when I began to develop and pay more attention to friendships with women who, like me, have never been married. Their worldviews feel relaxingly familiar, and give me the space to sort through my own ambivalence. That’s an abstract benefit. More concretely, there’s what my brother terms our “immigrant bucket brigade”—my peer group’s habit of jumping to the ready to help each other with matters practical and emotional. This isn’t to say that my married friends aren’t as supportive—some of my best friends are married!—it’s just that, with families of their own, they can’t be as available.

Indeed, my single friends housed me as I flew around the world to research this article; by the end, I had my own little (unwritten) monograph on the very rich lives of the modern-day single woman. Deb gave me the use of her handsome mid-century apartment in Chelsea when she vacated town for a meditation retreat; Courtney bequeathed her charming Brooklyn aerie while she traveled alone through Italy; Catherine put me up at her rambling Cape Cod summer house; when my weekend at Maria’s place on Shelter Island unexpectedly ballooned into two weeks, she set me up in my own little writing room; when a different Courtney needed to be nursed through an operation, I stayed for four days to write paragraphs between changing bandages.

The sense of community we create for one another puts me in mind of the 19th-century availability of single-sex hotels and boarding houses, which were a necessity when women were discouraged from living alone, and then became an albatross when they finally weren’t. So last year, inspired by visions of New York’s “women only” Barbizon Hotel in its heyday, I persuaded my childhood friend Willamain to take over the newly available apartment in my building in Brooklyn Heights. We’ve known each other since we were 5, and I thought it would be a great comfort to us both to spend our single lives just a little less atomized. It’s worked. These days, I think of us as a mini-neo-single-sex residential hotel of two. We collect one another’s mail when necessary, share kitchenware, tend to one another when sick, fall into long conversations when we least expect it—all the benefits of dorm living, without the gross bathrooms.

Could we create something bigger, and more intentional? In August, I flew to Amsterdam to visit an iconic medieval bastion of single-sex living. The Begijnhof was founded in the mid-12th century as a religious all-female collective devoted to taking care of the sick. The women were not nuns, but nor were they married, and they were free to cancel their vows and leave at any time. Over the ensuing centuries, very little has changed. Today the religious trappings are gone (though there is an active chapel on site), and to be accepted, an applicant must be female and between the ages of 30 and 65, and commit to living alone. The institution is beloved by the Dutch, and gaining entry isn’t easy. The waiting list is as long as the turnover is low.

I’d heard about the Begijnhof through a friend, who once knew an American woman who lived there, named Ellen. I contacted an old boyfriend who now lives in Amsterdam to see if he knew anything about it (thank you, Facebook), and he put me in touch with an American friend who has lived there for 12 years: the very same Ellen.

The Begijnhof is big—106 apartments in all—but even so, I nearly pedaled right past it on my rented bicycle, hidden as it is in plain sight: a walled enclosure in the middle of the city, set a meter lower than its surroundings. Throngs of tourists sped past toward the adjacent shopping district. In the wall is a heavy, rounded wood door. I pulled it open and walked through.

Inside was an enchanted garden: a modest courtyard surrounded by classic Dutch houses of all different widths and heights. Roses and hydrangea lined walkways and peeked through gates. The sounds of the city were indiscernible. As I climbed the narrow, twisting stairs to Ellen’s sun-filled garret, she leaned over the railing in welcome—white hair cut in a bob, smiling red-painted lips. A writer and producer of avant-garde radio programs, Ellen, 60, has a chic, minimal style that carries over into her little two-floor apartment, which can’t be more than 300 square feet. Neat and efficient in the way of a ship, the place has large windows overlooking the courtyard and rooftops below. To be there is like being held in a nest.

We drank tea and talked, and Ellen rolled her own cigarettes and smoked thoughtfully. She talked about how the Dutch don’t regard being single as peculiar in any way—people are as they are. She feels blessed to live at the Begijnhof and doesn’t ever want to leave. Save for one or two friends on the premises, socially she holds herself aloof; she has no interest in being ensnared by the gossip on which a few of the residents thrive—but she loves knowing that they’re there. Ellen has a partner, but since he’s not allowed to spend the night, they split time between her place and his nearby home. “If you want to live here, you have to adjust, and you have to be creative,” Ellen said. (When I asked her if starting a relationship was a difficult decision after so many years of pleasurable solitude, she looked at me meaningfully and said, “It wasn’t a choice—it was a certainty.”)

When an American woman gives you a tour of her house, she leads you through all the rooms. Instead, this expat showed me her favorite window views: from her desk, from her (single) bed, from her reading chair. As I perched for a moment in each spot, trying her life on for size, I thought about the years I’d spent struggling against the four walls of my apartment, and I wondered what my mother’s life would have been like had she lived and divorced my father. A room of one’s own, for each of us. A place where single women can live and thrive as themselves.

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KATE BOLICK is a former contributing editor at The Atlantic.

U.S.

The End of Men

Earlier this year, women became the majority of the workforce for the first time in U.S. history. Most managers are now women too. And for every two men who get a college degree this year, three women will do the same. For years, women’s progress has been cast as a struggle for equality. But what if equality isn’t the end point? What if modern, postindustrial society is simply better suited to women? A report on the unprecedented role reversal now under way— and its vast cultural consequences

HANNA ROSIN

JULY/AUGUST 2010 ISSUE

JOHN RITTER

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In the 1970s the biologist Ronald Ericsson came up with a way to separate sperm carrying the male-producing Y chromosome from those carrying the X. He sent the two kinds of sperm swimming down a glass tube through ever-thicker albumin barriers. The sperm with the X chromosome had a larger head and a longer tail, and so, he figured, they would get bogged down in the viscous liquid. The sperm with the Y chromosome were leaner and faster and could swim down to the bottom of the tube more efficiently. Ericsson had grown up on a ranch in South Dakota, where he’d developed an Old West, cowboy swagger. The process, he said, was like “cutting out cattle at the gate.” The cattle left flailing behind the gate were of course the X’s, which seemed to please him. He would sometimes demonstrate the process using cartilage from a bull’s penis as a pointer.

In the late 1970s, Ericsson leased the method to clinics around the U.S., calling it the first scientifically proven method for choosing the sex of a child. Instead of a lab coat, he wore cowboy boots and a cowboy hat, and doled out his version of cowboy poetry. (People magazine once suggested a TV miniseries based on his life called Cowboy in the Lab.) The right prescription for life, he would say, was “breakfast at five-thirty, on the saddle by six, no room for Mr. Limp Wrist.” In 1979, he loaned out his ranch as the backdrop for the iconic “Marlboro Country” ads because he believed in the campaign’s central image—“a guy riding on his horse along the river, no bureaucrats, no lawyers,” he recalled when I spoke to him this spring. “He’s the boss.” (The photographers took some 6,500 pictures, a pictorial record of the frontier that Ericsson still takes great pride in.)

VIDEO: In this family feud, Hanna Rosin and her daughter, Noa, debate the superiority of women with Rosin’s son, Jacob, and husband, Slate editor David Plotz

Feminists of the era did not take kindly to Ericsson and his Marlboro Man veneer. To them, the lab cowboy and his sperminator portended a dystopia of mass-produced boys. “You have to be concerned about the future of all women,” Roberta Steinbacher, a nun-turned-social-psychologist, said in a 1984 People profile of Ericsson. “There’s no question that there exists a universal preference for sons.” Steinbacher went on to complain about women becoming locked in as “second-class citizens” while men continued to dominate positions of control and influence. “I think women have to ask themselves, ‘Where does this stop?’” she said. “A lot of us wouldn’t be here right now if these practices had been in effect years ago.”

Ericsson, now 74, laughed when I read him these quotes from his old antagonist. Seldom has it been so easy to prove a dire prediction wrong. In the ’90s, when Ericsson looked into the numbers for the two dozen or so clinics that use his process, he discovered, to his surprise, that couples were requesting more girls than boys, a gap that has persisted, even though Ericsson advertises the method as more effective for producing boys. In some clinics, Ericsson has said, the ratio is now as high as 2 to 1. Polling data on American sex preference is sparse, and does not show a clear preference for girls. But the picture from the doctor’s office unambiguously does. A newer method for sperm selection, called MicroSort, is currently completing Food and Drug Administration clinical trials. The girl requests for that method run at about 75 percent.

Even more unsettling for Ericsson, it has become clear that in choosing the sex of the next generation, he is no longer the boss. “It’s the women who are driving all the decisions,” he says—a change the MicroSort spokespeople I met with also mentioned. At first, Ericsson says, women who called his clinics would apologize and shyly explain that they already had two boys. “Now they just call and [say] outright, ‘I want a girl.’ These mothers look at their lives and think their daughters will have a bright future their mother and grandmother didn’t have, brighter than their sons, even, so why wouldn’t you choose a girl?”

Why wouldn’t you choose a girl? That such a statement should be so casually uttered by an old cowboy like Ericsson—or by anyone, for that matter—is monumental. For nearly as long as civilization has existed, patriarchy—enforced through the rights of the firstborn son—has been the organizing principle, with few exceptions. Men in ancient Greece tied off their left testicle in an effort to produce male heirs; women have killed themselves (or been killed) for failing to bear sons. In her iconic 1949 book, TheSecond Sex, the French feminist Simone de Beauvoir suggested that women so detested their own “feminine condition” that they regarded their newborn daughters with irritation and disgust. Now the centuries-old preference for sons is eroding—or even reversing. “Women of our generation want daughters precisely because we like who we are,” breezes one woman in Cookie magazine. Even Ericsson, the stubborn old goat, can sigh and mark the passing of an era. “Did male dominance exist? Of course it existed. But it seems to be gone now. And the era of the firstborn son is totally gone.”

Ericsson’s extended family is as good an illustration of the rapidly shifting landscape as any other. His 26-year-old granddaughter—“tall, slender, brighter than hell, with a take-no-prisoners personality”—is a biochemist and works on genetic sequencing. His niece studied civil engineering at the University of Southern California. His grandsons, he says, are bright and handsome, but in school “their eyes glaze over. I have to tell ’em: ‘Just don’t screw up and crash your pickup truck and get some girl pregnant and ruin your life.’” Recently Ericsson joked with the old boys at his elementary-school reunion that he was going to have a sex-change operation. “Women live longer than men. They do better in this economy. More of ’em graduate from college. They go into space and do everything men do, and sometimes they do it a whole lot better. I mean, hell, get out of the way—these females are going to leave us males in the dust.”

Man has been the dominant sex since, well, the dawn of mankind. But for the first time in human history, that is changing—and with shocking speed. Cultural and economic changes always reinforce each other. And the global economy is evolving in a way that is eroding the historical preference for male children, worldwide. Over several centuries, South Korea, for instance, constructed one of the most rigid patriarchal societies in the world. Many wives who failed to produce male heirs were abused and treated as domestic servants; some families prayed to spirits to kill off girl children. Then, in the 1970s and ’80s, the government embraced an industrial revolution and encouraged women to enter the labor force. Women moved to the city and went to college. They advanced rapidly, from industrial jobs to clerical jobs to professional work. The traditional order began to crumble soon after. In 1990, the country’s laws were revised so that women could keep custody of their children after a divorce and inherit property. In 2005, the court ruled that women could register children under their own names. As recently as 1985, about half of all women in a national survey said they “must have a son.” That percentage fell slowly until 1991 and then plummeted to just over 15 percent by 2003. Male preference in South Korea “is over,” says Monica Das Gupta, a demographer and Asia expert at the World Bank. “It happened so fast. It’s hard to believe it, but it is.” The same shift is now beginning in other rapidly industrializing countries such as India and China.

Up to a point, the reasons behind this shift are obvious. As thinking and communicating have come to eclipse physical strength and stamina as the keys to economic success, those societies that take advantage of the talents of all their adults, not just half of them, have pulled away from the rest. And because geopolitics and global culture are, ultimately, Darwinian, other societies either follow suit or end up marginalized. In 2006, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development devised the Gender, Institutions and Development Database, which measures the economic and political power of women in 162 countries. With few exceptions, the greater the power of women, the greater the country’s economic success. Aid agencies have started to recognize this relationship and have pushed to institute political quotas in about 100 countries, essentially forcing women into power in an effort to improve those countries’ fortunes. In some war-torn states, women are stepping in as a sort of maternal rescue team. Liberia’s president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, portrayed her country as a sick child in need of her care during her campaign five years ago. Postgenocide Rwanda elected to heal itself by becoming the first country with a majority of women in parliament.

In feminist circles, these social, political, and economic changes are always cast as a slow, arduous form of catch-up in a continuing struggle for female equality. But in the U.S., the world’s most advanced economy, something much more remarkable seems to be happening. American parents are beginning to choose to have girls over boys. As they imagine the pride of watching a child grow and develop and succeed as an adult, it is more often a girl that they see in their mind’s eye.

What if the modern, postindustrial economy is simply more congenial to women than to men? For a long time, evolutionary psychologists have claimed that we are all imprinted with adaptive imperatives from a distant past: men are faster and stronger and hardwired to fight for scarce resources, and that shows up now as a drive to win on Wall Street; women are programmed to find good providers and to care for their offspring, and that is manifested in more- nurturing and more-flexible behavior, ordaining them to domesticity. This kind of thinking frames our sense of the natural order. But what if men and women were fulfilling not biological imperatives but social roles, based on what was more efficient throughout a long era of human history? What if that era has now come to an end? More to the point, what if the economics of the new era are better suited to women?

Once you open your eyes to this possibility, the evidence is all around you. It can be found, most immediately, in the wreckage of the Great Recession, in which three-quarters of the 8 million jobs lost were lost by men. The worst-hit industries were overwhelmingly male and deeply identified with macho: construction, manufacturing, high finance. Some of these jobs will come back, but the overall pattern of dislocation is neither temporary nor random. The recession merely revealed—and accelerated—a profound economic shift that has been going on for at least 30 years, and in some respects even longer.

Earlier this year, for the first time in American history, the balance of the workforce tipped toward women, who now hold a majority of the nation’s jobs. The working class, which has long defined our notions of masculinity, is slowly turning into a matriarchy, with men increasingly absent from the home and women making all the decisions. Women dominate today’s colleges and professional schools—for every two men who will receive a B.A. this year, three women will do the same. Of the 15 job categories projected to grow the most in the next decade in the U.S., all but two are occupied primarily by women. Indeed, the U.S. economy is in some ways becoming a kind of traveling sisterhood: upper-class women leave home and enter the workforce, creating domestic jobs for other women to fill.

The postindustrial economy is indifferent to men’s size and strength. The attributes that are most valuable today—social intelligence, open communication, the ability to sit still and focus—are, at a minimum, not predominantly male. In fact, the opposite may be true. Women in poor parts of India are learning English faster than men to meet the demands of new global call centers. Women own more than 40 percent of private businesses in China, where a red Ferrari is the new status symbol for female entrepreneurs. Last year, Iceland elected Prime Minister Johanna Sigurdardottir, the world’s first openly lesbian head of state, who campaigned explicitly against the male elite she claimed had destroyed the nation’s banking system, and who vowed to end the “age of testosterone.”

Yes, the U.S. still has a wage gap, one that can be convincingly explained—at least in part—by discrimination. Yes, women still do most of the child care. And yes, the upper reaches of society are still dominated by men. But given the power of the forces pushing at the economy, this setup feels like the last gasp of a dying age rather than the permanent establishment. Dozens of college women I interviewed for this story assumed that they very well might be the ones working while their husbands stayed at home, either looking for work or minding the children. Guys, one senior remarked to me, “are the new ball and chain.” It may be happening slowly and unevenly, but it’s unmistakably happening: in the long view, the modern economy is becoming a place where women hold the cards.

In his final book, The Bachelors’ Ball, published in 2007, the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu describes the changing gender dynamics of Béarn, the region in southwestern France where he grew up. The eldest sons once held the privileges of patrimonial loyalty and filial inheritance in Béarn. But over the decades, changing economic forces turned those privileges into curses. Although the land no longer produced the impressive income it once had, the men felt obligated to tend it. Meanwhile, modern women shunned farm life, lured away by jobs and adventure in the city. They occasionally returned for the traditional balls, but the men who awaited them had lost their prestige and become unmarriageable. This is the image that keeps recurring to me, one that Bourdieu describes in his book: at the bachelors’ ball, the men, self-conscious about their diminished status, stand stiffly, their hands by their sides, as the women twirl away.

The role reversal that’s under way between American men and women shows up most obviously and painfully in the working class. In recent years, male support groups have sprung up throughout the Rust Belt and in other places where the postindustrial economy has turned traditional family roles upside down. Some groups help men cope with unemployment, and others help them reconnect with their alienated families. Mustafaa El-Scari, a teacher and social worker, leads some of these groups in Kansas City. El-Scari has studied the sociology of men and boys set adrift, and he considers it his special gift to get them to open up and reflect on their new condition. The day I visited one of his classes, earlier this year, he was facing a particularly resistant crowd.

None of the 30 or so men sitting in a classroom at a downtown Kansas City school have come for voluntary adult enrichment. Having failed to pay their child support, they were given the choice by a judge to go to jail or attend a weekly class on fathering, which to them seemed the better deal. This week’s lesson, from a workbook called Quenching the Father Thirst, was supposed to involve writing a letter to a hypothetical estranged 14-year-old daughter named Crystal, whose father left her when she was a baby. But El-Scari has his own idea about how to get through to this barely awake, skeptical crew, and letters to Crystal have nothing to do with it.

Like them, he explains, he grew up watching Bill Cosby living behind his metaphorical “white picket fence”—one man, one woman, and a bunch of happy kids. “Well, that check bounced a long time ago,” he says. “Let’s see,” he continues, reading from a worksheet. What are the four kinds of paternal authority? Moral, emotional, social, and physical. “But you ain’t none of those in that house. All you are is a paycheck, and now you ain’t even that. And if you try to exercise your authority, she’ll call 911. How does that make you feel? You’re supposed to be the authority, and she says, ‘Get out of the house, bitch.’ She’s calling you ‘bitch’!”

The men are black and white, their ages ranging from about 20 to 40. A couple look like they might have spent a night or two on the streets, but the rest look like they work, or used to. Now they have put down their sodas, and El-Scari has their attention, so he gets a little more philosophical. “Who’s doing what?” he asks them. “What is our role? Everyone’s telling us we’re supposed to be the head of a nuclear family, so you feel like you got robbed. It’s toxic, and poisonous, and it’s setting us up for failure.” He writes on the board: $85,000. “This is her salary.” Then: $12,000. “This is your salary. Who’s the damn man? Who’s the man now?” A murmur rises. “That’s right. She’s the man.”

Judging by the men I spoke with afterward, El-Scari seemed to have pegged his audience perfectly. Darren Henderson was making $33 an hour laying sheet metal, until the real-estate crisis hit and he lost his job. Then he lost his duplex—“there’s my little piece of the American dream”—then his car. And then he fell behind on his child-support payments. “They make it like I’m just sitting around,” he said, “but I’m not.” As proof of his efforts, he took out a new commercial driver’s permit and a bartending license, and then threw them down on the ground like jokers, for all the use they’d been. His daughter’s mother had a $50,000-a-year job and was getting her master’s degree in social work. He’d just signed up for food stamps, which is just about the only social-welfare program a man can easily access. Recently she’d seen him waiting at the bus stop. “Looked me in the eye,” he recalled, “and just drove on by.”

The men in that room, almost without exception, were casualties of the end of the manufacturing era. Most of them had continued to work with their hands even as demand for manual labor was declining. Since 2000, manufacturing has lost almost 6 million jobs, more than a third of its total workforce, and has taken in few young workers. The housing bubble masked this new reality for a while, creating work in construction and related industries. Many of the men I spoke with had worked as electricians or builders; one had been a successful real-estate agent. Now those jobs are gone too. Henderson spent his days shuttling between unemployment offices and job interviews, wondering what his daughter might be doing at any given moment. In 1950, roughly one in 20 men of prime working age, like Henderson, was not working; today that ratio is about one in five, the highest ever recorded.

Men dominate just two of the 15 job categories projected to grow the most over the next decade: janitor and computer engineer. Women have everything else—nursing, home health assistance, child care, food preparation. Many of the new jobs, says Heather Boushey of the Center for American Progress, “replace the things that women used to do in the home for free.” None is especially high-paying. But the steady accumulation of these jobs adds up to an economy that, for the working class, has become more amenable to women than to men.

The list of growing jobs is heavy on nurturing professions, in which women, ironically, seem to benefit from old stereotypes and habits. Theoretically, there is no reason men should not be qualified. But they have proved remarkably unable to adapt. Over the course of the past century, feminism has pushed women to do things once considered against their nature—first enter the workforce as singles, then continue to work while married, then work even with small children at home. Many professions that started out as the province of men are now filled mostly with women—secretary and teacher come to mind. Yet I’m not aware of any that have gone the opposite way. Nursing schools have tried hard to recruit men in the past few years, with minimal success. Teaching schools, eager to recruit male role models, are having a similarly hard time. The range of acceptable masculine roles has changed comparatively little, and has perhaps even narrowed as men have shied away from some careers women have entered. As Jessica Grose wrote in Slate, men seem “fixed in cultural aspic.” And with each passing day, they lag further behind.

As we recover from the Great Recession, some traditionally male jobs will return—men are almost always harder-hit than women in economic downturns because construction and manufacturing are more cyclical than service industries—but that won’t change the long-term trend. When we look back on this period, argues Jamie Ladge, a business professor at Northeastern University, we will see it as a “turning point for women in the workforce.”

The economic and cultural power shift from men to women would be hugely significant even if it never extended beyond working-class America. But women are also starting to dominate middle management, and a surprising number of professional careers as well. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, women now hold 51.4 percent of managerial and professional jobs—up from 26.1 percent in 1980. They make up 54 percent of all accountants and hold about half of all banking and insurance jobs. About a third of America’s physicians are now women, as are 45 percent of associates in law firms—and both those percentages are rising fast. A white-collar economy values raw intellectual horsepower, which men and women have in equal amounts. It also requires communication skills and social intelligence, areas in which women, according to many studies, have a slight edge. Perhaps most important—for better or worse—it increasingly requires formal education credentials, which women are more prone to acquire, particularly early in adulthood. Just about the only professions in which women still make up a relatively small minority of newly minted workers are engineering and those calling on a hard-science background, and even in those areas, women have made strong gains since the 1970s.

Office work has been steadily adapting to women—and in turn being reshaped by them—for 30 years or more. Joel Garreau picks up on this phenomenon in his 1991 book, Edge City, which explores the rise of suburbs that are home to giant swaths of office space along with the usual houses and malls. Companies began moving out of the city in search not only of lower rent but also of the “best educated, most conscientious, most stable workers.” They found their brightest prospects among “underemployed females living in middle-class communities on the fringe of the old urban areas.” As Garreau chronicles the rise of suburban office parks, he places special emphasis on 1978, the peak year for women entering the workforce. When brawn was off the list of job requirements, women often measured up better than men. They were smart, dutiful, and, as long as employers could make the jobs more convenient for them, more reliable. The 1999 movie Office Space was maybe the first to capture how alien and dispiriting the office park can be for men. Disgusted by their jobs and their boss, Peter and his two friends embezzle money and start sleeping through their alarm clocks. At the movie’s end, a male co-worker burns down the office park, and Peter abandons desk work for a job in construction.

Near the top of the jobs pyramid, of course, the upward march of women stalls. Prominent female CEOs, past and present, are so rare that they count as minor celebrities, and most of us can tick off their names just from occasionally reading the business pages: Meg Whitman at eBay, Carly Fiorina at Hewlett-Packard, Anne Mulcahy and Ursula Burns at Xerox, Indra Nooyi at PepsiCo; the accomplishment is considered so extraordinary that Whitman and Fiorina are using it as the basis for political campaigns. Only 3 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs are women, and the number has never risen much above that.

But even the way this issue is now framed reveals that men’s hold on power in elite circles may be loosening. In business circles, the lack of women at the top is described as a “brain drain” and a crisis of “talent retention.” And while female CEOs may be rare in America’s largest companies, they are highly prized: last year, they outearned their male counterparts by 43 percent, on average, and received bigger raises.

Even around the delicate question of working mothers, the terms of the conversation are shifting. Last year, in a story about breast-feeding, I complained about how the early years of child rearing keep women out of power positions. But the term mommy track is slowly morphing into the gender-neutral flex time, reflecting changes in the workforce. For recent college graduates of both sexes, flexible arrangements are at the top of the list of workplace demands, according to a study published last year in the Harvard Business Review. And companies eager to attract and retain talented workers and managers are responding. The consulting firm Deloitte, for instance, started what’s now considered the model program, called Mass Career Customization, which allows employees to adjust their hours depending on their life stage. The program, Deloitte’s Web site explains, solves “a complex issue—one that can no longer be classified as a woman’s issue.”

“Women are knocking on the door of leadership at the very moment when their talents are especially well matched with the requirements of the day,” writes David Gergen in the introduction to Enlightened Power: How Women Are Transforming the Practice of Leadership. What are these talents? Once it was thought that leaders should be aggressive and competitive, and that men are naturally more of both. But psychological research has complicated this picture. In lab studies that simulate negotiations, men and women are just about equally assertive and competitive, with slight variations. Men tend to assert themselves in a controlling manner, while women tend to take into account the rights of others, but both styles are equally effective, write the psychologists Alice Eagly and Linda Carli, in their 2007 book, Through the Labyrinth.

Over the years, researchers have sometimes exaggerated these differences and described the particular talents of women in crude gender stereotypes: women as more empathetic, as better consensus-seekers and better lateral thinkers; women as bringing a superior moral sensibility to bear on a cutthroat business world. In the ’90s, this field of feminist business theory seemed to be forcing the point. But after the latest financial crisis, these ideas have more resonance. Researchers have started looking into the relationship between testosterone and excessive risk, and wondering if groups of men, in some basic hormonal way, spur each other to make reckless decisions. The picture emerging is a mirror image of the traditional gender map: men and markets on the side of the irrational and overemotional, and women on the side of the cool and levelheaded.

We don’t yet know with certainty whether testosterone strongly influences business decision-making. But the perception of the ideal business leader is starting to shift. The old model of command and control, with one leader holding all the decision-making power, is considered hidebound. The new model is sometimes called “post-heroic,” or “transformational” in the words of the historian and leadership expert James MacGregor Burns. The aim is to behave like a good coach, and channel your charisma to motivate others to be hardworking and creative. The model is not explicitly defined as feminist, but it echoes literature about male-female differences. A program at Columbia Business School, for example, teaches sensitive leadership and social intelligence, including better reading of facial expressions and body language. “We never explicitly say, ‘Develop your feminine side,’ but it’s clear that’s what we’re advocating,” says Jamie Ladge.

A 2008 study attempted to quantify the effect of this more-feminine management style. Researchers at Columbia Business School and the University of Maryland analyzed data on the top 1,500 U.S. companies from 1992 to 2006 to determine the relationship between firm performance and female participation in senior management. Firms that had women in top positions performed better, and this was especially true if the firm pursued what the researchers called an “innovation intensive strategy,” in which, they argued, “creativity and collaboration may be especially important”—an apt description of the future economy.

It could be that women boost corporate performance, or it could be that better-performing firms have the luxury of recruiting and keeping high-potential women. But the association is clear: innovative, successful firms are the ones that promote women. The same Columbia-Maryland study ranked America’s industries by the proportion of firms that employed female executives, and the bottom of the list reads like the ghosts of the economy past: shipbuilding, real estate, coal, steelworks, machinery.

If you really want to see where the world is headed, of course, looking at the current workforce can get you only so far. To see the future—of the workforce, the economy, and the culture—you need to spend some time at America’s colleges and professional schools, where a quiet revolution is under way. More than ever, college is the gateway to economic success, a necessary precondition for moving into the upper-middle class—and increasingly even the middle class. It’s this broad, striving middle class that defines our society. And demographically, we can see with absolute clarity that in the coming decades the middle class will be dominated by women.

We’ve all heard about the collegiate gender gap. But the implications of that gap have not yet been fully digested. Women now earn 60 percent of master’s degrees, about half of all law and medical degrees, and 42 percent of all M.B.A.s. Most important, women earn almost 60 percent of all bachelor’s degrees—the minimum requirement, in most cases, for an affluent life. In a stark reversal since the 1970s, men are now more likely than women to hold only a high-school diploma. “One would think that if men were acting in a rational way, they would be getting the education they need to get along out there,” says Tom Mortenson, a senior scholar at the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education. “But they are just failing to adapt.”

This spring, I visited a few schools around Kansas City to get a feel for the gender dynamics of higher education. I started at the downtown campus of Metropolitan Community College. Metropolitan is the kind of place where people go to learn practical job skills and keep current with the changing economy, and as in most community colleges these days, men were conspicuously absent. One afternoon, in the basement cafeteria of a nearly windowless brick building, several women were trying to keep their eyes on their biology textbook and ignore the text messages from their babysitters. Another crew was outside the ladies’ room, braiding each other’s hair. One woman, still in her medical-assistant scrubs, looked like she was about to fall asleep in the elevator between the first and fourth floors.

When Bernard Franklin took over as campus president in 2005, he looked around and told his staff early on that their new priority was to “recruit more boys.” He set up mentoring programs and men-only study groups and student associations. He made a special effort to bond with male students, who liked to call him “Suit.” “It upset some of my feminists,” he recalls. Yet, a few years later, the tidal wave of women continues to wash through the school—they now make up about 70 percent of its students. They come to train to be nurses and teachers—African American women, usually a few years older than traditional college students, and lately, working-class white women from the suburbs seeking a cheap way to earn a credential. As for the men? Well, little has changed. “I recall one guy who was really smart,” one of the school’s counselors told me. “But he was reading at a sixth-grade level and felt embarrassed in front of the women. He had to hide his books from his friends, who would tease him when he studied. Then came the excuses. ‘It’s spring, gotta play ball.’ ‘It’s winter, too cold.’ He didn’t make it.”

It makes some economic sense that women attend community colleges—and in fact, all colleges—in greater numbers than men. Women ages 25 to 34 with only a high-school diploma currently have a median income of $25,474, while men in the same position earn $32,469. But it makes sense only up to a point. The well-paid lifetime union job has been disappearing for at least 30 years. Kansas City, for example, has shifted from steel manufacturing to pharmaceuticals and information technologies. “The economy isn’t as friendly to men as it once was,” says Jacqueline King, of the American Council on Education. “You would think men and women would go to these colleges at the same rate.” But they don’t.

In 2005, King’s group conducted a survey of lower-income adults in college. Men, it turned out, had a harder time committing to school, even when they desperately needed to retool. They tended to start out behind academically, and many felt intimidated by the schoolwork. They reported feeling isolated and were much worse at seeking out fellow students, study groups, or counselors to help them adjust. Mothers going back to school described themselves as good role models for their children. Fathers worried that they were abrogating their responsibilities as breadwinner.

The student gender gap started to feel like a crisis to some people in higher-education circles in the mid-2000s, when it began showing up not just in community and liberal-arts colleges but in the flagship public universities—the UCs and the SUNYs and the UNCs. Like many of those schools, the University of Missouri at Kansas City, a full research university with more than 13,000 students, is now tipping toward 60 percent women, a level many admissions officers worry could permanently shift the atmosphere and reputation of a school. In February, I visited with Ashley Burress, UMKC’s student-body president. (The other three student-government officers this school year were also women.) Burress, a cute, short, African American 24-year-old grad student who is getting a doctor-of-pharmacy degree, had many of the same complaints I heard from other young women. Guys high-five each other when they get a C, while girls beat themselves up over a B-minus. Guys play video games in each other’s rooms, while girls crowd the study hall. Girls get their degrees with no drama, while guys seem always in danger of drifting away. “In 2012, I will be Dr. Burress,” she said. “Will I have to deal with guys who don’t even have a bachelor’s degree? I would like to date, but I’m putting myself in a really small pool.”

UMKC is a working- and middle-class school—the kind of place where traditional sex roles might not be anathema. Yet as I talked to students this spring, I realized how much the basic expectations for men and women had shifted. Many of the women’s mothers had established their careers later in life, sometimes after a divorce, and they had urged their daughters to get to their own careers more quickly. They would be a campus of Tracy Flicks, except that they seemed neither especially brittle nor secretly falling apart.

Victoria, Michelle, and Erin are sorority sisters. Victoria’s mom is a part-time bartender at a hotel. Victoria is a biology major and wants to be a surgeon; soon she’ll apply to a bunch of medical schools. She doesn’t want kids for a while, because she knows she’ll “be at the hospital, like, 100 hours a week,” and when she does have kids, well, she’ll “be the hotshot surgeon, and he”—a nameless he—“will be at home playing with the kiddies.”

Michelle, a self-described “perfectionist,” also has her life mapped out. She’s a psychology major and wants to be a family therapist. After college, she will apply to grad school and look for internships. She is well aware of the career-counseling resources on campus. And her fiancé?

MICHELLE: He’s changed majors, like, 16 times. Last week he wanted to be a dentist. This week it’s environmental science.

ERIN: Did he switch again this week? When you guys have kids, he’ll definitely stay home. Seriously, what does he want to do?

MICHELLE: It depends on the day of the week. Remember last year? It was bio. It really is a joke. But it’s not. It’s funny, but it’s not.

Among traditional college students from the highest-income families, the gender gap pretty much disappears. But the story is not so simple. Wealthier students tend to go to elite private schools, and elite private schools live by their own rules. Quietly, they’ve been opening up a new frontier in affirmative action, with boys playing the role of the underprivileged applicants needing an extra boost. In 2003, a study by the economists Sandy Baum and Eban Goodstein found that among selective liberal-arts schools, being male raises the chance of college acceptance by 6.5 to 9 percentage points. Now the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has voted to investigate what some academics have described as the “open secret” that private schools “are discriminating in admissions in order to maintain what they regard as an appropriate gender balance.”

Jennifer Delahunty, the dean of admissions and financial aid at Kenyon College, in Ohio, let this secret out in a 2006 New York Times op-ed. Gender balance, she wrote back then, is the elephant in the room. And today, she told me, the problem hasn’t gone away. A typical female applicant, she said, manages the process herself—lines up the interviews, sets up a campus visit, requests a visit with faculty members. But the college has seen more than one male applicant “sit back on the couch, sometimes with their eyes closed, while their mom tells them where to go and what to do. Sometimes we say, ‘What a nice essay his mom wrote,’” she said, in that funny-but-not vein.

To avoid crossing the dreaded 60 percent threshold, admissions officers have created a language to explain away the boys’ deficits: “Brain hasn’t kicked in yet.” “Slow to cook.” “Hasn’t quite peaked.” “Holistic picture.” At times Delahunty has become so worried about “overeducated females” and “undereducated males” that she jokes she is getting conspiratorial. She once called her sister, a pediatrician, to vet her latest theory: “Maybe these boys are genetically like canaries in a coal mine, absorbing so many toxins and bad things in the environment that their DNA is shifting. Maybe they’re like those frogs—they’re more vulnerable or something, so they’ve gotten deformed.”

Clearly, some percentage of boys are just temperamentally unsuited to college, at least at age 18 or 20, but without it, they have a harder time finding their place these days. “Forty years ago, 30 years ago, if you were one of the fairly constant fraction of boys who wasn’t ready to learn in high school, there were ways for you to enter the mainstream economy,” says Henry Farber, an economist at Princeton. “When you woke up, there were jobs. There were good industrial jobs, so you could have a good industrial, blue-collar career. Now those jobs are gone.”

Since the 1980s, as women have flooded colleges, male enrollment has grown far more slowly. And the disparities start before college. Throughout the ’90s, various authors and researchers agonized over why boys seemed to be failing at every level of education, from elementary school on up, and identified various culprits: a misguided feminism that treated normal boys as incipient harassers (Christina Hoff Sommers); different brain chemistry (Michael Gurian); a demanding, verbally focused curriculum that ignored boys’ interests (Richard Whitmire). But again, it’s not all that clear that boys have become more dysfunctional—or have changed in any way. What’s clear is that schools, like the economy, now value the self-control, focus, and verbal aptitude that seem to come more easily to young girls.

Researchers have suggested any number of solutions. A movement is growing for more all-boys schools and classes, and for respecting the individual learning styles of boys. Some people think that boys should be able to walk around in class, or take more time on tests, or have tests and books that cater to their interests. In their desperation to reach out to boys, some colleges have formed football teams and started engineering programs. Most of these special accommodations sound very much like the kind of affirmative action proposed for women over the years—which in itself is an alarming flip.

Whether boys have changed or not, we are well past the time to start trying some experiments. It is fabulous to see girls and young women poised for success in the coming years. But allowing generations of boys to grow up feeling rootless and obsolete is not a recipe for a peaceful future. Men have few natural support groups and little access to social welfare; the men’s-rights groups that do exist in the U.S. are taking on an angry, antiwoman edge. Marriages fall apart or never happen at all, and children are raised with no fathers. Far from being celebrated, women’s rising power is perceived as a threat.

WHAT WOULD A SOCIETY in which women are on top look like? We already have an inkling. This is the first time that the cohort of Americans ages 30 to 44 has more college-educated women than college-educated men, and the effects are upsetting the traditional Cleaver-family dynamics. In 1970, women contributed 2 to 6 percent of the family income. Now the typical working wife brings home 42.2 percent, and four in 10 mothers—many of them single mothers—are the primary breadwinners in their families. The whole question of whether mothers should work is moot, argues Heather Boushey of the Center for American Progress, “because they just do. This idealized family—he works, she stays home—hardly exists anymore.”

The terms of marriage have changed radically since 1970. Typically, women’s income has been the main factor in determining whether a family moves up the class ladder or stays stagnant. And increasing numbers of women—unable to find men with a similar income and education—are forgoing marriage altogether. In 1970, 84 percent of women ages 30 to 44 were married; now 60 percent are. In 2007, among American women without a high-school diploma, 43 percent were married. And yet, for all the hand-wringing over the lonely spinster, the real loser in society—the only one to have made just slight financial gains since the 1970s—is the single man, whether poor or rich, college-educated or not. Hens rejoice; it’s the bachelor party that’s over.

The sociologist Kathryn Edin spent five years talking with low-income mothers in the inner suburbs of Philadelphia. Many of these neighborhoods, she found, had turned into matriarchies, with women making all the decisions and dictating what the men should and should not do. “I think something feminists have missed,” Edin told me, “is how much power women have” when they’re not bound by marriage. The women, she explained, “make every important decision”—whether to have a baby, how to raise it, where to live. “It’s definitely ‘my way or the highway,’” she said. “Thirty years ago, cultural norms were such that the fathers might have said, ‘Great, catch me if you can.’ Now they are desperate to father, but they are pessimistic about whether they can meet her expectations.” The women don’t want them as husbands, and they have no steady income to provide. So what do they have?

“Nothing,” Edin says. “They have nothing. The men were just annihilated in the recession of the ’90s, and things never got better. Now it’s just awful.”

The situation today is not, as Edin likes to say, a “feminist nirvana.” The phenomenon of children being born to unmarried parents “has spread to barrios and trailer parks and rural areas and small towns,” Edin says, and it is creeping up the class ladder. After staying steady for a while, the portion of American children born to unmarried parents jumped to 40 percent in the past few years. Many of their mothers are struggling financially; the most successful are working and going to school and hustling to feed the children, and then falling asleep in the elevator of the community college.

Still, they are in charge. “The family changes over the past four decades have been bad for men and bad for kids, but it’s not clear they are bad for women,” says W. Bradford Wilcox, the head of the University of Virginia’s National Marriage Project.

Over the years, researchers have proposed different theories to explain the erosion of marriage in the lower classes: the rise of welfare, or the disappearance of work and thus of marriageable men. But Edin thinks the most compelling theory is that marriage has disappeared because women are setting the terms—and setting them too high for the men around them to reach. “I want that white-picket-fence dream,” one woman told Edin, and the men she knew just didn’t measure up, so she had become her own one-woman mother/father/nurturer/provider. The whole country’s future could look much as the present does for many lower-class African Americans: the mothers pull themselves up, but the men don’t follow. First-generation college-educated white women may join their black counterparts in a new kind of middle class, where marriage is increasingly rare.

As the traditional order has been upended, signs of the profound disruption have popped up in odd places. Japan is in a national panic over the rise of the “herbivores,” the cohort of young men who are rejecting the hard-drinking salaryman life of their fathers and are instead gardening, organizing dessert parties, acting cartoonishly feminine, and declining to have sex. The generational young-women counterparts are known in Japan as the “carnivores,” or sometimes the “hunters.”

American pop culture keeps producing endless variations on the omega male, who ranks even below the beta in the wolf pack. This often-unemployed, romantically challenged loser can show up as a perpetual adolescent (in Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up or The 40-Year-Old Virgin), or a charmless misanthrope (in Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg), or a happy couch potato (in a Bud Light commercial). He can be sweet, bitter, nostalgic, or cynical, but he cannot figure out how to be a man. “We call each other ‘man,’” says Ben Stiller’s character in Greenberg, “but it’s a joke. It’s like imitating other people.” The American male novelist, meanwhile, has lost his mojo and entirely given up on sex as a way for his characters to assert macho dominance, Katie Roiphe explains in her essay “The Naked and the Conflicted.” Instead, she writes, “the current sexual style is more childlike; innocence is more fashionable than virility, the cuddle preferable to sex.”

At the same time, a new kind of alpha female has appeared, stirring up anxiety and, occasionally, fear. The cougar trope started out as a joke about desperate older women. Now it’s gone mainstream, even in Hollywood, home to the 50-something producer with a starlet on his arm. Susan Sarandon and Demi Moore have boy toys, and Aaron Johnson, the 19-year-old star of Kick-Ass, is a proud boy toy for a woman 24 years his senior. The New York Times columnist Gail Collins recently wrote that the cougar phenomenon is beginning to look like it’s not about desperate women at all but about “desperate young American men who are latching on to an older woman who’s a good earner.” Up in the Air, a movie set against the backdrop of recession-era layoffs, hammers home its point about the shattered ego of the American man. A character played by George Clooney is called too old to be attractive by his younger female colleague and is later rejected by an older woman whom he falls in love with after she sleeps with him—and who turns out to be married. George Clooney! If the sexiest man alive can get twice rejected (and sexually played) in a movie, what hope is there for anyone else? The message to American men is summarized by the title of a recent offering from the romantic-comedy mill: She’s Out of My League.

In fact, the more women dominate, the more they behave, fittingly, like the dominant sex. Rates of violence committed by middle-aged women have skyrocketed since the 1980s, and no one knows why. High-profile female killers have been showing up regularly in the news: Amy Bishop, the homicidal Alabama professor; Jihad Jane and her sidekick, Jihad Jamie; the latest generation of Black Widows, responsible for suicide bombings in Russia. In Roman Polanski’s The Ghost Writer, the traditional political wife is rewritten as a cold-blooded killer at the heart of an evil conspiracy. In her recent video Telephone, Lady Gaga, with her infallible radar for the cultural edge, rewrites Thelma and Louise as a story not about elusive female empowerment but about sheer, ruthless power. Instead of killing themselves, she and her girlfriend (played by Beyoncé) kill a bad boyfriend and random others in a homicidal spree and then escape in their yellow pickup truck, Gaga bragging, “We did it, Honey B.”

The Marlboro Man, meanwhile, master of wild beast and wild country, seems too far-fetched and preposterous even for advertising. His modern equivalents are the stunted men in the Dodge Charger ad that ran during this year’s Super Bowl in February. Of all the days in the year, one might think, Super Bowl Sunday should be the one most dedicated to the cinematic celebration of macho. The men in Super Bowl ads should be throwing balls and racing motorcycles and doing whatever it is men imagine they could do all day if only women were not around to restrain them.

Instead, four men stare into the camera, unsmiling, not moving except for tiny blinks and sways. They look like they’ve been tranquilized, like they can barely hold themselves up against the breeze. Their lips do not move, but a voice-over explains their predicament—how they’ve been beaten silent by the demands of tedious employers and enviro-fascists and women. Especially women. “I will put the seat down, I will separate the recycling, I will carry your lip balm.” This last one—lip balm—is expressed with the mildest spit of emotion, the only hint of the suppressed rage against the dominatrix. Then the commercial abruptly cuts to the fantasy, a Dodge Charger vrooming toward the camera punctuated by bold all caps: MAN’S LAST STAND. But the motto is unconvincing. After that display of muteness and passivity, you can only imagine a woman—one with shiny lips—steering the beast.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

HANNA ROSIN is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and the author of The End of Men, which is based on her story in the July/August 2010 issue of The Atlantic.

TECHNOLOGY

Delayed Childbearing

Though career counselors and wishful thinkers may say otherwise, women who put off trying to have children until their mid-thirties or later worsen their chances of becoming pregnant—and risk losing out on motherhood altogether. Maybe society should enable them to delay their careers instead of their childbearing

GINA MARANTO

JUNE 1995 ISSUE

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Last fall, in San Antonio, Texas, at a session for infertility counselors held in conjunction with the annual meeting of the American Fertility Society, Dorothy Mitchell-Leef strode to the microphone during a question-and-answer period and presented a manifesto of sorts. Mitchell-Leef, a prominent reproductive endocrinologist, declared that in effect women have been sold a bill of goods.

For years physicians have said little as women have chosen to put off having children until their mid-thirties, their late thirties, their forties. The time had come, Mitchell-Leef believed, for a message to be delivered. She told the participants—mostly psychiatrists, psychologists, and clinical social workers—that women should be advised to consider having children earlier in their lives rather than later. In response her audience, most of whom had witnessed the anxiety and grief experienced by older women whose infertility treatments had ultimately failed, burst into applause.

College-educated women now appear to have accepted as a virtual article of faith the idea that babies must take a back seat to graduate or professional school and to the establishment of a career. So the fact that several hundred well-heeled professional women with no particular political ax to grind would applaud the notion of earlier childbirth is surprising (especially since some, including Mitchell-Leer, had delayed childbearing themselves). But the session's participants, like thousands of other infertility specialists worldwide, have over the past ten or fifteen years met vast numbers of couples whose reproductive problems have stemmed at least in part from the age of the would-be mother. Many of these professionals, who have seen the costs of the trend toward delayed childbearing firsthand, now want women to be given a more realistic picture of their reproductive limits.

This concern has been voiced before, most notably in the early 1980s, in response to the publication of a French study revealing that success rates for artificial insemination markedly worsened with each upward tick in a woman's age. Alan DeCherney, then at the Yale University School of Medicine and now the chairman of obstetrics and gynecology at Tufts University Medical School and the president of the American Fertility Society (recently renamed the American Society for Reproductive Medicine), and the epidemiologist Gertrud Berkowitz, then also at Yale and now at Mount Sinai Medical School, were among those who recognized the implications of the report. In an editorial for the New England Journal of Medicine they declared, "If the decline in fecundity after 30 is as great as the French investigation indicates, new guidelines for counseling on reproduction may have to be formulated."

That no such public-health initiative was undertaken can be attributed mainly to social circumstances, which tended to militate against the very notion of such a program. The women's movement was still struggling with a radical bias against making babies (the "cruel institution of motherhood" is how the author Gena Corea once described the evolutionarily assigned role of the female in human reproduction). Furthermore, women of all stripes continued to fight for standing in the workplace. To announce during the Reagan years that the ideal time for a woman to have children was in her twenties was to align oneself, however unintentionally, with "pro-family" advocates who argued that a woman's proper place is in the home tending little ones.

Moreover, family-planning guidelines seemed mundane in the face of impressive developments in the field of reproductive medicine. During the 1970s gynecology had ceased to be a backwater and had begun attracting its share of medical schools' best and brightest. At the same time, researchers who had been experimenting for years with ways to manipulate animal eggs, sperm, and embryos had begun adapting their techniques to human beings. Armed with drugs to regulate hormonal cycles, new surgical instruments, and procedures for literally creating life in the lab, reproductive endocrinologists and gynecologists, along with their embryologist helpmates, assumed the status of latter-day fertility gods. Media reports conveyed the impression that the vagaries of reproduction had been brought under technological control.

In short, an array of social and scientific forces have encouraged collective wishful thinking about the functioning of the body, and increasing numbers of women have continued to put off childbearing without fully understanding the possible consequences of that choice. David Meldrum, a reproductive endocrinologist who has been at the forefront of reproductive technology since the 1970s, and who heads the Center for Advanced Reproductive Care, in Redondo Beach, California, says, "Women aren't told enough about the decline of fertility with age. Many don't realize that if they wait, motherhood may pass them by." A Canadian royal commission appointed in 1989 to examine advances in reproductive medicine and make policy recommendations asserted in its 1,200-page report to the government.

People who want to have children should be aware of the normal decline in fertility as they age and consider this in their decisions about when to have children. Such decisions have to take many factors into consideration, but a knowledge of the biological realities of postponing childbearing should be part of the information couples have available when making this choice.

John Collins, a professor in the department of obstetrics and gynecology at McMaster University, in Ontario, and one of hundreds of experts consulted by the royal commission, has put together a slide show that provides a persuasive visual summary of the "biological realities." Collins selected a dozen pertinent studies of female fertility, plotted data from each study on a standardized graph, and superimposed several curves on each slide. All the curves but one, which derives from a small and perhaps not broadly applicable study, proceed from the upper left to the lower right corner, from age twenty-six to beyond forty. A couple of curves are punctuated by a distinct steepening at around age thirty-one; several others take a bend at around age thirty-six. The remainder track steadily downward, supporting the argument that the ability to conceive erodes incrementally as women age.

Of course, everyone can think of exceptions to the younger-is-easier rule. "There are some women who—bingo!—go out and get pregnant at forty," says Jean Benward, a clinical social worker in San Ramon, California. But those who have waited to start a family only to find themselves locked out of childbearing can be emotionally devastated. Benward has counseled numerous women who, like her, came of age in the 1960s and never suspected that they would not be able to get pregnant whenever they chose. "Infertility is a shock at any age," she says, "but it has come as a particular shock to women of my generation."

IN PRAISE OF OLDER MOTHERS

For the American media, marketers, and politicians alike, the Baby Boom has served as a kind of background radiation—a demographic version of the vestigial heat from the Big Bang, 2.7 degrees Kelvin, which bathes the cosmos. But the trend toward delayed childbearing is more properly the background radiation, with the Baby Boom flaring against it as an anomalous supernova. In Western nations the tendency for couples to marry later and have fewer children, at an older age, has been at work almost since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

As is by now commonly known, patterns of childbearing in the United States have shifted over the past three decades or so as women have entered the work force en masse. According to tables compiled by the National Center for Health Statistics, 66.7 percent of women aged twenty to twenty-four were childless in 1992, as compared with 47.5 percent of that age group in 1960, near the end of the Baby Boom years. More tellingly, 43.8 percent of women twenty-five to twenty-nine and 26.1 percent of women thirty to thirty-four were childless in 1992; in both cases this is almost double the corresponding percentage of those who were childless in 1960. Today roughly a quarter of all first-time births are to women thirty to forty-four years old, and the phrase "elderly prima gravida," traditionally employed by physicians to refer to women entering motherhood over thirty-five, sounds absurd in a whole new way.

The subject of delayed childbearing has filled many column inches in newspapers since the late 1950s and has all but dominated discussions of pregnancy in women's magazines, which no doubt shape as well as reflect social attitudes, and are influential dispensers of health information in any case. "CAREER BABIES," read a March, 1958, Mademoiselle headline; "Over 30? Over 35? Over 40? How Late Can You Wait To Have a Baby?" was an article that ran in the January, 1976, Ms.—just two examples among dozens of pieces appearing in Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Glamour, Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, McCall's, Redbook, Essence, Ebony, and Ladies 'Home Journal which dealt explicitly or implicitly with the phenomenon.

Such articles generally extolled the virtues of older motherhood and promulgated the myth that women can easily conceive any time until their early forties—maybe, considering those flukish change-of-life pregnancies, even up to menopause. In the 1960s women's magazines devoted considerable space to the increases in the risk of genetic defects, particularly Down syndrome, that come with advancing maternal age. But the advent of sonography, amniocentesis, and chorionic-villus sampling to gauge the health of the fetus tended to assuage worries, and coverage became almost universally upbeat. The intent was clearly to support women who put off having children in favor of furthering their educations and establishing careers, and to reassure those whose life circumstances had thus far worked against their desire to have children—for example, women who had not yet found a mate and were unwilling to undertake single parenthood. The author of a 1989 New York magazine article on women in their mid-forties having children expressed a fairly typical view in declaring of her subjects,

They are part of the first wave of baby-boomers, and they are intent on pushing old age back as far as they can push it. They are a tough, feisty, indomitable group of women who are redefining what it means to age in the most profound way they can—by having babies who will enter kindergarten after their mothers have celebrated their fiftieth birthdays.

Leaving aside all questions about the merits of older parenthood, and also the question of whether this putative indomitability might not also constitute a profound form of denial, such stories may be said to create the impression that any pre-menopausal woman who wishes to have a child may do so at will. A necessary corrective comes when one delves into the demographic literature.

INTERPRETING FERTILITY STATISTICS

Ever since the invention of statistics, at the turn of the nineteenth century, heads of nations have paid particular attention to the procreational habits of their citizens. Censuses have been taken, and marriage and birth certificates filed, so that statisticians in their bureaucratic warrens, tallying and manipulating the data in dozens of arcane ways, can sketch profiles of given populations. Deceptively dry-looking on the page, these columns of numbers and percentages, of figures broken out by age or race or sex or educational attainment, have often prompted paroxysms of national concern and dismay—as, for example, in the 1860s, when a rising birth rate in Germany in conjunction with a stationary one in France led to nervousness among the French, who believed that population growth bore a strong relationship to military might.

In attempting for predictive purposes to comprehend both the patterns underlying population fluctuations and the ways in which biological and societal forces interact to yield booms and busts, researchers began to distinguish between fertility, or the actual bearing of children, which is usually stated as a total number or rate per thousand women, and fecundity, or the capacity of a woman to conceive. (Medical scientists also speak of "infertilityz by which they may mean either the condition of childlessness or a difficulty in conceiving; in referring to the latter state, statisticians often prefer the term "impaired fecundity.")

Demographers have struggled to explain why younger women invariably register higher fertility than older ones. The obvious answer is that the female reproductive organs become less efficient with age, but establishing the truth of this is not as easy as one might think. To prove that the decline in fertility results from a deterioration of physiological function, one must separate out the effects of behavior from those of biology. The ideal for theoretical purposes would be a robust population in which breeding occurs without impediment over the entire reproductive lifetime of the female. Scientists have easily constructed such experiments with animals, and all the animal data support the hypothesis of an age-linked decline in fecundity. The situation is more complex with human beings, however. Modern populations do not in general approximate the required conditions, because surgical sterilization and contraceptive use are widespread. So demographers have turned instead to the study of small interbreeding groups that have not practiced contraception.

Perhaps the classic paper in this genre, by Joseph Eaton and Albert Mayer, sociologists from Wayne University, was published in a 1953 issue of Human Biology. Eaton and Mayer realized that records kept from 1880 to 1950 by the Hutterites, an Anabaptist sect living in scattered settlements in the Dakotas, Montana, and Canada, provided a means of carrying out "an ex post facto experiment in human biology." Close-knit, and meticulous about keeping their vital statistics, the Hutterites also observed a religious proscription against birth control. Eaton and Mayer saw that the Hutterites might help to answer the question "How many children can a group of human beings have if they reproduce up to the limit of their biological capacity and live through their entire period of potential fertility?"

The Hutterites proved to be extraordinarily fertile, registering a higher birth rate than any group previously examined. But more intriguing for demographers was a curve demonstrating that a Hutterite woman's chance of a live birth at a given age—her reproductive batting average, as it were—fell from just over .500 at age eighteen to .000 shortly after age forty-eight, with the curve taking a sharp bend southward at around age thirty-five. The Hutterite study became a standard reference, and its findings were bolstered in 1961 by a comparative survey of ten similar populations from around the world. But critics found possible reasons other than underlying biology for fertility drops: for example, sexual ennui—or, as they more technically put it, a diminution in coital frequency over the course of a marriage. The age of the male partner could also play a role, in part because the volume, vigor, and viability of sperm seem to begin to diminish around forty.

Demographers continue to debate interpretations of fertility figures and to question one another's methodologies and theoretical assumptions regarding the measurement of age-specific declines in fecundity. Yet although no consensus has emerged, statisticians such as William Mosher, who heads the Family Growth Survey Branch of the National Center for Health Statistics, and his colleague Anjani Chandra, who has written extensively on the demography of infertility, straightforwardly assert that "in women, fecundity decreases with age, particularly after the age of 30 or 35 years." Chandra says that one "could rage on forever about the actual critical age" at which fecundity sinks most sharply, but she thinks that virtually everyone agrees that the decline exists. "The truth of the matter," says James Trussell, an economist at Princeton University who is affiliated with the Office of Population Research there, "is that evolutionarily, women are designed to have children early. Of course, socially, things aren't designed that way."

Physicians, and gynecologists in particular, soon became aware of demographers' Sputnik-era discussions about fecundity, although the subject commanded only passing interest, because in those days infertility could not be overcome medically. Nonetheless, in the 1970s French medical researchers saw that they, like Eaton and Mayer, had been presented with a form of human biology experiment, an opportunity to arrive at a baseline reading of female fecundity.

Early on, French sperm banks and infertility centers had banded together under a single organizational umbrella. The Centres d'Etude et de Conservation du Sperme Humain, known by the acronym CECOS, had adopted standardized approaches to freezing and handling sperm and to treating patients. Around 1973 several CECOS researchers realized that by performing artificial insemination with donated sperm on a group of reproductively healthy but childless women of mixed ages who had come to the centers because their husbands were sterile, they could arrive at an approximation of "natural" fecundity. Artificial insemination under controlled conditions would eliminate confounding factors such as variations in coital frequency or in sperm quality.

By the time the CECOS clinicians wrote up their results, they had followed 2,193 women over the course of seven years, 1973 to 1980, and had observed a "slight but significant" decrease in the ability to conceive after age thirty and a "marked" decrease after age thirty-five. Whereas women under thirty-one had about a 74 percent chance of being impregnated within a year's time, the figure fell to 61 percent for those aged thirty-one to thirty-five, and to 54 percent for those over thirty-five. These were the numbers that prompted DeCherney and Berkowitz's New England Journal of Medicine editorial on the need to rethink delayed childbearing.

THE "BAD EGGS" EXPLANATION

The French researchers drew fire from a few demographers who, though confirming the trend, dismissed their numbers as too high. Meanwhile, infertility specialists hit upon a new angle from which to examine fecundity. As growing numbers of women underwent treatment with fertility drugs and attempted to conceive through in vitro fertilization, researchers tallied successes and failures according to age group. Almost invariably, older women had a poorer prognosis than younger ones. The test-tube-baby pioneers Patrick Steptoe and Robert Edwards observed this disparity among their patients in a 1983 progress report in The Lancet, and it was seen again and again in programs around the world, with the worst outcome being among women over forty, whose chances of conceiving turned out to be quite slim even if the fertility problem apparently lay with their partners.

Some researchers, puzzling over what could account for the ill fortune of older women, zeroed in on poor egg quality as a possible cause. This "bad eggs" explanation has gained widespread acceptance since the introduction, in 1983, of egg donation, a procedure in which a physician inserts a needle into the ovaries of one woman, sucks mature eggs from her follicles, combines the eggs with sperm, and then transfers the resulting embryos to a second woman, who hopes to carry one or more of them to term. In the bulk of cases, infertility specialists have found, older women who fail to become pregnant using embryos made with their own eggs succeed when the eggs come from a younger donor.

The work of the reproductive endocrinologists Mark Sauer and Richard Paulson and their associates at the University of Southern California School of Medicine has demonstrated in dramatic fashion the difference that young eggs make. From their clinic in downtown Los Angeles, Sauer and Paulson have inadvertently made a name for themselves in the tabloids by helping women old enough to be grandmothers get pregnant. Last year Sauer and Paulson reviewed the results of 300 egg donations carried out at their clinic, 198 of them in women aged forty to fifty-nine, and concluded that the natural aging of eggs accounts for the decline in female fecundity. Sauer and Paulson feel certain of this because even postmenopausal women who received donated eggs were able to undergo successful pregnancies, as long as they were given hormones to plump up the uterine lining.

Embryos from older eggs show no external signs of being flawed. Magnified and floating in culture medium, an eight-cell human embryo produced from a forty-year-old woman's egg cannot be differentiated from that of a teenager. But the eye is no gauge of embryonic fitness. Recently a team of scientists at Cornell University Medical Center, in New York City, provided compelling evidence that abnormalities deep within developing embryos account for failures of in vitro fertilization, and that these abnormalities occur with greater frequency among older women.

We have known since the 1930s that as women age, they are far more likely to produce fetuses and babies with Down syndrome and other "trisomic" anomalies. Embryos that are trisomic contain, instead of matched pairs of chromosomes, one too many of a given chromosome, most commonly chromosome 13, 18, 21 (which is responsible for Down syndrome), X, or Y. Trisomies are the result of a glitch known as nondisjunction, which occurs principally during the creation of egg cells (although sperm cells may also exhibit such errors). Immature human eggs, or oocytes, sit in suspended animation in the ovaries from the time they are formed in the female fetus, and complete the process of meiosis to form mature egg cells only just prior to ovulation. When nondisjunction occurs, the resulting eggs may carry too few or too many chromosomes, a state called aneuploidy.

In a 1983 letter to the journal Nature, British in vitro fertilization researchers conjectured that embryos formed from such botched eggs would be less viable than those with a normal genetic endowment, and either would not implant in the uterine wall or would spontaneously abort shortly after implantation. This, they said, could account for the generally high rate of in vitro failures then being seen—about 80 percent. The further implication, arising out of the well-known correlation between maternal age and chromosomal disorders, was that the longer oocytes sit around in the ovaries, the more likely they are to rub the series of steps vital to dividing up the chromosomes.

This notion has been borne out by the Cornell team, which made its case in one of the main papers presented at last fall's American Fertility Society meeting. Jamie Grifo, a reproductive endocrinologist who also holds a doctorate in biochemistry and is an assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Cornell, read the paper, which had taken top honors from the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology. Grifo and his colleagues have been fine-tuning an experimental method for diagnosing chromosomal abnormalities in embryos before they are transferred to women undergoing in vitro fertilization (the aim being to help couples at high risk of passing on genetic diseases). The test involves removing one cell, or blastomere, from an eight-cell embryo and exposing the cell to flagged fragments of single-stranded DNA, which bind to the chromosomes and can be viewed, glowing, under a special microscope. If the blastomere is aneuploid, this molecular tool, called "fluorescence in situ hybridization," or FISH, will unmask it. Grifo announced at the meeting that in screening normal-looking pre-implantation embryos from two groups of women, twenty-five to thirty-nine years old, and over thirty-nine, they had found significantly higher proportions of aneuploidy in the second group than in the first—42 percent as against nine percent.

The team has further illuminated the extent to which eggs go bad with age in an unpublished paper written by the geneticist Santiago Munne. Munne reports that FISH screening of 3,594 blastomeres from 514 pre-implantation embryos pinpointed far more aneuploidies among women over forty than should have been expected, given the rates of aneuploidy tallied from amniocentesis tests of fetuses carried by older women and from live births. In other words, more aneuploid embryos are formed than ever show up as pregnancies, and more pregnancies with aneuploid embryos spontaneously terminate at some early stage than ever continue to term. Nature, it appears, has a mechanism for weeding out embryos of inferior quality, whether they're made in a petri dish or in the body.

Grifo and the Cornell team contend that genetically faulty embryos are the main cause of the high failure rate of in vitro fertilization among older women, but other fertility specialists have reservations. Richard Paulson, who was a physics major as an undergraduate, professes to being something of a stickler when it comes to data; he is not entirely persuaded by the Cornell numbers and suggests that flaws in aging eggs other than chromosomal ones might bar their implantation and development. David Meldrum, of the Center for Advanced Reproductive Care, who has made a review of the literature on female reproductive aging, contends that both egg quality and uterine receptivity play a role in the decline of fecundity with age. But whatever the locus of the problem, pregnancies prove harder to establish and maintain in older women—whether in the infertility clinic or in the world at large. Women in their forties are known to have a rate of spontaneous abortion half again as high as those in their twenties. And the older a woman gets, the greater her prospects of bearing a premature or low-birth-weight infant, or of having a stillbirth—and thus the greater her possibilities for heartache.

INFERTILITY

The natural reduction in reproductive capacity can be considered an unavoidable part of being human. But in weighing the potential liabilities of delayed childbearing, the slings and arrows of personal fortune must also be considered. Every woman is an individual, and as all college students learn, statistics apply to populations, not people. Whether any particular woman will have difficulty conceiving if she delays childbearing depends in part upon her history and family heritage. For example, the more sexual partners a woman has had, the greater her risk of having been exposed to a disease like chlamydia, which can spread into the pelvic region and cause inflammation and scarring, rendering the passage of ovulated eggs down the fallopian tubes difficult or impossible. Pelvic inflammatory disease, which is often asymptomatic, has been on the rise since the 1970s, and is thought to have affected some 11 percent of women in the United States. Smoking, exposure to chemicals in the workplace and home, and the use of alcohol and other drugs have also been shown to undermine fertility. Women in their forties have higher incidences of cervical, uterine, and ovarian cancer, the ravages of which may leave them incapable of bearing children.

Dorothy Mitchell-Leef and other infertility specialists have expressed concern as well about the number of women they are seeing with premature ovarian failure, or early menopause. Normally, women in the industrialized world go through menopause between the ages of forty-nine and fifty-one. Outwardly marked by a cessation of menstruation, menopause is caused by the depletion of eggs in the ovaries. The store of eggs—some 6 to 8 million in female fetuses—begins to dwindle even during gestation, and eggs continue to be lost throughout girlhood and adulthood by attrition and with each menstrual cycle, until, finally, too few eggs remain to maintain the monthly reproductive cycle. In the past year or so Mitchell-Leef has seen what she considers an unusually large number of women in their mid-thirties to early forties whose hormone levels indicate that they are entering menopause. Last fall she saw ten such patients in two weeks alone.

Because no population-based studies of premature ovarian failure have been performed, and even the anecdotal evidence is not being widely reported, probably the best interpretation for the time being (from a scientific, not a humane, point of view) is that the patients walking into Mitchell-Leef's clinic represent a statistical blip rather than an early warning signal of a major public-health problem. But even without an epidemic of premature ovarian failure, the overall reproductive health of American women is a matter of some concern.

In 1990 William Mosher and William Pratt, at the National Center for Health Statistics, performed an analysis of information gathered in the 1988 National Survey of Family Growth, in which 8,450 women, selected as representative of the population at large, were asked about their reproductive histories and health. Extrapolating from their answers, Mosher and Pratt projected that 8.4 percent of women in the United States, or about 4.9 million of the 57.9 million women aged fifteen to forty-four, could be categorized as having impaired fecundity. When Mosher and Pratt broke out the figures by age, the percentage of those expected to suffer from impaired fecundity increased in stepwise fashion. Falling into that category were 4.1 percent of all American women aged fifteen to twenty-four (some 614,000 women), 13.4 percent of those aged twenty-five to thirty-four (972,000 women), and 21.4 percent of those aged thirty-five to forty-four (620,000).

In part because the survey relied on women's own awareness of their reproductive health, which could be incomplete, the incidence of impaired fecundity appeared greater among married than among unmarried women. The phenomenon was particularly pronounced among childless married women. The survey suggested that approximately 1,037,000 of these women aged twenty-five to forty-four had tried to get pregnant and couldn't, or had had intercourse with a spouse for three years without using contraceptives and had failed during that time to become pregnant, or had been told by a physician not to become pregnant because it might endanger their health, or knew that they could not become pregnant, owing to a previous accident, an illness, or an "unexplained inability to conceive," a condition referred to in medical jargon as idiopathic infertility.

Statisticians have no idea how many women who want children reach the end of their childbearing years without fulfilling that desire, or how many would have liked to have more children than they had but were unable to because of impaired fecundity. The 1992 Current Population Survey, carried out by the Bureau of the Census, estimated that of the 44 million childless U.S. women aged eighteen to thirty-nine, some 15 million expected to have one child or more during her lifetime. About a third of these women were aged thirty to thirty-nine. Even the most conservative National Center for Health Statistics estimate—that one in twelve women suffers from impaired fecundity—suggests that some 350,000 to 700,000 women could encounter impediments to their plans.

Gynecologists and obstetricians argue that the majority of women who want to have children will conceive, and indeed this is true. But as David Meldrum says, "The cup they are looking at is half full, and the one we're looking at is half empty." The one-in-five rate of impaired fecundity among all childless women aged thirty-five to forty-four, and the one-in-eight rate for those aged twenty-five to thirty-four, don't strike this observer as amounting to terribly good odds. They're not cause for panic, but they are worth mulling over. John Collins, of McMaster University, says, "Clinicians should tell women, 'These are the facts, and you see how that fits in with the remainder of your life.'" He believes that his approach—to empower women with information rather than advise them to get pregnant at a certain age—comports with that of the majority of his colleagues. Jean Benward, the California social worker, says, "People's life trajectories are very complicated, and circumstances are not always within our control. Knowing the facts may not have an impact on a woman's behavior, but I think it's valuable for women to have the information so that they can make informed choices."

Of course, those who, having delayed parenthood, find themselves unable to conceive naturally can choose to enter the high-tech world of assisted reproduction. But this path is generally costly (patients must pay tens of thousands of dollars out of their own pockets, because only a few states mandate insurance coverage for infertility treatments), as well as unpleasant (women undergo painful daily injections of fertility drugs, frequent blood tests, general anesthesia, and invasive surgery). Medically mediated conception is also time-consuming and encourages a kind of obsessiveness. Some women, among them the journalist Anne Taylor Fleming, who has written a disquieting account of her own unsuccessful attempts to have a child in Motherhood Deferred, spend the better part of ten years in and out of infertility clinics. If artificial insemination and the various in vitro fertilization options fail, women who want children but don't want to adopt now face the ethical and other quandaries built into two exotic new alternatives: trying to become pregnant using another woman's egg, and enlisting a surrogate mother.

The unfortunate bottom line is that infertility specialists cannot help all couples who seek their services. Even leading clinics using the latest procedures offer no guarantees. True, a certain number of couples who don't succeed by high-tech means go on to achieve pregnancies by the old-fashioned method. But many others are left childless, in debt, and anguished over their failed dreams.

Some reproductive endocrinologists point out that when researchers learn how to freeze eggs (so far, sperm can safely be frozen and thawed, as can embryos, but eggs have proved refractory), women will be able to consign a clutch of young eggs to the cryopreservation tanks when they are twenty and reclaim them at a later date. Clever as that sounds, it seems a highly impractical solution to the problem. As already noted, egg retrieval is expensive and invasive. Without a radical restructuring of health care, few women would be able to take advantage of an option like egg cryopreservation.

SUPPORTING PARENTHOOD

Perhaps there's another way. Suppose America put its money where its mouth is on family values. Politicians endlessly invoke that shibboleth, yet the United States—notwithstanding the Family and Medical Leave Act signed with much fanfare by President Clinton in February of 1993—still offers far less social support for childbearing than do most other industrialized countries. Luxembourg, whose state-mandated maternity and parental leaves are among the least generous in the European Union, provides women with up to ten weeks of paid maternity leave and gives parents the option of unpaid absences for certain periods until their children are fifteen years old, with the guarantee of a job upon their return. Italy, whose policies are among the most generous in this regard, gives women up to five months' fully paid maternity leave, and has a proviso allowing either parent to take two or three days at a time off to care for a sick child under three years old. Paid maternity and parental leaves and safe, affordable day care, which are taken for granted by citizens of other nations, remain out of reach in the richest economy in the world.

Women's-rights advocates have been fighting for a century for equity in the American workplace, and still have to deal with corporate bias. Sixty years ago few companies thought twice about firing a female employee who became pregnant; now the discrimination against women who have children is more subtle but nevertheless tangible, as they are shunted off into corporate backwaters or kept out of consideration for partnerships or passed over for pay raises. Women delay childbearing for a variety of reasons, but surely important among these is the need to establish themselves professionally, and the awareness that opportunity and credibility are elusive, particularly if they become mothers.

Felice Schwartz, in her incendiary 1989 Harvard Business Review article "Management Women and the New Facts of Life," which caused the "mommy track" brouhaha, contended that women are more prone to "career interruptions, plateauing, and turnover" than men, and that these all cost companies money, in lost training dollars and in lost expertise, when middle- and upper-level women retire to the nursery. Aside from the fact that "career interruptions, plateauing, and turnover" reads like the resumes of a substantial number of middle-management Baby Boomers in this age of downsizing and globally free-floating corporate dollars, one must seriously question, as Schwartz herself did, whether these are the inevitable consequences of motherhood or an artifact of national social policies.

Notwithstanding subsequent misinterpretations and misuses of her thesis by corporations and feminists alike, Schwartz concluded that the majority of women "want to pursue serious careers while participating actively in the rearing of children," and suggested that employers should help women to "plan for and manage maternity" and should act to "make family supports and high-quality, affordable child care available to all women." That such an approach can yield good results can be seen in Sweden, where government and corporations have made a concerted effort since the 1970s to encourage women to enter the workplace. There, generous parental leave, excellent public day care, and job flexibility have allowed women to balance work and motherhood with aplomb.

Women today make up almost half of the work force in the United States, and the proportion continues to rise. Two thirds of women with children are employed. In light of the biological realities they face, women would do well to continue to press for a reconfiguration of society, so that they might, if they chose to, have babies in their twenties and develop their careers in their thirties—as suggested by Alan DeCherney and Gertrud Berkowitz in the wake of the CECOS study. In order for that to be possible, society will need to amend itself in ways that are likely to redound to the benefit of not just women but everyone.

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U.S.

Marry Him!

The case for settling for Mr. Good Enough

LORI GOTTLIEB

MARCH 2008 ISSUE

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Illustration by Lou Brooks

About six months after my son was born, he and I were sitting on a blanket at the park with a close friend and her daughter. It was a sunny summer weekend, and other parents and their kids picnicked nearby—mothers munching berries and lounging on the grass, fathers tossing balls with their giddy toddlers. My friend and I, who, in fits of self-empowerment, had conceived our babies with donor sperm because we hadn’t met Mr. Right yet, surveyed the idyllic scene.

“Ah, this is the dream,” I said, and we nodded in silence for a minute, then burst out laughing. In some ways, I meant it: we’d both dreamed of motherhood, and here we were, picnicking in the park with our children. But it was also decidedly not the dream. The dream, like that of our mothers and their mothers from time immemorial, was to fall in love, get married, and live happily ever after. Of course, we’d be loath to admit it in this day and age, but ask any soul-baring 40-year-old single heterosexual woman what she most longs for in life, and she probably won’t tell you it’s a better career or a smaller waistline or a bigger apartment. Most likely, she’ll say that what she really wants is a husband (and, by extension, a child).

To the outside world, of course, we still call ourselves feminists and insist—vehemently, even—that we’re independent and self-sufficient and don’t believe in any of that damsel-in-distress stuff, but in reality, we aren’t fish who can do without a bicycle, we’re women who want a traditional family. And despite growing up in an era when the centuries-old mantra to get married young was finally (and, it seemed, refreshingly) replaced by encouragement to postpone that milestone in pursuit of high ideals (education! career! but also true love!), every woman I know—no matter how successful and ambitious, how financially and emotionally secure—feels panic, occasionally coupled with desperation, if she hits 30 and finds herself unmarried.

VIDEO: Lori Gottlieb explains why women should stop holding out for Mr. Right

Oh, I know—I’m guessing there are single 30-year-old women reading this right now who will be writing letters to the editor to say that the women I know aren’t widely representative, that I’ve been co-opted by the cult of the feminist backlash, and basically, that I have no idea what I’m talking about. And all I can say is, if you say you’re not worried, either you’re in denial or you’re lying. In fact, take a good look in the mirror and try to convince yourself that you’re not worried, because you’ll see how silly your face looks when you’re being disingenuous.

Whether you acknowledge it or not, there’s good reason to worry. By the time 35th-birthday-brunch celebrations roll around for still-single women, serious, irreversible life issues masquerading as “jokes” creep into public conversation: Well, I don’t feel old, but my eggs sure do! or Maybe this year I’ll marry Todd. I’m not getting any younger! The birthday girl smiles a bit too widely as she delivers these lines, and everyone laughs a little too hard for a little too long, not because we find these sentiments funny, but because we’re awkwardly acknowledging how unfunny they are. At their core, they pose one of the most complicated, painful, and pervasive dilemmas many single women are forced to grapple with nowadays: Is it better to be alone, or to settle?

My advice is this: Settle! That’s right. Don’t worry about passion or intense connection. Don’t nix a guy based on his annoying habit of yelling “Bravo!” in movie theaters. Overlook his halitosis or abysmal sense of aesthetics. Because if you want to have the infrastructure in place to have a family, settling is the way to go. Based on my observations, in fact, settling will probably make you happier in the long run, since many of those who marry with great expectations become more disillusioned with each passing year. (It’s hard to maintain that level of zing when the conversation morphs into discussions about who’s changing the diapers or balancing the checkbook.)

Obviously, I wasn’t always an advocate of settling. In fact, it took not settling to make me realize that settling is the better option, and even though settling is a rampant phenomenon, talking about it in a positive light makes people profoundly uncomfortable. Whenever I make the case for settling, people look at me with creased brows of disapproval or frowns of disappointment, the way a child might look at an older sibling who just informed her that Jerry’s Kids aren’t going to walk, even if you send them money. It’s not only politically incorrect to get behind settling, it’s downright un-American. Our culture tells us to keep our eyes on the prize (while our mothers, who know better, tell us not to be so picky), and the theme of holding out for true love (whatever that is—look at the divorce rate) permeates our collective mentality.

Even situation comedies, starting in the 1970s with The Mary Tyler Moore Show and going all the way to Friends, feature endearing single women in the dating trenches, and there’s supposed to be something romantic and even heroic about their search for true love. Of course, the crucial difference is that, whereas the earlier series begins after Mary has been jilted by her fiancé, the more modern-day Friends opens as Rachel Green leaves her nice-guy orthodontist fiancé at the altar simply because she isn’t feeling it. But either way, in episode after episode, as both women continue to be unlucky in love, settling starts to look pretty darn appealing. Mary is supposed to be contentedly independent and fulfilled by her newsroom family, but in fact her life seems lonely. Are we to assume that at the end of the series, Mary, by then in her late 30s, found her soul mate after the lights in the newsroom went out and her work family was disbanded? If her experience was anything like mine or that of my single friends, it’s unlikely.

And while Rachel and her supposed soul mate, Ross, finally get together (for the umpteenth time) in the finale of Friends, do we feel confident that she’ll be happier with Ross than she would have been had she settled down with Barry, the orthodontist, 10 years earlier? She and Ross have passion but have never had long-term stability, and the fireworks she experiences with him but not with Barry might actually turn out to be a liability, given how many times their relationship has already gone up in flames. It’s equally questionable whether Sex and the City’s Carrie Bradshaw, who cheated on her kindhearted and generous boyfriend, Aidan, only to end up with the more exciting but self-absorbed Mr. Big, will be better off in the framework of marriage and family. (Some time after the breakup, when Carrie ran into Aidan on the street, he was carrying his infant in a Baby Björn. Can anyone imagine Mr. Big walking around with a Björn?)

When we’re holding out for deep romantic love, we have the fantasy that this level of passionate intensity will make us happier. But marrying Mr. Good Enough might be an equally viable option, especially if you’re looking for a stable, reliable life companion. Madame Bovary might not see it that way, but if she’d remained single, I’ll bet she would have been even more depressed than she was while living with her tedious but caring husband.

What I didn’t realize when I decided, in my 30s, to break up with boyfriends I might otherwise have ended up marrying, is that while settling seems like an enormous act of resignation when you’re looking at it from the vantage point of a single person, once you take the plunge and do it, you’ll probably be relatively content. It sounds obvious now, but I didn’t fully appreciate back then that what makes for a good marriage isn’t necessarily what makes for a good romantic relationship. Once you’re married, it’s not about whom you want to go on vacation with; it’s about whom you want to run a household with. Marriage isn’t a passion-fest; it’s more like a partnership formed to run a very small, mundane, and often boring nonprofit business. And I mean this in a good way.

I don’t mean to say that settling is ideal. I’m simply saying that it might have gotten an undeservedly bad rap. As the only single woman in my son’s mommy-and-me group, I used to listen each week to a litany of unrelenting complaints about people’s husbands and feel pretty good about my decision to hold out for the right guy, only to realize that these women wouldn’t trade places with me for a second, no matter how dull their marriages might be or how desperately they might long for a different husband. They, like me, would rather feel alone in a marriage than actually be alone, because they, like me, realize that marriage ultimately isn’t about cosmic connection—it’s about how having a teammate, even if he’s not the love of your life, is better than not having one at all.

The couples my friend and I saw at the park that summer were enviable but not because they seemed so in love—they were enviable because the husbands played with the kids for 20 minutes so their wives could eat lunch. In practice, my married friends with kids don’t spend that much time with their husbands anyway (between work and child care), and in many cases, their biggest complaint seems to be that they never see each other. So if you rarely see your husband—but he’s a decent guy who takes out the trash and sets up the baby gear, and he provides a second income that allows you to spend time with your child instead of working 60 hours a week to support a family on your own—how much does it matter whether the guy you marry is The One?

Also see:

Interview: "The Case for Mr. Not-Quite Right"

Lori Gottlieb talks about soul mates, all-consuming love, and why it makes sense to compromise those ideals.

It’s not that I’ve become jaded to the point that I don’t believe in, or even crave, romantic connection. It’s that my understanding of it has changed. In my formative years, romance was John Cusack and Ione Skye in Say Anything. But when I think about marriage nowadays, my role models are the television characters Will and Grace, who, though Will was gay and his relationship with Grace was platonic, were one of the most romantic couples I can think of. What I long for in a marriage is that sense of having a partner in crime. Someone who knows your day-to-day trivia. Someone who both calls you on your bullshit and puts up with your quirks. So what if Will and Grace weren’t having sex with each other? How many long- married couples are having much sex anyway?

“I just want someone who’s willing to be in the trenches with me,” my single friend Jennifer told me, “and I never thought of marriage that way before.” Two of Jennifer’s friends married men who Jennifer believes aren’t even straight, and while Jennifer wouldn’t have made that choice a few years back, she wonders whether she might be capable of it in the future. “Maybe they understood something that I didn’t,” she said.

What they understood is this: as your priorities change from romance to family, the so-called “deal breakers” change. Some guys aren’t worldly, but they’d make great dads. Or you walk into a room and start talking to this person who is 5'4" and has an unfortunate nose, but he “gets” you. My long-married friend Renée offered this dating advice to me in an e-mail:

I would say even if he’s not the love of your life, make sure he’s someone you respect intellectually, makes you laugh, appreciates you … I bet there are plenty of these men in the older, overweight, and bald category (which they all eventually become anyway).

She wasn’t joking.

A number of my single women friends admit (in hushed voices and after I swear I won’t use their real names here) that they’d readily settle now but wouldn’t have 10 years ago. They believe that part of the problem is that we grew up idealizing marriage—and that if we’d had a more realistic understanding of its cold, hard benefits, we might have done things differently. Instead, we grew up thinking that marriage meant feeling some kind of divine spark, and so we walked away from uninspiring relationships that might have made us happy in the context of a family.

All marriages, of course, involve compromise, but where’s the cutoff? Where’s the line between compromising and settling, and at what age does that line seem to fade away? Choosing to spend your life with a guy who doesn’t delight in the small things in life might be considered settling at 30, but not at 35. By 40, if you get a cold shiver down your spine at the thought of embracing a certain guy, but you enjoy his company more than anyone else’s, is that settling or making an adult compromise?

Take the date I went on last night. The guy was substantially older. He had a long history of major depression and said, in reference to the movies he was writing, “I’m fascinated by comas” and “I have a strong interest in terrorists.” He’d never been married. He was rude to the waiter. But he very much wanted a family, and he was successful, handsome, and smart. As I looked at him from across the table, I thought, Yeah, I’ll see him again. Maybe I can settle for that. But my very next thought was, Maybe I can settle for better. It’s like musical chairs—when do you take a seat, any seat, just so you’re not left standing alone?

Back when I was still convinced I’d find my soul mate, I did, although I never articulated this, have certain requirements. I thought that the person I married would have to have a sense of wonderment about the world, would be both spontaneous and grounded, and would acknowledge that life is hard but also be able to navigate its ups and downs with humor. Many of the guys I dated possessed these qualities, but if one of them lacked a certain degree of kindness, another didn’t seem emotionally stable enough, and another’s values clashed with mine. Others were sweet but so boring that I preferred reading during dinner to sitting through another tedious conversation. I also dated someone who appeared to be highly compatible with me—we had much in common, and strong physical chemistry—but while our sensibilities were similar, they proved to be a half-note off, so we never quite felt in harmony, or never viewed the world through quite the same lens.

Now, though, I realize that if I don’t want to be alone for the rest of my life, I’m at the age where I’ll likely need to settle for someone who is settling for me. What I and many women who hold out for true love forget is that we won’t always have the same appeal that we may have had in our 20s and early 30s. Having turned 40, I now have wrinkles, bags under my eyes, and hair in places I didn’t know hair could grow on women. With my nonworking life consumed by thoughts of potty training and playdates, I’ve become a far less interesting person than the one who went on hiking adventures and performed at comedy clubs. But when I chose to have a baby on my own, the plan was that I would continue to search for true connection afterward; it certainly wasn’t that I would have a baby alone only to settle later. After all, wouldn’t it have been wiser to settle for a higher caliber of “not Mr. Right” while my marital value was at its peak?

Those of us who choose not to settle in hopes of finding a soul mate later are almost like teenagers who believe they’re invulnerable to dying in a drunk-driving accident. We lose sight of our mortality. We forget that we, too, will age and become less alluring. And even if some men do find us engaging, and they’re ready to have a family, they’ll likely decide to marry someone younger with whom they can have their own biological children. Which is all the more reason to settle before settling is no longer an option.

I’ll be the first to admit that there’s something objectionable about making the case for settling, because it’s based on the premise that women’s biological clocks place them at the mercy of men, and that therefore a power dynamic dictates what should be an affair solely of the heart (not the heart and the ovaries). But I’m not the only woman who accepts settling as a valid choice—apparently so do the millions who buy bestselling relationship books that advocate settling but that, so as not to offend, simply spin the concept as a form of female empowerment.

Take, for instance, books like Men Are Like Fish: What Every Woman Needs to Know About Catching a Man or Find a Husband After 35 Using What I Learned at Harvard Business School, whose titles alone make it clear that today’s supposedly progressive bachelorettes aren’t waiting for old-fashioned true love to strike before they can get married. Instead, they’re buying dozens of proactive coaching manuals to learn how to strategically land a man. The actual man in question, though, seems so irrelevant that, to my mind, these women might as well grab a well-dressed guy off the street, drag him into the nearest bar, buy him a drink, and ask him to marry her. (Or, to retain her “power,” she should manipulate him into asking her.)

The approaches in these books may differ, but the message is the same: more important than love is marriage. To achieve that goal, women across the country are poring over guidebooks that all boil down to determining, “Does he like me?,” while completely overlooking the equally essential question, “Do I like him?” In other words, whatever compromises you have to make—including, but not limited to, pretending to be or actually becoming an entirely different person—make sure that you get some schmo to propose to you before you turn into a spinster.

Last year’s Why Smart Men Marry Smart Women makes the most blatant case for settling: if women were more willing to “think outside the box,” as one of the book’s married sources advises, many of them would be married. The author then trots out tales of professional, accomplished women happily dating a plumber, a park ranger, and an Army helicopter nurse. The moral is supposed to be “Don’t be too picky” but many of the anecdotes quote women who seem to be trying to convince not just the reader, but themselves, that they haven’t settled.

“I should be with some guy with a vast vocabulary who is very smart,” said Heather, a 30-year-old lawyer turned journalist. Instead, she’s dating an actor who didn’t finish college. “My boyfriend is fun, he’s smart, but he hasn’t gone through years of school. He wanted to pursue acting. And you can tell—he doesn’t have that background, and it never ever once bothered me. But for everyone else, [his lack of education] is what they see.” Another woman says she dates “the ‘secrets’ … guys other women don’t recognize as great.” How’s that for damning praise?

Meanwhile, in sugarcoating this message, the authors often resort to flattery, telling the reader to remember how fabulous, attractive, charming, and intelligent she is, in the hopes that she’ll project a more confident vibe on dates. In my case, though, the flattery backfired. I read these books thinking, Wait, if I’m such a great catch, why should I settle for anyone less than my equal? If I’m so fabulous, don’t I deserve true romantic connection?

Only one popular book that I can think of in the vast “find a man” genre (like most single women confounded by their singleness, I’m embarrassingly well versed) takes the opposite approach. In He’s Just Not That Into You, written by the happily married Greg Behrendt and the unhappily single Liz Tuccillo, the duo exhorts women not to settle. But the book’s format is telling: Behrendt gives perky pep talks to women unable to find a worthy match, while Tuccillo repeatedly comments on how hard it is to take her co-author’s advice, because while being with a partner who is “beneath you” (Behrendt’s term) is problematic, being single just plain “sucks” (Tuccillo’s term).

Before I got pregnant, though, I also read single-mom books such as Choosing Single Motherhood: The Thinking Woman’s Guide, whose chapter titles “Can I Afford It?” and “Dealing With the Stress” seemed like realistic antidotes to the faux-empowering man-hunting manual headings like “A Little Lingerie Can Go a Long Way.” But the book’s author, Mikki Morrissette, held out a tantalizing carrot. In her introduction, she describes having a daughter on her own; then, she writes, a few years later and five months pregnant with her son, “I met a guy I fell in love with. He and my daughter were in the delivery room when my son was born in January 2004.” Each time I read about single women having babies on their own and thriving instead of settling for Mr. Wrong and hiring a divorce lawyer, I felt all jazzed and ready to go. At the time, I truly believed, “I can have it all—a baby now, my soul mate later!”

Well … ha! Hahahaha. And ha.

Just as the relationship books fail to mention what happens after you triumphantly land a husband (you actually have to live with each other), these single-mom books fail to mention that once you have a baby alone, not only do you age about 10 years in the first 10 months, but if you don’t have time to shower, eat, urinate in a timely manner, or even leave the house except for work, where you spend every waking moment that your child is at day care, there’s very little chance that a man—much less The One—is going to knock on your door and join that party.

They also gloss over the cost of dating as a single mom: the time and money spent on online dating (because there are no single men at toddler birthday parties); the babysitter tab for all those boring blind dates; and, most frustrating, hours spent away from your beloved child. Even women who settle but end up divorced might be in a better position than those of us who became mothers on our own, because many ex-wives get both child-support payments and a free night off when the kids go to Dad’s house for a sleepover. Never-married moms don’t get the night off. At the end of the evening, we rush home to pay the babysitter, make any houseguest tiptoe around and speak in a hushed voice, then wake up at 6 a.m. at the first cries of “Mommy!”

Try bringing a guy home to that.

Settling is mostly a women’s game. Men settle far less often and, when they do, they don’t seem the least bit bothered by the fact that they’re settling.

My friend Alan, for instance, justified his choice of a “bland” wife who’s a good mom but with whom he shares little connection this way: “I think one-stop shopping is overrated. I get passion at my office with my work, or with my friends that I sometimes call or chat with—it’s not the same, and, boy, it would be exciting to have it with my spouse. But I spend more time with people at my office than I do with my spouse.”

Then there’s my friend Chris, a single 35-year-old marketing consultant who for three years dated someone he calls “the perfect woman”—a kind and beautiful surgeon. She broke off the relationship several times because, she told him with regret, she didn’t think she wanted to spend her life with him. Each time, Chris would persuade her to reconsider, until finally she called it off for good, saying that she just couldn’t marry somebody she wasn’t in love with. Chris was devastated, but now that his ex-girlfriend has reached 35, he’s suddenly hopeful about their future.

“By the time she turns 37,” Chris said confidently, “she’ll come back. And I’ll bet she’ll marry me then. I know she wants to have kids.” I asked Chris why he would want to be with a woman who wasn’t in love with him. Wouldn’t he be settling, too, by marrying someone who would be using him to have a family? Chris didn’t see it that way at all. “She’ll be settling,” Chris said cheerfully. “But not me. I get to marry the woman of my dreams. That’s not settling. That’s the fantasy.”

Chris believes that women are far too picky: everyone knows, he says, that a single middle-aged man still has appealing prospects; a single middle-aged woman likely doesn’t. And he’s right. Single women are painfully aware of this. I hear far more women than men talk about getting married as a goal to be met by a certain deadline. My friend Gabe points out that this allows men to be the true romantics; when a man breaks up with a perfectly acceptable woman because he’s “just not feeling it,” there’s none of the ambivalence a woman with a deadline feels. “Women are the least romantic,” Gabe said. “They think, ‘I can do that.’ For a lot of women, it becomes less about love and more about what they can live with.”

Not long ago, Gabe, who is 43, dated a woman he liked very much one-on-one, but he broke up with her because “she couldn’t be haimish”—comfortable—with his friends in a group setting. He has no regrets. A female friend who broke up with a guy because he “didn’t like to read” and who is now, too, a single mom (with, ironically, no time to read herself) similarly felt no regrets—at first. At the time, she couldn’t imagine settling, but here’s the Catch-22: “If I’d settled at 39,” she said, “I always would have had the fantasy that something better exists out there. Now I know better. Either way, I was screwed.”

The paradox, of course, is that the more it behooves a woman to settle, the less willing she is to settle; a woman in her mid- to late 30s is more discriminating than one in her 20s. She has friends who have known her since childhood, friends who will know her more intimately and understand her more viscerally than any man she meets in midlife. Her tastes and sense of self are more solidly formed. She says things like “He wants me to move downtown, but I love my home at the beach,” and, “But he’s just not curious,” and “Can I really spend my life with someone who’s allergic to dogs?”

I’ve been told that the reason so many women end up alone is that we have too many choices. I think it’s the opposite: we have no choice. If we could choose, we’d choose to be in a healthy marriage based on reciprocal passion and friendship. But the only choices on the table, it sometimes seems, are settle or risk being alone forever.That’s not a whole lot of choice.

Remember the movie Broadcast News? Holly Hunter’s dilemma—the choice between passion and friendship—is exactly the one many women over 30 are faced with. In the end, Holly Hunter’s character decides to wait for the right guy, but he (of course) never materializes. Meanwhile, her emotional soul mate, the Albert Brooks character, gets married (of course) and has children.

And no matter what women decide—settle or don’t settle—there’s a price to be paid, because there’s always going to be regret. Unless you meet the man of your dreams (who, by the way, doesn’t exist, precisely because you dreamed him up), there’s going to be a downside to getting married, but a possibly more profound downside to holding out for someone better.

My friend Jennifer summed it up this way: “When I used to hear women complaining bitterly about their husbands, I’d think, ‘How sad, they settled.’ Now it’s like, ‘God, that would be nice.’”

That’s why mothers tell their daughters to “keep an open mind” about the guy who spends his weekends playing Internet poker or touches your back for two minutes while watching ESPN and calls that “a massage.” The more-pertinent questions, to most concerned mothers of daughters in their 30s, have to do with whether the daughter’s boyfriend will make a good father; or, if he’s a workaholic, whether he can provide the environment for her to be a good mother. As my own mother once advised me, when I was dating a musician, “Everyone settles to some degree. You might as well settle pragmatically.”

I know all this now, and yet—here’s the problem—much as I’d like to settle, I can’t seem to do it. It’s not that I have to be dazzled by a guy anymore (though it would be nice). It’s not even that I have to think about him when he’s not around (though that would be nice, too). Nor is it that I’m unable to accept reality and make significant compromises because that’s what grown-ups do (I can and have—I had a baby on my own).

No, the problem is that the very nature of dating leaves women my age to wrestle with a completely different level of settling. It’s no longer a matter, as it was in my early 30s, of “just not feeling it,” of wanting to be in love. Consider the men whom older women I know have married in varying degrees of desperation over the past few years: a recovering alcoholic who doesn’t always go to his meetings; a trying-to-make-it-in-his-40s actor; a widower who has three nightmarish kids and who’s still actively grieving for his dead wife; and a socially awkward engineer (so socially awkward that he declined to attend his wife’s book party). It’s not that these women are crazy; it’s that the dating pool has dwindled dramatically and that, due to gender politics, the few available men tend to require far more of a concession than those who were single when we were younger. And while I have a much higher tolerance for settling than I did back then, now I have my son to consider. It’s one thing to settle for a subpar mate; it’s quite another to settle for a subpar father figure for my child. So while there’s more incentive to settle now, there’s less willingness to settle too much, because that would be a disservice to my son.

This doesn’t undermine my case for settling. Instead, it supports my argument to do it young, when settling involves constructing a family environment with a perfectly acceptable man who may not trip your romantic trigger—as opposed to doing it older, when settling involves selling your very soul in exchange for damaged goods. Admittedly, it’s a dicey case to make because, like the divorced women I know who claim they wouldn’t have done anything differently, because then they wouldn’t have Biff and Buffy, I, too, can’t imagine life without my magical son. (Although, had I had children with a Mr. Good Enough, wouldn’t I be as hopelessly in love with those children, too?) I also acknowledge the power of the grass-is-always-greener phenomenon, and allow for the possibility that my life alone is better (if far more difficult) than the life I would have in a comfortable but tepid marriage.

But then my married friends say things like, “Oh, you’re so lucky, you don’t have to negotiate with your husband about the cost of piano lessons” or “You’re so lucky, you don’t have anyone putting the kid in front of the TV and you can raise your son the way you want.” I’ll even hear things like, “You’re so lucky, you don’t have to have sex with someone you don’t want to.”

The lists go on, and each time, I say, “OK, if you’re so unhappy, and if I’m so lucky, leave your husband! In fact, send him over here!”

Not one person has taken me up on this offer.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

LORI GOTTLIEB is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a psychotherapist based in Los Angeles. She is the author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone.

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U.S.

In Search of Mr. Right

Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, the author of Why There Are No Good Men Left, discusses the challenges facing today's single women, and argues that the contemporary courtship system needs to be transformed

SAGE STOSSEL

DECEMBER 2002 ISSUE

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Why There Are No Good Men Left

Why There Are No Good Men Left: The Romantic Plight of the New Single Woman

by Barbara Dafoe Whitehead

Broadway Books

320 pages, $23.95

Odds are that the pulled-together young woman you encounter in the elevator, emerging from the gym, or riding the subway wearing sleek professional attire but no wedding ring is struggling to meet someone to spend her life with. The thirty-something woman of today is three times more likely to be single than her counterpart of the 1970s. Indeed, both women and men—particularly those with high levels of education—are staying single far longer into their adult years than in previous eras. For both groups this delayed search for a spouse is a deliberate choice, but the effect of that delay on the two sexes is dramatically different.

For men, the change in timing is merely an incidental matter with few repercussions. But for women, the delay makes the search more difficult, fraught with anxiety, and shadowed by the possibility of ultimate failure. It is this pervasive anxiety that explains the current popularity of such movies, television shows, and books as Bridget Jones' Diary, Sex and the City, and Cowboys Are My Weakness, all of which feature thirty-something women struggling to find men.

In a new book, Why There Are No Good Men Left: The Romantic Plight of the New Single Woman, the social historian Barbara Dafoe Whitehead considers the challenges facing the contemporary single woman in her search for a mate, and argues that the prevailing courtship system must be transformed. Inspired in part by the fact that both of her own thirty-something daughters are single, Whitehead (who is the director of a scholarly organization called the National Marriage Project) undertook an informal study of the issue—poring over demographic studies, surveys, focus-group transcripts, self-help books, and popular fiction, and personally interviewing sixty single women in their late twenties and early thirties.

What she found was that at the time in their lives when they feel ready for a partner, young women are at a loss as to how to find one. Contemporary young women, she points out, have been raised to seek fulfilling careers rather than husbands. And upon college graduation they want to spend time on their own, making their mark on the world, rather than pairing off right away and exchanging their independence for family life.

The problem, she explains, is that when these women reach their late twenties or thirties and become interested in settling down, the large pool of eligible young men to which they had access in college—with backgrounds and ambitions similar to their own—has disappeared. A woman at this stage in her life is likely to be trapped in a somewhat narrow routine that includes work, working-out, and socializing with a close circle of friends. Her odds of encountering her future spouse in these limited spheres are low.

The difficulties of the woman no longer fresh out of college are compounded by the fact that, as time passes, she is increasingly faced with competition from younger women. And if her life goals include not just marriage but children as well, then she must keep in mind that her time-frame is limited. Many women in this situation begin to feel a growing sense of panic, as they fear that their chances for the life they envisioned are slipping away.

Though conservative commentators have argued that the obvious solution is for women to go back to looking for their spouses while still in college, Whitehead dismisses such views, pointing out that women who wait longer to marry are more mature, more financially secure, and have a better sense of who they could happily spend their lives with than those who marry earlier. Moreover, studies have shown that later marriages tend to be more stable and long-lasting.

What needs to change, then, she suggests, is not the contemporary woman's postponement of the search for a spouse, but the courtship system itself. A well-functioning courtship system, she emphasizes, should succeed in bringing a society's eligible young people into appropriate partnerships. But today's courtship system fails on that count, leaving singles who have aged out of the college scene to fend for themselves.

She expresses confidence, however, that given the urgency of the need, new courtship mechanisms—tailored to fit the needs of busy professionals with limited time (both in the day and in their window for finding appropriate partners)—will spring up to fill the void. Already, she points out, such innovations as online introduction services and "SpeedDating" events have emerged and appear to be flourishing. It will take some creative ingenuity, she argues, and a good understanding of the aspirations of today's single women, but with a concerted effort, society should be able to "revive [women's] flagging faith that it is possible to find lasting love and to integrate a loving marriage into a life of individual career achievement."

Barbara Dafoe Whitehead holds a PhD. in American social history from the University of Chicago. She has written for a number of publications, including Slate, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and The Boston Globe. Her previous book, The Divorce Culture (1997), was an expansion of her controversial Atlantic Monthly article "Dan Quayle Was Right" (April 1993). She has three adult children and lives in Amherst, Massachusetts with her husband.

I spoke with her recently by telephone.

—Sage Stossel

Barbara Dafoe Whitehead

Barbara Dafoe Whitehead

You mention in the acknowledgments that you have two single daughters in their thirties. What role did they play in the conception and writing of this book?

Their life experience certainly influenced my thinking. I have a big extended family, and in addition to my two daughters, I have four nieces, ranging in age from their mid-twenties to their mid-thirties, who are also single women, living and working in big cities. I couldn't help but notice how different their early adult lives are from the early adult lives of women of my generation. So I guess in that way my daughters helped to draw me to the topic.

Your previous book is about divorce, and you're a director of a scholarly organization called the National Marriage Project at Rutgers. How did your interest in family issues develop?

It really began with my interest in the social history of women and children back in my graduate school days. I realized back then that socially and culturally things were changing pretty fast in American family life. Gradually, as part of my work, I got interested in divorce and marriage and the whole question of how people choose their mates. The book looks at the contemporary mating system and why some of the most accomplished women of our day are finding it a struggle to find the right man at the right time in their lives.

Is it your sense that society as a whole suffers in some way if highly educated professional women must struggle to find mates—and that society should therefore (for its own good) take it upon itself to change the situation? Or is the problem more one of personal angst for the individual women directly affected?

The book isn't about a social problem. It's about an important set of social changes. The impact of divorce on children, which I wrote about in my previous book, is a social problem. But the reason I write about the romantic plight of the new single woman isn't because society is going to be damaged if she doesn't find the right man on the right time on the right terms. It's because college-educated women have been the authors of social change. For example, college-educated Baby Boom women were the focus of huge social interest and concern in the past—particularly with respect to their progress in the work place. This was not because society was going to collapse if Baby Boom women didn't get good careers but because they were creating social and cultural change. That's what this book is about—it's a look at a recent and important set of social changes and the women who are part of it.

What audience is the book intended for?

It's written for three audiences. One obviously is the people I'm writing about: college-educated single women in their twenties and thirties who are experiencing some of the circumstances I'm describing. A second audience is the parents of the young women who are in this life stage. A third might be those with some scholarly interest in the changing patterns of dating, mating, and union formation.

You write that the dating and mating behavior of contemporary single women has been neglected by the scholarly world so far. What fields do you think could shed useful light on the subject?

I think a broad range of the human and social sciences—from anthropology to religion to economics to literature—could shed some light on today's dating and mating practices.

You write that the new "chick lit" genre of fiction about smart, well-educated women having trouble finding good men is analogous to genres that appeared in earlier eras when the courtship system was also in upheaval. You explain that in Medieval France the great chivalric poem the Roman de la Rose, for example, offered instructions for jobless young men on how to win a lady. Does the "chick lit" genre offer that same kind of instructive element? Or is it more just an expression of frustration with things as they are?

"Chick lit" in my definition—though maybe not in the orthodox definition—would include dating advice books. But chick lit fiction is really a cultural indicator of the absence of a common set of rules and rituals to guide women and men in their contemporary courtship practices. It is evidence of a watershed moment when we have mating systems in transition: an old one is receding and a new one has not yet fully formed.

How did you find the women you interviewed for the book?

I recruited them through ads in alumni magazines and public radio magazines. Some of the women who were referred to me took a little recruitment ad that I wrote and put it out on their e-mail networks. I just asked to interview women who fit a particular demographic profile.

The interviews themselves were all the same. They weren't really about "guy talk" or "girl talk"—they were simply an effort to collect biographical, educational, and dating histories of the women who agreed to participate.

Did you also consider interviewing married women of the same age and educational background to compare how their views on courtship and women's life patterns might be different?

Well, that would have been the best way to do a comparative scholarly investigation. But as I say in the introduction, this is just a journalistic first sketch of the subject. Given the limitations of resources and time, I focused exclusively on women who weren't married. It would be very worthwhile to look at a similar sample of women who were married, because I do expect that there would be interesting differences.

You mention a 1999 book about women and career achievement called See Jane Win, which you describe as "a study of the girlhood paths followed by older successful women." Have any analogous books or studies been published in which insight is gleaned from the paths taken by various older women in their family and romantic lives?

One book that looks at dating and mating practices in an earlier era is by Beth Bailey. It's called From Front Porch to Back Seat. Her analysis covers the period from the 1920s to the 1960s. It's in the spirit of what I'm trying to do, which is to look at the broad and deep changes in the social rules and practices of dating.

You talk about how in recent decades girls have been raised to be more competitive, strong, and assertive than they were in the past. Did the women you talked to feel that those qualities were somehow a detriment to them when it came to romance?

Not particularly. Several women mentioned that at times in their life they felt that their intelligence or intellectual achievement seemed to work against them in their romantic relationships with men, but most women felt that there were some men "out there" who would be attracted to smart women. The problem was finding them.

You talk about how success has been redefined for women—that it's shifted from being more about marriage and children to individual accomplishment. But have you found that on a deep-seated level, many of the people you interviewed still consider marriage and children to be ultimately what makes a woman successful?

That's an interesting question. I think the women I talked to want to have both. Their ultimate sense of what they want in life includes family and children, but they aren't willing to contemplate the fact that they therefore will probably have to give up some of their own individual pursuits and career goals. I think the definition of success includes both love and work, and that the challenge is how to sequence that. There is always a certain amount of choice and compromise involved.

You mention that studies have shown that it's the women who are better educated and wait longer to think about getting married who tend to have more stable, long-lasting marriages than women in other demographic groups. But that seems sort of counterintuitive; you'd think the fact that they're spending their early adulthoods learning to become independent might make it more difficult for them to later subsume themselves into family life where the collective welfare of the family takes precedence over individual pursuits.

I think that people who are a little older and more mature and who have had a chance to do at least some of the things that people today feel they need to do in order to make a wise judgment about a partner are more likely to eventually end up in a stable kind of marriage. It's also true, of course, that they're likely to marry someone who is similar to them in education and earning power, which means that those marriages are likely to have more money in them. But there is also some contradictory evidence which suggests that if you have two people who are hyper-careerist and well set in their ways there can be conflict.

A recurring theme in your description of the cohort of women whose plight you're addressing is their having been raised to win prizes, achieve, and generally go after the best of everything. Are these women to some extent seeking impressive husbands as trophies? Are there nice men who express romantic interest in them, but whom these women won't have anything to do with because they're not high enough up the ladder of achievement, or because it's too early yet to tell how far they'll go?

What the women I spoke with said was that they want a husband who is independent and dedicated to his career, but that he doesn't have to make a lot of money. The emphasis was always on finding a best friend—a soul mate—someone you could tell all your troubles to and who would be supportive. So it doesn't seem to be the case that these women were looking for super high-achieving men.

You talk about how there really isn't a courtship crisis for high-achieving young men. But I would have thought they would experience some of the same difficulties as high-achieving women with respect to figuring out where and how to meet suitable mates. After all, they tend to be on the same track as high-achieving women in terms of waiting until they're far beyond their college years to get married.

It's true that you do hear some talk about these problems from men as well, but one reason it doesn't come up as much as a cultural theme is that the male biological clock ticks more slowly and men have more years to devote to their search. They're also able to choose among younger women. Of course, that pattern seems to be changing slightly—there's now more navigation up and down the age scale as opposed to the past when men married women who were about two years younger. However, I think that for men, as well as for women, the standard for someone who you'd want to spend your life with hinges much more today on emotional intimacy. It takes some trial and error and a pretty prolonged and dedicated search to identify the kind of person who is emotionally in sync with you and who is able to communicate and listen to trouble talk.

At the National Marriage Project, we've been interviewing men for the past three years, so I have some sense of the men's side of this, though it's not central to the book.

And these men you talked to didn't express the feeling that they were sometimes being spurned because they weren't impressive enough?

Well some men did, yes, but they tended not to be four-year college graduates. They were guys who were not quite so well-educated and felt that many women looked down on them.

You argue that a new courtship system reflecting contemporary realities needs to be developed so that high-achieving women will have some societal assistance when it comes to finding mates. You point to the emergence of online dating and the proliferation of commercial introduction services as an auspicious beginning. How optimistic are you about the prospects for a mating system that will one day make finding a desirable partner straightforward and relatively easy for the new single woman?

Well, it's never been easy, but it can be a lot easier than it is now. I do think it is likely that a common set of practices, rules, and rituals will evolve to make finding a mate less of a do-it-yourself project than it is today. As for the Internet, it obviously won't provide the whole answer, but I think it will play an important role. In the past, technological innovations have had a huge impact on dating and mating. No one would dismiss the influence on dating of the automobile or the birth-control pill. What's more, the Internet is a technology that helps us to save time and manage information, and both of these things are important to the way the new single woman conducts her mating search.

Is this something you plan to continue to study for a while?

Yes, I do think I'll continue to keep tabs on what's going on in the dating world. The topic offers lots of possibilities and is continuing to evolve  Although I suppose it's a rather strange occupation for someone who's pushing sixty!

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

SAGE STOSSEL is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and draws the cartoon feature Sage, Ink. She is author and illustrator of the children's books On the Loose in Boston, On the Loose in Washington, DC, and On the Loose in Philadelphia. Her graphic novel Starling is serialized on GoComics.com.

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CULTURE

Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off

The author is ending her marriage. Isn’t it time you did the same?

SANDRA TSING LOH

JULY/AUGUST 2009 ISSUE

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IMAGE: KIM ROSEN

SADLY, AND TO my horror, I am divorcing. This was a 20-year partnership. My husband is a good man, though he did travel 20 weeks a year for work. I am a 47-year-old woman whose commitment to monogamy, at the very end, came unglued. This turn of events was a surprise. I don’t generally even enjoy men; I had an entirely manageable life and planned to go to my grave taking with me, as I do most nights to my bed, a glass of merlot and a good book. Cataclysmically changed, I disclosed everything. We cried, we rent our hair, we bewailed the fate of our children. And yet at the end of the day—literally during a five o’clock counseling appointment, as the golden late-afternoon sunlight spilled over the wall of Balinese masks—when given the final choice by our longtime family therapist, who stands in as our shaman, mother, or priest, I realized … no. Heart-shattering as this moment was—a gravestone sunk down on two decades of history—I would not be able to replace the romantic memory of my fellow transgressor with the more suitable image of my husband, which is what it would take in modern-therapy terms to knit our family’s domestic construct back together. In women’s-magazine parlance, I did not have the strength to “work on” falling in love again in my marriage. And as Laura Kipnis railed in Against Love, and as everyone knows, Good relationships take work.

Which is not to say I’m against work. Indeed, what also came out that afternoon were the many tasks I—like so many other working/co-parenting/married mothers—have been doing for so many years and tearfully declared I would continue doing. I can pick up our girls from school every day; I can feed them dinner and kiss their noses and tell them stories; I can take them to their doctor and dentist appointments; I can earn my half—sometimes more—of the money; I can pay the bills; I can refinance the house at the best possible interest rate; I can drive my husband to the airport; in his absence, I can sort his mail; I can be home to let the plumber in on Thursday between nine and three, and I can wait for the cable guy; I can make dinner conversation with any family member; I can ask friendly questions about anybody’s day; I can administer hugs as needed to children, adults, dogs, cats; I can empty the litter box; I can stir wet food into dry.

Which is to say I can work at a career and child care and joint homeownership and even platonic male-female friendship. However, in this cluttered forest of my 40s, what I cannot authentically reconjure is the ancient dream of brides, even with the Oprah fluffery of weekly “date nights,” when gauzy candlelight obscures the messy house, child talk is nixed and silky lingerie donned, so the two of you can look into each other’s eyes and feel that “spark” again. Do you see? Given my staggering working mother’s to-do list, I cannot take on yet another arduous home- and self-improvement project, that of rekindling our romance. Sobered by this failure as a mother—which is to say, my failure as a wife—I’ve since begun a journey of reading, thinking, and listening to what’s going on in other 21st-century American families. And along the way, I’ve begun to wonder, what with all the abject and swallowed misery: Why do we still insist on marriage? Sure, it made sense to agrarian families before 1900, when to farm the land, one needed two spouses, grandparents, and a raft of children. But now that we have white-collar work and washing machines, and our life expectancy has shot from 47 to 77, isn’t the idea of lifelong marriage obsolete?

SLIDESHOW:

Sandra Tsing Loh reports on her divorce from inside her new 10 x 10 foot U-Haul storage trailer

I sense you picking up the first stone to hurl, even if you yourself may be twice or even three times divorced. Such a contradiction turns out to be uniquely American. Just because marriage didn’t work for us doesn’t mean we don’t believe in the institution. Just because our own marital track records are mixed doesn’t mean our hearts don’t lift at the sight of our daughters’ Tiffany-blue wedding invitations. After all, we can easily arrange to sit far from our exes, across the flower-bedecked aisle, so as not to roil the festive day. Just because we know that nearly half of U.S. marriages end in divorce—including perhaps even those of our own parents (my dearest childhood wish was not just that my parents would divorce, but also that my raging father would burst into flames)—doesn’t mean we aren’t confident ours is the one that will beat the odds. At least that is the attitudinal yin/yang described by Andrew J. Cherlin in his scrupulously argued Marriage-Go-Round: compared with our western European counterparts, Americans are far more credulous about marriage. In World Values Surveys taken at the turn of the millennium, fewer Americans agreed with the statement “Marriage is an outdated institution” than citizens of any other Western country surveyed (compare the U.S.’s tiny 10 percent with France’s 36 percent). We are also more religious—more Americans (60 percent) say they attend religious services once a month than do the Vatican-centric Italians (54 percent) or, no surprise, the laissez-faire French (12 percent). At the same time, Americans endure the highest divorce rate in the Western world. In short, although we say we love religion and marriage, Cherlin notes, “religious Americans are more likely to divorce than secular Swedes.”

Cherlin believes the reason for this paradox is that Americans hold two values at once: a culture of marriage and a culture of individualism. Or is it an American spirit of optimism wedded, if you will, to a Tocquevillian spirit of restlessness that inspires three out of four Americans to say they believe marriage is for life, while only one in four agreed with the notion that even if a marriage is unhappy, one should stay put for the sake of the children. If America is a “divorce culture,” it may be partly because we are a “marriage culture,” since we both divorce and marry (a projected 90 percent of us) at some of the highest rates anywhere on the globe. Hence Cherlin’s cautionary advice consists of two words—“Slow down”—his chief worry about our frenetic marriage-go-round being its negative impact on our children. In fact, while having two biological parents at home is, the statistics tell us, best for children, a single-parent household is almost as good. The harm comes, Cherlin argues, from parents continually coupling with new partners, so that the children are forced to bond, or compete for attention, with ever-new actors. These are the youngsters who are likely to suffer, according to a measurable matrix of factors such as truancy, disobedience in school, and teen pregnancy. Instead of preaching marriage, Cherlin says, we should preach domestic stability for children. Is marriage the best way to ensure this? Apparently not, at least not the way we do it in America.

RACHEL IS ONE of the women I regularly dine with, now that I have a divorced person’s oddly relaxed—oddly civilized, even horribly French?—joint-custody schedule. It has been almost 10 years since I dined with adults on a weekly basis. My domestic evenings have typically revolved around five o’clock mac and cheese under bright lighting and then a slow melt into dishes and SpongeBob … because yet another of my marital failings was that I was never able to commit to a nanny. Even though my husband and I both drew full-time incomes, I, as a writer, worked at home and hence was ambivalent, because if I had daily in-house help, what was my role as a mother? Would I be emotionally displaced? Also, I secretly worried that using domestic help was exploitative—recall Barbara Ehrenreich’s dictum that she’d never let another woman scrub her toilets. Yea, these are the various postfeminist hurdles that stretched before me at 2:00 a.m. as I lay awake in our bed, contorted not just by cats but by two children kicking me from both sides—Exhibit A of lazy, undisciplined attachment parenting.

Imagine driving with me now to Rachel’s house for our new 40-something social hobby—the Girls’ Night dinner. Leap not from my car, even though I realize—given my confessed extramarital affair, avowed childhood desire to see my father explode into flames, and carpet of tattered Happy Meal wrappers—I may not strike you as the most reliable explicator of modern marriage. Still, we forge on, and what I’d like to do now is recant for a moment and not be quite so hard on marriage, which I think is a very good fit for some people. It certainly has been for Judith S. Wallerstein (married more than 48 years, as the jacket flap indicates), co-author with Sandra Blakeslee of the 1995 book The Good Marriage: How and Why Love Lasts. Through close observation of 50 happily married couples, the authors identified four templates for lasting nuptial success. The Romantic Marriage thrives on the spark of love that never dies. (Think of those affectionate 80-somethings in convalescent homes, still holding hands.) The Rescue Marriage features partners who fit each other like lost puzzle pieces, healing each other from mutual childhood traumas. (And then there are those shrieky co-dependent pairs: think of fiercely attached couples whose commitment is cemented by a commitment to unwholesome habits. Said a friend of his 70-something WASP parents, who sally off to their frequent cruises with huge Lavoris bottles filled with gin: “What they share is an enthusiasm for drinking.”) The Traditional Marriage succeeds because the man works while the woman runs the home, a clear and valuable division of labor.

Today, the most common type of marriage is the Companionate Marriage, in which husband and wife each have a career, and they co-parent and co-housekeep according to gender-free norms they negotiate. Three decades ago, in their 1972 runaway best seller, Open Marriage, Nena and George O’Neill suggested that such a modern arrangement might even include sexual freedom. But as we all know, the Sexually Open Marriage fizzled with the lava lamp, because it is just downright icky for most people. How, then, has marriage evolved? In what sorts of partnerships do we find ourselves in the 21st century? Enter with me, finally, the home of my friend Rachel. (To appease the diligent Atlantic fact checkers, I must now pause to announce that I’ve carefully disguised some of the individuals whose lives we’re about to dissect.) Picture a stunning two-story Craftsman—exposed wood, Batchelder tile fireplace, caramel-warm beams, Tiffany lamps on Mission tables—nestled in the historic enclave in Pasadena dubbed Bungalow Heaven. Rachel, 49, an environmental lawyer, is married to Ian, 48, a documentary-film editor. They have two sons, 9 and 11, whom Ian—in every way the model dad—has whisked off this evening to junior soccer camp (or drum lessons or similar; the boys’ impressive whirl of activities is hard to keep track of). Rachel is cooking dinner for three of us: Ellen (a writer, married with children), Renata (violinist, single, lithe, and prowling at 45), and me. Rachel is, more accurately, reheating dinner; the dish is something wonderfully subtle yet complex, like a saffron-infused porcini risotto, that Ian made over the weekend and froze for us, in Tupperware neatly labeled with a Sharpie, because this is the sort of thoughtful thing he does. Ian subscribes to Cook’s Illustrated online and a bevy of other technically advanced gourmet publications—he’s always perfecting some polenta or bouillabaisse. If someone requests a cheeseburger, he will fire back with an über-cheeseburger, a fluffy creation of marbled Angus beef, Stilton, and homemade ketchup. Picture him in bike shorts (he’s a cyclist), hovering over a mandala of pots that are always simmering, quietly simmering. To Ian’s culinary adventurousness, Rachel attributes the boys’ sophisticated taste buds—they eagerly eat everything: curry, paella, seaweed, soba noodles. My own girls are strictly mac-and-cheese-centric (but I’ve been told in therapy not to keep beating myself up over the small things).

Since her own home fires seemed to roar so warmly, I was hesitant to hit Rachel with news of my breakup, and it is true that her first reaction was a degree of disbelief and horror even more pronounced than everyone else’s in our village of longtime marrieds. “But what about the children?” she wailed. I explained that since their parents had been in parallel motion since they were born, the girls appeared—on the surface at least—to be unfazed. On top of my musician husband’s roadwork, some years I’d logged 200 shows as a theater performer, carrying my babies in buckets to hotel rooms. In addition, when my girls’ cousins—at ages 6, 5, and 2—suddenly lost their mother, through illness, we had done an emergency move-in with my brother for two years (while my husband remained on the road), so my girls were more used to sitting down to dinner with an extended family tribe than with one father and one mother. Now elementary age, my children seem relatively content as long as they remain in their own house, their own beds, and their own school, with Mom and Dad coming and going as usual (and when Dad’s in the house, I pick them up from school every day so they always see me). Their most ardent daily fixations continue to be amassing more Pokémon cards and getting a dog named Noodles to add to their menagerie of five fish and two cats, Midnite and Cuteface.

But it is now our second Girls’ Night dinner since my horrifying announcement, and Rachel has eschewed Ian’s customary wine-club Bordeaux and is mixing some alarmingly strong martinis.

Leaning forward heavily across the bar, she swirls her glass and huskily drops the bomb: “I have to tell you—since we talked, I too have started thinking divorce.” “No!” we girls exclaim. With a stab of nausea, I suddenly feel as though now that I’ve touched my pool of friends with my black pen, a cloud of ink is enveloping them.

“You can’t!” Renata cries. “Ian—he’s the perfect father! The perfect husband! Look at this … kitchen!”

It’s true: the kitchen is a prime example of Ian’s contribution to their union. He based the design of the remodel on an old farmhouse kitchen they saw during their trip to Tuscany, and of course—carpentry being another of his hobbies—he did all the details himself, including building the shelves. One of the room’s marvels is how ingeniously and snugly all the specialty kitchenware is housed—the hanging copper pots, the garlic press, the mandolin, the lemon zester, the French press coffeemaker …

“Ian won’t have sex with me,” Rachel says flatly. “He has not touched my body in two years. He says it’s because I’ve gained weight.” Again, we stoutly protest, but she goes on. “And he thinks I’m a bad mother—he says I’m sloppy and inattentive.”

The list of violations unfurls. Last week, Rachel mistakenly gave the wrong medication to the dog, a mistake Ian would never make. She also forgot to deglaze the saucepan and missed the window to book the family’s Seattle flights on Expedia, whose chiming bargains Ian meticulously tracks.

Rachel sees herself as a failed mother, and is depressed and chronically overworked at her $120,000-a-year job (which she must cling to for the benefits because Ian freelances). At night, horny and sleepless, she paces the exquisite kitchen, gobbling mini Dove bars. The main breadwinner, Rachel is really the Traditional Dad, but instead of being handed her pipe and slippers at six, she appears to be marooned in a sexless remodeling project with a passive-aggressive Competitive Wife.

Rachel had even asked Ian point-blank: “Do you want a divorce?” And Ian said absolutely not—they must show discipline and work at the marriage (again with the work!), since any domestic upset could negatively affect the boys, who were now facing a particularly fraught time at their new school, where they have an extraordinarily challenging roster of extracurricular activities and a quarterly testing schedule.

“You know, it’s funny,” says Ellen, after a moment of gloom. (Passing note: Ellen has been married for 18 years, and she also, famously, never has sex. There were the hot 20s with Ron and the making-the-babies 30s, and in the 40s there is … nothing. Ellen had originally picked Ron because she was tired of all the bad boys, and Ron was settle-down husband material. What she didn’t know was that after the age of 38, thanks to Mr. Very Settled-Down, she was never going to have regular sex with a man again.)

“When marriage was invented,” Ellen continues, “it was considered to be a kind of trade union for a woman, her protection against the sexually wandering male. But what’s happened to the sexually wandering male?”

In our parents’ era, the guy hit 45, got the toupee, drove the red Porsche, and left his family for the young, hot secretary. We are unable to imagine any of the husbands driving anything with fewer than five seat belts.

“Ron only goes as far as the den,” Ellen says. “He has his Internet porn bookmarked on the computer.”

“Ian has his Cook’s Illustrated,” Rachel adds. “And his—his men’s online fennel club.”

Of the four of us, Renata has the fastest-thrumming engine, as evidenced by her rabid in-the-moment sex-tryst texting (“omg he flyz in 2nite on red i @ 2 am!!!”). One imagines a string of men toppled behind her in ditches like crashed race cars. “My problem is, I’m a dopamine freak!” She waggles her hands in the air. “Dopamine!”

“Helen Fisher!” Ellen exclaims, pointing at her.

Fisher, a women’s cult figure and an anthropologist, has long argued that falling in love—and falling out of love—is part of our evolutionary biology and that humans are programmed not for lifelong monogamy, but for serial monogamy. (In stretches of four years, to be exact, approximately the time it takes to get one kid safely through infancy.)

Why Him? Why Her? explains the hormonal forces that trigger humans to be romantically attracted to some people and not to others (a phenomenon also documented in the animal world). Fisher posits that each of us gets dosed in the womb with different levels of hormones that impel us toward one of four basic personality types:

The Explorer—the libidinous, creative adventurer who acts “on the spur of the moment.” Operative neurochemical: dopamine.

The Builder—the much calmer person who has “traditional values.” The Builder also “would rather have loyal friends than interesting friends,” enjoys routines, and places a high priority on taking care of his or her possessions. Operative neurotransmitter: serotonin.

The Director—the “analytical and logical” thinker who enjoys a good argument. The Director wants to discover all the features of his or her new camera or computer. Operative hormone: testosterone.

The Negotiator—the touchy-feely communicator who imagines “both wonderful and horrible things happening” to him- or herself. Operative hormone: estrogen, then oxytocin.

Fisher reviewed personality data from 39,913 members of Chemistry.com. Explorers made up 26 percent of the sample, Builders 28.6 percent, Directors 16.3 percent, Negotiators 29.1 percent. While Explorers tend to be attracted to Explorers, and Builders tend to be attracted to Builders, Directors are attracted to Negotiators, and vice versa.

Exclaims Ellen, slapping the book: “This is why my marriage has been dead for 15 years. I’m an Explorer married to a Builder!” (Ron literally is a builder—like Ian, he crafts wonderful shelves and also, of course, cooks.) But what can Ellen do? Explorer-Explorer tends to be one of the most unstable combinations, whereas Fisher suspects “most of the world’s fifty-year marriages are made by Builders who marry other Builders.”

While a Rutgers study suggests that only 38 percent of married people in America describe themselves as happy, we stay married for many good reasons. Take, for instance, the otherwise unaffordability of homeownership.

Some of us stay married because we’re in competition with our divorcing 1960s and 1970s parents, who made such a hash of it. What looks appealing to us now, in an increasingly frenetic, digital world, is the 1950s marriage. Writes Karen Karbo, in Generation Ex, reminiscing about her mother’s evening routine of serving old-fashioneds to her dad by the pool:

At the turn of the millennium, our marriages and remarriages bear almost no resemblance to these single-paycheck, cocktail-hour unions. Once considered sexist and monotonous, these staid marriages are emblems of an easier time. What seemed too dull and constricting a mere fifteen years ago now looks luxurious, like those huge gas-guzzling cars with all that chrome and the tuck-and-roll seats.

Some of us stay married because along with fancy schools, tae kwan do lessons, and home-cooked organic food, the two-parent marriage is another impressive—and rare—attainment to bestow on our fragile, gifted children.

Some of us stay married because … what else is there? A lonely apartment and a hot plate?

That said, it’s clear that females are dissatisfied—more and more, divorce seems to be initiated by women. If marriage is the Old World and what lies beyond is the New World, it’s the apparently stable men (comfortable alone in their postfeminist den with their Cook’s Illustrated and their porn) who are Old Worlders, and the Girls’ Night Out, questionnaire-completing women who are the questing New Worlders. They most embody what Tocqueville described as America’s “restless temper,” or l’inquiétude du caractère. (Interestingly, according to EnlightenNext magazine, some northern European women are reportedly eschewing their progressive northern European male counterparts and dating Muslims, who are more like “real men.”)

To work, to parent, to housekeep, to be the ones who schedule “date night,” only to be reprimanded in the home by male kitchen bitches, and then, in the bedroom, to be ignored—it’s a bum deal. And then our women’s magazines exhort us to rekindle the romance. You rarely see men’s magazines exhorting men to rekindle the romance.

So, herewith, some modest proposals. Clearly, research shows that what’s best for children is domestic stability and not having to bond with, and to be left by, ever new stepparent figures. Less important is whether or not their overworked parents are logging “date night” (or feeling the magic). So why don’t we accept marriage as a splitting-the-mortgage arrangement? As Fisher suggests, rekindling the romance is, for many of us, biologically unnatural, particularly after the kids come. (Says another friend of mine, about his wife of 23 years: “My heart doesn’t lift when she walks in the room. It sinks, slightly.”) If high-revving women are sexually frustrated, let them have some sort of French arrangement where they have two men, the postfeminist model dad building shelves, cooking bouillabaise, and ignoring them in the home, and the occasional fun-loving boyfriend the kids never see. Alternately, if both spouses find life already rather exhausting, never mind chasing around for sex. Long-married husbands and wives should pleasantly agree to be friends, to set the bedroom aglow at night by the mute opening of separate laptops and just be done with it. More than anything, aside from providing insulation from the world at large, that kind of arrangement could be the perfect way to be left alone.

As far as the children are concerned, how about the tribal approach (a natural, according to both primate and human evolution)? Let children between the ages of 1 and 5 be raised in a household of mothers and their female kin. Let the men/husbands/boyfriends come in once or twice a week to build shelves, prepare that bouillabaisse, or provide sex.

Or best of all, after the breast-feeding and toddler years are through, let those nurturing superdads be the custodial parents! Let the Type A moms obsessively work, write checks, and forget to feed the dog. Let the dads then, if they wish, kick out those sloppy working mothers and run effective households, hiring the appropriate staff, if need be. To a certain extent, men today may have more clarity about what it takes to raise children in the modern age. They don’t, for instance, have today’s working mother’s ambivalence and emotional stickiness.

In any case, here’s my final piece of advice: avoid marriage—or you too may suffer the emotional pain, the humiliation, and the logistical difficulty, not to mention the expense, of breaking up a long-term union at midlife for something as demonstrably fleeting as love.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

CULTURE

The Wifely Duty

Marriage used to provide access to sex. Now it provides access to celibacy

CAITLIN FLANAGAN

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2003 ISSUE

- Link Copied

Okay, So I Don't Have a Headache BY CRISTINA FERRARE

I'm Not in the Mood BY JUDITH REICHMAN, M.D.

Motherhood and Hollywood BY PATRICIA HEATON

For Women Only BY JENNIFER BERMAN, M.D., AND LAURA BERMAN, PH.D.

The Total Woman BY MARABEL MORGAN

The Sex-Starved Marriage BY MICHELE WEINER DAVIS

I Don't Know How She Does It BY ALLISON PEARSON

During two strange days in New York last winter, three married people—one after another—confessed to me either that they had stopped having sex or that they knew a married person who had stopped having sex. Like a sensible person, I booked an early flight home and chalked the whole thing up to the magic and mystery that is New York. But no sooner had I put my coat on the peg than it started up again. A number of the mothers in my set began making sardonic comments along similar lines. The daytime talk shows to which I am mildly and happily addicted worried the subject to death, revived it, and worried it some more. Dr. Phil—who, like his mentor Oprah Winfrey, has an uncannily precise sense of what American women in the aggregate are thinking about—noted on his Web site that "sexless marriages are an undeniable epidemic." Mass-circulation magazines aimed at married women rarely go to press these days without an earnest review of some new sexual technique or gadget, the information always presented in the context of how to relight a long-doused fire. (And I must say that an article in Redbook that warns desperate couples away from a product called Good Head Oral Delight Gel—"the consistency is like congealed turkey fat"—deserves some kind of award for service journalism.) Patricia Heaton, a star of Everybody Loves Raymond, has published a memoir called Motherhood and Hollywood, in which she observes, "Sex? Forget about it. I mean that literally." Books with titles such as Okay, So I Don't Have a Headache and I'm Not in the Mood have become immediate hits, and another popular book, For Women Only, lists various techniques that married women use to avoid sex, from the age-old strategy of feigning sleep to the quite modern practice of taking on household night-owl projects. And Allison Pearson's much loved novel about a busy working mother, I Don't Know How She Does It (which opens with the main character engaged in just such a late-night project), features a woman so tired that she's frantic to escape sex with her husband, prompting Margaret Carlson, of Time magazine, to observe, "Sleep is the new sex." It has become impossible not to suspect that a large number of relatively young and otherwise healthy married people are forgoing sex for long periods of time and that many have given it up altogether.

And so we turn our curious attention to the marital therapist Michele Weiner Davis, whose new book, The Sex-Starved Marriage, is so well timed and so aptly titled that it is primed to become a cultural sensation. Davis is not particularly interested in the cause of this strange turn of events, though she tosses around the expected observations about the exhaustion that dogs contemporary working parents and the reduction in lust that has always gone along with marriage. Hers is not a deep-thinking, reflective kind of book but, rather, a get-cracking-and-solve-the-problem kind of book. Solutions? She's armed to the teeth with them. She has created a "passion-building toolkit" filled with "field-tested" techniques—none of them bad. Although I found Part IV ("Doing It Together") far more appealing than a scary mini-chapter called "The Do-It-Yourself Solution," her notions about how to jump-start the old hanky-panky seem eminently reasonable. Make "romantic overtures," she counsels. A wife might buy some new lingerie; a husband might wear flattering clothes. Most important, though, is a recommendation based on exciting new "research" revealing that for many people, waiting for the urge to strike is pointless; better to bash ahead and hope for the best. Davis asks, "Have you ever noticed that although you might not have been thinking sexual thoughts or feeling particularly sexy, if you push yourself to 'get started' when your spouse approaches you, it feels good, and you find yourself getting into it?" Many of her clients have received this counsel with enthusiasm. "I really wasn't in the mood for sex at all," reports one of her advisees after just such a night, "but once we got started, it was fun. I really enjoyed it."

What's odd here is not the suggestions themselves—each seems quite sensible, and I myself can vouch for more than one of them—but, rather, the generation that apparently needs them. American adults under the age of fifty tend to know more about sex and its many delightful permutations than did streetwalkers of an earlier century. When Davis describes the process of arousal ("You notice a feeling of fullness in your pelvic area as your genitals become engorged with blood"), you might think she was addressing a seventh-grade health class rather than adults of the post-sexual-revolution era. Yuppies, with that winsome arrogance that is all their own, proudly describe the nature and frequency of their premarital couplings with a specificity matched only by advanced seminars on animal husbandry. The reason abortion rights hold such a sanctified position in American political life is that they are a critical component of the yuppie program for maximum personal sexual pleasure. But let these inebriates of nooky enter marriage, a state in which ongoing sexuality often has as much to do with old-fashioned notions of obligation and commitment as it does with the immediate satisfaction of intense physical desire, and they grow as cool and limp as yesterday's Cobb salad.

All of this makes me reflect that those repressed and much pitied 1950s wives—their sexless college years! their boorish husbands, who couldn't locate the clitoris with a flashlight and a copy of Gray's Anatomy!—were apparently getting a lot more action than many of today's most liberated and sexually experienced married women. In the old days, of course, there was the wifely duty. A housewife understood that in addition to ironing her husband's shirts and cooking the Sunday roast, she was—with some regularity—going to have relations with the man of the house. Perhaps, as some feminists would have us believe, these were grimly efficient interludes during which the poor humped-upon wife stared at the ceiling and silently composed the grocery list. Or perhaps not. Maybe, as Davis and her "new" findings suggest, once you get the canoe out in the water, everybody starts happily paddling. The notion that female sexuality was unleashed forty years ago, after lying dormant lo these uncountable millennia, is silly; more recent is the sexual shutdown that apparently takes place in many marriages soon after they have been legalized.

Jane Greer, Redbook's online sex therapist, has a thriving midtown-Manhattan practice. When I asked her about what I had been hearing, she told me that she has seen many married couples who have gone without sex for periods of time ranging from six months to six years. Why? "Marriage has changed," she told me. "In the old days the husband was the breadwinner. The wife had the expectation of raising the children and pleasing him. Now they're both working and both taking care of the children, and they're too exhausted and resentful to have sex." I asked Greer the obvious question: If a couple is not having sex because of job pressures and one partner quits working, does the couple have more sex? The answer was immediate and unequivocal: "Absolutely!"

And this, of course, is the general plot of I Don't Know How She Does It, which has the heroine, Kate Reddy, playing dead in the sack for a world of nights until, at book's end, she resigns from her job and runs into her husband's arms. (We have been pointedly instructed by the author not to imagine that this character is based on her own husband, Anthony Lane, but it's just about impossible not to do exactly that.) "The hug wasn't that dry click of bones you get holding someone when the passion has drained away. It was more like a shadow dance: I still wanted him and I think he wanted me, but we hadn't touched in a very long time." Let us get one thing straight from the outset: despite its rapturous reviews, the book is not artful or literary or—to borrow Time's thunderously wrong adjective—"sparkling." It's full of stock characters, including a wise minicab driver who is forever making insightful remarks about the meaning of life. A pigeon family constructs a nest outside Kate's office window and teaches her valuable lessons about motherhood. "Phones may have become cordless," we are lectured, "but mothers never will." When Kate and her husband reconnect in a London coffee shop after a brief, miserable separation, "we both laugh, and for a moment Starbucks is filled with the sound of Us." (Funny, I thought that grating, deafening sound was the coffee grinder.) Still, though, the book has struck a chord—on an episode of Oprah devoted to the book Oprah Winfrey introduced it as "the new bible for working mothers." In particular, droves of readers report that the nature of Kate's marriage mirrors theirs exactly.

The dominant feature of Kate's attitude toward her husband—that is, before they resume making the sound of Us—is blistering contempt. Contempt for his work: he is a quietly successful architect, given to building whimsical little structures like Peace Pagodas, a pursuit that leaves him time to make pesto and watch Disney videos with the kids while she strides off to her high-paying, high-pressure job. Contempt for his inability to notice if the family has run out of toilet paper or whether the children are properly dressed for a birthday party. Contempt for his very existence in the household: when he wonders whether it would be such a bad thing if their uncooperative nanny quit, Kate tells him, "Frankly, it would be easier if you left." That the man entertains even a single amorous notion about this ball-breaker—much given to kittenish, come-hither comments along the lines of "Richard, I thought I asked you to tidy up?" and "Why the hell can't you do something that needs doing?"—is testament either to a libido of iron or to an erotic sensibility that leans toward the deeply masochistic. If best-selling novels succeed because they "tap into" something in the culture, surely this woman's helpless anger at the man who she thought was going to share her domestic burden accounts in part for the book's immense popularity.

Pearson told an interviewer, "Until they program men to notice you're out of toilet paper, a happy domestic life will always be up to women"—a sentiment almost unanimously held by the working mothers I know. What we've learned during this thirty-year grand experiment is that men can be cajoled into doing all sorts of household tasks, but they will not do them the way a woman would. They will bathe the children, but they will not straighten the bath mat and wring out the washcloths; they will drop a toddler off at nursery school, but they won't spend ten minutes chatting with the teacher and collecting the art projects. They will, in other words, do what men have always done: reduce a job to its simplest essentials and utterly ignore the fillips and niceties that women tend to regard as equally essential. And a lot of women feel cheated and angry and even—bless their hearts—surprised about this. In the old days, of course, men's inability to perform women's work competently was a source of satisfaction and pride to countless housewives. A reliable sitcom premise involved Father's staying home for a day while Mother handled things at his office; chastened and newly admiring of the other's abilities, each ran gratefully back to familiar terrain. Nowadays, when a working mother arrives home after a late deposition, only to find the living room strewn with Legos and a pizza box crammed into the kitchen trash, she tends to get madder than a wet hen. Women are left with two options: endlessly haranguing their husbands to be more womanly, or silently fuming and (however wittingly) launching a sex strike of an intensity and a duration that would have impressed Aristophanes. The men who cave to the pressure to become more feminine—putting little notes in the lunch boxes, sweeping up after snack time, the whole bit—may delight their wives but they probably don't improve their sex lives much, owing to the thorny old problem of la difference. I might be quietly thrilled if my husband decided to forgo his weekly tennis game so that he could alphabetize the spices and scrub the lazy Susan, but I would hardly consider it an erotic gesture.

It turns out that the "traditional" marriage, which we've all been so happy to annihilate, had some pretty good provisions for many of today's most stubborn marital problems, such as how to combine work and parenthood, and how to keep the springs of the marriage bed in good working order. What's interesting about the sex advice given to married women of earlier generations is that it proceeds from the assumption that in a marriage a happy sex life depends upon orderly and successful housekeeping. Marabel Morgan's notorious 1973 book, The Total Woman, has lingered in people's minds because of the seduction techniques it recommends to unhappy housewives. They ought to consider meeting their husbands at the front door in sexy costumes (heels and lingerie, that kind of thing), calling them at work and talking dirty to them, seducing them beneath the dining-room table. (Morgan does not, however, recommend that women nurture a burning intelligence. In a list of unconventional locations in which to make love, she includes the hammock, counseling her readers, "He may say 'We don't have a hammock.' You can reply 'Oh, darling, I forgot!'"). But long before she describes any of these memorable techniques, Morgan gives a quite thorough accounting of how a housewife ought to go about "redeeming the time" and the energy so that she is physically and emotionally able to make love on a regular basis. A housewife should run her household the way an executive runs his business: with goals, schedules, and plans. She should make dinner—or at least do all the shopping and planning for it—right after breakfast, so that she isn't running around like a madwoman in the late afternoon with no idea what to cook. She should take time to rest and relax during the day so that she is not exhausted and depleted come whoopee hour. With the right kind of planning, "you can have all your home duties finished before noon." In a household run by an incompetent wife, however, "by the time her husband enters the scene, she's had it," Morgan writes. "She's too tired to be available to him." This seems a fairly accurate depiction of many contemporary two-career marriages, in which dinner is a nightly crisis (what to eat?) and an endless negotiation (who to cook it?) entered into by two people who have been managing crises and negotiating agreements all day long and who still have the children's homework and baths and bedtimes to contend with.

A document in circulation on the Internet purports to be a list contained in a 1950s home-economics book and announces that it is designed to offer future wives "preparation for married life." I recently attended a dinner party at which this list was read aloud by the hostess, to general hilarity, and I know of at least two classrooms (one at a prep school, the other at a graduate school) where it was read and received in similar sidesplitting fashion. The book advises the housewife to prepare for her husband's arrival at the end of the day: to have dinner ready, to minimize household noise and clutter, to avoid assaulting her man with a list of domestic problems and disappointments, and to inquire about his day. There was a sense back in those innocent years that a day at the office was a tiring event that required a bit of recuperation: a cold drink, a sympathetic companion, a decent meal—all of which, I suspect, functioned as a sexual tonic. The modern professional workday, as we all know, is far more demanding than its predecessors: it lasts much longer, and the various technologies that were supposed to liberate workers from the office have in fact made the whole world an office. (I recently sat on an otherwise deserted tropical beach, a few minutes after a spectacular sunrise, and watched a middle-aged American man march grimly through pellucid knee-high surf, barking commands on a cell phone.) When a professional person crosses the threshold at the end of the day, the commute hasn't provided a transition from work; it has been a continuation of it, thanks to the array of pagers, phones, and even Internet connections available to the modern driver. And—here's the kicker—there isn't just one spouse who has had such a punishing day, there are two of them. No one has spent even a moment planning a gentle re-entry into home life, let alone plotting a thrilling seduction.

Adding to a modern wife's reluctance to seduce the old man on a regular basis is the fact that her job outside the home has conferred on her a power that housewives simply didn't possess. In The Total Woman there's a quite frank acceptance of the fact that keeping a husband sexually happy is a direct route to a measure of economic power for the wife. A couple of days after Morgan's first night of giving her husband "super sex," he calls her to make sure that she will be home at three o'clock: "I couldn't imagine what was coming and I was stunned to see a truck pull up with a new refrigerator-freezer ... Now, without being nagged, he was beginning to give me what I yearned for." Later he lets her redecorate the family room. The women with whom Morgan shares the secrets of super sex (which, in case you are wondering, include not only making dinner early but also moaning a lot during sex and keeping your hands moving on your husband's body throughout intercourse) also get their share of perks. One delighted postcoital woman breathlessly reports to her classmates in a Total Woman workshop, "He has never brought me a gift before, but this past week he bought me two nighties, two rose bushes, and a can opener!" (Ah, would that Dr. Freud were still with us to contemplate that can opener.)

Although I have an amused tolerance for books like The Total Woman, I am not entirely incapable of good, old-fashioned feminist rage. The notion that even educated middle-class American women had to put out in order to get a damn refrigerator—even that they might "yearn" for one—just steams me. However, I would not advise against using sex for more subtle marital adjustments, of a type described in The Sex-Starved Marriage. Davis reminds women that one of the more effective ways to get a husband to be more considerate and helpful is to seduce him. She counsels a group of female clients who complain of angry, critical husbands to "pay more attention to their physical relationships with their husbands," to "be sexier, more affectionate, attentive, responsive, and passionate." Darned if the old bag of tricks doesn't work like a charm—the ladies arrive at the next therapy session giggling and thrilled with their new powers. To many contemporary women, however, the notion that sex might have any function other than personal fulfillment (and the occasional bit of carefully scheduled baby making) is a violation of the very tenets of the sexual revolution that so deeply shaped their attitudes on such matters. Under these conditions, pity the poor married man hoping to get a bit of comfort from the wife at day's end. He must somehow seduce a woman who is economically independent of him, bone tired, philosophically disinclined to have sex unless she is jolly well in the mood, numbingly familiar with his every sexual maneuver, and still doing a slow burn over his failure to wipe down the countertops and fold the dish towel after cooking the kids' dinner. He can hardly be blamed for opting instead to check his e-mail, catch a few minutes of SportsCenter, and call it a night.

A final, less quantifiable development has served to snuff out marital sexuality, and it has to do with the way middle- and upper-middle-class adults think about family life and their role in it. There are many indications of this, but let us simply glance at the Disney catalogue. Not surprisingly, in addition to toys and figurines the catalogue features Disney-themed clothing: bathrobes with Winnie the Pooh appliqués, stretch knit pants with a small Mickey Mouse at the hem, quilted "Magic Winter Jackets" featuring a choice of Eeyore, Mickey, or Pooh. Here's the problem: all these items are for adults. In fact, I was horrified to discover that it would have been possible for my husband and me to spend last Halloween trick-or-treating in matching Tweedledum and Tweedledee costumes—a pretty far cry from Marabel Morgan's idea of a good costume.

For many couples child-rearing has become not merely one aspect of marriage but its entire purpose and function. Spouses regard each other not as principally lovers and companions but as sharers of the great, unending burden of taking care of the children. And make no mistake about it: American middle-class families have made child-rearing a dauntingly complex enterprise. My children are still very small, but it has been made abundantly clear to me by friends and acquaintances that I had better get in the market for an SUV or a minivan, because I am soon enough going to be shuttling the children and their friends to a bewildering series of soccer games, soccer parties, soccer tournaments. Already I throw birthday parties with guest lists and budgets that approximate those of a wedding-rehearsal dinner. The curious thing about this labor-intensive variety of parenting is that it has arisen now, when parents—and specifically mothers—have less time to devote to their children than ever before. One can't help finding in these developments a frantic attempt at compensation for the hours some professional-class mothers spend away from their children. Mothering, which used to be a rather private affair (requiring, principally, a playpen, a back yard, a television set, and a coffeepot), has now adopted a very public dimension. Why, of course Sarah So-and-So is a good mother: little Andrew is at Gymboree, Music Rhapsody, Bright Child, and Fit for Kids every week! All of domestic life now turns on the entertainment and happiness not of the adults but of the children. At vacation time my husband and I don't drag our little boys through the Louvre, as I was dragged at a tender age (because my parents wanted to see it, and it would never have occurred to them to consult their children about where to go on holiday). Rather, we check into hotels with elaborate children's pools and nightly fireworks and huge duck ponds. It's all very jolly, but it is entirely possible, I suppose, that some parents will overidentify with the whole thing, will forget that they are in fact the adults and not the children. And if your conception of yourself is as a great big eight-year-old, you're not very likely to have sex on your mind come the end of the day.

When I was a teenager, in the 1970s, I was always quite happy to accept a baby-sitting job, because I knew that once I got the kids to sleep, I could read The Joy of Sex for an hour or two; I don't think I baby-sat for a single family that didn't have a copy. There was a sense that young parents of that generation—granted, I grew up in Berkeley, which may have skewed the sample considerably—were still getting it on. Similarly, the characters one encounters in Cheever and Updike, with their cocktails and cigarettes and affairs, seem at once infinitely more dissolute and more adult than most of the young parents I know. Nowadays, American parents of a certain social class seem squeaky clean, high-achieving, flush with cash, relatively exhausted, obsessed with their children, and somehow—how to pinpoint this?—undersexed.

If I Don't Know How She Does It, a book about a working woman who discovers deep joy and great sex by quitting her job and devoting herself to family life, had been written by a man, he would be the target of a lynch mob the proportions and fury of which would make Salman Rushdie feel like a lucky, lucky man. But of course it was written by a with-it female journalist, so it's safe, even admired. Allison Pearson, we have been given to understand, is telling it like it is. And what she's telling us, essentially, is that in several crucial aspects the women's movement has been a bust, even for the social class that most ardently championed it.

Given the curious alchemy of feminism, which transforms absolutely anything women choose to do into a crucial element of liberation doctrine, confessing that one has given up sex has become a very right-on and empowering act. A hot new collection of essays (all of them interesting and one of them—by Ellen Gilchrist—exquisite) titled The Bitch in the House is filled with such gleefully tendered admissions, including that of the writer Jill Bialosky, whose account of a long lunch with an old friend is featured on the book's jacket: "My friend asked me about my marriage. 'Are you guys having sex?' she asked bluntly ... I wanted to laugh." What's interesting about these public confessions—and, I suspect, what makes them so satisfying to women—is that they are utterly humiliating to husbands. Granted, Bialosky has protected her husband's privacy by referring to him as "D." throughout the essay—but perhaps, if her heart had really been in it, she would have written under a pseudonym. Clearly, sticking it to D. was part of her intention when she wrote and published the piece. Every account I've ever read in which a married woman admits she's not having sex anymore begins with a red-hot account of the sex she used to have with her husband before they had children. Before Jill Bialosky decided to cut off poor D., he was having the time of his life.

He pressed up against me in dark alleys. I gave him blow jobs as he drove on one of our weekend treks. We made out in taxicabs. There was a kind of volatile tension wired through our relationship that set my body on fire feeling his arm resting against mine in the dark cavern of a movie theater.

But now? "A little faucet had turned off inside my body. My veins were cold. I didn't want to be touched." And here—with that little faucet—is the heart of the matter. The Jill Bialoskys of the world may feel that they belong to the most outrageously liberated group of women yet to stride the earth. These women assume that in the very act of confession they are wearing the mantle of freedom. They are not only free enough to perform oral sex in a moving car—a bit of cutting-edge eroticism that, I believe, dates back to the Model T—but also free enough to admit, in tones of outrage and bewilderment, to the abrupt waning of their desire. What they don't understand, and what women of an earlier era might have been able to tell them, is that when the little faucet turns off, it is time not to rat out your husband (is there anything more wounding to a man, and therefore more cruel and vicious, than a wife's public admission that he is not satisfying her in bed?) but rather to turn it back on. It is not complicated; it requires putting the children to bed at a decent hour and adopting a good attitude. The rare and enviable woman is not the one liberated enough to tell hurtful secrets about her marriage to her girlfriends or the reading public. Nor is she the one capable of attracting the sexual attentions of a variety of worthy suitors. The rare woman—the good wife, and the happy one—is the woman who maintains her husband's sexual interest and who returns it in full measure.

Sex therapists concur that sexless marriages are not inherently problematic; if both partners are satisfied with a passionless union, the marriage is said to be in fine shape. But I'm not so sure. Marriage remains the most efficient engine of disenchantment yet invented. There is nothing like uninterrupted cohabitation and grinding responsibility to cast a clear, unforgiving light on the object of desire. Once children come along, it's easy for parents to regard each other as co-presidents of an industrious little corporation. Certainly, all sound marriages benefit from sudden and unexpected infusions of good will—What luck! Here we are, so many years later and still as happy as ever! But the element that regularly restores a marriage to something with an aspect of romance rather than of collegiality is sex.

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CAITLIN FLANAGAN is a staff writer at The Atlantic. She is the author of Girl Land and To Hell With All That.

Sex and the College Girl

“I think that the charge that men have become emasculated by the competence of women is both depressing and untrue.”

NORA JOHNSON

NOVEMBER 1959 ISSUE

A. Y. OWEN / GETTY

- Link Copied

Ever since Gertrude Stein made her remark about the Lost Generation, every decade has wanted to find a tag, a concise explanation of its own behavior. In our complicated world, any simplification of the events around us is welcome and, in fact, almost necessary. We need to feel our place in history; it helps in our constant search for self-identity. But while the Beatniks travel about the country on the backs of trucks, the rest of us are going to college and then plunging—with puzzling eagerness—into marriage and parenthood. While the Beatniks are avoiding any signs of culture or intellect, we are struggling to adapt what we have to the essentially nonintellectual function of early parenthood. We are deadly serious in our pursuits and, I am afraid, non-adventurous in our actions. We have a compulsion to plan our lives, to take into account all possible adversities and to guard against them. We prefer not to consider the fact that human destinies are subject to amazingly ephemeral influences and that often our most rewarding experiences come about by pure chance. This sort of thinking seems risky to us, and we are not a generation to take risks. Perhaps history will prove that we are a buffer generation, standing by silently while our children, brought up by demand-feeding and demand-everything, kick over the traces and do startling things, with none of our predilection for playing it safe.

Or parents kicked over so many traces that there are practically none left for us. That is not to say, of course, that all of our parents were behaving like the Fitzgeralds. Undoubtedly most of them weren't. But the twenties have come down to us as the Jazz Age, the era described by Time as having "one abiding faith—that something would happen in the next twenty minutes that would utterly change one's life," and this is what will go on the record. The people living more quietly didn't make themselves so eloquent. And this gay irresponsibility is our heritage. There is very little that is positive beneath it, and there is one clearly negative result—so many of our parents are divorced. This is something many of us have felt and want to avoid ourselves (though we have not been very successful). But if we blame our parents for their way of life, I suspect we envy them even more. They seemed so free of our worries, our self-doubts, and our search for what is usually called security—a dreary goal. I think that we bewilder our parents with our sensible ideas, which look, on the surface, like maturity. Quite often they really are, but how did we get them so early? After all, we're young!

Since so many of us are going to college, a great many of our decisions about our lives have been and are being made on the campuses, and our behavior in college is inevitably in for some comment. Two criticisms rise above the rest: people in college are promiscuous, for one thing, and, for another, they are getting married and having children too early. These are interesting observations because they contradict each other. The phenomena of pinning, going steady, and being monogamous-minded do not suggest sexual promiscuity. Quite the contrary—they are symptoms of our inclination to play it safe.

Promiscuity, on the other hand, demands a certain amount of nerve. It might be misdirected nerve, or neurotic nerve, or a nerve born of defiance or ignorance or of an intellectual disregard of social mores, but that's what it takes. Sleeping around is a risky business, emotionally, physically, and morally, and this is no light undertaking. I have never really understood why it is considered to be so easy for girls to say yes, particularly to four different men over a period of two weeks. On the other hand, it is very easy to go steady. Everybody is doing it. During my first two weeks at Smith I felt rather like a display in a shop window. Boys from Amherst, Yale, Williams, and Dartmouth swarmed over the campus in groups, looking over the new freshmen for one girl that they could tie up for the next eight Saturday nights, the spring prom, and a house party in July. What a feeling of safety not to have to worry about a date for months ahead! A boy might even get around to falling in love at some point, and that would solve the problem of marriage too.

The depressing aspect of this perpetual twosome is that it is so often based on sex and convenience. It is so easy to become tied up with old Joe, even though he is rather a bore, and avoid those nightmarish Saturday nights home with the girls. But the trouble is, once the relationship with Joe has become an established thing, getting out of it again (when Joe's conversation begins to have the stimulating effect of a dose of Seconal) is about as easy as climbing out of a mud swamp. Joe objects; how about the spring prom? A friend of mine, trying to rid herself of such a relationship, told me she felt bad about "flushing" old Joe, since he was really such a nice person. She worried for a long time, then prepared the most understanding, sensitive, kind speech she could think of, taking into account his tender feelings and possible indignation. She delivered it to Joe, who listened her out with a rather stunned expression, and then waited for his reaction. "I understand your point of view," said Joe finally, "but you don't understand mine at all. Don't you realize that now I have to go out and find myself a new girl?" Joe might have been an exaggerated case, but there is an element of eternity about his feelings.

Joe is not a man to take chances. He might waste seven Saturday nights and two proms on hopeless blind dates before he finds one he likes. He does not enjoy spending the evening dredging up conversation with a complete stranger; he wants to relax. Beyond this, he does not want the bother of starting the whole sex cycle over again, with discussions and possibly arguments about how far he may go how soon. He wants it all understood, with the lady reasonably willing, if possible. (This depends on his and her notions of what constitutes a nice girl.) Now if Joe sounds abominably lazy, besides being a monster of self-indulgence (which, of course, he is), I do not mean to say that he is the living example of young American manhood. I simply use him to illustrate what I imagine to be some of the attitudes of young men who want to settle down early.

"Marriage is for girls," a young man told me recently, and I had no reason to take exception to this until he told me later that, when he said it, he had become engaged only an hour before. For no matter how much is said about the conniving ability of females to lay traps for men, the fact remains that men not only phone for the dates but ordinarily they do the proposing, too; if by chance a girl proposes to them, there is nothing to stop them from refusing. And when we look over the campuses today, it is obvious that they are accepting with alacrity.

The modern American female is one of the most discussed, written-about, sore subjects to come along in ages. She has been said to be domineering, frigid, neurotic, repressed, and unfeminine. She tries to do everything at once and doesn't succeed in doing anything very well. Her problems are familiar to everyone, and, naturally, her most articulate critics are men. But I have found one interesting thing. Men, when they are pinned down on the subject, admit that what really irritates them about modern women is that they can't, or won't, give themselves completely to men the way women did in the old days. This is undoubtedly true, though a truth bent by the male ego. Women may change roles all they wish, skittering about in a frantic effort to fulfill themselves, but the male ego has not changed a twig for centuries. And this, God knows, is a good thing, problems or not.

I think that the charge that men have become emasculated by the competence of women is both depressing and untrue. Men become annoyed, certainly, and occasionally absolutely furious at all this nonsense, but they are still calmly sure of their own superiority; and women, whether or not they admit it, find this comforting. Old Joe's problem is laziness, not lack of self-confidence; his ego is of crushing size. Women, of course, when consulted, are less articulate about their problems. Often they dismiss the whole subject as nonsense, but then the women who say this are usually unmarried. I suspect that for most women the problem doesn't really become apparent until after a few years of marriage, when the novelty of everything has worn off and the ticking of the clock becomes louder.

The average college girl, then, is trapped by the male wish for dating security. If she balks at this at first, she soon accepts—a couple of Saturday nights playing bridge with the girls quickly teach her what's good for her. She can't really manage to keep up a butterfly life for long, unless she is an exception. Even if she wants to, the boys she goes out with are all too willing to make an honest woman of her. Their fraternity pins are burning holes in their lapels. Avoiding going steady with old Joe requires an extraordinary measure of tact and delicacy, because curious situations arise very early in the game. If Susie has gone out with a boy three or four times and then is asked out by a friend of his she met at the fraternity house, she is already in a predicament. She would like to go, because she likes Boy Number Two, and why not? But Boy Number One would be terribly hurt. It just isn't cricket. If she does go, she runs the risk of being thought lightheaded and lighthearted by the rest of the fraternity, besides having done dirt to one of the brothers (an unpardonable offense), which practically extinguishes any other dating possibilities at that particular house.

Besides, the evening with Number Two won't be much fun anyway, because when they go to the fraternity house (which is almost unavoidable) Boy Number One will be skulking about, either casting her hurt looks as he creeps off to the library or else whooping it up in an ostentatious manner with another girl. The brothers will be uncomfortable, the pattern will be upset, and it is all Susie's fault for trying to play the field a bit. Boy Number Two probably won't last long either, unless he is swept off his feet and throws all caution to the winds. In that case, they might become duly pinned and eventually engaged, and probably by then she will be forgiven. But by then it's graduation time, and she doesn't care anyway. This is just one of the innumerable difficulties that girls can get into and it has a great deal to do with the strong loyalty of the fraternity system. The point is that, if Susie is determined to play the field, she will have to manage it carefully. None of her dates must know any of the others, and she will have to be scrupulously careful in her allotment of Saturday nights. For if a boy is turned down for three Saturday nights in a row, rather than being fascinated he is likely to be discouraged and give up. She just can't manage it for long, unless she is unusually beautiful and simply catnip to every man who sees her. Better settle for old Joe, who has been snapping at her heels on and off during freshman year and who eventually offers her his pin. Now Joe, for all his faults, is really an eminently sensible and dependable sort. Wild horses couldn't stop him from taking her out every Saturday night, most Fridays and Sundays, and occasional weekdays. Besides, Joe has a future. He knows exactly what he is going to do after graduation, the army, navy, or marines; and a few years' graduate school. Of course he won't earn a cent until he is thirty, but that doesn't matter. Susie can always work, and they can wait a couple of years for babies.

Now, one might wonder about the questions of love and sex. Susie has, on the whole, kept her chastity. She is no demimondaine, and she wants to be reasonably intact on her wedding night. She had an unfortunate experience at Dartmouth, when she and her date were both in their cups, but she barely remembers anything about it and hasn't seen the boy since. She has also done some heavy petting with boys she didn't care about, because she reasoned that it wouldn't matter what they thought of her. She has been in love twice (three times, if you count Joe), once in high school and once in freshman year with the most divine Yale senior, whom she let do practically anything (except have intercourse) and who disappeared for no reason after two months of torrid dating. It still hurts her to think about that.

She has kept Joe fairly well at arm's length, giving in a little at a time, because she wanted him to respect her. He didn't really excite her sexually, but probably he would if they had some privacy. Nothing was less romantic than the front porch of the house, or Joe's room at the fraternity with his roommate running back and forth from the shower, or in the back of someone's car with only fifteen minutes till she had to be in. Anyway, it might be just as well.

Susie and Joe have decided that they will sleep together when it is feasible, since by now Joe knows she is a nice girl and it's all right. But they will be very careful. Susie, like all her friends, has a deep-rooted fear of pregnancy, which explains their caution about having affairs. They have heard that no kind of birth control is really infallible. And, today, shotgun weddings are looked down upon and illegal abortions sound appalling. It simply isn't worth the worry. She will sleep with Joe, if they become engaged, because he wants to, and if she becomes pregnant, they can get married sooner. But they will do everything possible to prevent it.

Obviously, Susie is hardly in love with Joe in the way one might hope. But she is sincerely fond of him, she feels comfortable with him, and, in some unexplained way, when she is with him life seems much simpler. The decision about her life keeps her awake at night, but when she is with Joe things make more sense. The prospect of marrying Joe gradually becomes more attractive.

The New Yorker recently ran the following item, titled "Overheard on the Barnard Campus": "I can't decide whether to get married this Christmas or come back and face all my problems." If Susie becomes engaged, she can, in a way, stop trying so hard. She can let go. For college (though it may not sound it from this account) hasn't been easy. Her liberal education has had the definite effect of making her question herself and some of her lifelong ideas for the first time, sometimes shatteringly. She has learned to think, not in the proportions of genius, but intelligently, about herself and her place in the world. She realizes, disturbingly, that a great many things are required of her, and sometimes she can't help wondering about the years beyond the casserole and playpen. The beginnings of maturity are taking place in her.

The Eastern women's colleges (and I can speak with authority only about Smith) subtly emanate, over a period of four years, a concept of the ideal American woman, who is nothing short of fantastic. She must be a successful wife, mother, community contributor, and possibly career woman, all at once. Besides this, she must be attractive, charming, gracious, and good-humored; talk intelligently about her husband's job, but not try to horn in on it; keep her home looking like a page out of House Beautiful; and be efficient, but not intimidatingly so. While she is managing all this, she must be relaxed and happy, find time to read, paint, and listen to music, think philosophical thoughts, be the keeper of culture in the home, and raise her husband's sights above the television set. For it is part and parcel of the concept of liberal education to better human beings, to make them more thoughtful and understanding, to broaden their interests. Liberal education is a trust. It is not to be lightly thrown aside at graduation, but it is to be used every day, forever.

These are all the things that a liberally educated girl must do, and there has been in her background a curious lack of definition of the things she must not do. Parents who have lived in the Jazz Age can not very well forbid adventurousness, nor can they take a very stalwart attitude about sex. Even if they do, their daughters rarely listen. What or what not to do about sex is, these days, relative. It all depends. This is not to say that there are no longer any moral standards; certainly there are—the fact that sex still causes guilt and worry proves it. But moral generalizations seem remote and unreal, something our grandparents believed in.

Today girls are expected to judge each situation for itself, a far more demanding task. A man recently told me that he had found girls rather inept at this, since taking a square view of a new relationship at the beginning, before sex has entered it, requires more maturity and insight than most college girls have. He said he had found such girls inconsistent in their attitude toward him—sexual sirens at first (when they wanted to attract him), promising everything, then becoming more and more aloof and more and more anxious to discuss the relationship step by step, when logically their behavior should be quite reversed; he had thought that as they got to know and like him they would be more relaxed about sex.

The fact is that, lacking a solid background of Christian ethics, most girls have only a couple of vague rules of thumb to go by, which they cling to beyond all sense and reason. And these, interestingly enough, contradict each other. One is that anything is all right if you're in love (romantic, from movies and certain fiction—the American dream of love) and the other is that a girl must be respected, particularly by the man she wants to marry (ethical, left over from grandma). Since these are extremely shaky and require the girl's knowing whether or not there is a chance of love in the relationship, sex, to her, requires constant corroborative discussion while she tries to plumb the depths of a man's intentions. Actions alone are not trustworthy. After all, a prostitute can arouse a man as well as (and probably better than) a "nice" girl. But if a man loves her for herself, and not just her body, he will augment his wandering hands with a few well-placed words of love. Clinging to her two contradictory principles, she tries to be a sexual demon and Miss Priss at tea at the same time; she tries not to see what strange companions love and propriety are.

On the other side of the coin, men do little to clarify the situation. Some, at least, are simple-minded about it. They divide girls into two categories, bad and good: the bad ones have obvious functions, and the good ones are to be married; but good ones, once pinned or engaged (and the official definition of being pinned is "being engaged to be engaged") must loosen up immediately or run the risk of being considered cold or hypocritical. This would require the girl to be an angel of civilized and understanding behavior at first, pacifying her man by a gentle pat on the knee at just the right time and keeping him at bay and yet interested—in a way both tactful and loving (the teen-age magazines devote a lot of space to this technique and recommend warding off unwise passes by asking about the latest football scores), and then, once the pin has been handed over, to shed her clothes and hop into bed with impassioned abandon.

Even more complicated to deal with is the intellectual-amoral type of man, who has affairs as a matter of course and doesn't (or says he doesn't) think less of a girl for sleeping with him. He is full of highly complicated arguments on the subject, which have to do with empiricism, epicureanism, live today, for tomorrow will bring the mushroom cloud, learning about life, and the dangers of self-repression, all of which are whipped out with frightening speed and conviction while he is undoing the third button on his girl's blouse. And he may well need arguments at this point.

Our liberally educated girl is not very likely to be swept away on a tide of passion. With the first feeling of lust, her mind begins working at a furious rate. Should she or shouldn't she? What are the arguments on both sides? Respect or not? Does she really want to enough? and so on, until her would-be lover throws up his hands in despair and curses American womanhood. Even if she gives in, she is hardly going to be his dream goddess of love; she is too exhausted by her mental exertions. She must discuss the whole thing at length. And by then her Lothario, who had been so articulate about sex while they were still sitting in the bar, has turned into a panting beast to whom words mean nothing. This is clearly a mess and not one that is going to clear up with magic speed on the wedding night.

A good many girls try to solve their bewilderment in college by constantly comparing notes with each other. Things seem more acceptable if everybody is doing them. I remember an occasion during my freshman year when a girl walked into my room after a date and said mournfully to several of us who were sitting around, “He tried to take my blouse off. What shall I do?" She typified all of us, and all of us were going to have to solve the same problem sooner or later. As a friend of mine put it, "Freshman year, the problem is what to do when a boy tries to unbutton your blouse; sophomore year, when he reaches up your skirt; and after that, everybody shuts up." For when the real problem comes, the best thing to do is simply look sphinxlike about the whole thing. I suppose the ideal girl is still technically a virgin but has done every possible kind of petting without actually having had intercourse. This gives her savoir-faire, while still maintaining her maiden dignity.

A girl, then, by the end of college is saddled with enough theories, arguments pro and con, expectations, and conflicting opinions to keep her busy for years. She is in the habit of analyzing everything, wondering why she does things, and trying to lay a pattern for her life. Her education, which has laid such a glittering array of goals before her as an educated American woman, has also taught her to be extremely suspicious of the winds of chance. She has been told that she is a valuable commodity, that only efficiency will allow her to utilize all her possibilities, and that to get on in this risky and nerve-racking world she must keep what a disillusioned male friend of mine calls "the safety catch." There must always be something held in reserve, a part of her that she will give to no one, not even her husband. It is her belief in herself, modern version, and the determination to protect that belief. It is the vision of possibility which remains long after she is mature enough to accept the eventual, gradual limitation of the things that will happen to her in life. It is the dream of the things she never did.

In other ages, women were not educated to expect so much, and consequently they were less frequently disappointed. A really mature girl can, of course, absorb her disappointment by saying to herself, "I can't do all the things I wanted, but, instead of trying to, I can be much happier by doing my best in the few things that are possible to me." Others never give up the hope of being able to manage everything—a husband, a career, community work, children, and all the rest. A few exceptional ones can manage it, but others end up with an ulcer, a divorce, a psychiatrist, or deep disappointment. And there are a sad few who think that since they can't do everything, they won't do anything at all. They then give themselves over to the most confining kind of domestic life, an attitude of martyred anti-intellectualism, and a permanent chip on the shoulder.

The safety catch, then, can be a woman's happiness or her doom. If my disillusioned friend complains about it, he had better realize that as long as he wants an educated woman, his chances of finding one who is also willing to be totally dominated by her husband, who can yield completely to him, are fairly slim.

This, then, is what the result is for a girl who has been brought up in a world where the only real value is self-betterment. She has had to create her own right and wrong, by trial and error and endless discussion. If this is what is meant by Susie's search for security, it is not security from a frightening world but from a world that has treated her too well.

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TECHNOLOGY

A Successful Bachelor

"More interest should be taken in bachelors. Their need is greater, and their condition really deplorable. It is a misfortune to be unhappily married, but it comes near to being a disgrace not to be married at all."

LEON H. VINCENT

JUNE 1898 ISSUE

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FEW books are quite as amusing as the volumes which profess to give advice on how to live peacefully with one's wife or one's husband. Marriage is accounted a serious matter, but advice about marriage is sure to be humorous. Swift, Fielding, and Sterne are good to read, but one cannot read them always; their humor is too robust and virile, they are at times almost painfully intellectual. It is a relief to turn from Tom Jones and Tristram Shandy to those masterpieces of unconscious humor which set forth with the exactness of a newly painted guide-post the order of his going who wishes to achieve happiness in the married state. The contented man laughs as he reads such books, because he knows how independent is his own marital felicity of small rules and infinitesimal plottings. The man who is unhappily married laughs, too; in a way, however, which may mean that he wishes the author of the book had his wife to contend with.

For these Guides to a Prosperous Domestic Career are written by men,—a fact which needs interpretation. Men have always shown a pathetic courage in grappling with such high themes. From John Lyly who maintained that wives should be subdued with kindness, and Jeremy Taylor who took the advanced and perilous position that a husband ought not to beat his wife, down to the latest theorizer who imagines that his placid domestic state is of his own shaping, and who does not perceive how adroitly he is managed by the feminine element of his household, men, and only men, have had the desperate courage to explain to the married world what it must do to be content. And these bold spirits have had their financial reward. There are many roads to fame, but this way fortune lies. If you would be noted,—or quite as likely, notorious,—write a novel. If you would have your human document in the magazines, and your opinions on subjects about which you know nothing set forth in the Sunday newspapers, write a novel. But if you would be rich, write a book which shall instruct married people how to make the best of their uncomfortable situation.

On the whole, it may be conceded that this department of literature is overdone. We want books of quite another description. More interest should be taken in bachelors. Their need is greater, and their condition really deplorable. It is a misfortune to be unhappily married, but it comes near to being a disgrace not to be married at all. Marriage is a perilous undertaking, but what shall be thought of him who hesitates because it is perilous? We may not care to go to the length of affirming that bachelors are cowardly, but we must grant that they are socially nondescript. It is possible to respect a bachelor, but it is impossible to be at ease with him. Not without reason does the world speak of a married man as "settled." There is something final in the condition of a Benedict. You know where to find him, or at least you know where he should be found. But of a bachelor you know nothing. Bachelorhood is a normal condition up to a certain period in a man's life, and after that it is abnormal. He who elects to remain unmarried elects to become queer. It is wonderful how readily most men adapt themselves to the conditions of matrimonial existence. Almost any man can become a fairly respectable husband; but to be a successful bachelor implies unusual gifts. I once met in the Northwest a middleaged writer of verse who gave me four volumes of his works, "composed, printed, and bound" by himself. He said, "This country is crying for a national poet, and I want the job." But he was mistaken. This country is crying for help in taking care of its timid bachelors, help in marrying them off; and if they will not marry, help in getting them well housed and neatly mended. And the greatest need is the book which shall instruct the bachelor how to make glad the desert regions of his solitary existence, how to fill the vacuities with which his life is perforated.

There have been successful bachelors, and among them none more successful than Henry Crabb Robinson. He died in February, 1867, at the age of ninety-two. The inscription on his tomb records the names of eight men of renown to whom he had sustained the relation of "friend and associate." The eight names are Goethe, Wordsworth, Wieland, Coleridge, Flaxman, Blake, Clarkson, and Charles Lamb. The list is striking, and clearly indicates the wide range of Crabb Robinson's sympathies. To each of these men he rendered the tribute of a hearty and discriminating admiration. His place in the world of literature and art was peculiar. He had a strong masculine regard for men of genius because they were men of genius, but no measure of self-interest mixed with this regard. He had not the creative power himself, but he understood that power in others. He was not a mere satellite, for he held distinctly a critical attitude at times; and no commonplace moon ever thinks of passing strictures upon the central sun. We need a word to express the relation. To men of genius he gave the encouragement and stimulus of a dignified admiration based on solid reasons. To the general reading public he was a sort of mentor; his good sense in other matters awakened confidence in the soundness of his judgment; his catholicity of taste operated to allay that prejudice which the mob always conceives against a poet who is both new and queer.

One of Crabb Robinson's qualifications for successful bachelorhood lay in the fact that he was not good-looking. I have heard men who were handsome complain about it as a positive disadvantage. Tawno Chikno did not find beauty embarrassing; he only regretted that he was not a writer, so that he might tell the world how beautiful he was. Conventional persons would hardly dare to express themselves with the naiveté which characterized the speech of this gypsy gentleman.

Robinson early learned to make the best of his physical disadvantages, and to view himself objectively with an amused interest. When he was in Weimar, in 1829, he spent five evenings with Goethe. Goethe was fond of "portrait memorials," and had several hundred of them. Robinson thought it an "extreme instance" of this taste that the poet should have insisted upon having his portrait. It was done in crayons by "one Schmeller," and must have been a success, for Crabb says, "It was frightfully ugly, and very like." And when he was once complimented on the success of his portrait by Masquerier, and told that it was just the picture one would wish to have of a friend, his "very best expression," Robinson dryly observed, "It need be the best to be endurable."

Walter Bagehot, who used to figure at Crabb Robinson's famous breakfasts, expatiates on Robinson's chin,—"a chin of excessive length and portentous power of extension." The old gentleman "made very able use of the chin at a conversational crisis." "Just at the point of the story he pushed it out and then very slowly drew it in again, so that you always knew when to laugh."

Miss Fenwick (Wordsworth's Miss Fenwick) pronounced Mr. Robinson downright ugly, and underscored the word. It seems that there was a great variety in his ugliness,—"a series of ugliness in quick succession, one look more ugly than the one which preceded it, particularly when he is asleep. He is always asleep when he is not talking." "On which occasions little Willy contemplates him with great interest, and often inquires, 'What kind of face has Mr. Robinson?' 'A very nice face,' is the constant answer; then a different look comes, and another inquiry of 'What kind of face was that?' 'A nice face too.' What an odd idea he must have of nice faces!"1

Miss Fenwick was of the opinion that a man could not preserve kindliness and courtesy in the bachelor state unless he had something the matter with him; that is, unless he was the victim of some misfortune which kept him "humble, grateful, and loving." "I remember," she says in the letter just quoted, "making out to my own satisfaction that old Wishaw preserved his benevolence through the want of his leg, a want that made him feel his dependence on his fellow creatures." And she concludes that "Robinson's ugliness had done for him what the want of a leg had done for old Wishaw."

II.

If one were to take out the important episodes of Crabb Robinson's life, pack them together, suppress the dull passages and the monotonous incidents, it would seem that this man had had a brilliant career. He lived long, which gave him time to see many things; he had good health, which enabled him to enjoy what he saw. Life tasted sweet to him up to the last day, and almost to the last hour. His wholesome curiosity about good books and good people never failed. The effect of reading his Diary is to make one ambitious to live long; and if the book were more generally read, I am sure that longevity would be greatly on the increase among us.

Let us note a few facts which bring out the stretch of time through which his experiences lay. Many men have lived more years than he, but they have not had Robinson's gift for friendship nor Robinson's opportunities. He was born in 1775. In 1790 he heard John Wesley preach "in the great round meeting-house at Colchester." "On each side of him stood a minister, and the two held him up, having their hands under his armpits. His feeble voice was barely audible. But his reverend countenance, especially his long white locks, formed a picture never to be forgotten." Sixty-two years after this date Crabb Robinson was attending church at Brighton, listening to that gifted man the Reverend Frederick W. Robertson; and when he was told that Robertson unsettled people's minds, he replied that nobody could be awakened out of a deep sleep without being unsettled.

He was able, as a matter of course, distinctly to remember the breaking out of the French Revolution, and the universal rejoicing in it as an "event of great promise." Though he was brought up an orthodox Dissenter, he, like many other orthodox Dissenters, sympathized with Dr. Priestley during the Birmingham riots. At a banquet he defended Priestley. A toast was given "in honor of Dr. Priestley and other Christian sufferers." Some bigot present objected that he did not know the doctor to be a Christian. Young Robinson answered that if this gentleman had read Priestley's Letter to the Swedenborgians he would have "learned more of real Christianity than he seemed to know."

From the French Revolution and the sufferings of English sympathizers therewith down to our American civil war is a long stretch, not by years alone, but by the multitude of changes which have on the whole bettered the conditions of human life. Crabb Robinson appears to have followed the events of the American struggle with keen interest, and on March 19, 1865, he writes to a friend: "Nothing has brought me so near to being a partisan of President Lincoln as his inaugural speech. How short and how wise! How true and how unaffected! It must make many converts. At least I should despair of any man who needs to be converted."

Crabb Robinson was past his majority when Lyrical Ballads was published. He outlived Wordsworth by twenty-seven years, and Coleridge by thirty-three years. He had seen Matthew Arnold as a boy in his father's house. In 1866, meeting Arnold at the Athenæum, he asked him for the name of his most remarkable book. The author of Essays in Criticism denied having written anything remarkable. "Then," said Robinson, "it must be some other Matthew Arnold whom they are talking about." Subsequently Arnold sent the old gentleman the volume of his essays, and the last note in the Diary records the interest he took in reading the essay on the Function of Criticism at the Present Time.

These facts bring out the limits of Robinson's experiences. He was eleven years old when Burns printed his poems at Kilmarnock, sixteen years old when Boswell's Life of Johnson was published, twenty-three when the Lyrical Ballads appeared, and he lived into the very year which saw the publication of William Morris's Jason and Swinburne's Song of Italy. Between these extremes lay his intellectual life; and there were few things worth knowing of which he did not know something, and few people worth cultivating whom he had not cultivated. It is a temptation to roll the great names of great people as sweet morsels under the tongue.

In early life Robinson studied in Germany. He met Goethe and Schiller. He saw a performance of Wallenstein's Tod at the court theatre of Weimar, both the great poets being present; Schiller in his seat near the ducal box, and Goethe in his armchair in the centre aisle. Robinson declared that Goethe was the most oppressively handsome man he had ever seen. He met Wieland, who told him that Pilgrim's Progress was the book in which he had learned to read English. He heard Gall lecture on craniology, "attended by Spurzheim as his famulus." He met Wolf and Griesbach, and also Herder, to whom he loaned the Lyrical Ballads. He saw Kotzebue, the dramatist, who was a star of considerable magnitude in those days. Robinson describes him as "a lively little man with black eyes." Another star rose above the Weimar horizon in the year 1803, and it was Madame de Staël. Robinson helped her in getting materials for her book on Germany, notably for the portions which related to German philosophy. Some years later, he was able to render her a considerable service in coming to terms with her English publisher.

When he returned to England to live he lost in no degree his "facility in forming acquaintance." He knew everybody outside of the circles which were purely fashionable. Being born a Dissenter, his "Dissenting connection" (I believe that is the phrase) would be very large. His attitude in this matter of the Church and Dissent was unusual, but easy to comprehend. He said he liked Dissent better than the Church, but he liked Churchmen better than Dissenters.

To mention but a few of the interesting people with whom he had personal relations. He knew Wakefield and Thelwall. He had an early passion for the writings of Godwin, used to see him occasionally, and once met Shelley at Godwin's house. He was interested in some plan to relieve Godwin from his financial difficulties, being one of many friends who were imposed upon by Godwin's incapability for doing anything financially productive.

He had been a Times correspondent in 1807, and his friendship for Walter was an undying one. In Walter's parlor he used to meet Peter Fraser, who in those days wrote the great leaders, the "flash articles which made the sensation." There it was that he saw old Combe, whose Dr. Syntax rich book-collectors still buy under the impression that it has something to do with literature. He used to play chess and drink tea with Mrs. Barbauld, and drink tea and play whist with Charles and Mary Lamb. One of his early loves was William Hazlitt, whom he pronounced clever before other people had learned to say it. He knew Coleridge, Southey, Flaxman, and Blake. His accounts of Coleridge give us some of the best side-lights that have been thrown upon that brilliant genius. He once heard Coleridge talk from three o'clock in the afternoon until twelve at night.

He knew Walter Savage Landor in Florence. Landor told him that he could not bear contradiction. "Certainly I frequently did contradict him," says Robinson. "Yet his attentions to me were unwearied." Landor gave Robinson a good word in a letter to a friend. It runs thus: "I wish some accident may have brought you acquainted with Mr. Robinson, a friend of Wordsworth. He was a barrister, and notwithstanding, both honest and modest,—a character I never heard of before." One of the prettiest incidents in the Diary is of Landor's sending his mastiff dog to take care of Crabb Robinson when he returned from Fiesole to Florence after midnight. "I could never make him leave me until I was at the city gate; and then on my patting him on the head, as if he were conscious his protection was no longer needed, he would run off rapidly."

III.

Crabb Robinson justified his existence if only by the services he rendered Wordsworth. He was an early and discriminating admirer. He championed Wordsworth's poetry at a time when champions were few and not influential. It must have been with special reference to the needs of poets like the author of Lyrical Ballads that the saying "Woe unto you when all men shall speak well of you" was uttered. Yet I am not sure but there is a measure of woe in the condition of him of whom all men speak ill.

At a time when critical disapprobation was pretty nearly unanimous Crabb Robinson's was one of the few voices in commendation. It was not a loud voice, but it was clear and impressive.

Friends of Wordsworth's art sometimes express surprise, and even anger, that the public should have been so slow in awaking to the merits of that art. There is at least no occasion for surprise. When one considers the length of time it takes to interest the public mind in the high qualities of a new brand of soap, he may reasonably conclude that it will take even longer to arouse interest in tbe transcendental qualities of a new brand of poetry. Some of Wordsworth's verse was not encouraging. One of the volumes of 1807 contains a poem beginning, "I met Louisa in the shade." This possibly struck readers as grotesque. Such a line provokes to irreverence. It is human nature to laugh and throw the volumes aside. But exactly at this point admirers like Henry Crabb Robinson began to exert their beneficent influence and to pay their unselfish homage.

Two sorts of homage are paid by lesser men to greater. The first sort consists in following one's idol about, noting the externals of his life, his diet, his dress, his gait; being solicitous as to the color of his necktie rather than the measure of his intellect. Homage of this kind seems to proceed on the theory that if you only stare long enough at a man's head, you will presently be rewarded by a sight of his mind. It invokes the aid of photography. The author is exhibited in his study, his pen in hand. An admiring world beholds him in literary surroundings with a flashlight expression of countenance. Perhaps we have him in six different positions, with a quoted remark supposed to be in keeping with each position. He is in the act of telling how his mind rose to the great thought which has made him famous and worthy to be illustrated. He is photographed saying to the camera, "This idea came to me as I was on the way from my front porch to my front gate."

Homage like this, so careful about externals, is not very good for the author, and is apt to be wholly bad in its effect upon the worshiper. Everybody has read Henry James's book entitled Terminations. It contains a story of a young American girl who waited upon a famous English novelist with a very large autograph album, in which she wished him to write a sentiment. I believe it is a quite general practice of young American girls abroad to travel with large autograph albums under their arms. It will be remembered, too, that the novelist's friend gently explained to the fair visitor that true worship of genius does not consist in collecting autographs, but in reading an author's works, in seeking their deeper meaning, and in making those works known in places where they will be understood. And the young lady was persuaded to depart, with tears in her eyes, and without the great novelist's autograph.

Crabb Robinson's way of paying homage was very delicate. I think that it would have met with the hearty approval of even the author of Terminations. He liked Wordsworth's poetry, and he did his unostentatious best to make others like it. He did not cry aloud from the housetop that the messiah of English verse had at last arrived, neither did he found a society. He spoke to people of Wordsworth's verse, got them to read it, occasionally read poems himself to receptive listeners. If people balked at Louisa in the Shade, or were unsympathetic in attitude toward the Spade, with which Wilkinson hath till'd his Lands, he urged upon them the necessity and the wisdom of judging a man by the noble parts of his work, and not by the less fortunate parts. If they had read Wordsworth only to laugh at him, he insisted upon reading to them those poems which compelled their admiration; for there are poems with respect to which the public cannot hold a noncommittal attitude. The public must either admire, or else consent to stultify itself by not admiring.

By this method he did more to advance Wordsworth's reputation than if he had written a dozen eulogistic articles in the great reviews. And we cannot overpraise the single-heartedness of his aim. There was positively no thought of self in it. With many men that which begins as pure admiration of genius ends as a form of self-love. They worship the great man two thirds for his own sake, and one third for the sake of themselves. There is pleasure in being known as the friend of him about whom everybody is talking. But we shall look in vain for any evidence that Crabb Robinson was impelled by motives of this lower sort.

He may, therefore, be imagined as reading Wordsworth's poetry to more or less willing listeners all his life. He had too much tact to overdo it, and he was too catholic in his poetic tastes ever to grow an intolerant Wordsworthian. He was content to sow the seed, and let come of it what would. In his German tour of 1829 he spent a considerable portion of his time in reading poetry with his friend Knebel, "and after all I did not fully impress him with Wordsworth's power." He may even be suspected of having read Wordsworth to Goethe, for in his correspondence with Zelter Goethe speaks of Robinson as "a kind of missionary of English literature." "He read to me and my daughter, together and apart, single poems." In short, the Diary is studded with such entries as: "Took tea with the Flaxmans, and read to them extracts from Wordsworth's new poems." "My visit to Witham was made partly that I might have the pleasure of reading The Excursion to Mrs. W. Pattison." "A call on Blake,—my third interview. I read to him Wordsworth's incomparable ode, which he heartily enjoyed."

Crabb Robinson sacrificed in no degree his independence because of his personal relation to the poet. He regretted that Wordsworth should have reproached the bad taste of the times in his published notes and prefaces; and in a talk over the alterations which had been made in the poems Robinson frankly told Wordsworth that he did not dare to read aloud in company the lines "Three feet long and two feet wide." Wordsworth's reply was, "They ought to be liked."

It is rather a comfort to find from one or two of Wordsworth's letters how thoroughly human he was, even to the extent of getting out of conceit of his own trade, and wishing that petty practitioners in the same trade were out of conceit of it, too. He disliked minor poets. "I am sick of poetry," he says; "it overruns the country in all the shapes of the plagues of Egypt." Wordsworth grew less intolerant, and was more willing to acknowledge the merits of other poets, as he grew older. No one welcomed this change more than Crabb Robinson. It is assuming too much to assume that he was influential in bringing about such modification in the poet's attitude toward men or things, but his influence would be in that direction rather than in any other. In later years Crabb Robinson used regularly to spend his Christmas holidays at Rydal Mount. His presence was regarded as essential to the sober merrymaking of the household there. They had a family saying, "No Crabb, no Christmas."

IV.

The Diary is filled with suggestive points. To mention but one out of many. Without intending it Robinson makes clear the almost total extinction of Southey's life in mere books. He was a slave to the printed page. Wordsworth said, "It is painful to see how completely dead Southey is become to all but books." Robinson had himself noticed it. Rogers had noticed it. The talk of it in Dr. Arnold's presence frightened him for his own safety, and he wondered whether he too was in danger of losing his interest in things, and retaining "an interest in books only." Southey made a visit to Paris, but all the time he was there he did not go once to the Louvre; "he cared for nothing but the old book-shops." But he must have gathered a few impressions of the French capital, for he wrote to his daughter, "I would rather live in Paris than be hanged."

I believe that the evidence of the Diary goes to show that Crabb Robinson was able to pronounce upon new poetry. This is one of the most difficult and delicate of undertakings. People with that gift are few. With respect to poetry, most of us follow the hue and cry raised in the newspapers and literary journals. We are able to admire what we are told is admirable. When the road is pointed out for us we can travel it, but we are not able to find the road ourselves. Crabb Robinson placed himself upon record more than once. The most notable entry concerns Keats. In December, 1820, he wrote, "I am greatly mistaken if Keats do not very soon take a high place among our poets."

Of many good books which a man may read, if he will, this Diary of Henry Crabb Robinson is one of the "sweetest and most fortifying." It is a fine illustration of literary sanity. Literary sanity is not entirely fashionable just now, and a perusal of these thirty-years-old volumes may be good for us. Certainly, it is well for us to know about the Diarist himself. A life like his is among the most potent influences for culture. He was modest, unassuming, gentle, and strong. He was a successful bachelor and a good man.

1 Letter from Miss Fenwick to Henry Taylor, January 26, 1839.

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Tinder and the Dawn of the “Dating Apocalypse”

As romance gets swiped from the screen, some twentysomethings aren’t liking what they see.

BY NANCY JO SALES

PHOTOGRAPHY BY JUSTIN BISHOP

This image may contain Pub Bar Counter Human and Person

It’s a balmy night in Manhattan’s financial district, and at a sports bar called Stout, everyone is Tindering. The tables are filled with young women and men who’ve been chasing money and deals on Wall Street all day, and now they’re out looking for hookups. Everyone is drinking, peering into their screens and swiping on the faces of strangers they may have sex with later that evening. Or not. “Ew, this guy has Dad bod,” a young woman says of a potential match, swiping left. Her friends smirk, not looking up.

“Tinder sucks,” they say. But they don’t stop swiping.

At a booth in the back, three handsome twentysomething guys in button-downs are having beers. They are Dan, Alex, and Marty, budding investment bankers at the same financial firm, which recruited Alex and Marty straight from an Ivy League campus. (Names and some identifying details have been changed for this story.) When asked if they’ve been arranging dates on the apps they’ve been swiping at, all say not one date, but two or three: “You can’t be stuck in one lane … There’s always something better.” “If you had a reservation somewhere and then a table at Per Se opened up, you’d want to go there,” Alex offers.

“Guys view everything as a competition,” he elaborates with his deep, reassuring voice. “Who’s slept with the best, hottest girls?” With these dating apps, he says, “you’re always sort of prowling. You could talk to two or three girls at a bar and pick the best one, or you can swipe a couple hundred people a day—the sample size is so much larger. It’s setting up two or three Tinder dates a week and, chances are, sleeping with all of them, so you could rack up 100 girls you’ve slept with in a year.”

He says that he himself has slept with five different women he met on Tinder—“Tinderellas,” the guys call them—in the last eight days. Dan and Marty, also Alex’s roommates in a shiny high-rise apartment building near Wall Street, can vouch for that. In fact, they can remember whom Alex has slept with in the past week more readily than he can.

“Brittany, Morgan, Amber,” Marty says, counting on his fingers. “Oh, and the Russian—Ukrainian?”

“Ukrainian,” Alex confirms. “She works at—” He says the name of a high-end art auction house. Asked what these women are like, he shrugs. “I could offer a résumé, but that’s about it … Works at J. Crew; senior at Parsons; junior at Pace; works in finance … ”

“We don’t know what the girls are like,” Marty says.

“And they don’t know us,” says Alex.

And yet a lack of an intimate knowledge of his potential sex partners never presents him with an obstacle to physical intimacy, Alex says. Alex, his friends agree, is a Tinder King, a young man of such deft “text game”—“That’s the ability to actually convince someone to do something over text,” Marty explains—that he is able to entice young women into his bed on the basis of a few text exchanges, while letting them know up front he is not interested in having a relationship.

“How does he do it?,” Marty asks, blinking. “This guy’s got a talent.”

But Marty, who prefers Hinge to Tinder (“Hinge is my thing”), is no slouch at “racking up girls.” He says he’s slept with 30 to 40 women in the last year: “I sort of play that I could be a boyfriend kind of guy,” in order to win them over, “but then they start wanting me to care more … and I just don’t.”

“Dude, that’s not cool,” Alex chides in his warm way. “I always make a point of disclosing I’m not looking for anything serious. I just wanna hang out, be friends, see what happens … If I were ever in a court of law I could point to the transcript.” But something about the whole scenario seems to bother him, despite all his mild-mannered bravado. “I think to an extent it is, like, sinister,” he says, “ ‘cause I know that the average girl will think that there’s a chance that she can turn the tables. If I were like, Hey, I just wanna bone, very few people would want to meet up with you …

“Do you think this culture is misogynistic?” he asks lightly.

“Sex Has Become So Easy”

“Icall it the Dating Apocalypse,” says a woman in New York, aged 29.

As the polar ice caps melt and the earth churns through the Sixth Extinction, another unprecedented phenomenon is taking place, in the realm of sex. Hookup culture, which has been percolating for about a hundred years, has collided with dating apps, which have acted like a wayward meteor on the now dinosaur-like rituals of courtship. “We are in uncharted territory” when it comes to Tinder et al., says Justin Garcia, a research scientist at Indiana University’s Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. “There have been two major transitions” in heterosexual mating “in the last four million years,” he says. “The first was around 10,000 to 15,000 years ago, in the agricultural revolution, when we became less migratory and more settled,” leading to the establishment of marriage as a cultural contract. “And the second major transition is with the rise of the Internet.”

People used to meet their partners through proximity, through family and friends, but now Internet meeting is surpassing every other form. “It’s changing so much about the way we act both romantically and sexually,” Garcia says. “It is unprecedented from an evolutionary standpoint.” As soon as people could go online they were using it as a way to find partners to date and have sex with. In the 90s it was Craigslist and AOL chat rooms, then Match.com and Kiss.com. But the lengthy, heartfelt e-mails exchanged by the main characters in You’ve Got Mail (1998) seem positively Victorian in comparison to the messages sent on the average dating app today. “I’ll get a text that says, ‘Wanna fuck?’ ” says Jennifer, 22, a senior at Indiana University Southeast, in New Albany. “They’ll tell you, ‘Come over and sit on my face,’ ” says her friend, Ashley, 19.

Mobile dating went mainstream about five years ago; by 2012 it was overtaking online dating. In February, one study reported there were nearly 100 million people—perhaps 50 million on Tinder alone—using their phones as a sort of all-day, every-day, handheld singles club, where they might find a sex partner as easily as they’d find a cheap flight to Florida. “It’s like ordering Seamless,” says Dan, the investment banker, referring to the online food-delivery service. “But you’re ordering a person.”

The comparison to online shopping seems an apt one. Dating apps are the free-market economy come to sex. The innovation of Tinder was the swipe—the flick of a finger on a picture, no more elaborate profiles necessary and no more fear of rejection; users only know whether they’ve been approved, never when they’ve been discarded. OkCupid soon adopted the function. Hinge, which allows for more information about a match’s circle of friends through Facebook, and Happn, which enables G.P.S. tracking to show whether matches have recently “crossed paths,” use it too. It’s telling that swiping has been jocularly incorporated into advertisements for various products, a nod to the notion that, online, the act of choosing consumer brands and sex partners has become interchangeable.

“It’s instant gratification,” says Jason, 26, a Brooklyn photographer, “and a validation of your own attractiveness by just, like, swiping your thumb on an app. You see some pretty girl and you swipe and it’s, like, oh, she thinks you’re attractive too, so it’s really addicting, and you just find yourself mindlessly doing it.” “Sex has become so easy,” says John, 26, a marketing executive in New York. “I can go on my phone right now and no doubt I can find someone I can have sex with this evening, probably before midnight.”

And is this “good for women”? Since the emergence of flappers and “moderns” in the 1920s, the debate about what is lost and gained for women in casual sex has been raging, and is raging still—particularly among women. Some, like Atlantic writer Hanna Rosin, see hookup culture as a boon: “The hookup culture is … bound up with everything that’s fabulous about being a young woman in 2012—the freedom, the confidence.” But others lament the way the extreme casualness of sex in the age of Tinder leaves many women feeling de-valued. “It’s rare for a woman of our generation to meet a man who treats her like a priority instead of an option,” wrote Erica Gordon on the Gen Y Web site Elite Daily, in 2014.

It is the very abundance of options provided by online dating which may be making men less inclined to treat any particular woman as a “priority,” according to David Buss, a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin who specializes in the evolution of human sexuality. “Apps like Tinder and OkCupid give people the impression that there are thousands or millions of potential mates out there,” Buss says. “One dimension of this is the impact it has on men’s psychology. When there is a surplus of women, or a perceived surplus of women, the whole mating system tends to shift towards short-term dating. Marriages become unstable. Divorces increase. Men don’t have to commit, so they pursue a short-term mating strategy. Men are making that shift, and women are forced to go along with it in order to mate at all.”

Now hold on there a minute. “Short-term mating strategies” seem to work for plenty of women too; some don’t want to be in committed relationships, either, particularly those in their 20s who are focusing on their education and launching careers. Alex the Wall Streeter is overly optimistic when he assumes that every woman he sleeps with would “turn the tables” and date him seriously if she could. And yet, his assumption may be a sign of the more “sinister” thing he references, the big fish swimming underneath the ice: “For young women the problem in navigating sexuality and relationships is still gender inequality,” says Elizabeth Armstrong, a professor of sociology at the University of Michigan who specializes in sexuality and gender. “Young women complain that young men still have the power to decide when something is going to be serious and when something is not—they can go, ‘She’s girlfriend material, she’s hookup material.’ … There is still a pervasive double standard. We need to puzzle out why women have made more strides in the public arena than in the private arena.”

RELATED: Tinder’s New Group-Date Feature Reveals Which of Your Friends Are on Tinder

“Hit It and Quit It”

“The men in this town have a serious case of pussy affluenza,” says Amy Watanabe, 28, the fetching, tattooed owner of Sake Bar Satsko, a lively izakaya in New York’s East Village. “We’ve seen them come in with more than one Tinder date in one night.”

(The data underpinning a widely cited study claiming millennials have fewer sex partners than previous generations proves to be open to interpretation, incidentally. The study, published in May in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, became a talking point for its surprising conclusion that millennials are having sex with fewer people than Gen X-ers and baby-boomers at the same age. When I asked Jean Twenge and Ryne Sherman, two of the study’s authors, about their methodology, they said their analysis was based partly on projections derived from a statistical model, not entirely from direct side-by-side comparisons of numbers of sex partners reported by respondents. “All data and all studies are open to interpretation—that’s just the nature of research,” Twenge said.)

On a steamy night at Satsko, everyone is Tindering. Or OkCupiding, or Happning, or Hinging. The tables are filled with young women and men drinking sake and beer and intermittently checking their phones and swiping. “Agh, look at this,” says Kelly, 26, who’s sitting at a table with friends, holding up a message she received from a guy on OkCupid. “I want to have you on all fours,” it says, going on to propose a graphic sexual scene. “I’ve never met this person,” says Kelly.

At a table in the front, six young women have met up for an after-work drink. They’re seniors from Boston College, all in New York for summer internships, ranging from work in a medical-research lab to a luxury department store. They’re attractive and fashionable, with bright eyes highlighted with dark eyeliner wings. None of them are in relationships, they say. I ask them how they’re finding New York dating.

“New York guys, from our experience, they’re not really looking for girlfriends,” says the blonde named Reese. “They’re just looking for hit-it-and-quit-it on Tinder.”

“People send really creepy shit on it,” says Jane, the serious one.

“They start out with ‘Send me nudes,’ ” says Reese. “Or they say something like ‘I’m looking for something quick within the next 10 or 20 minutes—are you available?’ ‘O.K., you’re a mile away, tell me your location.’ It’s straight efficiency.”

“I think that iPhones and dating apps have really changed the way that dating happens for our generation,” says Stephanie, the one with an arm full of bracelets.

“There is no dating. There’s no relationships,” says Amanda, the tall elegant one. “They’re rare. You can have a fling that could last like seven, eight months and you could never actually call someone your ‘boyfriend.’ [Hooking up] is a lot easier. No one gets hurt—well, not on the surface.”

They give a wary laugh.

They tell me how, at their school, an adjunct instructor in philosophy, Kerry Cronin, teaches a freshman class in which an optional assignment is going out on an actual date. “And meet them sober and not when you’re both, like, blackout drunk,” says Jane. “Like, get to know someone before you start something with them. And I know that’s scary.”

They say they think their own anxiety about intimacy comes from having “grown up on social media,” so “we don’t know how to talk to each other face-to-face.” “You form your first impression based off Facebook rather than forming a connection with someone, so you’re, like, forming your connection with their profile,” says Stephanie, smiling grimly at the absurdity of it.

When it comes to hooking up, they say, it’s not as simple as just having sex. “It’s such a game, and you have to always be doing everything right, and if not, you risk losing whoever you’re hooking up with,” says Fallon, the soft-spoken one. By “doing everything right” she means “not texting back too soon; never double texting; liking the right amount of his stuff,” on social media.

“And it reaches a point,” says Jane, “where, if you receive a text message” from a guy, “you forward the message to, like, seven different people: ‘What do I say back? Oh my God, he just texted me!’ It becomes a surprise. ‘He texted me!’ Which is really sad.”

“It is sad,” Amanda says. “That one A.M. text becomes ‘Oh my God, he texted me!’ No, he texted you at one A.M.—it’s meaningless.”

They laugh ruefully.

“If he texts you before midnight he actually likes you as a person. If it’s after midnight, it’s just for your body,” says Amanda. It’s not, she says, that women don’t want to have sex. “Who doesn’t want to have sex? But it feels bad when they’re like, ‘See ya.’ ”

“It seems like the girls don’t have any control over the situation, and it should not be like that at all,” Fallon says.

“It’s a contest to see who cares less, and guys win a lot at caring less,” Amanda says.

“Sex should stem from emotional intimacy, and it’s the opposite with us right now, and I think it really is kind of destroying females’ self-images,” says Fallon.

“It’s body first, personality second,” says Stephanie.

“Honestly, I feel like the body doesn’t even matter to them as long as you’re willing,” says Reese. “It’s that bad.”

“But if you say any of this out loud, it’s like you’re weak, you’re not independent, you somehow missed the whole memo about third-wave feminism,” says Amanda.

“Boom-Boom-Boom Swipe”

“ ‘Hi,’ ” says Amy, the Satsko owner, reading a message she received on OkCupid from a random man. “ ‘I’m looking for a cute girl like you that has a bit of a kinky side, so I’m curious if you fantasize about rough sex. Do you think you would like to get choke-fucked, tied up, slapped, throat-fucked and cummed on? I think we could have a wild afternoon together but I am happy just to share brunch with you.’ ” She drops her iPhone on the bar in mock horror.

On another busy night at the same bar, at the same table in the front, three good-looking guys are having beers. They are John, Nick, and Brian, 26, 25, and 25; John is the marketing executive mentioned above, Nick works in the fitness industry, and Brian is an educator. When asked about their experience with dating apps, their assessment is quite different from the interns from Boston College. “Works for me,” Nick says.

“I hooked up with three girls, thanks to the Internet, off of Tinder, in the course of four nights, and I spent a total of $80 on all three girls,” Nick relays proudly. He goes on to describe each date, one of which he says began with the young woman asking him on Tinder to “ ‘come over and smoke [weed] and watch a movie.’ I know what that means,” he says, grinning.

“We talk for a total of maybe 10 to 15 minutes,” he says. “We hook up. Afterwards she goes, ‘Oh my God, I swear I wasn’t gonna have sex with you.’ And I was like, Well, you did a pretty shitty job of that one.”

“They all say that,” the guys say, chuckling.

Nick, with his lumbersexual beard and hipster clothes, as if plucked from the wardrobe closet of Girls, is, physically speaking, a modern male ideal. That he fulfills none of the requirements identified by evolutionary psychologists as what women supposedly look for in mates—he’s neither rich nor tall; he also lives with his mom—doesn’t seem to have any effect on his ability to get rampantly laid. In his iPhone, he has a list of more than 40 girls he has “had relations with, rated by [one to five] stars…. It empowers them,” he jokes. “It’s a mix of how good they are in bed and how attractive they are.”

They laugh.

“I’m on Tinder, Happn, Hinge, OkCupid,” Nick says. “It’s just a numbers game. Before, I could go out to a bar and talk to one girl, but now I can sit home on Tinder and talk to 15 girls—”

“Without spending any money,” John chimes in.

Neither Nick nor John has had a girlfriend in the last few years; Brian had one until recently but confesses, “I cheated…. She found out by looking at my phone—rookie mistake, not deleting everything.” Some guys, they say, in order to hide their multiple sex partners from each other, will assign them fake names in their phones, such as “Crazy Mike.”

“When it’s so easy, when it’s so available to you,” Brian says intensely, “and you can meet somebody and fuck them in 20 minutes, it’s very hard to contain yourself.”

“I’ve gotten numbers on Tinder just by sending emojis,” says John. “Without actually having a conversation—having a conversation via emojis.”

He holds up his phone, with its cracked screen, to show a Tinder conversation between him and a young woman who provided her number after he offered a series of emojis, including the ones for pizza and beer.

“Now is that the kind of woman I potentially want to marry?” he asks, smiling. “Probably not.”

I ask if they’re aware of the double standard that’s often applied to women when it comes to sex. “The double standard is real,” Nick says. “If I’m a guy and I’m going out and fucking a different girl every night, my friends are gonna give me high-fives and we’re gonna crack a beer and talk about it. Girls do the same, but they get judged. I don’t want it to be like that, but sometimes the world is the way it is and I can’t change it, so I just embrace it.”

They all say they don’t want to be in relationships. “I don’t want one,” says Nick. “I don’t want to have to deal with all that—stuff.”

“You can’t be selfish in a relationship,” Brian says. “It feels good just to do what I want.”

I ask them if it ever feels like they lack a deeper connection with someone.

There’s a small silence. After a moment, John says, “I think at some points it does.”

“But that’s assuming that that’s something that I want, which I don’t,” Nick says, a trifle annoyed. “Does that mean that my life is lacking something? I’m perfectly happy. I have a good time. I go to work—I’m busy. And when I’m not, I go out with my friends.”

“Or you meet someone on Tinder,” offers John.

“Exactly,” Nick says. “Tinder is fast and easy, boom-boom-boom, swipe.”

RELATED: Hacktivist Highlights Flaws in Tinder’s Privacy Settings

“Too Easy”

A“fuckboy” is a young man who sleeps with women without any intention of having a relationship with them or perhaps even walking them to the door post-sex. He’s a womanizer, an especially callous one, as well as kind of a loser. The word has been around for at least a decade with different meanings; it’s only in about the last year that it has become so frequently used by women and girls to refer to their hookups.

“What percentage of boys now do you think are fuckboys?,” I asked some young women from New Albany, Indiana.

“One hundred percent,” said Meredith, 20, a sophomore at Bellarmine University in Louisville.

“No, like 90 percent,” said Ashley (the same as mentioned earlier). “I’m hoping to find the 10 percent somewhere. But every boy I’ve ever met is a fuckboy.”

Men in the age of dating apps can be very cavalier, women say. One would think that having access to these nifty machines (their phones) that can summon up an abundance of no-strings-attached sex would make them feel happy, even grateful, and so inspired to be polite. But, based on interviews with more than 50 young women in New York, Indiana, and Delaware, aged 19 to 29, the opposite seems to be the case. “ ‘He drove me home in the morning.’ That’s a big deal,” said Rebecca, 21, a senior at the University of Delaware. “ ‘He kissed me good-bye.’ That shouldn’t be a big deal, but boys pull back from that because—”

“They don’t wanna give you the wrong idea,” said her classmate Kayla, 20.

“But a lot of us girls aren’t gonna take the wrong idea,” said Rebecca, piqued. “Sometimes we just want to get it in”—have sex—“too. We don’t want to marry you. You’re either polite or you’re fucking rude.”

Hearing story after story about the ill-mannered behavior of young women’s sex partners (“I had sex with a guy and he ignored me as I got dressed and I saw he was back on Tinder”), I wondered if there could be a parallel to Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth (1991). Wolf posited that, as women achieved more social and political power, there was more pressure on them to be “beautiful” as a means of undermining their empowerment. Is it possible that now the potentially de-stabilizing trend women are having to contend with is the lack of respect they encounter from the men with whom they have sex? Could the ready availability of sex provided by dating apps actually be making men respect women less? “Too easy,” “Too easy,” “Too easy,” I heard again and again from young men when asked if there was anything about dating apps they didn’t like.

“Online dating apps are truly evolutionarily novel environments,” says David Buss. “But we come to those environments with the same evolved psychologies.” And women may be further along than men in terms of evolving away from sexist attitudes about sex. “Young women’s expectations of safety and entitlement to respect have perhaps risen faster than some young men’s willingness to respect them,” says Stephanie Coontz, who teaches history and family studies at the Evergreen State College and has written about the history of dating. “Exploitative and disrespectful men have always existed. There are many evolved men, but there may be something going on in hookup culture now that is making some more resistant to evolving.”

Such a problem has the disrespectful behavior of men online become that there has been a wave of dating apps launched by women in response to it. There is Bumble, created by Tinder co-founder Whitney Wolfe, who sued the company after she was allegedly sexually harassed by C.M.O. Justin Mateen. (She reportedly settled for just over $1 million, with neither party admitting to wrongdoing.) One of the main changes in female-centric dating apps gives women the power to message first; but as some have pointed out, while this might weed out egregious harassers, it doesn’t fix a cultural milieu. Such apps “cannot promise you a world in which dudes who suck will definitely not bother you,” wrote Kate Dries on Jezebel.

Bring all of this up to young men, however, and they scoff. Women are just as responsible for “the shit show that dating has become,” according to one. “Romance is completely dead, and it’s the girls’ fault,” says Alex, 25, a New Yorker who works in the film industry. “They act like all they want is to have sex with you and then they yell at you for not wanting to have a relationship. How are you gonna feel romantic about a girl like that? Oh, and by the way? I met you on Tinder.”

“Women do exactly the same things guys do,” said Matt, 26, who works in a New York art gallery. “I’ve had girls sleep with me off OkCupid and then just ghost me”—that is, disappear, in a digital sense, not returning texts. “They play the game the exact same way. They have a bunch of people going at the same time—they’re fielding their options. They’re always looking for somebody better, who has a better job or more money.” A few young women admitted to me that they use dating apps as a way to get free meals. “I call it Tinder food stamps,” one said.

Even the emphasis on looks inherent in a dating game based on swiping on photos is something men complain women are just as guilty of buying into. “They say in their profiles, ‘No shirtless pictures,’ but that’s bullshit,” says Nick, the same as above. “The day I switched to a shirtless picture with my tattoos, immediately, within a few minutes, I had, like, 15 matches.”

And if women aren’t interested in being treated as sexual objects, why do they self-objectify in their profile pictures? some men ask. “There’s a lot of girls who are just like, Check me out, I’m hot, I’m wearing a bikini,” says Jason, the Brooklyn photographer, who on his OkCupid profile calls himself a “feminist.” “I don’t know if it’s my place to tell a girl she shouldn’t be flaunting her sexuality if that’s what she wants to do. But,” he adds, “some guys might take the wrong idea from it.”

Men talk about the nudes they receive from women. They show off the nudes. “Tit pics and booty pics,” said Austin, 22, a college student in Indiana. “My phone is full of ‘em.”

And what about unsolicited dick pics? “They want to see your dick,” insists Adam, 23, a male model in New York. “They get excited from it. They’re like, ‘Oh my God, you’re huge.’ ”

No woman I talked to said she had ever asked for one. And yet, “If you’re a girl who’s trying to date, it’s normal to get dick pics all the time,” said Olivia, 24, a Brandeis graduate. “It’s like we have dicks flying at us.”

The Morning After

On a rainy morning at the University of Delaware, the young women who live in an off-campus house are gathering on their front porch for coffee. They’ve been joined by their sister “squad,” so the porch table is crammed with sorority girls in shorts and sundresses, all ponytails and smooth bare legs, all meeting up to discuss their Saturday night, which included some hookups.

“This kid went to sleep and woke up with the same hairstyle—how the shit did that happen?” says Danielle, 21, the one with the Betty Boop voice.

Rebecca, the blonde with the canny eyes, also mentioned above, hooked up with someone, too. “It was O.K.” She shrugs. “Right after it was done, it was kind of like, mmmp … mmmp.” She gives a little grunt of disappointment.

As they talk, most are on their phones. Some are checking Tinder. I ask them why they use Tinder on a college campus where presumably there’s an abundance of available guys. They say, “It’s easier.” “And a lot of guys won’t talk to you if you’re not invited to their fraternity parties.” “A lot of guys won’t talk to you, period.” “They don’t have to.” “Tinder has destroyed their game.”

“I’m on it nonstop, like nonstop, like 20 hours a day,” says Courtney, the one who looks like a 70s movie star.

“It’s, like, fun to get the messages,” Danielle says. “If someone ‘likes’ you, they think you’re attractive.”

“It’s a confidence booster,” says Jessica, 21, the one who looks like a Swedish tennis player.

I tell them how I heard from guys that they swipe right on every picture in order to increase their chances of matching.

“Nooooo … ” They explode with laughter.

“Boys will do anything, do anything, to get it in,” says Rebecca, frowning.

The rain comes down harder, and they move inside to the living room, which has a couch, a coffee table, and tie-dyed tapestries everywhere. The talk turns to sex again:

“A lot of guys are lacking in that department,” says Courtney with a sigh. “What’s a real orgasm like? I wouldn’t know.”

They all laugh knowingly.

“I know how to give one to myself,” says Courtney.

“Yeah, but men don’t know what to do,” says Jessica, texting.

“Without [a vibrator] I can’t have one,” Courtney says. “It’s never happened” with a guy. “It’s a huge problem.”

“It is a problem,” Jessica concurs.

They talk about how it’s not uncommon for their hookups to lose their erections. It’s a curious medical phenomenon, the increased erectile dysfunction in young males, which has been attributed to everything from chemicals in processed foods to the lack of intimacy in hookup sex.

“If a guy can’t get hard,” Rebecca says, “and I have to say, that happens a lot, they just act like it’s the end of the world.”

“At four in the morning this guy was so upset, and I was like, Dude, I’ll just go to fucking sleep—it’s O.K.,” says Sarah, 21, the one with the long curly dark hair. “I get really tired of faking.”

According to multiple studies, women are more likely to have orgasms in the context of relationships than in uncommitted encounters. More than twice as likely, according to a study done by researchers at the Kinsey Institute and Binghamton University.

“When I see limp dicks coming at me I’m like, Oh my God,” says Courtney, putting her fingers in the sign of a cross, as if to ward off a vampire.

They laugh.

“It would be great if they could just have the ability to perform and not come in two seconds,” says Rebecca.

“I think men have a skewed view of the reality of sex through porn,” Jessica says, looking up from her phone. “Because sometimes I think porn sex is not always great—like pounding someone.” She makes a pounding motion with her hand, looking indignant.

“Yeah, it looks like it hurts,” Danielle says.

“Like porn sex,” says Jessica, “those women—that’s not, like, enjoyable, like having their hair pulled or being choked or slammed. I mean, whatever you’re into, but men just think”—bro voice—“ ‘I’m gonna fuck her,’ and sometimes that’s not great.”

“Yeah,” Danielle agrees. “Like last night I was having sex with this guy, and I’m a very submissive person—like, not aggressive at all—and this boy that came over last night, he was hurting me.”

They were quiet a moment.

“People Are Gorging”

So where is this all going to go? What happens after you’ve come of age in the age of Tinder? Will people ever be satisfied with a sexual or even emotional commitment to one person? And does that matter? Can men and women ever find true intimacy in a world where communication is mediated by screens; or trust, when they know their partner has an array of other, easily accessible options?

According to Christopher Ryan, one of the co-authors of Sex at Dawn (2010), human beings are not sexually monogamous by nature. The book contends that, for much of human history, men and women have taken multiple sex partners as a commonly accepted (and evolutionarily beneficial) practice. The thesis, controversial and widely criticized by anthropologists and evolutionary biologists, didn’t keep the book from being an international best-seller; it seemed to be something people were ready to hear.

“I think the spectrum of human sexuality appears to be getting more colorful and broader, and very rapidly,” Ryan says. “You have an acceptance of gay relationships, of transgender people; young kids are redefining themselves as queer and other gender identities.

“I think a lot of people are still interested in having long-term, stable, deep connections to one or a few other people,” he says. “We as a species value intimacy and authenticity very highly. On the other hand, we are very attracted to novelty…. So people are going to go ahead and have sex with the people they’re attracted to, as they’ve always done, and it’s a good thing for everyone if that becomes accepted and not censured by church or state.”

Listening to him talk, I could only think, If only it were that easy. In a perfect world, we’d all have sex with whomever we want, and nobody would mind, or be judged, or get dumped; but what about jealousy, and sexism, not to mention the still-flickering chance that somebody might fall in love?

“Some people still catch feelings in hookup culture,” said Meredith, the Bellarmine sophomore. “It’s not like just blind fucking for pleasure and it’s done; some people actually like the other person. Sometimes you actually catch feelings and that’s what sucks, because it’s one person thinking one thing and the other person thinking something completely different and someone gets their feelings hurt. It could be the boy or the girl.”

And even Ryan, who believes that human beings naturally gravitate toward polyamorous relationships, is troubled by the trends developing around dating apps. “It’s the same pattern manifested in porn use,” he says. “The appetite has always been there, but it had restricted availability; with new technologies the restrictions are being stripped away and we see people sort of going crazy with it. I think the same thing is happening with this unlimited access to sex partners. People are gorging. That’s why it’s not intimate. You could call it a kind of psychosexual obesity.”

Catching Feelings

Michael Falotico, 29, is the bassist for Monogold, an indie band that has played in all the top Brooklyn venues and at festivals from Austin to Cannes. He’s tall and slim and looks like a Renaissance painting of Jesus, plus a nose ring. All of which means that, in a certain corner of the world, Michael is a rock star. So he should have no trouble meeting women.

Which he doesn’t. But he still uses dating apps. “I would consider myself an old-school online dater,” Michael says on a summer day in New York. “I’ve been doing it since I was 21. First it was Craigslist: ‘Casual Encounters.’ Back then it wasn’t as easy; there were no pictures; you had to impress somebody with just what you wrote. So I met this girl on there who actually lived around the corner from me, and that led to eight months of the best sex I ever had. We’d text each other if we were available, hook up, sometimes sleep over, go our separate ways.” Then she found a boyfriend. “I was like, Respect, I’m out. We still see each other in the street sometimes, give each other the wink.

“Now it’s completely different,” he says, “because everyone is doing it and it’s not like this hot little secret anymore. It’s profiles that are, like, airbrushed with lighting and angles and girls who will send you pictures of their pussies without even knowing your last name. I’m not saying I’m any better—I’m doing it. It’s texting someone, or multiple girls, maybe getting very sexual with them, 99 percent of the time before you’ve even met them, which, more and more I realize, is fucking weird.” He grimaces.

“And it’s just like, waking up in beds, I don’t even remember getting there, and having to get drunk to have a conversation with this person because we both know why we’re there but we have to go through these motions to get out of it. That’s a personal struggle, I guess, but online dating makes it happen that much more. Whereas I would just be sitting at home and playing guitar, now it’s ba-ding”—he makes the chirpy alert sound of a Tinder match—“and … ” He pauses, as if disgusted. “ … I’m fucking.”