How coupling up became cringe

Having a boyfriend or husband is no longer seen as a goal for a growing number of young women, according to an unromantic procession of recent reports.

Over the past 30 years, the share of senior US high school girls who say they are likely to “choose to get married” has dropped more than 20 percentage points, according to Pew Research Center data. The proportion of young men who hope to get married has remained steady.

Indeed, for a lot of “single and partnered women alike”, choosing to couple up with a man feels like “an almost guilty thing to do”, said Chanté Joseph in Vogue. “It’s become more of a flex to pronounce yourself single.”

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No ‘obvious rewards’

The “script is shifting” and “being partnered doesn’t affirm your womanhood anymore,” said Joseph.

You can see the signs on social media, once a space to flaunt one’s relationship status. Now, you see women opting for "subtler signs: a hand on a steering wheel” or “obscuring their partner’s face when they post”. At the more extreme end, “you have faces blurred out of wedding pictures or entire professionally edited videos with the fiancé conveniently cropped out of all shots”.

While being single “was once a cautionary tale”, it’s now a “desirable and coveted status”, another “nail in the coffin” of the “heterosexual fairytale that never really benefited women to begin with”.

For young women brought up to “live their best lives”, marriage is a “hindrance because it requires compromise”, said Lara Brown in The Spectator. Having to “build a life around someone else” is a challenge for an “increasingly transactional generation”.

Marriage “doesn’t bring obvious rewards”; in the UK, there are “almost no tax incentives for committing to someone. Wedding costs are spiralling and far fewer parents are prepared or able to help”.

‘Having-a-boyfriend-is-uncool theory’

Are men the problem? Some feminist thinkers believe that “women still value marriage; they just can’t find enough marriageable men”, said the Institute for Family Studies.

It’s true that “many men are floundering on many fronts – from education to employment”, in a way that is inevitably “unappealing to the opposite sex”. There’s “an ideological dimension” because data shows marriage has “lost its appeal primarily for women on the left”. “Liberal women” are also “much less likely to desire marriage and children”, compared to their “conservative peers”.

Beyond a growing sense that it is “tacky to boast about a soulmate in the era of toxic dating”, simply “loving and wanting to be loved feels like a hangover from old-fashioned times”, said Gabriella Bennett in The Times. “Something has happened along the way to make care seem undesirable.”

But I want “to see my friends happy”. This does not necessarily mean having a “romantic partner” – I just “want to know there’s someone making them sausage pasta after a rough day”.