Ladies Who Are 'Boy Sober' Are Far From Alone

Women in the US "would rather be alone than with a man who holds them back." That's according to Daniel Cox, director of the American Enterprise Institute's Survey Center on American Life, who says that American women have become more choosy in recent years and even started blowing off marriage completely, deciding instead to be "boy sober" and focus on friendships, careers, and self-improvement, per the Wall Street Journal. What's helping to drive this phenomenon: "major demographic shifts" in politics, education, earnings, and attitudes on married life, as well as a decrease in the stigma that often comes with being single, the paper notes.

Among recent numbers on the matter:

• A 2022 Pew survey of single adults found that only 34% of women were seeking a partner, while a substantially greater 54% of men were. In 2019, those numbers were 38% and 61%, respectively.

• In what the Journal calls a "crisis of connection," the share of single women—which for the purposes here are women not married or living with anyone—between the ages of 18 and 40 in 2023 was just above 51%. In 2000, that figure was about 10 percentage points lower.
• Meanwhile, a 2023 Pew Research Center poll of 5,000-plus US adults found that 48% of women said that being married wasn't critical for them to have a fulfilling life, compared with 39% of men—up from 31% and 28%, respectively, just four years earlier.

With these "divergent paths" that US men and women are now taking, the Journal notes that the latter group appears to be handling it better. According to an AEI survey from last year, more than half of the single women surveyed said they were happier than their married counterparts, while just a third of single men indicated the same. That's not to say that all of the ladies who've sworn off marriage never had any intention to wed, or would refuse to do so if the "right one" came along. "I don't want to sit here and say I'm 100% happy," 29-year-old Andrea Vorlicek tells the Journal of her decision to put her husband hunt on pause. "But I feel happier just accepting my reality. It's mentally and emotionally a sense of peace." (More marriage stories.)