18-29 Relationships: Same As It Ever Was

Recently a number of online mavens have been quoting this...

“In 2025, approximately 63% of men aged 18–29 in the U.S. were single, and 34% of women the same age range were single.”

... and depending on their intended audience, blame this on men (who are all scardy-cat Peter Pans) or women (who would rather be one of a top 10% man's harem than partner to a regular guy) or whatever else it is they think their audience will pay to hear.

Oh woe is us and the downfall of our society.

But wait. There’s a sleight-of-hand here. If I told you that 100% of men aged 14-17 were single, as were 100% of women, you would not bemoan the state of our society. You would remind me that 14-17 year olds are not supposed to be married.

Well, neither in this economy are 18-21 year olds. They are supposed to be in education or starting their careers. Some will be married, but not many, and to a first approximation, none. 18-21 year olds are (approximately) 33% of the 18-29 year-old cohort. So let’s take that 33% of shouldn’t-be-married out of the they-are-single figures.

Wow! 1% of women aged 22-29 are unmarried. That’s nonsense. Even if 100% of the 29 year olds were married, and women started marrying at 22, the average over the 22-29 range would be 50% (assuming a straight-line rate). So “single” does not mean married. It means “not in a relationship”.

“In a relationship” is a self-reporting variable (marriage is a Government statistic based on a legal document), and self-reporting variables are subject to delusions and mis-understandings. One person might report something as a relationship that another would regard as a weekly hook-up, while another might only regard the weekly hook-up as a perfectly acceptable "relationship". It would not be the first time women were caught...um...managing their answers to such questions. (Remember that old canard about "men being more promiscuous than women"? Went on for years until some researchers debunked it, and it turned out that women were exactly as promiscuous as men. Men were exaggerating a bit as well, but nowhere near as much as the women.)

But then 18-21 year olds can be “in a (flimsy as all heck) relationship”. So let’s assume that’s what it means, and run the numbers again.

The proportion of men under 30 in relationships (or “relationships” they would describe as such) with women 30 or over is not quite zero, but to keep things simple we will take it as such. However, the proportion of women under thirty dating (or married to) men 30 or over is significant. On average wives are two years younger than husbands. Let’s assume that applies across the age-group, though it may not at the younger end. Two year’s worth of a 12-year wide cohort (18-29) is 16%, women who are going out with men 30 and older.

So that 63% of single men 18-29 breaks down like this: 34% (single 18-29 year old women) + 16% (18-29 dating men 30 or over) + 13% (other reasons).

One of those “other reasons” could be that more that 16% of those 18-29 year old women are going out with older men. The rest is women thinking they are in a relationship with a man who doesn’t think of it as one, or just outright… um… response management. I’ll leave you to pick your weighting of these

In other words, 63% of men and 34% of women aged 18–29 in the U.S. being single is a feature, not a bug. It's the way it's always been.

But wait. Why are 34% of women 18-29 single? Isn’t that because of (enter clickbait reason here)?

Do the math. Suppose you’re in a relationship for two years / quarters / months and it takes a year / quarter / month to get over the break-up, find and establish a new one. You spend one-third of your time not in a relationship. Seems about how real life works to me.

None of this means that men and women today have the same attitudes towards each other and “relationships” as their parents, grandparents or “back in the day”. Some do, many do not. The quantity of their relationships is more or less unchanged, and for many the quality will not have changed much either. But let’s be clear about one thing: their parents and their grandparents are lying about how much better they were at relationships. And I have the divorce statistics to prove it.