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What makes a person stay single? Lack of options, professional or educational commitments are all at the top of the list. The age a person is at the time of their first marriage is on the rise. Women are getting married for the first time around age 25 and men are waiting even longer with the average first marriage being at age 27. According to webmd.com, singles are the fastest growing population. The majority of Americans will spend the largest part of their adult lives being single.
Women have been the driving forces for marriage. Now that women have unlimited access to birth control, financial security and it is finally acceptable for a woman to be independent and self sufficient, the amount of married households has fallen nearly 30% since the 1950’s. Parents are no longer encouraging their children to get married right out of high school and start a family like was the norm forty years ago. The goal after high school is college and after college is the pursuit of a successful career not a successful relationship.
Even though all of this has been statistically proven, the emergence of dating websites, reality tv shows about dating, and getting married have flooded American society. So what does this mean? Being single is the popular choice among most young adults, but the desire to find that special someone is still there. And with the generation of technology, the goal of dating is now for entertainment instead of to find a life partner.
Old maid or hippie? Single women after a certain age use to be referred to as old maids. But being single for a lot of women is about empowerment and options. Women no longer have to conform to the expectations of society. Has the age of the hippie returned? Is the American society reverting back to some of the same ideologies found in the late 1960’s? According to dictionary.reference.com, a hippie is a member of countercultural society who rejects the mores of mainstream American life. A hippie sought spontaneity and direct personal relations expressing love. Sexual relations or sex has become the motivating stimulus of the American society. American television illustrates this point. Sex, once a topic for cable tv and rated R movies only, is now openly discussed on some of the most popular prime time shows. Gossip Girl, a show directed towards teenagers, overflows with sexual innuendos. The dialog and scenes that make up the hour long hit series are saturated with the formerly taboo topic.
In some ways the shift in being single has been good. It promotes independence, setting and achieving goals as well as the pursuit of happiness. But the down side to this evolved single is the inability to find, nurture and maintain a meaningful relationship. Yet the amount of people having sex has not decreased, thus the spike in the amount of single parent households and teenage pregnancies.
As a society the focus cannot remain on casual sexual encounters. The American culture is in for a world of difficulty if family, love and the pursuit of both do not prevail as prominent focal points.
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