The Age of Singlehood

On one special day of the year, you can find a bunch of single men jumping into a river wearing only underwear (or less), while single women run down the streets of major cities wearing wedding dresses. The Guanggun Jie, or Singles' Day, is a new, popular Chinese festival that celebrates being single with shopping, festivities, and socializing with friends. Originating in 1993 as a day for singles to party with single friends at universities in Nanjing, one of China's major cities, this festival has become the largest online shopping event in the world and a cultural marker for modern Chinese society. Its date, November 11 (11/11), was chosen because the number 1 represents a single individual. Although this day is widely called Singles' Day, in China it is also known as the "bare sticks holiday" because the numerical date of the holiday resembles unaccompanied twigs or sticks, which, in Mandarin, is a metaphor for single individuals. Throughout the years, this holiday has developed as an anti–Valentine's Day, and branding it a singles celebration proved a tremendous success. The online retail giant Alibaba made more than twentyfive billion dollars in revenue on 2017's Singles' Day, four times more than on 2017's Cyber Monday, the biggest online shopping day on the American calendar.

Given the higher percentage of singles in the United States, it is a little surprising that the Singles' Day movement began in China. But America joined in the fun quickly. The American version of National Singles' Day was first observed in 2013 on January 11 (1/11). Here again, the number 1 is the almighty symbol of singlehood. In 2017, the date was changed to coincide with National Singles' Week in September, which the Buckeye Singles' Council in Ohio began celebrating in the 1980s. In an interview with Singular Magazine, Karen Reed, the founder of National Singles' Day, said:

China's Singles' Day was actually the initial inspiration for starting a Singles' Day here. ... I also felt it was necessary to create a fresh, new singles holiday because so much has changed in recent years. Twenty-first century singles are a new breed. Today's singles are a vibrant, diverse demographic and a force to be reckoned with....

Definitions of singlehood are complex — single by choice or circumstance, legally or figuratively, solo forever or just for now. Reaching single people as a group is a daunting task. And sometimes the best way to approach a massive, virtually unsolvable problem is to bypass the details, jump high on top and shout with one voice — we're here! Then do it again. And again.

It is striking that even a few decades ago such festivals of singlehood would not have been imaginable. But the institution of marriage has been undergoing profound changes that are altering the face of modern society. The Chinese celebration of Singles' Day did not come out of nowhere. China saw a precipitous fall in the mean size of households from 5.4 persons per household in 1947 to merely 3.1 in 2005 corresponding to the change from an agricultural society to a modern, urban one. It is really hard to comprehend, for example, that a Chinese young man who grew up in a rural area surrounded by his uncles and aunts, all working in one field and growing rice, now lives in a fundamentally different landscape — probably in a tiny apartment in a multistory building in one of the smoggy megacities of China — and works at a mammoth factory until late evening. In fact, more than 60 million Chinese households were registered in 2014 as single occupancy, up from 17 million one-person households in 1982, all while the Chinese population grew concurrently by a mere 40 percent.

In Europe, more than 50 percent of households in major cities such as Munich, Frankfurt, and Paris are occupied by singles. In the United States, 22 percent of American adults were single in 1950, while today this number has jumped to more than 50 percent, and one in four American newborns is predicted to never marry. At the same time, getting married before having children has become less prevalent in developed nations. The proportion of American children living with two married parents decreased from 87 percent at the start of the 1960s to 69 percent in 2015.

Japan is probably the global leader in the rise of singlehood. The latest survey from the Japanese National Institute of Population and Social Security Research shows that, in 2015, one-third of Japanese adults under the age of thirty had never dated and over 40 percent were virgins. Furthermore, among unmarried Japanese, almost 60 percent of women and 70 percent of men aged eighteen to thirty-four were not in a romantic relationship, an approximately 10 percent rise from the 2010 survey and a whopping 20 percent increase from the 2005 survey. In fact, 30 percent of men and 26 percent of women stated they were not even looking for a relationship.

In 2006, Maki Fukasawa, a popular author in Japan, wrote an article in which he referred to the increasing number of men not interested in intimate relationships as sôshoku danshi, or "herbivore men." Since intimacy and physical relations in Japanese are referred to as "desire of flesh," labeling a man an herbivore indicates a fundamental withdrawal from relationships. Moreover, it connotes a fundamental deconstruction of Japanese masculinity in which the once vigorous, procreating man of miraculous, postwar Japan has become anemic and even lost. Notably, sôshoku danshi was on the 2009 short list of a national "buzzwords of the year" competition and, by 2010, was accepted as a standard noun. While buzzwords tend to have short lifespans, soon after this term gained prominence, one survey revealed that 75 percent of Japanese single men in their twenties and thirties considered themselves herbivores.

These trends are spreading rapidly, especially in the developed world, where the main forces behind the rise in singlehood, discussed later in this chapter, appeared considerably earlier than in other regions. Processes such as individualism, mass urbanization, increased longevity, the communications revolution, and the women's rights movement all began taking hold within developed nations in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. A short-lived exception to this trend was observed in the United States, where World War II and the development of the suburbs brought about a short "golden age" in the 1950s, when people married early and the birthrate increased. However, the single lifestyle gained steam again in the 1970s, after the social emphasis on individualism, rooted in consumerism and capitalism, spread in the United States, Europe, and other developed countries, again pushing people away from marriage and toward a postfamily culture. The map in figure 1, which is based on the most recent data from the United...