A record percentage of Americans live in a single-person household, nearly quadrupling over the past 80 years, according to U.S. Census data.
As of 2022, the data found roughly 29 percent of Americans living in a single-person household — a reality that was not as prevalent in decades past. In 1940, for example, eight percent of U.S. households were thought to be “single-person.” That figure more than doubled by 1970, shooting to 18 percent and reaching an all-time high of 29 percent in 2022.
The Hill associates this increase, in part, to women entering the workforce “and achieving economic self-sufficiency.”
“The share of adult women participating in the labor force reached 50 percent around 1980,” the Hill reported.
Further, the culture of third wave feminism has developed trends unfathomable in the 1940s. For instance, the concept of “sologamy,” featuring women who essentially “marry themselves,” caught the attention of CNN, which spoke to four women who did so as an expression of “self-love.”
One of those women, Danni Adams, said she did so after investing in herself. Following the coronavirus pandemic, she married herself with roughly 40 witnesses and a fleet of bridesmaids by her side. Similarly, another woman, Ena Jones, married herself on her 50th birthday, roughly four years after her husband’s passing. She did so to symbolize “[her] love for [herself] for the rest of [her] life.”
According to CNN, “The concept of self-marriage, or sologamy, has been around for years…No data exists on how many people celebrate sologamy with ceremonies, but the practice has been explored in a handful of recent news articles.”
Coinciding with that is the fact that a quarter of 40-year-olds in the United States have never been married as of 2021, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data.
Breitbart News reported:
“Marriage has long been a central institution in the lives of Americans. In 1980, just 6 percent of 40-year-olds had never been married. But people born from the 1960s onward have been increasingly delaying marriage, and a growing share are forgoing it altogether,” Pew Research Senior Researcher Richard Fry wrote.
The 2021 data “marks a new milestone in that decades-long trend,” Fry found.
Census Bureau data showed that while many unmarried 40-year-olds cohabited with a romantic partner, most were on their own. In 2022, 22 percent of adults between the ages of 40 and 44 who had never been married were cohabiting.
Meanwhile, a November 2021 analysis from Pew Research also found a growing share of childless U.S. adults saying they will not have children, for a range of reasons.
According to the data, “Some 44% of non-parents ages 18 to 49 say it is not too or not at all likely that they will have children someday, an increase of 7 percentage points from the 37% who said the same in a 2018 survey.”