Decoding Love - Andrew Trees [50]
But, single women, take heart! I also come with some very good news, which should liberate you from certain stereotypes with which you are bludgeoned. Even if demographics and our culture are working against you, the latest science reveals that it is men who should be far more worried about finding the right partner. All those jokes about inept bachelors living in a sinkhole of their own filth appear to contain some truth. You only need to take a look at average life expectancy for married men and women versus single men and women. To pick the starkest example, nine out of ten married men alive at forty-eight will still be alive at sixty-five. The corresponding rate for single men? Six out of ten (with divorced and widowed men faring only slightly better than confirmed bachelors). Not getting married is worse for a man than heart disease. While heart disease will shorten a man’s life by a little under six years, not being married will shorten it by almost a decade. Women benefit from marriage as well. A nonmarried woman has a 50 percent higher rate of mortality. But men benefit far more—a nonmarried man has a mortality rate 250 percent higher. So, despite the cultural stereotypes, men seem to need marriage more than women do. You can see this by how eager each sex is to remarry. Men are four times more likely to remarry, and they remarry sooner as well, averaging only three years between wives compared to nine years for women.
When you look at more nebulous measures, such as life satisfaction, the contrast is also stark. While married men have greater life satisfaction than single men, the situation is reversed for women. Single women actually have greater life satisfaction than their married counterparts. One study has even identified a “happiness gap” that has opened up between men and women. In the early 1970s, surveys showed that women were slightly happier than men, but that situation is now reversed, leaving men as the happier sex. The reason for this is likely due to the incomplete gains of feminism. Since the 1960s, the amount of time men spend working has gone down, while the amount of time they spend relaxing has gone up. Meanwhile, woman may do less housework, but they have also added a great deal more paid work to their schedules. Forty years ago, women spent about two hours a day doing work they found unpleasant, about forty minutes more than men. Now, that gap has grown to ninety minutes. Perhaps never before has the old country and western lament about how hard it is to be a woman been more true.
Unfortunately, the idea that being single is worse for men than it is for women is rarely the message that our culture sends out to single women. Just think of our cultural stereotypes. A single woman is expected to sink gradually into the slough of despond, alone except for her cats. By contrast, a man alone still inspires—although to a lesser degree than he used to—thoughts of a swinging bachelor along the lines of George Clooney. Unsurprisingly, this causes a certain amount of defensiveness in single women. Maureen Dowd, a successful single woman if ever there was one, titled her most recent book Are Men Necessary? It is almost impossible to imagine a successful single man giving his book the title Are Women Necessary? You could argue that men are simply too egotistical to worry that much about the opposite sex. For example, Christopher Hitchens wrote a book entitled God Is Not Great, which, translated into Dowd’s terms, could be called Is God Necessary? so men get to worry about God while women worry about men. In fact, there is a whole subgenre of advice books that reveal the pervasive anxiety of women through their very stridence. My personal favorite: Why cucumbers are better than men. These books are the result of the intense pressure that our society places on single women. This is hardly a new phenomenon. One theory behind the Salem witch trials is that they were largely caused by the fear of young women in Salem that they wouldn’t be able to find husbands.
That the reality