Introduction:
Damned Lies and Statistics

“First comes love, then comes marriage. . .”
—Children’s rhyme

“Sex without love is an empty experience, but, as empty experiences go, it’s one of the best.”
—Woody Allen

Decorated in retro-space age décor, complete with shiny plastic-and-vinyl booths straight out of a Kubrick movie, the Remote Lounge is the state of the art in twenty-first century cool. Located in Manhattan's East Village, the bar is a voyeur's delight. All-seeing remote-controlled cameras are scattered throughout, giving patrons their proverbial 15 minutes of fame, while monitors decorating the walls allow one to both watch and be watched with perfect anonymity. Should one wish for a more interactive experience, however, in front of each seat is a console with a camera, a TV screen, a button that will signal your interest to the object of your desire, and a telephone to talk to him or her. The Lounge's façade, which advertises the goings-on inside with flickering video screens, fronts onto The Bowery, a street first made infamous in the nineteenth century by its raucous dance halls, and again in the 1970s by the birth of punk rock at a club called CBGB. Just over the East River is Williamsburg, from where thousands of young professionals commute every morning to their jobs creating our collective culture at publishing houses, dot-coms, and TV studios.

On this particular evening, though, the Remote Lounge is the place to be. The party going on inside is hosted by Nerve.com, "a community of thoughtful hedonists," and Skyy vodka, a liquor company best known for its ads featuring wholesomely sexy Betty Page-lookalike models serving martinis to elegant young men in Buddy Holly glasses. The noise of the well-dressed crowd as they flirt, gossip, and exchange e-mail addresses almost drowns out the thumping trance beat, their conversation lubricated by the free vodka drinks offered by Skyy. who hope to infiltrate this key market of young, sophisticated urban tastemakers.

"Nerve" is, in truth, a name brand no less than "Skyy," but, rather than liquor, the product the Web site sells is identity. Saying we are Nerve people is shorthand for indicating that we are modern, cool, fashionable, desirable, and uninhibited-in short, everything one could want in a sex partner. Everyone at the party-whether they are male or female, whether they have never been married, are divorced, or are pretending not to be married, whether they are straight, bisexual, or gay, whether they are native New Yorkers or transplants from Minnesota-has two things in common: We all received invitations to this party because we were users of Nerve's personal ad service, and we all placed a personal ad because we were all looking to fulfill an imperative hard-wired into our nervous systems: the mating instinct.

In fact, without the assistance of machines, it is doubtful any of us here at the Remote tonight would have crossed paths, and, if we had, we would more than likely not have spoken to each other. Modern schools and workplaces have rules against flirting on the premises, and in the chaotic milieu of life in New York City, even an innocent "hello" on the subway becomes an awkward invasion of privacy. Only in special, sanctioned spaces, such as dance clubs and bars-or on the Internet-is it acceptable to perform the millennia-old rituals of courtship. The brilliance of the Remote Lounge's design is that it takes this fact to its most extreme conclusion: We are so remote from one another that we require technology to interact; yet, at the same time, we yearn desperately to connect.

To paraphrase the old Talking Heads song, "How did we get here?"

Considered objectively, single life is one of the strangest notions Western culture has given the world. Many of the ideas about courtship that we unthinkingly accept as the norm have a long history behind them-and the conditions under which these ideas evolved were very different from our current environment. What's more, though it ultimately draws on traditions that date back thousands of years, the idea that young people are not only capable of going out and wisely choosing their own mates, but that they ought to, has been profoundly changed by our modern, industrialized, secular society. The clash between our received values and the way we live now has been the source of no small amount of angst.

So why is a book about our ideas of courtship billing itself as a history of "single life"? Shouldn't we be more concerned with medieval nuns, "bachelor girls" of the 1920s, and the marriagefree movement of the twenty-first century? The answer is, of course, no: Like many ideas, "singleness" only exists in opposition to its antithesis. We see "singleness," after all, as ideally a temporary time of life that culminates with its opposite state and logical endpoint-tossing a bridal bouquet and taking off for your honeymoon in a rented limo with tin cans dragging behind it. This is, therefore, a biography of sorts of the scripts that govern the ostensible goal of single life-not being single any more.

What is important to understand about this, however, is that our current regime of free-market love was never a historical inevitability. For instance, it was not so long ago that one's parents' desires were more of an influence on whom one married than were one's own wishes, and arranged marriages are still a fact of life in many parts of India, Africa, East Asia, and the Middle East. Immigrants from these areas of the world often find themselves in conflict with our ideas of the way courtships should proceed. On December 18, 2000, the New York Times related a story that illustrates this cultural conflict. Bunyamin Simsek was brought to Denmark at the age of two by his father, Ali, where he grew up speaking Danish, attending Danish schools, and making Danish friends. In fact, to the outside world, Bunyamin was a Dane in all but the color of his skin, while Ali, one of the many "guest workers" from rural eastern Turkey who fill Western Europe's need for cheap menial labor, never adopted the culture of his new home. It is, therefore, not so surprising that Bunyamin's marriage to an uneducated village girl from eastern Anatolia, which his father arranged when Bunyamin was 17, fell apart. Bunyamin was disowned by his family and spurned by the local Turkish community; his second wife, Fatma Oektem, a second-generation Dane of Turkish ancestry, was likewise shunned.

Bunyamin and Fatma's marriage at least gives their story a relatively happy ending. Others were not so lucky: In January of 2002, Fadime Sahindal, a 26-year-old Swede of Kurdish ancestry, was shot to death by her father for dating a man of her own choice, rather than consenting to an arranged marriage. Likewise, in 2004, Arash Ghorbani-Zarin, a 19-year-old student at Oxford University, was murdered by his girlfriend's brothers on the orders of her Bangladeshi-born father. Though shocking to Western mores, such "honor killings" regularly take place from Pakistan to Palestine. Nor is such hysteria unique to the Muslim world: from ancient Roman patricians to Victorian anti-masturbation crusaders to conservative Supreme Court Justices in the U.S., sex has served as a flashpoint for those who have feared the erosion of the "traditional values" of whatever social order they advocate.
Yet, despite the Sodom-and-Gomorrah rhetoric of contemporary moralists, the norm, at least for the moment, still remains monogamous heterosexual pairing. Setting aside for a moment Benjamin Disraeli's aphorism that there are three types of lies-lies, damned lies, and statistics-the Census Bureau reports that fully 90 percent of Americans wind up married at some point. It is how we get to that point that has undergone an extraordinary and bewildering transformation in the last 50 years or so.

Today we both marry later and have a more relaxed attitude towards premarital sex than our grandparents ever did. The median age for marriage rose from its historical low of 23 for men and 20 for women in 1950 to 27 and 26 in 2003, and a modern woman who has reached the age of 30 or 40 without settling down is no Miss Haversham from Dickens' Great Expectations. The idea of spinsterhood is almost obsolete; in fact, it has rather been turned on its head: Women who have chosen careers instead of families, instead of being denigrated as "selfish," are-at least in some quarters-admired for their independence. And, thanks to modern medicine, when the fish finally decides to ride the bicycle, it is, at least in theory, possible to have children well into one's forties.

Likewise, the idea of waiting for one's wedding night has become a quaint anachronism: According to the Census Bureau, though only one-third of American women marry by 24, and two-thirds by 29, 90 percent of women have had at least one male sexual partner by age 20. By 29, the number rises to 95 percent. The Sexual Revolution has freed us not only to discuss pre-, post-, and extramarital sex in public, but also to spend much of our leisure time pursuing it, worrying about it, and downloading it from the World Wide Web.

The decline of the nuclear family has been an inseparable part of this change. Even a generation or two ago, it was not uncommon for children to live in a two-parent household until marriage. If you went to any town in America in 1940, and knocked on the door of any home, you had nine chances in ten of finding a family living there-perhaps not a family as envisioned by Norman Rockwell, but a family nonetheless. By 1970, though, the percentage of what the Census Bureau calls "non-family households" had almost doubled, so that you had only eight chances in ten of finding a family behind that random door. By 1998, the ratio had fallen further, to seven in ten, and by 2005, to under fifty percent-55.2 million out of 111.1 million. On the other hand, five percent of American households are unmarried opposite-sex partners living in what used to be colorfully described as "sin."

These numbers go hand-in-hand a sea change in our idea of how single people ought to live. Our collective attitude is illustrated perfectly by a query answered in January of 2002 by Cary Tennis, advice columnist for the popular Web magazine Salon.com. A man who described himself as a "26-year-old professional" asked Tennis how he should tell a potential girlfriend that, due to financial circumstances, he was returning to live in his parents' home for a while. Tennis answered: "Sheesh, what's wrong with living as a family? Isn't the family the basic unit of human social organization? What has happened to America, anyway, that it's shameful to live as a family? Is that what being 'a professional male' means?"

The answer to Tennis' rhetorical question is, of course, yes. Today, to continue to live with one's parents into adulthood is seen by many as a personal failing that implies an inability to "make it" in the adult world. The new model, as portrayed in countless books, television shows, and movies, is for young people to leave home for college at the age of 18, thereafter moving to major cities to settle in unrealistically large and well-furnished apartments, pursue interesting/and or lucrative careers as actors, singer-songwriters, and chefs, and hang out (and occasionally sleep with) with other equally cool and interesting never-married people. As a sort of generational midway point between an identity as a child and an identity as a parent, we can see single life as a sort of protracted adolescence, almost a grown-up fulfillment of the fairy-tale wish for adult authority to disappear-and to be sure, we have no shortage of appealing alternatives to commitment available to us.

Conversely, in many parts of Europe and Asia, where living in the family home well into adulthood is not seen as at all strange, various unique trysting customs have developed. In Italy, for instance, most cities have an area, such as the Riviera in Naples or the Gianicolo in Rome, that turns into an immense parking lot on warm nights-save that all the cars' interiors are curtained. In Thailand, young couples seeking privacy venture into dimly-lit cafes with large, private booths. Likewise, in crowded Japan, "love hotels" go to great lengths to ensure discretion for intimate trysts. Guests can park their cars in a private garage adjacent to their cabin, pay by credit card, and check out without ever seeing an employee of the establishment. However, the American model of independent living, with its attendant benefits of sexual freedom, is becoming increasingly prevalent.

In many ways, this is but a continuation of America's traditional geographical and social mobility, but the truth of the matter is that none of it would be possible if not for the booming post-World War II economy, which has allowed us a standard of living unprecedented in human history, together with the unparalleled cultural changes that have gone along with increased urbanization and advances in technology. Thanks to modern methods of contraception, sex has become permanently sundered from childbearing. Though it has for centuries been an integral part of courtship and the formation of romantic attachments, in recent years, sex has also become more and more acceptable as an end to itself.

In many ways, singles have become the trendsetters for the rest of society, as our vision of the sublime life have been conditioned by the expectations embodied in everything from online dating services to commercials for hair-care products. Our collective fascination with youth has made settling down into married respectability decidedly unstylish. After all, no matter what one' lifestyle may be, there is virtually no one in our society who would deny that romantic love is an objective worthy of pursuit. Yet, according to the Census Bureau, about 24 million Americans between the ages of 20 and 40 have never been married. Entire industries have grown up around this demographic: Single people are a prime market for consumer goods such as clothes, perfumes, and alcoholic beverages. From That Girl to Friends, from Sex and the Single Girl to The Rules, stories about the trials and travails of single life have been a sure-fire way for the media machine to turn a profit.

In fact, not only are we marrying later in life, but, in sharp contrast to the De Beers marketing slogan, a diamond is hardly forever. Despite our supposed ideal of lifetime monogamy, we are not surprised when our relationships eventually end, and the best statistics indicate that between 40 and 50 percent of all marriages fail. At the turn of the last century, only one American in 2,000 was divorced and not remarried. In 1940, it was between 1 in 100 and 1 in 50. Today, however, around 1 in 10 Americans older than 18 are divorced and not remarried. This lack of security may explain why five percent of American households are composed of unmarried couples: It would be foolhardy to buy a car before taking it for a test drive. Our consumer culture has taught us that everything from cell phones to relationships has built-in obsolescence, and, despite the fact that people are marrying later and supposedly choosing more compatible spouses, thousands upon thousands of men and women resume the search for a spouse every year.

Faced with the tremendous uncertainty and slight dividends offered by twenty-first century family life, it's no surprise that increasing numbers of middle-class men and women are making a rational choice to remain single, or to delay or even do without having children. Thus, at the age where their own parents were often already married and had children, many young, urban singles are more concerned with establishing their own identities, settling into their careers, and finding suitable partners. Leaving the nest is, of course, a necessity if one is going to pursue a job in a distant city, but, instead of establishing a household and a family, more and more young people today are putting their energies into their careers and developing fulfilling lives outside of the traditional bounds of marriage and family.

So, to reiterate the question, how did we get here? Why has the search for a mate become such a source of disappointment and disillusionment to many-and why is a permanent sort of "single life," ostensibly a temporary time of life between adolescence and starting one's own family, slowly becoming the new norm?

Without a doubt, much of the reason for our collective disillusionment is the conflict between our received ideas of courtship and the world we find ourselves living in. Many of our ideas about single life are atavisms-cultural baggage that had its own rationale at the time it was adopted, but which currently weigh us down. Though we have been conditioned all our lives that having "someone" is central to being well-adjusted members of society, people are rational actors who adopt behaviors that make sense in their economic, political, and social milieu. In our current world, where maintaining the lifestyle we have been raised to expect is becoming increasingly untenable, investing in the future by getting married and settling down is less appealing than ever. Furthermore, we live in a throw-away society where market capitalism has raised the consumption of novelty-in lifestyles, in fashion, and in people-to the level of moral imperatives. We therefore find ourselves in a conundrum: We are a society that sees the single person as only one half of an ideal whole and has raised (usually unrealistically idealized) romance to the level of a mania, but which simultaneously tells us that the true purpose of life continual pursuit of novelty.

But our ideas of single life had to come from somewhere. The singles bars, the online personals, the glossy magazines, the liquor ads and movies and television shows and top-40 songs- the scripts that govern how we express this most driving of human instincts-did not appear overnight. Behind the mating dances and free-market romance that make up our idea of "single life" lie thousands of years of intellectual and social history. By understanding how these developments have influenced us, we also understand what makes us who we are-and we empower ourselves to shape a world more to our liking.

This is a history of single life.