After an eight-year relationship ended in 2021, Chloe Bow started imagining what life might look like if she gave up on marriage.

Bow,
now 33, of Toronto, spent much of her 20s living with a boyfriend who became her fiance. Then, during the pandemic, she realised she was feeling unfulfilled but had settled out of a familiar fear: what if I end up alone?

But now, being alone is the goal, she said. Forever.

“I can’t think of one person in a relationship that I would want for myself,” Bow said. “I’ve done it before and prefer focusing on me and my own needs.”

No relationships, no marriage. “I don’t see myself budging on this,” she added.

The growing number of US singles indicates she’s in good company. As of 2023, the last data available from Pew Research Center, there were about 111 million single adults ages 18 and up in the United States. That was a sizeable increase from 70 million in 1990.

There is now consensus among researchers that after years of a steady decline in marriage rates, the institution has lost its lustre for many.

“I used to say we didn’t know if marriage was being delayed or foregone,” said Richard Fry, a social and demographic trends researcher at Pew. “I think the evidence is pretty clear now. It’s not just that adults are delaying marriage.” Increasingly, he said, they are dismissing it.

According to Pew, the US marriage rate hit a 140-year low in 2019 and has never fully rebounded. A slight rise in the overall marriage rate in the past few years may be attributable to a dip in the divorce rate and longer life spans. “Men are living longer,” Fry said, which means fewer widows are being pooled into the singles population.

The start of this decade dealt a further, if temporary, blow to the US marriage rate. In 2021, the National Center for Family and Marriage Research at Bowling Green State University found that the rate of couples marrying was at its lowest since 1971. Since then, it has ticked up and is now back at pre-pandemic levels, said co-director Wendy D. Manning.

And the federal government has also observed a shift: in December 2025, the US Census Bureau reported that 47% of American households were married couples, noting a significant drop from 50 years earlier, when it found that 66% of households fit that description.

Alternative paths

For some, cohabitation is close enough.

Manning said some couples who lived together felt they were married already and didn’t see a reason to bother with legality. “Or they may have initially thought they’d get married and then they got busy,” she said. “Life got in the way.”

Rachel Skyward, 41, owns a home with her partner in Morrison, Colorado. And although the couple has no plans to marry or even get engaged, they have a prenuptial agreement “just so the legalese is in order” in their common-law state, she said. In the eyes of a Colorado judge, “one could argue we are married”, she said. The prenup secures assets for each of them in the event of a split.

Skyward, who works in finance, is not opposed to marriage, but after a divorce in 2022, “I’m in no hurry to do it again.”

Some women say they would like to marry but have been disappointed by the prospects available to them. Shani Silver, 43, the host of A Single Serving Podcast and author of What If We Never Get Married? A Happily Ever Answer, said her followers tended to be, like her, single, straight women who were brought up believing the milestones of marriage and raising a family would arrive as punctually as the phone bill.

But “as millennials, we got to the age where we were promised all these things would happen, and they never did”, said Silver, who lives in New Orleans. Now, collectively, “we’re starting to see a future that can be scary because no one has really mapped it out for us”.

A lot of the women she has connected with have been dating unsuccessfully for decades. “It’s punishing,” she said.

Because of cultural biases that have put the onus on women to mould themselves into perfect partners, we “worked on ourselves throughout our lives to become the desirable partners we were told to become”, Silver said. “But the men didn’t rise along with us. They’ve stagnated. There are imbalances in domestic labour responsibilities, emotional labour responsibilities, in running a household.”

She added: “If you marry a man you’re settling for, I don’t see a lot of relationship longevity.”

Peter McGraw, 55, has never been married, and he acknowledges that women still bear the brunt of the age-old stigma attached to remaining single.

“I call myself a lifelong bachelor, and it’s ‘cool’,” he said. “‘Lifelong spinster’ doesn’t land the same.”

McGraw said he wished that double standard didn’t exist. “Not that long ago, women couldn’t vote or have a mortgage or a credit card without a man,” he said. “The world was sort of set up so if you wanted to live outside your father’s house, you needed to marry.” Times have changed: “You don’t need a man anymore.”

That doesn’t mean true equality has arrived.

“Men were never socialised to view singlehood as a bad thing,” Silver said. “For them, it was, ‘You guys are fine, stay who you are and women will fall into your lap.’”

McGraw, a behavioural scientist who teaches at the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado, Boulder, said he wasn’t always as eager to make light of his lifelong bachelorhood. But in recent years, he has been finding more reasons to embrace it.

“A lot of the assumptions we used to make about people were based on their relationship status,” said McGraw, who lives in Denver and hosts the podcast Solo: The Single Person’s Guide to a Remarkable Life. “If I knew you were single or married, I would feel like I knew a lot about you – like how you live, your values, your lifestyle. A lot of those assumptions are false now.”

He is interested in neither cohabitation nor marriage – mainly because of what he believes marriage has become.

“In 1960, when you married your husband or wife, you were not looking for that person to be everything for you,” he said. Now, however, “the person is also supposed to be your best friend, your personal and professional confidant”.

For him, and for much of his largely Generation X audience, that’s too much pressure.

The next generation

If millennials like Silver are succumbing to dating exhaustion and Gen Xers like McGraw are reaching the conclusion that modern marital standards are impossible, where does that leave Gen Z? Deeply uncertain, according to Alia Rose Ginevra, 22, a classical singer from Richmond Hill, Ontario.

In 2023, Ginevra wrote an opinion piece for the University of Toronto’s student newspaper about her generation’s polarities when it comes to marriage.

“From how I see it, Gen Z – those born between 1997 and 2012 – is generally risk-averse,” she wrote. “Studies demonstrate that we are getting our driver’s licences later in life and that we aren’t engaging in risky behaviours as much as our predecessors. I believe that this aversion to risk will seep into Gen Z delaying or outright avoiding saying ‘I do’.”

On the other hand, she wrote, “there is also a faction of Gen Z that anticipate marriage for the stability. Based on chats with my friends, I know that we’re already tired of the dating culture of swiping left and right and that we crave real commitment.”

In a recent phone call, Ginevra said she was among the faction that would like to get married, ideally in her late 20s or early 30s. “But I’m trying to be content in my singleness, and I’m preparing myself for if that doesn’t happen,” she said.

Among her friends, both men and women, money is a major concern. Most want the twin bed of their childhood to be well in the rear-view mirror by the time they sign a lease or a mortgage with a spouse. But “it’s taking a lot longer for people to settle into financial independence and move out of their parents’ house, myself included”, she said.

Manning of the National Center for Family and Marriage Research doesn’t believe the disappointments and deliberations of Ginevra and the others add up to a cultural movement, or that a Generation “I do not” is in the works.

“Marriage is still hugely regarded,” she said. Recent dips in the share of people who are married, in her view, can be chalked up to the average age of first marriages continuing to creep up. “I think we value marriage so much that we want to wait until we’re really set,” she added. “We want to make sure we have all the right resources in place before we begin.”

One-third of all marriages now include at least one spouse who has been married before, she said, which may illustrate the appeal of being married.

“Most people still want to get married and expect to be married,” Manning said. “Americans are still very enthusiastic about it.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Written by: Tammy LaGorce

Illustration by: Antonio Giovanni Pinna

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