Romantic Relationships Turn Off Women More Than Men by Bella DePaulo

Romantic Relationships Turn Off Women More Than Men by Bella DePaulo

(Link): Romantic Relationships Turn Off Women More Than Men

Excerpts:

Women with previous romantic partners are more likely to want to stay single.

Updated April 3, 2024

Marriage and romantic relationships are relentlessly celebrated in the US and other nations. In popular culture, romantic plots are ubiquitous. Characters who love being single and want to stay single – I call them “single at heart” – are rare. …

[Previous studies have shown that more people are not interested in obtaining romantic relationships]

… How Previous Romantic Relationship Experience Matters in Opposite Ways for Men and Women

…For those who did have previous romantic relationship experience, the results were exactly the opposite. Women were more likely than the men to say that having a romantic partner was not at all important.

Among those who had previous romantic relationship experience, but had never been married, more than 40 percent of the women said that having a romantic partner was not at all important, compared to just over 20 percent of the men who said the same thing.

Among those who had previously been married, more than half of the women (about 55 percent) said that having a romantic partner was not at all important, compared to just over 30 percent for the men

Can Christian Singles Thrive? How Singles Around the World Confront the Likelihood of Remaining Unmarried By Anna Broadway

Can Christian Singles Thrive? How Singles Around the World Confront the Likelihood of Remaining Unmarried By Anna Broadway

This author, Anna Broadway, has a new book about adult singleness being released soon (March 2024), I think it’s called “Solo Planet.”

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This essay she wrote I am featuring excerpts of here touches on several topics I’ve raised before, one of which is Bedroom Evangelization, where some Christians mistakenly think God teaches that the way to grow the kingdom of God is via biological reproduction – married couples having sex and making children. The Bible does not teach that.

The Bible repeatedly teaches, in the New Testament, that one’s spiritual siblings (other Christians) are of equal, or more, import than one’s biological family, and that God’s kingdom is grown by Christians sharing the Gospel with non-believers.

But many Christians prefer a worldly, secular solution and approach – they prefer the idea of getting more Christians married off to enlarge the church (which again the Bible does not teach) – but it’s the same situation as to how God warned the Israelites in the Old Testament that having a king, as they kept asking for, was not a good idea.

Just because you marry and have children does not mean that your children will accept your beliefs. They may later reject them as they age.

(Link): Can Christian Singles Thrive? How Singles Around the World Confront the Likelihood of Remaining Unmarried By Anna Broadway

Excerpts:

by Anna Broadway
August 2021

…Researching singleness was not the academic project I’d have wished for myself. By the time of my May 2018 departure, the question of whether Christian singles could still thrive without a partner had become an urgently personal one. I was weeks from my fortieth birthday and starting to face the likelihood of dying barren and unmarried.

For most of my life, well-intended Christians had assured me that the fact I wanted marriage must mean God intended to give it to me. Yet the more I’ve learned about racial injustice, the less this view holds up. If so many long for a justice they don’t receive in their lifetimes, how dare I assume my longing for marriage is any likelier to resolve as I want?

The global church has at least eighty-five million more women than men among adults thirty or older; the US church has twenty-five million more women. Even if some of those women have or find spouses outside the faith, that leaves millions who can’t ever marry – a reality the church has yet to face. Instead, most Christians I met around the world treated heterosexual marriage as the primary narrative axis in life. Marrieds and singles alike seemed largely unaware of or unwilling to reckon with this significant demographic disconnect.

And the gap may be worse than it seems. For one thing, not all Christian men can or will marry. Those who do marry may not seek Christian wives. In her 2019 book Relatable, Vicky Walker reports that almost two-thirds of women in her survey, but only half the men, deemed a Christian spouse “non-negotiable.” The numbers get far worse as age and the sex gap increase. Factor in the more pronounced unevenness caused by genocide, war, mass incarceration, and other factors, and women’s prospects for marriage get worse yet.

Yet most Christians continue to act – and churches to teach – as if nearly all will marry, with the corollary implication that it’s singles’ fault when we don’t. With that comes a tendency to view singleness as a second-class status – as missing out and falling short.

Book Review: The Struggle to Stay: Why Single Evangelical Women Are Leaving the Church – Review of Gaddini Book by E. Feyas

Book Review: The Struggle to Stay: Why Single Evangelical Women Are Leaving the Church – Review of Gaddini Book by E. Feyas

This author says she “left the faith” in a podcast interview she gave (that podcast is on You Tube – it is linked to and embedded further below).

The author, when asked by the atheist interviewer, which Christians are giving, in her opinion, good sexual advice to Christians today, she unfortunately cites perverted Christian personality Nadia Bolz Weber, who you can read about here.  Nadia Bolz Weber would be the last person I’d go to for sex advice if I wanted sex advice.

Not that most conservative Christians are any better on some sexual topics, but, two wrongs don’t make a right. Many conservatives and many liberals and progressives are wrong about many a thing.

The author explains in the book and the podcast that single, Christian women are leaving the church “faster than ever before.” Some are leaving the faith for agnosticism or atheism, while others remain Christian but stop attending church.

This book was released a year or more ago, and I already made at least one blog post about it around a year ago (that other post is linked to below, under “Related Posts”)

(Link): Book Review: The Struggle to Stay: Why Single Evangelical Women Are Leaving the Church

Feb. 2024
by Emma Feyas

Combining deep ethnographic research with personal experience and cultural realities, Katie Gaddini tells relatable stories and asks difficult questions. Her research seeks to understand not merely why single women might leave the evangelical church, but what exactly makes them stay.

Walking alongside four women—Carys, Jo, Maddie, and Liv—who move from deep commitment and service to evangelical congregations to “Christian-ish,” Gaddini’s narration provides an empathetic window into the reality of evangelical women, especially single evangelical feminist women.

Gaddini’s objective to “expose the costs of being an evangelical woman” is successful in three distinct ways. …

In between the narratives of each of the women in the study, Gaddini explains evangelical norms and cultures for readers who may be unfamiliar. White, mid-upper-class evangelicalism provides the boundaries for the study.

Conservative (Christian?) Not The Bee Account Blocked Me On X – For Pointing Out They’re Marriage and Parenthood Idolizers and Hypocritical about Sexual Mores, Singleness, Childlessness

Conservative (Christian?) “Not The Bee” Account Blocked Me On X – For Pointing Out They’re Marriage and Parenthood Idolizers and Hypocritical about Sexual Mores, Singleness, Childlessness

Sometime the evening of January 28, 2023, the clowns at “Not The Bee” blocked me!

The Not the Bee account blocked me over this post on X (Twitter), and I put a screen cap of it here below (I will resume commentary about this situation below the screen capture):

I recently published a blog post about how yes, Planned Parenthood is wrong to publish anti-virginity content as they’ve done before,
but I pointed out to various conservatives who posted against it on “X” that they’re often the VERY SAME conservatives who insult or scold single, childless adults for being single and childless.
(That post is here: (Link): Planned Parenthood Hammered After Sharing Video Redefining Sex Act as Whatever ‘You’ Want It To Be)

Which is rather hypocritical.

You can’t (if you want to be consistent) simultaneously support virginity for teens and young adults…
but then turn around and criticize those same adults for still being a single virgin (hence no children) years later – when they’re age 30+ and still not married with children –
but that is exactly what hyper-pro-marriage/parenthood types like Matt Walsh, Lyman Stone, Al Mohler, Eric Conn, and accounts like “Not the Bee” do.
(That is also what marriage- and motherhood-idolizing Southern Baptists have done for years; I wrote a little bit about it in this post.)

Before I continue, I should state that I am a conservative.
I am not a liberal nor a progressive. 

I am also not opposed to marriage, parenthood, or the nuclear family, but I’ve noticed for years now that too many other conservatives, especially religious ones, have turned marriage, parenthood, and the nuclear family into Golden Calves that they worship.

Such conservatives go far, far beyond what the Bible teaches about marriage, parenthood and family, to turn all three into idols, then they frequently lash out and shame any adult who is over age 25 or so who is still single (whether by choice or by circumstance), and they mock any adult (single or married) who does not have children.

Jesus speaking:

“Anyone who loves their father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves their son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. (Matthew 10:37)

That is quite the odd thing for Jesus to say if Jesus – being God in the flesh – was nearly as “pro Nuclear Family” and into singles-shaming as are the average conservatives of today.

The fact that a minority of people on the far left may make anti-nuclear family (or anti-parenthood) commentary does not mean the correct way, wisest way, or most advantageous way, of dealing with such rhetoric, is to bash, shame, and insult adults for being single and childless.

Why as a Childless Woman I’ve Quit My Job Because I Can’t Bear Yet Another Christmas Picking Up the Slack for Working Mothers

Why as a Childless Woman I’ve Quit My Job Because I Can’t Bear Yet Another Christmas Picking Up the Slack for Working Mothers

Yes, this is common. I don’t remember this happening to me often over what jobs I’ve held, but I’ve read articles going back years where childfree, childless, and/or single women are expected to fill in for married persons or parents, so that the marrieds or parents can have more time off for holidays or to attend their kid’s soccer games – which isn’t fair to the childless, childfree, and single adults.

This type of exploitation and presumption also happens among Christians. Periodically, going back to my teens, I’ve seen or heard Christians say that single, childless Christian women should provide free babysitting services to married parents.
I’ve never seen Christians or churches cater to the needs of single, childless adults, though (and yes, we single and childless adults do have our own needs).

If parenthood truly made people more mature, giving, and ethical than being childless, I would expect married parents to give up holidays with their children and take over the work shifts of their childless co-workers, so that their childless co-workers could have the holidays off.
But parents, many spoiled brats that they are, DEMAND that the childless sacrifice FOR THEM.

(Link): Why as a childless woman I’ve quit my job because I can’t bear yet another Christmas picking up the slack for working mums

by Samantha Walsh
Dec 14, 2023

[The author explains at how she’s worked in retail jobs going back many years, and she’s often had to take on extra shifts and so on to cover for women co-workers who are mothers, who get extra time off to spend holidays and such with their children]

… As anyone who’s worked in a shop in December will know, it’s very hard. But there’s a reason why it’s been particularly unrelenting for me: I don’t have children. And there is an expectation that women like me will pick up the slack so the mums can have time off with their families.

A third of my team were mums and, as much as it pains me to say it, mums can be unreliable. When their child is ill they get to take parental leave — that’s the law.

But I’m the one who has to cover their work, and there are times it’s hard to be around them when this is happening repeatedly.

This autumn, as another brutal Christmas approached, I realised I just wasn’t prepared to take the strain through yet another festive season. So, in October, I handed in my notice.

But it wasn’t just Christmas; I’d become disillusioned by the disparity between the monumental effort I consistently ploughed into my career as a woman without children and the lack of recognition and reward I received in return.

As a society we support working parents, but the same kind of support is not offered to those like me. My dad is ill, but I knew I wouldn’t have been granted any time off in the run-up to Christmas, paid or otherwise.

Legally, you can get leave to deal with an emergency involving a child, grandchild, partner or parent — but they have to be a ‘dependant’ of yours, and rely on you for their care. As my dad doesn’t live with me, I wouldn’t qualify for time off to help him.

Single Women Struggle to Pay Rent More Than Single Men: Study – Also: Singles Pay More for Rent Than Couples

Single Women Struggle to Pay Rent More Than Single Men: Study  – Also: Singles Pay More For Rent Than Couples

(Link): The ‘singles tax’: People who live alone are paying thousands more on rent than their coupled-up counterparts

Excerpts:

Juliana Kaplan and Madison Hoff
Feb 14, 2023

• • It costs to be single: Americans living alone are facing a “singles tax” that costs thousands.
  • A new Zillow analysis finds, on average, a single American living alone pays around $7,000 more a year in rent compared to their cohabitating peers.
  • Meanwhile, couples save tens of thousands living together, further dividing economic prospects.

…It’s yet another economic data point showing that, while more Americans are opting to fly solo, their wallets are feeling the burden.

A recent Zillow analysis compares how much more single Americans are paying to live alone in a one-bedroom place, compared to couples in the same spots. The results: On average, solo Americans are paying a “singles tax” of almost $7,000 every year.

It makes sense; couples living together can split the cost that one single American takes on solo. Those savings add up.

(Link): Single women struggle to pay rent more than single men: study

by Hannah Frishberg
December 15, 2023

On the day rent is due each month, the gender gap between male and female one-person households is enormous, new research has found.

According to RentHop’s annual (Link): Singles Index, single women in 50 major cities across the nation spend 124% more of their income on rent than their male counterparts.

The report, now in its third year, calculates the rent burden (how much of an individual’s income is spent on housing, with more than 30% being considered a burden) on one-income renters of studio apartments and found that, as a result of making significantly less money, women bear a much larger burden.

“With housing prices skyrocketing over the past year, many young professionals are now faced with high rent prices as single-income earners,” the RentHop index explained, before going into the fact that, while everyone is impacted by these market trends, they ultimately create a larger challenge for all the single ladies.

“According to Pew Research, the [gender wage] gap barely narrowed in 2022 — for every dollar men earned, women earned only 82 cents,” the report continued. “Translating to housing, the gap means it is harder for women to buy or even rent a home independently.”

The gap is far more extreme in certain cities than others.

At the top of the list, in the dubious first place position for largest gender rent burden gap, is El Paso, TX, where the average man puts 18% of their income towards rent but the average woman puts almost 35%.  …

(Link):  Single Women Are More Rent Burdened Than Single Men

(or use this Alt Link to access the full article)

Excerpts:

A new study puts a spotlight on the challenges faced by female renters living alone.

By Michael Kolomatsky
Dec. 14, 2023

Living alone can be a choice or a pit stop, but one thing’s for sure: The rent is on you. Buying a home has been especially difficult over the past year, so more singles have been left to rely on leasing in a market where the typical renter is already rent burdened — that is, spending at least 30 percent of income on rent.

To spotlight the plight of solo renters, RentHop’s annual Single’s Index compared rents on studios in the 50 largest U.S. cities. The most recent study broke it down by gender using income data from the U.S. Census Bureau, and because single women typically make less money than single men, they face a larger hurdle.

Single Woman, 38, Reveals Her Horror at Being Rejected by a Matchmaker Who Said She Was Too ‘High Strung’ and Needed to Become ‘Softer’ to be ‘Worthy of Love’ (It’s Good To Have Walls Up – Avoiding Toxic Partners)

Single Woman, 38, Reveals Her Horror at Being Rejected by a Matchmaker Who Said She Was Too ‘High Strung’ and Needed to Become ‘Softer’ to be ‘Worthy of Love’ (It’s Good to Have Walls Up – Avoiding Toxic Partners)

There are no guarantees for finding love, romance, or marriage.

There may be things one can do to potentially attract more mates – for example, if you’re a big obese fatty, for example, if you lost weight, you may attract more people who’d be willing to date you (that goes for men and women).

If you never, ever brush your teeth and have awful breath, that may be why you’re repelling so many mates. If you’d begin regularly brushing your teeth, maybe you could attract more people.

I think a person can possibly increase his or her chances of snagging a partner, if he or she is really lacking in some area, but I don’t think there are fool-proof, 100% guaranteed ways to get dates or married.

If you have a personality disorder or have their traits (narcissism or BPD, for example) I think you’re SOL when it comes to dating or friendship.
(SOL = Shit Out Of Luck)

If you have Cluster B disorders or traits (e.g., narcissism, BPD, or sociopathy) your relationships will keep imploding over and over, and it’s all YOUR fault, though due to your hideous personality style or disorder, you will forever remain blind to your OWN faults and keep blaming everyone around you for YOUR mistakes and flaws, so you will never take steps to correct the characteristics that keep driving other people away.

I grew up in a Baptist context, where I constantly heard or read in Christian sermons, books, and magazines, that if I wanted to be married one day, I should do “X, Y, and Z.”
Well, I did “X, Y, and Z” but I remain single into my 50s, so obviously, following certain sets of rules or advice are not guarantees you’re going to get married.

It doesn’t matter if the advice is secular, feminist, anti-feminist, or Christian, none of it is a guarantee.

The woman in this story says she is more an “Alpha” type, so she is seeking an “Alpha” type man, she does not want a doormat.

The matchmaker actually told her (or implied) that all men prefer “Beta” women.

I’m old enough now, and I’ve read enough articles about relationships, abuse dynamics, divorce, personality disorders, etc, to tell you, that each person has their own set of preferences, and no, it’s not true that all or most men prefer “soft” women or “women without walls.”
I’ve seen plenty of men say in interviews that they wanted an “Alpha” woman to marry, or someone who was their equal.

Healthy people prefer other Healthy people to be friends with, or to date, or to marry.

If someone is with you only or primarily because you’re “Beta,” (or because you are “soft”), I would be very leery and cautious, because people with Cluster B disorders or who have those traits (Narcissism, BPD, sociopathy) love to dominate and control other people.
Those are people who can and will abuse you if you’re the “soft” type; those types of people have low to no empathy, and they will NOT meet your needs over the course of the relationship (they will only meet some of your needs up front to seduce you at first, to entrap you into a relationship – that happens during what is called the “love bombing” phase).

You can follow this matchmaker’s advice, if you’re a single woman, and still end up single.
There is no relationship advice on the planet that is guaranteed 100% effective all the time for every person.
You can follow all of someone’s “rules” and principles and still end up alone and single – it happened to me, and I’ve seen it happen to other single men and single women, too.
I’ve had visitors to this blog (that is, other never married adults who are over the age of 35) say the same thing under other posts I’ve done.

The article says a lot of people were siding with the matchmaker on this one, but I don’t know. I cannot blame the single lady for being offended or upset by what the matchmaker said or did.

Not all men want to date or marry “soft” women, I hate to break it to this so-called dating or matchmaking expert.

By “soft,” I think most people are actually referring to stereotypical, American 1950s feminine ideals: that is, they are referring to Codependent, people pleasing behaviors and attitudes, where the woman is highly submissive and doesn’t insist the man meet her needs in return (though she does want him to occasionally meet her needs).

Ultimately, the only types of men who favor passive, people pleasing, and Codependent traits in a long term partner, are abusers, and men with Narcissism, BPD, and Sociopathy – and those are all toxic men no woman should date, marry, or befriend.

Many controlling, abusive men, or ones with disorders or who are on the spectrum (such as Narcissists) want you to have low or no walls (this is also true of abusive women, or women with Cluster B traits or disorders).
They will rush you quickly into a relationship and move too fast.
So, it’s good that this woman has walls up and doesn’t trust someone instantly and takes her time in getting to know them.
If anyone is telling you that having walls is a bad idea, run away in the opposite direction! Those are either Cluster B types themselves, or they are the Enablers of abusers and Cluster Bs.

If you’re dating someone, and you feel as though the person you’re dating is rushing you, moving the relationship too quickly, and they’re asking you to take your walls down and rush (emotional or sexual) intimacy, tell them to SLOW DOWN and to respect YOUR timetable and YOUR boundaries.
And if they refuse to slow down or rage at you for asking any of that from them, or put on a show of hurt, that is a RED FLAG.
You may want to consider breaking up with that person.

A normal, healthy person will respect YOUR walls, they will respect your boundaries, and they will be happy to slow things down, if it puts you at ease.

I have more comments in this post, below this long excerpt:

(Link): Single woman, 38, reveals her horror at being REJECTED by a matchmaker who said she was too ‘high strung’ and needed to become ‘softer’ to be ‘worthy of love’ – after she paid $350 for a consultation

Dec 12, 2023

A single woman has revealed that she was rejected by a matchmaker who implied that she was too ‘high strung’ and needed to change to be ‘worthy of love.’

Danielle Fewings, 38, a digital marketing specialist from Philadelphia, went viral on TikTok after venting about her fruitless consultation with the unnamed dating expert.

‘When we met, I told her what I was looking for and told her a lot about me,’ she explained as she did her makeup in the video.

‘I tried to highlight some of my core qualities, including the fact that I am very, very Type A, organized, [and] I like to be the leader.

‘I told her the types of things I like doing. I also told her I was looking for a man who was also a leader because I don’t want to always be the leader, believe it or not.’

Fewings said she wanted a partner who was at or above her income level, driven, ambitious, and ready to get married.

She admitted that the matchmaker might have picked up on the fact that she was a ‘little high strung,’ but she insisted she was not a ‘stressed out or anxious person.’

‘I’m just high energy, Type A. This is who I am,’ she said. ‘She was asking me: “Do I meditate?” No. “Do I journal?” No. “Do anything woo?” and I said, “No, in fact, I’m not even on the same planet as woo.”‘

When asked what she didn’t like in a man, she told the expert that she ‘could never really be with a beta type.’

‘I specifically used the word “doormat.” I said I would chew them up and spit them out,’ she recalled. ‘And her response was “well, I married that type of man.”

‘She was saying that men really like a soft woman, and I should try some of these vision boarding, journaling, meditating type of things. [But] I’m never going to be that type of person.’

Fewings also shared how the matchmaker told her she had ‘some walls up,’ but she felt it was ‘perfectly normal’ for her to be guarded when meeting someone for the first time.

Restaurants Scamming Single Adults Through Dating Apps and Dating Sites

Restaurants Scamming Single Adults Through Dating Apps and Dating Sites

I’ve seen a few people online suggest that this is a bogus claim, that restaurants are not actually doing this to single adults, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it is in fact true.

I have verified stories on my blog of restaurants and landlords who do in fact discriminate against single adults, and there are companies who hire out their staff for the express purpose of answering dating messages on sites for single adults – that is, if you’re a busy single adult, you can hire someone to pretend to be you on a dating app you’re using, and they will type responses back to anyone who contacts you.

So no, it would not surprise me if this is true.

That is, according to several women online, they’re responded to men on dating apps who tell them to meet up with them for a date at a specific restaurant, but the man turns out to not be real
– he is hired by the restaurant, or may be the owner of the restaurant – and the whole thing is a ploy to get the single woman into the establishment, and she figures, ‘well, I’ve been stood up by the man on the dating app, but I might as well order a drink or a dinner while I’m here.’

This is how restaurants are luring single adults into restaurants.

Maybe this is only an urban legend, but I do believe that there are businesses who would absolutely do this, and there are probably a few restaurants who are doing this. I don’t put it past anyone.

You can read more about this alleged dating app / dating site scam here:

(Link):  Woman Gets Stood Up On A Date, Finds Out The Restaurant Tricked Her Into Eating Dinner Alone

by Ugnė Bulotaitė
December 1, 2023

Participating in the dating scene is already hard enough. And still, businesses keep finding ways to make it even worse.

For instance, this restaurant came up with a catfishing scheme to get people to come to eat at their establishments, which many people fell for. Now they are starting to talk about it on the internet. And we all know that when the internet is infuriated, it’s not good news for the target of it.

More info: (Link): TikTok

This woman turned to TikTok to share a story about how she was catfished by a restaurant that orchestrated a fake date just to get customers, and people online are fuming

“I was just stood up on a date and it was the most humiliating experience ever. Storytime!”

“Met this guy on a dating app. And he immediately asked me out on a date to a specific restaurant. He confirmed day off. I get to the restaurant and see that he’s nowhere to be found. So, I reached out, no response.”

“I checked the app and noticed that he unmatched me.”

“At that point, I was a little confused, and I was kind of pissed because I was already dressed and I got all the way there. And because I had put in so much effort, I thought I might as well just have a meal, while I am in the building.”

“And it wasn’t until I got home and I was scrolling Facebook and I saw a very similar story from a girl, that same restaurant, who also got stood up”

“She found out that there are restaurants now posing as people on dating apps, just so you go to their business. And once you get stood up, they know that probably 9 times out of 10 you’re going to buy something from them.”

“And that just blew my mind. The fact that we have stooped this low…”

“Sirens – jail time, jail for all the people at the restaurant thinking they’re marketing geniuses”

“You are not, no girl boss town, you are just ruining a girl’s mental self-esteem. I can’t even believe, I’m gonna insert the screenshots below so you can see, but what a wild ride, right?”

The video was posted by a TikTok user who goes by @paretay or just Taylor. On her account, the creator posts various videos usually relating to her life. On TikTok, Taylor has 22K followers and over 5M likes.

In the video, Taylor told a story about how a restaurant orchestrated a fake date to get her to their establishment. She also said that she read a story about another woman falling victim to the same trick.

And we found out that there are even more victims of this trick out there.

The restaurants that take part in this scam are called food diggers. It is a pun on the phrase “gold digger.” These establishments tend to partner with bot apps. And these partnerships let them create bots on dating apps to lure people to their restaurants. There people, just like Taylor, get stood up, and so, order food on their own. Essentially, the restaurants are exploiting people who are looking for love and/or fun.

Why Aren’t More People Getting Married? Ask Women What Dating Is Like. by A. L. Sussman

Why Aren’t More People Getting Married? Ask Women What Dating Is Like. by A. L. Sussman

Thanks to an X (Twitter) acquaintance of mine for DMing me a link to this (link and excerpt below). I didn’t see it prior to getting that DM.

This article hits on one point I’ve made numerous times on this blog: where are all the average to above-average single men for single women to marry?

I grew up Southern Baptist, and the Baptists – along with Protestant evangelicals – brainwashed single, Christian women into thinking it would be wrong to marry outside the Christian faith (the “equally yoked” belief), which led to prolonged, unwanted singleness for a lot of marriage-desiring single women (including myself).

A lot of single women out there, secular and Christian, would like to marry, but there are no average to high quality single men to marry. Some men have opted out of dating. And, my fellow conservatives who keep hyping marriage (and nuclear family and parenthood) continually neglect those of us women, such as myself, who are Single by Circumstance.

Into my 20s to my late 30s, I tried attending singles classes at local churches, I even tried dating sites for awhile, but none of that worked – though I was taught constantly in Sunday School courses, Christian books, Christian magazine articles, and a bit later, in my mid-30s, in Christian blogs and forums, that if I just had faith in God, prayed, waited, remained sexually chaste, that in due time, God would send me a “Christian Mr. Right,” but that never happened. I’m still single by circumstance into my 50s.

However, women such as myself who desired marriage but were unable to find mates often get mocked, shamed, or flat out insulted by sexist ass clowns on a semi-regular basis, by Christian preachers, authors, and pundits, such as, but not limited to, Lyman Stone, Matt Walsh, Al Mohler and Mark Driscoll.

None of those bozo idiots realize how hard it is to find a good man when one is single. They just assume that either women turned down a lot of good men along the way (nope), we were too “career focused” (nope), or we hate marriage (nope).

Single women (who want to be married) do not need to be insulted, fear-mongered or screamed at about how great marriage is – they already know and would like to be married, but they cannot find someone decent to marry.

I followed most of the Christian “how to get married” advice I heard or read as I was growing up, and it didn’t result in me ever getting married. You can follow all the usual rules and advice and still end up being single through no fault of your own.

If you’re a single woman dealing with the “online ageism” the article mentions: go into your dating app or site profile, and knock off 10, 15, or 20 years from your age, whatever you feel is necessary, and whatever you’re comfortable with, because some men, even ones who are 35 or 40 whatever years old, may set their dating age preferences lower.

I’ve knocked off around ten years of my own age on one dating profile I still have, to get around any age preferences men around my age set, but I only respond to men around my own age, if they contact me.

If I meet one in person and he sees I’m older, he’ll either want to leave on the spot – which is fine – but maybe go ahead, take a chance, and spend some time with me to see if there’s anything there.

As this author concludes, and as I’ve said in older posts, Christians and conservatives telling women to marry – or yelling at them to marry, or telling them they will die alone if they don’t marry (to scare them into marriage) – will not work; plenty of women already WANT to marry, so they do not need to be convinced to marry. They need a compatible, loving partner – trying fixing them up with one to help – scolding and shaming does not help in this situation.

(Link): Why Aren’t More People Getting Married? Ask Women What Dating Is Like. (to archived version)

Excerpts:

by Anna Louie Sussman

[The essay opens with the author discussing a single woman she knows who is raising a daughter alone after the father walked out. The single woman says she did not plan on still being single – and raising a child alone – at age 38. She says this is not how she planned or envisioned her life going.]

… The most recent wave of commenters have tended to position themselves as iconoclasts speaking hard truths: Two-parent families often result in better outcomes for kids, writes Megan McArdle, in The Washington Post, but “for various reasons,” she goes on, this “is too often left unsaid” — even though policy wonks, and the pundits who trumpet their ideas, have been telling (straight) people to get married for the sake of their children for decades.

Brad Wilcox of the Institute for Family Studies, who recently scoffed at “the notion that love, not marriage, makes a family,” has a forthcoming book titled “Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization.”

All of these scolds typically rely on the same batch of academic studies, now compiled by economist Melissa Kearney in her new book “The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind,” which show that kids with two parents fare better on a variety of life outcomes than those raised by single parents, who are overwhelmingly women.

This may well be true. But harping on people to get married from high up in the ivory tower fails to engage with the reality on the ground that heterosexual women from many walks of life confront: that is, the state of men today.
Having written about gender, dating, and reproduction for years, I’m struck by how blithely these admonitions to get married skate over people’s lived experience.
A more granular look at what the reality of dating looks and feels like for straight women can go a long way toward explaining why marriage rates are lower than policy scholars would prefer.

When Marriage and Motherhood Become Idols by J. Oshman

When Marriage and Motherhood Become Idols by J. Oshman

This author makes many of the same points I’ve been making here on this blog for years and over on twitter.

I’m a never married, middle aged conservative woman, and while I am not opposed to parenthood or marriage, I can see how too many secular and religious conservatives have unwisely sought to fight against “anti nuclear family” or “anti natalism” sentiments of progressives by doubling down on being pro-natalism, pro-marriage, and pro-nuclear family,
even if it means insulting single and childless adults for being single and childless.

And even if it means trying to fear-monger single and childless women into getting married before they feel ready to marry, or if they have not found a suitable partner (ie, pressuring them into marrying the first other  single adult to come along, even if that other single adult is all wrong for them or comes with a truck load of Red Flags).

(Link): When Marriage and Motherhood Become Idols

Excerpts:

August 1, 2022
by Jen Oshman

Our Highest Calling?

“Motherhood is a woman’s highest calling.” It was said with awe, reverence, and authority. And it was said at a baby shower I went to a couple years ago. I was in attendance along with various friends, including one deeply saddened by infertility and one who longed to be married. …

…indeed, marriage and motherhood are good gifts. You will never catch me saying otherwise.

But the Christian church—at least the church in the United States, which I love and serve with my whole heart—has a tendency to set marriage and motherhood on a pedestal that Scripture does not support….

We in the church can know we’ve made marriage and motherhood idols by the way we talk about them and frame them in our ministries and programs. Our words and church bulletins reveal, even though it’s likely subconscious, that we can’t imagine that unmarried or childless adults have really “arrived.” We doubt their maturity until they have a spouse and some kids to prove it.

I know many singles and childless couples who have been wounded, confused, or angered by thoughtless comments made by members of their church family:

• • Are you dating anyone? I know someone I can fix you up with.
  • Don’t worry; you’ll find the right person soon.
  • The real sanctification happens when you get married (or have kids).
  • You wouldn’t know; you’re not a mom (or dad) yet.

Daily Mail: Actor Matthew Perry Died Lonely and Longing for a Wife and a Family – Churches and Christians Have Failed to Help People in These Situations

Daily Mail: Actor Matthew Perry Died Lonely and Longing for a Wife and a Family – Churches and Christians Have Failed to Help People in These Situations

January 2024 update:
More information has trickled out about Matthew Perry since he died, and if it’s true, my opinion of him has gone down quite a bit.

I don’t have as much empathy for the guy as I did when I first wrote the blog post below about 2 or 3 months ago.

Here’s one of the new articles about him (published in January 2024 – he died around October 2023):

(Link): Matthew Perry ‘assaulted women’ including ex-fiancée: Friends actor ‘hurled table’ at Molly Hurwitz after she confronted him about cheating – and ‘threw live-in sober companion against wall’

Friends actor Matthew Perry physically assaulted several women – including his ex-fiancée Molly Hurwitz – in the years leading up to his death, sources close to the late star have sensationally revealed.
— end excerpt —

(Link): ‘All Matthew Perry knew was how to cause pain and play the victim’: Not content with being cruel and physically abusive to women in his life, how the drug-addled Friends star turned to dating apps to manipulate 21-year-old females before he died

Yet Perry’s addiction certainly caused him to behave in ways that were troubling at best, malign at worst. As well as being cruel and physically abusive to women in his life, he consistently manipulated other young females he had approached on online dating apps in order to get his hands on the drugs he so desperately desired.
— end —

But my point about churches needing to focus less on nuclear families and more on never married, divorced, widowed, and childless / childfree people still stands.

---

I’m largely going with the Daily Mail’s headline for this (the article is linked to and excerpted much farther below). It’s a somewhat unfortunate headline, because it feeds into some of the recent anti-singleness commentary and bashing of adult singles I’ve seen by conservative Christians and conservative political talking heads.

I know if you are an adult over the age of 34 or 35 who’s never been married, and you had hoped or expected to be married by now, that you will likely go through a few years of disappointment, anger, hurt, and frustration that you’re not married.

Maybe you’ve seen more of your friends get married in the meantime while you remain single, and you’ve even attended a few of their weddings (if it’s any comfort, let me assure you, if most of your friends got married in their 20s, that most of your friends’ marriages are awful behind closed doors and many will later go on to divorce by the time they’re in their 40s – or sooner!)

If you permit yourself to consciously go through a grieving process over never getting married, you can recover, start to enjoy your life as a single adult, and move on, I promise.

Being single long past the time you have expected to be married does not have to be horrible, painful, or lonely.

Many of my fellow conservatives like to depict singleness into someone’s 40s and older as being some kind of Hellscape filled with loneliness, but it is not. It does not have to be – unless you allow it to be.

If you’re still single long past when you had hoped to be married, you can find other goals, and other pursuits to bring purpose, meaning, and happiness into your life, and it’s up to you to figure out what that looks like for you, because what works for me may not necessarily work for you.

If you had hoped or expected to be married by your mid-30s (like me), your late 30s into your early to mid 40s can be rough, I understand. But you can make peace with your protracted, unwanted single status, and by your mid to late 40s, you can adjust to being okay with being single.

Notice that this article says that Perry was engaged to be married a time or two, but the women he was engaged to broke things off, so he died at age 54 with never having been married.

A lot of the erroneous teachings I see about single adults by Christians frequently overlooks adults who are “single by circumstance.”

Many Christians are total idiots on this topic, and their faulty thinking seems to be if you desire marriage, then God will see to it that you get a spouse (God will send someone to you), but, if you’re still single into your 30s and older, God determined for you to be single, so they think you have a “gifting of” or a “calling to” singleness.

There is no acknowledgement in this faulty worldview and wrong theology for adults like me who desired marriage, but we never met compatible mates, we remain single – and we’re surprised by our own singleness. Again, I had fully expected to be married by my mid-30s at the latest. I sure wasn’t expecting to be still not-married into my 50s.

A lot of rhetoric Christians use for singleness, or how they interpret it, such as “singleness is a gift” or “it’s a calling” are in error.

God does not sit about in Heaven picking and choosing who will marry, and then choose a spouse for them, and send them a spouse, if that person is in the “God decided that this person should marry” group.

In referring to marriage and singleness as being gifts, the Bible is not saying God foreordained who would marry and who would not. The Bible is simply saying BOTH states, marriage AND singleness, have their benefits.

A lot of Christians wrongly assume if you want to be married, it will happen, or if it does not, you never wanted to get married. Many Christians think that God will always send a husband to any and every Christian woman who desires marriage, and that is not true.

Many of them also have other false beliefs about older singles, such as, all older singles lack a libido, because God removed it, because God supposedly “gifted” the person with singleness. This is not the case.

I had wanted to be married, I have a normal libido, but I remain chaste – God, if He exists – did not supernaturally remove my libido.

God did not remove my desire for marriage (though, these days, as I am so accustomed to being single, it doesn’t bother me so much; I am still open to the idea of marriage, but I’m not as keen on it as I was when younger.

Marriage, for me, has lost some of its appeal or luster, just with having gained life experience, age, and perspective – also, seeing the daily or weekly news reports of married men who murder their wives also takes some of the allure of marriage away).

But I would hate for any of the marriage-worshipping secular or Christian conservatives out there to use headlines like this one from Daily Mail to try to scare or shame singles into marriage, by saying, “See, see! This actor was never married when he died at age 54, and this article say she was LONELY!!! You will live your life in misery if you don’t marry by the time you’re 30!”

That is also wrong rhetoric, because wanting to be married does not mean a person can or will get married. I had wanted to be married by my late 20s or mid 30s at the latest, but I never met the right guy. I was engaged years ago but dumped the man I was engaged to.

Most of the churches I went to did not have single men my age, and the ones who did, the single men were weird, and I would’ve felt uncomfortable dating them. The dating sites I tried in my mid to late 30s were filled with perverts and weirdos, even including the men who identified as Christian.

Wanting something does not mean you will ever get the thing you want.

As Jesus taught, and as the New Testament reveals, believers in Jesus are supposed to act as family for widows, orphans, the divorced, and never married adults. Christians and churches have utterly failed at meeting the companionship needs of single adults, however, because they have turned Marriage, Parenthood, and The Nuclear Family into idols that they prioritize above even Jesus Himself.

A guy like Matthew Perry, if he was in fact lonely or upset at being single, should have been able to find fellowship and friendship among any and all types of Christians and in a church. But this is not possible, because most churches ignore single adults (when they’re not insulting them for being single).

Most Christians treat unmarried men as though they are pedophiles, so they keep them at arm’s distance. Most Christians practice the insipid, sexist “Billy Graham Rule,” so that unmarried women are all treated like potential threats and therefore kept socially isolated.

Single adults should be able to find friendship and companionship among Christians if they need or want companionship, but they can’t – because singles are either ignored in churches or isolated because they’re regarded as weirdos or sexual threats by Christians.

(Link): Matthew Perry died lonely and longing for a wife and a family, with late Friends star even keen to have stepchildren – because of his close bond with his own stepfather –  Dateline host Keith Morrison

by Hazel Jones
October 30, 2023

Matthew Perry was lonely and longing for a wife and a family when he died, after a string of failed relationships left him feeling ‘sad and depressed,’ sources told DailyMail.com.

The Friends star, 54, was found dead on Saturday at his home in Los Angeles – and close sources say that Perry longed for stepchildren, thanks to his great relationship with his own stepdad Keith Morrison.

Perry never married and he ended his engagement to Molly Hurwitz, a talent manager, in 2021. He also dated several well-known actresses throughout his life, including Julia Roberts and Lizzy Caplan.

‘Matthew always dreamed of having the perfect family,’ a source close to the star told DailyMail.com. ‘He wanted a wife, and at least a couple of kids. And he said he wouldn’t even mind marrying a woman who already had kids.’

Would Jesus Shame Single Christian Women? [No, He Would Not] by G. Dalfonzo

Would Jesus Shame Single Christian Women? [No, He Would Not] by G. Dalfonzo

This single-shaming phenomenon (by Christians especially, and sometimes secular conservatives) seems to come in waves.

In the early 2000s, Southern Baptist seminary president Al Mohler began trash talking adult singleness and adult singles in radio shows and so forth, which prompted several adult, single Christians to write rebuttals of his views.

In the past couple of months, secular and religious conservatives have been shaming, insulting, and criticizing single, childless women for being single and childless – everyone from conservative and Catholic commentator Matt Walsh, to Jewish and conservative Ben Shapiro, to Christian pastor Eric Conn.

Furthermore, Christian author Lyman Stone, wrote an absolutely disgusting singles-shaming essay for “Christianity Today” last month, where he turned Motherhood into an Idol and advocates for “bedroom evangelization,” which is NOT taught in the  Bible. The Bible says the kingdom of God grows through sharing the Gospel, not through Christians marrying, having sex, and having “Christian” children.

Sorry Lutherans and other Protestants who are into “baby baptism” and so forth, but there is no “grace” conferred upon children merely for being born to Christian adults – those children grow up and eventually have to take responsibility each for their own behavior, beliefs, and choices, and either accept or reject Christ on their own.

Being born to Christian parents does not make a child “Christian.”

Some people raised to Christian parents later reject the Christian faith in their teen or adult years and become agnostic, atheist, or jettison the fundamentalism or evangelicalism of their parents to join another type of expression of the Christian faith.

The Bible teaches that the faith is grown by sharing the Gospel – not by having biological children.

(Link): Would Jesus Shame Single Christian Women?  by G. Dalfonzo

Excerpts:

Unlike some pastors today, he never suggested that the single and childless are selfish.

May 9, 2022

My friend Ruth Buchanan recounts in her recent book Socially Awkward: “I sat through a service in which the pastor characterized all single women in my current age bracket as those who, in their twenties and thirties, had not gotten married because we wanted to have fun, enjoy life, pursue careers, and ‘do our own thing’ – and in doing so, had turned our backs on God’s will for our lives, squandering our opportunities to marry and now reaping the fruit of our self-centered choices.”

As a single Christian, I could tell a few stories myself.

I’m thankful to have found a church with pastors and congregants who have gone out of their way to show support for me as a single woman. But I’ve also been on the receiving end of jokes, stereotypes, mean tweets, casual but stinging insults.

And even more common is the unintentional overlooking of singles’ needs, our situations, and our limitations: the scheduling of women’s Bible studies during work hours, for example, or conversations that consistently leave no room for any topic but families and parenting.

For readers of a Bible that goes out of its way to honor faithful single people – including its own central character! – or even to tell us that it is better to be single (1 Cor. 7:7), we single Christians seem to spend a lot of time reminding our churches that we are also part of the body of Christ. This can be exhausting and demoralizing. For some, it’s too exhausting and demoralizing to endure.