Free All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation by Rebecca Traister

about men, that if I hadn’t married by the time I was twenty-eight, I would decamp for less urban climes. “You don’t want to be one of those women,” she’d say darkly. “The ones who stay after it stops being fun.”
    Ten years later, into my thirties and still having fun, I had dinner with a friend who’d lived in New York, but dispatched for New Orleansin her mid-thirties, where she’d promptly fallen in love. “As soon as you cross to the other side of the Hudson,” she’d told me, “you’ll meet a man.” More recently, while chatting with a group of women about the difficulty, especially for successful black women, of meeting a man in New York, MSNBC host and political scientist Melissa Harris-Perry cracked: “Just go stand in a mall in North Carolina.” Worried that that her remark had sounded glib, Harris-Perry later elaborated: “When I say if you stand in a mall you can get a husband, I’m not saying it’s a good husband or one you’d want to marry.” She added, even more seriously, that what she meant to convey was her sense that, “in my experience, marriage is an expectation and a desire of young adulthood for both men and women in the South. Men are actually wanting and expecting to marry and seeing marriage as a sign of full achieved adult manhood.”
    Precisely. And if the reluctance of most women to go stand in the mall but, instead, to tough it out (or live it up) in largely single cities tells us one thing, it’s perhaps that these women are not really living their lives to find husbands who make such firm connections between marriage and adulthood.
    Journalist Jen Doll wrote in The Village Voice , in a very fine piece about the varied pleasures of being single in New York City: “That, to a large extent, is why we live here. It’s not because we wanted to settle down with the patient and reliable plod-along schmo, and have babies and live in a three-bedroom house with a two-car garage where we peaceably grill in the summer and make casseroles in winter until we die. It’s not because we wanted our lives charted out before we lived them.”
    Doll’s view was one that the journalist Juliet Wilbor Tompkins had scoffed off a century before, in an essay called, “Why Women Don’t Marry,” in which she wrote of young single women: “They are very happy. . . . with their battle cry of freedom! To their ignorance, life offers an enchanting array of possibilities. They see ahead of them a dozen paths and have but contemptuous pity for the woman of the past who knew but one dull highway.”
    Whether Tompkins was correct about the contemptuous pity, what’s true today, especially in light of more contemporary possibilities, is that that one dull highway is simply not for everyone. To that end, cities permita degree of self-selection; they siphon from the nonurban dating pool many of those who might rather be working or playing or sleeping with someone else. Perhaps the distractible and sexually voracious actually shouldn’t be committing to the people they’d rather be doing something else than committing to, and cities offer a place for them to live and thrive.
    When we cast, as we so often do, the choice not to permanently partner as a failure or as a tragedy, we assume partnership as a norm to which everyone should or must aspire. But cities allow those who might have made restless, dissatisfied, always hungry-for-something-else mates who caused their partners unhappiness to exit the marriage highway, veering instead onto paths that take them to places that they’d rather be.
    It’s not such a bad thing to always have something to do, someone to meet, work to complete, trains to catch, beers to drink, marathons to run, classes to attend. By the time some women find someone to whom they’d like to commit and who’d like to commit to them,