As Valentine's day approaches and married people take a moment to express their boundless and eternal love for their spouse by buying chocolates made in faraway China a romantically long time ago, they tend to take pity on single folk. They imagine a vast tribe of female lonely hearts roaming an emotional Sahara, confounded by mirages that look like marriage-minded men. But according to what may be the biggest study of single people ever, that image is, like the enthusiasm for the chocolate, quite false.
Single men are, on the whole, as likely to want to get married as single women, the survey found. They are more likely than women to be open to dating people of a different race or religion, more prone to falling in love at first sight, more eager to combine bank accounts sooner and more likely to want children. (That distant choking sound you hear is thousands of women finding this news hard to swallow.)
The study--of 5,200 people ages 21 to over 65 who weren't married, engaged or in a serious relationship--was funded by Match.com which has a vested interest in understanding the partnerless. But it was carried out by an independent company in conjunction with Rutgers University anthropologist Helen Fisher, social historian Stephanie Coontz and the evolutionary-studies program at Binghamton University. (Evolutionists are all over mate selection, which is the academic term for dating, because those who successfully pair up and procreate send their DNA into the next generation. Think of it as survival of the flirtiest.)
Their findings put the lie to the impression that all guys are Seth Rogen--esque commitmentphobes who regard the dating scene as a kind of all-you-can-meet buffet for their enjoyment. "This study confirms what my research on the brain shows," says Fisher. "The mechanisms for attachment for men and women are exactly the same. Just as many men want to get married as women do."
But the figures need to be parsed carefully. While overall, as many men as women wanted to marry, age played a big role in their preferences. Younger (ages 21 to 24) and older men (50 and up) were more favorably disposed to legal lifetime unions than their female peers. In the between years--the decades when women must pay heed to a uterine deadline--the ratios shift the other way.
Men's greater inclination toward parenthood, however, seems to hold across every age group. While more than half the single men ages 21 to 35 wanted kids, only 46% of the women did. After that, the difference widens further, and not just out of biological reality. Only 16% of childless women in the still fertile years from 35 to 44 wanted kids; 27% of the men did. Plus, more women than men were prepared to say definitively that they were skipping parenthood.
"Women are much more interested in their independence than men are," says Fisher. They value certain parts of their single lives more than men do: according to the survey, women are likelier to want to have their own bank accounts, their own interests, their own personal space and solo vacations, even if they're in a committed relationship. They also care more about nights out with buddies.