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From the get-go, women are fussier about whom they'll consider for a partner. More men (80%) than women (71%) don't care about the race of a love interest, and many more men (83%) than women (62%) are flexible on their date's religious beliefs. It's not simply, the figures suggest, that guys are more pro-marriage than has been believed; it's that women are less so than the stereotypes would have it.
Despite the size of the sample and the big names attached to the study, not everybody deems plausible the idea that men are slavering to become husbands. Mark Regnerus, a sociologist at the University of Texas at Austin, points to figures from the 2002 National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health that show the opposite. When asked if they would like to be married, more single women ages 21 to 24 said yes than men. "Maybe this is a brave new world, but I'd be surprised if things had changed that fast," says Regnerus, a co-author of Premarital Sex in America, which explores how young people's attitudes toward sex affect their inclination to marry. But he concurs that women's enthusiasm for marriage has faded in the light of their growing economic independence. "For them more than men, marriage has to be good or it's not worth trading their newfound independence for."
Then again, acquiring a spouse is not the must-do item it once was on either sex's checklist. The Match.com study echoes other recent research that finds an increasing number of single people of both genders opting to skip marriage or at least being uncertain of its merits. Some of them could be putting up a brave front or have yet to be thwacked sufficiently by Cupid's arrow, because most Americans do eventually get married. However, there are now more than 100 million single people in the U.S.; households headed by married couples are in the minority.
It just may be that single people like being single. "We're still carting around the concept that they're workaholics or desperate or can't get on with anyone," says Fisher. "The reality is that many of them may be choosing this lifestyle."
Even if it means skipping the chocolates.