What is the point of romantic partnerships? This is the sort of grand and existential question I’ve found myself pondering lately. Fitting, because I first seriously considered it 10 years ago, when I was 25. My mum had just told my dad that she wanted to separate. They had been married for almost 30 years.
After a few weeks of manic hoovering, even when everything was clean, my mother had a mid-life metamorphosis: she started going out, made new friends and her career went from strength to strength. To some of her peers, the end of a long partnership might have looked like a life fallen apart. What I saw, instead, was the relief of a person who had spent decades trying to hold the pieces of a conventional family – a husband, a home – together, before realising she didn’t want to grip so tightly any more. That relief converted into something I’d never really seen my mum express before: happiness. A growing number of studies are telling us the same thing: unmarried and childless women are the happiest subgroup in the population. They are more likely to live longer than their married and child-bearing peers. They are also more satisfied with being unpartnered than single men.
There are caveats, of course. Being unpartnered is generally easier for women who earn enough to financially support themselves and any dependents they might have. Economic power brings social freedoms. Nonetheless, broadly speaking, in a relatively small window of history, women’s aspirations have expanded beyond the domestic pursuits of finding a husband and starting a family because the options available to us have expanded rapidly, too.
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Just over a century ago, married women were still considered the property of men and few girls were educated beyond the age of 16. Today, more women attend university in Britain than men. There is a gender pay gap, but data shows us that women now earn more than men on average in their twenties before they take timeout to have children. Women are choosing to get married later than ever before (35.8 years old on average, according to the Office for National Statistics) and, if they do have children, they’re waiting until the age of 30.7 years old, a record high since the 1970s.
Female social and economic liberation means that, for women who earn enough, finding a partner no longer has to be a question of need; it becomes one of desire. Advances around sperm donation and IVF also mean that, anecdotally at least, I am hearing from more and more women of reasonable financial means who do not consider parenting alone to be the worst thing that could happen to them. Indeed, quite the contrary; they think ending up in the wrong relationship would be.
As Amy, a single woman in her late thirties who works in tech, earns almost six figures and lives in London, puts it: ‘Having built up my self-worth and respect, I’ve been able to pull the plug on multiple relationships that weren’t working. I always know that means I’ll be single again, but I’m OK with that... I’m not afraid to be alone, whether there’s a child involved or not.’This shift can be seen in the culture we’re consuming, too. Contemporary novels, TV and film are now reflecting something else entirely back to us: thoughtful depictions of women who are choosing to be unpartnered and delaying marriage and motherhood – if they opt into it at all.
At the end of Sally Rooney’s Normal People, Marianne and Connell do not end up together. There is no neat tying up of the messy threads that make a life but, instead, the chance for both of Rooney’s protagonists to go their separate ways and become the people they are supposed to be. Separately. In Greta Gerwig’s box-office record-breaker, Barbie, Barbie chooses to leave everything she knows in Barbieland, including her preordained and perfect partner Ken, to embark on mortal life. Alone. And, in Dolly Alderton’s new novel Good Material, a confused ex-boyfriend struggles to understand why his girlfriend has broken up with him, only to realise that she is telling the truth when she says she isn’t sure whether or not she wants to be in a relationship at all.
This brave new era has created an opportunity for a reassessment of what romantic partnerships and heterosexual relationships look like; of what purpose they serve. Romantic ideas of heteronormative, loving partnerships are enduring in their appeal. Their origins might come from the medieval courts of the 12th century, where knights came in to save the day – and often women’s lives, too – but these stories have been repackaged throughout time, in Disney myths and countless romantic comedies. The formula is the same: neat, happy endings in a world where life, so often, throws us nothing but curveballs.
The romantic legend that love can ‘save the day’ persists (not just for cisgender and heterosexual people but for everyone, regardless of their gender and sexuality), but it seems that more and more women are questioning where the reality starts after the fantasy of early dating ends.
Mila, 33, who works in advertising and earns just over £100,000a year, says that, while the dream of finding ‘the one’ still appeals to her, she thinks it’s ‘much harder to find’ for adult women who have lived a bit. ‘I just don’t go for the men I went for in my twenties,’ she says. ‘Being financially stable also means that I have the independence to walk away at any point. I no longer buy in to the narrative I grew up with: that men are the sole breadwinners and women are therefore subordinate. I stayed in a toxic relationship for too long in my twenties, because I couldn’t afford to move out. I don’t ever want to be in that position again.’
There is a new fantasy, and it is one of freedom. For the first time in history, it can become a reality for a growing number of women who have the financial means to pursue it: the share of women who earn more than their male partners reached a record high of 30.6% in 2021, up from 15.9% in 1981. And, as society changes, it feels like the stigma and shame surrounding being unpartnered is (slowly, slowly) starting to wane. It’s also evident in the figures around marriage, which is now in decline in the UK:the latest British census data confirms that, compared with 1991, adults in 2021 were 44% more likely to have never been married. French sociologist Eva Illouz has been studying romantic love for two decades. She believes, based on interviews with hundreds of individuals across the world, that the scales are falling from people’s eyes (particularly women’s) when it comes to the fantasy of romantic love and partnership. In her new book The End of Love, she remarks that marriage once symbolised the beginning of adult life. From the industrial revolution onwards, it was the moment at which a young person left their family home, had sex for the first time and started their own family. Now, for a growing number of young adults, it marks the end of an era of freedom, which, though it may also be the start of new, loving commitments, will mean taking the needs of another person– or potentially several – into account. ‘While pre-modern courtship started with emotions and ended with sex that could produce guilt and anxiety,’ she writes, ‘contemporary relationships start with (pleasurable) sex and must grapple with the anxious task of generating emotions.’
Adding to the shifts taking place with marriage and motherhood, the latest census also shows us that a growing number of women identify as bisexual or lesbian; I’m one of them. This could be because there is less stigma surrounding being openly gay today and it could be because more women are choosing to explore queer relationships. Either way, it signals a questioning of heteronormative love, which has, for so long, been dominant in both society and mainstream culture. More prevalent queerness, combined with the fact that those women who do marry men do it later on in life, means that we have something our mothers and grandmothers may not have had:independent adult years to have multiple relationships, to focus on our careers and friendships and, perhaps most importantly, to ‘find’ ourselves before we find a long-term partner. This, co-opted as it has been by the tongue-in-cheek ‘Eat, Pray, Love era’ hashtag on Instagram and TikTok, is significant. Where most women once grew up and met themselves in the context of a relationship – asa wife and mother – they now have the opportunity to do it in multiple relationships, locations and scenarios across the world.
For my own part, at the age of 35, I am unpartnered and, after ending a relationship with a man that lasted for nearly nine year sat the age of 31, am currently unsure that the old ways of entering into a romantic partnership – love-drunk and hopped up on blind faith – will work for me again, regardless of who I meet or how much I like them. Far from being lonely without a partner, as I feared in the darker moments following what I now call my ‘millennial divorce’ (when you separate from a long-term partner with whom you share a mortgage or a rental lease but were not married to), my world has expanded professionally and personally in ways that I didn’t know were possible before.
Illouz thinks there is something else going on, too. Just as the notion of romantic love was co-opted as an idea from the medieval period onwards to encourage people to get into relationships, it has since been absorbed by capitalist corporations who have used it to sell us things, from champagne to huge diamond engagement rings. ‘Capitalism has hijacked sexual freedom,’ Ilouz writes and, in doing so, created a market where romantic love can be commodified and quantified, which makes it more about consumerism than it does about commitment.
Today, with more women being single or unmarried for longer, the number of first dates, and of candlelit dinners eaten, in adult life will likely be far higher than those the women of previous generations had during their pre-marital courtships. This means that the novelty wears off and the signifiers of romance that have emerged in the past century start to look less like the foundation of a healthy partnership and more like the (albeit fun) fantasy bit that comes before the real relationship.It feels as though there is at once a reckoning about romantic love – how it ought to work, look and what it ought to mean –taking place and, that at the same time, the cottage industries surrounding romantic love have gone into overdrive: Instagram is full of engagement posts, elaborate and expensive wedding dresses and images of couples on romantic mini-breaks. None of these will guarantee a successful partnership, no matter how much money you spend on them. So, at a time when a growing number of young adults can’t afford safe and secure housing in Britain, is it any wonder that marriage and the costly weddings that come with them are in decline?
In the years since the #MeToo movement finally took conversations about rape and sexual assault mainstream, how could there not be a recalibration of what it means to be a woman who has relationships with men? Once the illusion of romantic love is shattered by reality, it becomes less aspirational than the basic building blocks of partnership: good communication, emotional support and respect.
According to British academic Katherine Angel, author of Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again, a book that interrogates sexual relationships between men and women post-#MeToo, we are, asa society, ‘in a very complex moment’ as women reckon with the question of what a sexual or emotional relationship with a man needs to involve. ‘It’s still undoubtedly the case that men retain a large share of economic, social, and political power. This means the odds are still stacked against women in many ways, particularly when it comes to the risk of sexual violence,’ Angel says. ‘However, the unsteady and volatile phenomenon that was #MeToo revealed something really crucial: that when injustices reign, alternative ways of seeking justice can be just as fraught.’
Something Mila said has stayed with me: ‘I’ve found myself in my worst mental state when I was in relationships, so I don’t necessarily think that marriage or romantic relationships can solve problems. They are not the be all and end all... I’d love one day to have a family and be married but, equally, I’d raise children on my own with the support of my sisters, friends and wider family. I prioritise my mental health and the non-romantic connections I have above all else.’
We need new stories to help us envision the future of romantic partnership and think beyond the plan for marriage and children that is imprinted on so many women from a young age. More and more single adult women have new possibilities: they can choose to find a partner when they’re ready, if they want, and, perhaps, as the work of Rooney, Gerwig and Alderton depicts, the real romance is to be found in the precious years spent on that journey and the happiness, freedom and sense of self that can be found along the way.
This article was originally published in the November issue of ELLE.
