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Retrieved April 23, 2008. New members are offered a seven-day fee trial of 5 minutes. On January 24, 2009, its ninth charting week, it moved to its peak spot at number two, and was subsequently certified double-platinum by the CRIA for sales of over 160,000 copies.

Beyoncé's marriage inspired Nash to compose a song about an issue that affected many people's relationships: the fear or unwillingness of men to commit. Retrieved December 14, 2011. It reached the top 10 in the Netherlands, Italy and Spain, and the top 40 in both Belgian territories Flanders and Wallonia , as well as in Hungary, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland.

All The Single Ladies Song Mp3 Download

I n 2001, when I was 28, I broke up with my boyfriend. Allan and I had been together for three years, and there was no good reason to end things. He was and remains an exceptional person, intelligent, good-looking, loyal, kind. My friends, many of whom were married or in marriage-track relationships, were bewildered. The period that followed was awful. I barely ate for sobbing all the time. Learning to be alone would make me a better person, and eventually a better partner. On bad days, I feared I would be alone forever. Had I made the biggest mistake of my life? Also see: Earlier this year, women became the majority of the workforce for the first time in U. A report on the unprecedented role reversal now under way—and its vast cultural consequences. By Hanna Rosin Though career counselors and wishful thinkers may say otherwise, women who put off trying to have children until their mid-thirties risk losing out on motherhood altogether. The case for settling for Mr. By Lori Gottlieb Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, the author of Why There Are No Good Men Left, on the challenges facing today's single women The author is ending her marriage. Isn't it time you did the same? By Sandra Tsing Loh Marriage used to provide access to sex. Now it provides access to celibacy. Their need is greater, and their condition really deplorable. It comes near to being a disgrace not to be married at all. At this point, certainly, falling in love and getting married may be less a matter of choice than a stroke of wild great luck. This unfettered future was the promise of my time and place. That we would marry, and that there would always be men we wanted to marry, we took on faith. How could we not? Men were our classmates and colleagues, our bosses and professors, as well as, in time, our students and employees and subordinates—an entire universe of prospective friends, boyfriends, friends with benefits, and even ex-boyfriends-turned-friends. In this brave new world, boundaries were fluid, and roles constantly changing. Allan and I had met when we worked together at a magazine in Boston full disclosure: this one , where I was an assistant and he an editor; two years later, he quit his job to follow me to New York so that I could go to graduate school and he could focus on his writing. After the worst of our breakup, we eventually found our way to a friendship so deep and sustaining that several years ago, when he got engaged, his fiancée suggested that I help him buy his wedding suit. In 1969, when my 25-year-old mother, a college-educated high-school teacher, married a handsome lawyer-to-be, most women her age were doing more or less the same thing. By the time she was in her mid-30s, she was raising two small children and struggling to find a satisfying career. Could she have even envisioned herself on a shopping excursion with an ex-lover, never mind one who was getting married while she remained alone? What my mother could envision was a future in which I made my own choices. I n the 1990s, Stephanie Coontz, a social historian at Evergreen State College in Washington, noticed an uptick in questions from reporters and audiences asking if the institution of marriage was falling apart. She decided to write a book discrediting the notion and proving that the ways in which we think about and construct the legal union between a man and a woman have always been in flux. In her fascinating Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage, she surveys 5,000 years of human habits, from our days as hunters and gatherers up until the present, showing our social arrangements to be more complex and varied than could ever seem possible. For thousands of years, marriage had been a primarily economic and political contract between two people, negotiated and policed by their families, church, and community. This held true for all classes. Two-income families were the norm. Not until the 18th century did labor begin to be divided along a sharp line: wage-earning for the men and unpaid maintenance of household and children for the women. But as labor became separated, so did our spheres of experience—the marketplace versus the home—one founded on reason and action, the other on compassion and comfort. Not until the post-war gains of the 1950s, however, were a majority of American families able to actually afford living off a single breadwinner. All of this was intriguing, for sure—but even more surprising to Coontz was the realization that those alarmed reporters and audiences might be onto something. Last summer I called Coontz to talk to her about this revolution. When it comes to what people actually want and expect from marriage and relationships, and how they organize their sexual and romantic lives, all the old ways have broken down. In 1960, the median age of first marriage in the U. Today, a smaller proportion of American women in their early 30s are married than at any other point since the 1950s, if not earlier. Compare that with 1960, when more than half of those ages 18 to 29 had already tied the knot. These numbers reflect major attitudinal shifts. According to the Pew Research Center, a full 44 percent of Millennials and 43 percent of Gen Xers think that marriage is becoming obsolete. Biological parenthood in a nuclear family need not be the be-all and end-all of womanhood—and in fact it increasingly is not. Today 40 percent of children are born to single mothers. Even as single motherhood is no longer a disgrace, motherhood itself is no longer compulsory. Since 1976, the percentage of women in their early 40s who have not given birth has nearly doubled. A childless single woman of a certain age is no longer automatically perceived as a barren spinster. Like me, for instance. Do I want children? But somewhere along the way, I decided to not let my biology dictate my romantic life. Do I realize that this further narrows my pool of prospects? Just as I am fully aware that with each passing year, I become less attractive to the men in my peer group, who have plenty of younger, more fertile women to pick from. But what can I possibly do about that? Sure, my stance here could be read as a feint, or even self-deception. Over the past half century, women have steadily gained on—and are in some ways surpassing—men in education and employment. A 2010 study of single, childless urban workers between the ages of 22 and 30 found that the women actually earned 8 percent more than the men. Women are also more likely than men to go to college: in 2010, 55 percent of all college graduates ages 25 to 29 were female. B y themselves, the cultural and technological advances that have made my stance on childbearing plausible would be enough to reshape our understanding of the modern family—but, unfortunately, they happen to be dovetailing with another set of developments that can be summed up as: the deterioration of the male condition. As of last year, women held 51. No one has been hurt more by the arrival of the post-industrial economy than the stubbornly large pool of men without higher education. An analysis by Michael Greenstone, an economist at MIT, reveals that, after accounting for inflation, male median wages have fallen by 32 percent since their peak in 1973, once you account for the men who have stopped working altogether. The Great Recession accelerated this imbalance. Nearly three-quarters of the 7. The implications are extraordinary. As Maureen Dowd memorably put it in her 2005 book, Are Men Necessary? Then there are those women who choose to forgo men altogether. But while the rise of women has been good for everyone, the decline of males has obviously been bad news for men—and bad news for marriage. So women are now contending with what we might call the new scarcity. What does this portend for the future of the American family? Take the years after the Civil War, when America reeled from the loss of close to 620,000 men, the majority of them from the South. An article published last year in The Journal of Southern History reported that in 1860, there were 104 marriageable white men for every 100 white women; in 1870, that number dropped to 87. Will I marry a man much older, or much younger? Will I remain alone, a spinster? Diaries and letters from the period reveal a populace fraught with insecurity. As casualties mounted, expectations dropped, and women resigned themselves to lives without husbands, or simply lowered their standards. The anxious climate, however, as well as the extremely high levels of widowhood—nearly one-third of Southern white women over the age of 40 were widows in 1880—persisted. Or take 1940s Russia, which lost some 20 million men and 7 million women to World War II. In order to replenish the population, the state instituted an aggressive pro-natalist policy to support single mothers. Mie Nakachi, a historian at Hokkaido University, in Japan, has outlined its components: mothers were given generous subsidies and often put up in special sanatoria during pregnancy and childbirth; the state day-care system expanded to cover most children from infancy; and penalties were brandished for anyone who perpetuated the stigma against conceiving out of wedlock. This family pattern was felt for decades after the war. I n their 1983 book, Too Many Women? How this plays out, however, varies drastically between genders. Rates of illegitimacy and divorce are low. One might hope that in low-sex-ratio societies—where women outnumber men—women would have the social and sexual advantage. In societies with too many women, the theory holds, fewer people marry, and those who do marry do so later in life. In 1988, the sociologists Scott J. South and Katherine Trent set out to test the Guttentag-Secord theory by analyzing data from 117 countries. Most aspects of the theory tested out. In each country, more men meant more married women, less divorce, and fewer women in the workforce. South and Trent also found that the Guttentag-Secord dynamics were more pronounced in developed rather than developing countries. In other words—capitalist men are pigs. Also see: The revival of blatant sexism in American culture has many progressive thinkers flummoxed. By David Brooks Down the ladder from Playboy to Maxim. And yet, as a woman who spent her early 30s actively putting off marriage, I have had ample time to investigate, if you will, the prevailing attitudes of the high-status American urban male. My spotty anecdotal findings have revealed that, yes, in many cases, the more successful a man is or thinks he is , the less interested he is in commitment. Take the high-powered magazine editor who declared on our first date that he was going to spend his 30s playing the field. Or the novelist who, after a month of hanging out, said he had to get back out there and tomcat around, but asked if we could keep having sex anyhow, or at least just one last time. Are you The One? Like zealous lepidopterists, they swoop down with their butterfly nets, fingers aimed for the thorax, certain that just because they are ready for marriage and children, I must be, too. But the non-committers are out there in growing force. I n August I traveled to Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania, a small, predominantly African American borough on the eastern edge of Pittsburgh. I was there to spend the afternoon with Denean, a 34-year-old nurse who was living in one such house with three of her four children the eldest is 19 and lived across town and, these days, a teenage niece. Denean is pretty and slender, with a wry, deadpan humor. For 10 years she worked for a health-care company, but she was laid off in January. She is twice divorced; no two of her children share a father. An astonishing 70 percent of black women are unmarried, and they are more than twice as likely as white women to remain that way. Across all income levels, black men have dropped far behind black women professionally and educationally; women with college degrees outnumber men 2-to-1. In August, the unemployment rate among black men age 20 or older exceeded 17 percent. In his book, Is Marriage for White People? In 1950, 64 percent of African American women were married—roughly the same percentage as white women. In 1965, when Moynihan wrote with such concern about the African American family, fewer than 25 percent of black children were born out of wedlock; in 2011, considerably more than 25 percent of white children are. This erosion of traditional marriage and family structure has played out most dramatically among low-income groups, both black and white. According to the sociologist William Julius Wilson, inner-city black men struggled badly in the 1970s, as manufacturing plants shut down or moved to distant suburbs. These men naturally resented their downward mobility, and had trouble making the switch to service jobs requiring a very different style of self-presentation. The joblessness and economic insecurity that resulted created a host of problems, and made many men altogether unmarriable. Today, as manufacturing jobs disappear nationwide American manufacturing shed about a third of its jobs during the first decade of this century , the same phenomenon may be under way, but on a much larger scale. Just as the decline of marriage in the black underclass augured the decline of marriage in the white underclass, the decline of marriage in the black middle class has prefigured the decline of marriage in the white middle class. In the 1990s, the author Terry McMillan climbed the best-seller list and box-office charts with novels like Waiting to Exhale and How Stella Got Her Groove Back, which provided incisive glimpses of life and frustrated romance among middle-class black women, where the prospect of marrying a black man often seemed more or less hopeless. Is it any wonder marriage rates have fallen? Increasingly, this extends to the upper-middle class, too: early last year, a study by the Pew Research Center reported that professionally successful, college-educated women were confronted with a shrinking pool of like-minded marriage prospects. Increasingly, the new dating gap—where women are forced to choose between deadbeats and players—trumps all else, in all socioeconomic brackets. Also see: How girls reluctantly endure the hookup culture. By Caitlin Flanagan How nice girls got so casual about oral sex. By Caitlin Flanagan According to Robert H. If women greatly outnumber men, he says, social norms against casual sex will weaken. In 2010, The New York Times ran a much-discussed article chronicling this phenomenon. Last year, a former management consultant named Susan Walsh tried to dig a little deeper. She applied what economists call the Pareto principle—the idea that for many events, roughly 20 percent of the causes create 80 percent of the effects—to the college dating market, and concluded that only 20 percent of the men those considered to have the highest status are having 80 percent of the sex, with only 20 percent of the women those with the greatest sexual willingness ; the remaining 80 percent, male and female, sit out the hookup dance altogether. Surprisingly, a 2007 study commissioned by the Justice Department suggested that male virgins outnumber female virgins on campus. Of course, plenty of women are perfectly happy with casual, no-strings sex, but they are generally considered to be in the minority. I became aware of Walsh this past summer when I happened upon her blog, HookingUpSmart. A frumpy beige Web-site palette and pragmatic voice belie a refreshingly frank, at times even raunchy, dialogue; postings in the comments section can swell into the high hundreds—interestingly, the majority of them from men. In 2008, after the younger group had left home, Walsh started the blog so they could all continue the conversation. I came of age with hookup culture, but not of it, having continued through college my high-school habit of serial long-term relationships, and I wanted to hear from the front lines. What would these sexual buccaneers be like? When Walsh opened the door, I could immediately see why young women find her so easy to talk to; her brunette bob frames bright green eyes and a warm, easy smile. But now every woman who is a six and above wants the hottest guy on campus, and she can have him—for one night. It appears that the erotic promises of the 1960s sexual revolution have run aground on the shoals of changing sex ratios, where young women and men come together in fumbling, drunken couplings fueled less by lust than by a vague sense of social conformity. Or is it that pornography endows the inexperienced with a toolbox of socially sanctioned postures and tricks, ensuring that one can engage in what amounts to a public exchange according to a pre-approved script? Most striking to me was the innocence of these young women. Does that freak you out? Is there an expiration date on the fun, running-around period of being single captured so well by movies and television? I am getting old. But now that 35 had come and gone, and with yet another relationship up in flames, all bets were off. It might never happen. Or maybe not until 42. Or 70, for that matter. Was that so bad? Perhaps I could actually get down to the business of what it means to be a real single woman. The numbers are striking: The Census Bureau has reported that in 2010, the proportion of married households in America dropped to a record low of 48 percent. Fifty percent of the adult population is single compared with 33 percent in 1950 —and that portion is very likely to keep growing, given the variety of factors that contribute to it. The median age for getting married has been rising, and for those who are affluent and educated, that number climbs even higher. Indeed, Stephanie Coontz told me that an educated white woman of 40 is more than twice as likely to marry in the next decade as a less educated woman of the same age. Last year, nearly twice as many single women bought homes as did single men. And yet, what are our ideas about single people? Perverted misanthropes, crazy cat ladies, dating-obsessed shoe shoppers, etc. Some of them are widows. Some of them are divorced and between connections, some of them are odd, loners who prefer to keep their habits undisturbed. Famous Bolick family story: When I was a little girl, my mother and I went for a walk and ran into her friend Regina. They talked for a few minutes, caught up. How could that be? Thus began my lifelong fascination with the idea of the single woman. There was my second-grade teacher, Mrs. Connors, who was, I believe, a former nun, or seemed like one. There was the director of my middle-school gifted-and-talented program, who struck me as wonderfully remote and original. Was she a lesbian? There was a college poetry professor, a brilliant single woman in her 40s who had never been married, rather glamorously, I thought. Once, I told her I wanted to be just like her. Back when I believed my mother had a happy marriage—and she did for quite a long time, really—she surprised me by confiding that one of the most blissful moments of her life had been when she was 21, driving down the highway in her VW Beetle, with nowhere to go except wherever she wanted to be. When I embarked on my own sojourn as a single woman in New York City—talk about a timeworn cliché! I was seeking something more vague and, in my mind, more noble, having to do with finding my own way, and independence. And I found all that. Early on, I sometimes ached, watching so many friends pair off—and without a doubt there has been loneliness. Once, when my father consoled me, with the best of intentions, for being so unlucky in love, I bristled. All of which is to say that the single woman is very rarely seen for who she is—whatever that might be—by others, or even by the single woman herself, so thoroughly do most of us internalize the stigmas that surround our status. In 2005, she coined the word singlism, in an article she published in Psychological Inquiry. Over lunch at a seafood restaurant, she discussed how the cultural fixation on the couple blinds us to the full web of relationships that sustain us on a daily basis. To ignore the depth and complexities of these networks is to limit the full range of our emotional experiences. I have always been very close with my family, but welcoming my nieces into the world has reminded me anew of what a gift it is to care deeply, even helplessly, about another. There are many ways to know love in this world. This is not to question romantic love itself. Rather, we could stand to examine the ways in which we think about love; and the changing face of marriage is giving us a chance to do this. That we want is enduring; what we want changes as culture does. O ur cultural fixation on the couple is actually a relatively recent development. Children were raised collaboratively. As a result, women and men were sexually and socially more or less equals; divorce or its institution-of-marriage-preceding equivalent was common. It was in our personal and collective best interest that the marriage remain intact if we wanted to keep the farm afloat. Even servants and apprentices shared the family table, and sometimes slept in the same room with the couple who headed the household, Coontz notes. Until the mid-19th century, the word love was used to describe neighborly and familial feelings more often than to describe those felt toward a mate, and same-sex friendships were conducted with what we moderns would consider a romantic intensity. When honeymoons first started, in the 19th century, the newlyweds brought friends and family along for the fun. But as the 19th century progressed, and especially with the sexualization of marriage in the early 20th century, these older social ties were drastically devalued in order to strengthen the bond between the husband and wife—with contradictory results. But by overloading marriage with more demands than any one individual can possibly meet, we unduly strain it, and have fewer emotional systems to fall back on if the marriage falters. In 2006, the sociologists Naomi Gerstel and Natalia Sarkisian published a paper concluding that unlike singles, married couples spend less time keeping in touch with and visiting their friends and extended family, and are less likely to provide them with emotional and practical support. And yet we continue to rank this arrangement above all else! Dalton Conley, the dean for the social sciences at New York University, recently analyzed data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and found a 40 percent increase, between 1986 and 2003, in men who are shorter than their wives. Most research confirms casual observation: when it comes to judging a prospective mate on the basis of looks, women are the more lenient gender. Perhaps true to conservative fears, the rise of gay marriage has helped heterosexuals think more creatively about their own conventions. Gay men have traditionally had a more permissive attitude toward infidelity; how will this influence the straight world? Coontz points out that two of the hallmarks of contemporary marriage are demands for monogamy on an equal basis, and candor. Or understand that flings happen? In her new book, Unhitched, Judith Stacey, a sociologist at NYU, surveys a variety of unconventional arrangements, from gay parenthood to polygamy to—in a mesmerizing case study—the Mosuo people of southwest China, who eschew marriage and visit their lovers only under cover of night. Sexual relations are kept separate from family. At night, a Mosuo woman invites her lover to visit her babahuago flower room ; the assignation is called sese walking. She can take another lover that night, or a different one the next, or sleep every single night with the same man for the rest of her life—there are no expectations or rules. Every goodbye is taken to be the end of the açia relationship, even if it resumes the following night. America has a rich history of its own sexually alternative utopias, from the 19th-century Oneida Community which encouraged postmenopausal women to introduce teenage males to sex to the celibate Shakers, but real change can seldom take hold when economic forces remain static. I n the months leading to my breakup with Allan, my problem, as I saw it, lay in wanting two incompatible states of being—autonomy and intimacy—and this struck me as selfish and juvenile; part of growing up, I knew, was making trade-offs. Susan Glaspell, Neith Boyce, Edna St. Vincent Millay—they investigated the limits and possibilities of intimacy with a naive audacity, and a touching decorum, that I found familiar and comforting. I am not a bold person. To read their essays and poems was to perform a shy ideological striptease to the sweetly insistent warble of a gramophone. That underprivileged communities are often forced into matrilineal arrangements in the absence of reliable males has been well documented by the University of Virginia sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox, among others , and I am not in any way romanticizing these circumstances. Evidence suggests that American children who grow up amidst the disorder that is common to single-parent homes tend to struggle. But we would do well to study, and to endorse, alternative family arrangements that might provide strength and stability to children as they grow up. I am curious to know what could happen if these de facto female support systems of the sort I saw in Wilkinsburg were recognized as an adaptive response, even an evolutionary stage, that women could be proud to build and maintain. I definitely noticed an increase in my own contentment when I began to develop and pay more attention to friendships with women who, like me, have never been married. Their worldviews feel relaxingly familiar, and give me the space to sort through my own ambivalence. Indeed, my single friends housed me as I flew around the world to research this article; by the end, I had my own little unwritten monograph on the very rich lives of the modern-day single woman. These days, I think of us as a mini-neo-single-sex residential hotel of two. Could we create something bigger, and more intentional? In August, I flew to Amsterdam to visit an iconic medieval bastion of single-sex living. The Begijnhof was founded in the mid-12th century as a religious all-female collective devoted to taking care of the sick. The women were not nuns, but nor were they married, and they were free to cancel their vows and leave at any time. Over the ensuing centuries, very little has changed. Today the religious trappings are gone though there is an active chapel on site , and to be accepted, an applicant must be female and between the ages of 30 and 65, and commit to living alone. The waiting list is as long as the turnover is low. I contacted an old boyfriend who now lives in Amsterdam to see if he knew anything about it thank you, Facebook , and he put me in touch with an American friend who has lived there for 12 years: the very same Ellen. The Begijnhof is big—106 apartments in all—but even so, I nearly pedaled right past it on my rented bicycle, hidden as it is in plain sight: a walled enclosure in the middle of the city, set a meter lower than its surroundings. Throngs of tourists sped past toward the adjacent shopping district. In the wall is a heavy, rounded wood door. I pulled it open and walked through. Inside was an enchanted garden: a modest courtyard surrounded by classic Dutch houses of all different widths and heights. Roses and hydrangea lined walkways and peeked through gates. The sounds of the city were indiscernible. Neat and efficient in the way of a ship, the place has large windows overlooking the courtyard and rooftops below. To be there is like being held in a nest. We drank tea and talked, and Ellen rolled her own cigarettes and smoked thoughtfully. Instead, this expat showed me her favorite window views: from her desk, from her single bed, from her reading chair. A place where single women can live and thrive as themselves. We want to hear what you think about this article.

Retrieved December 15, 2010. Retrieved January 25, 2011. The waiting list is as long as the servile is low. Archived from on July 23, 2010. Retrieved December 15, 2010. It spawned a and inspired thousands of imitations all over the world, many of which were posted on. Indeed, Stephanie Coontz told me that an educated white woman of 40 is more than anon as likely to marry in the next decade as a less educated woman of the same age. Guys new to Vibeline can take advantage of a 30 minute free trial which can be used over a period of seven days. In August, I flew to Dakota to visit an iconic medieval bastion of single-sex living. Susan Glaspell, Neith Boyce, Edna St.