The Singleness Machine

How Late Modernity Makes Unhappy Singles and What the Church Should be Doing to Help

If you’ve ever studied WWII odds are you’ve heard of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. Le Chambon-sur-Lignon is a town in south central France, and during the German occupation, the people there sheltered, transported, and saved hundreds—by some estimates thousands—of people: Mostly Jewish people, mostly children.

I heard about that town on a podcast, went and found a book, and in the course of reading discovered that Le Chambon-sur-Lignon—and the wider plateau of Vivarais-Lignon—had a centuries-long habit of saving people. Many towns in that region were founded by French Protestants as safe havens during the wars of religion in the 16th and 17th century. Having been fugitives themselves, the residents of Vivarais-Lignon prioritized asylum: During the French Revolution and the French civil war, for example, Vivarais-Lignon sheltered fugitives, and in the early 20th century, the plateau’s pastors took on the cause of the urban poor. Somehow and unmistakably the generational blessing of shelter imprinted itself on the culture of that region, and so the farmers and vinedressers and merchants harbored the harborless almost as a matter of habit.

Naturally that kind of thing gets me fired up. It makes me think of the Church, because the Church is the harbor for the harborless.

And I’m talking about that now with a group in mind that doesn’t make the ordinary lists.

Singles.

Yup, I’m going to write about singleness.

Specifically, I’m going to write about Late Modern Singleness, which is not the same thing as historical singleness. For a long time my wife has been asking me to put something together on behalf of our single friends and for a long time I’ve refused. I don’t poke hornets’ nests for fun, is why, and Late Modern Singleness is a buzzing apocalypse of a hornet’s nest. It touches on male-female relationships, marriage, Liberalism, Capitalism, and a veritable thicket of related issues.

This summer, however, something changed my mind. I had (or overheard) one conversation after another that convinced me the Church does not in general understand what’s happening and why.

You know the ones. They sound like this: “Where are all the good men?” “Why don’t people just get married?” “Why don’t single people date more?” “Why don’t single people date less?” “Well, God does call some people to singleness.”

In this series I’m going to tell you where the good men are and why highly eligible people can’t just get married; I’m also going to explain why God’s call to singleness—Jesus’s “eunuchs for the kingdom” and Paul’s unmarried men from 1 Corinthians—doesn’t neatly map on to what’s happening in Late Modernity.

Here’s my thesis: Late Modern Singleness is a genuine pastoral crisis requiring the loving attention of the Church. It is not, in other words, the burden of Late Modern Singles to bear. It is the Church’s burden (though I am also going to explain why the people in the Church don’t think so).

This series will run at least three posts. In Part 1, I’m going to put Late Modern Singleness in context and explain why it’s so strange. In Part 2, I’m going to talk about the Domestic Church and why Late Modern assumptions about the household make everything worse. In Part 3, I’m going to say what the Church can do. In the next decade or so Late Modern Singleness will almost certainly get worse and that will set off a ton of experimentation. The Church needs to be on the leading edge of those experiments because the Church—unlike Modern states—has resolved many a social crisis before.

Three parts is the plan. But I may need to plug in an excursus or two, because the issues at stake are not simple. Late Modern Singleness is Liberalism’s irresolvable paradoxes becoming visible. It’s also part of a growing separation between men and women that the West doesn’t know how to heal. What’s at stake is imaging God.

One more note before we get started.

These essays are for the Church and everyone in it: Singles, spouses, families, everybody. But I know that the story here may sound intensely depressing, especially if you’re single and eligible and you’d like to be married but you’ve found it impossible to get married.

To you I’d say: You’re not crazy. Something real and significant is happening. And Jesus sees you. You’re not doomed because you were born after 1940. Jesus does have an exciting solution and an aspirational vision for a life you’d enjoy.

With God’s help, we can explore that together.

So let’s begin.

I. Doing the Math

I think most of us are aware of the situation even if we cannot provide the statistics. But here they are: In 1949, 78.8% of US households were married couples. By 2024, that number had fallen to 47.1%.

That doesn’t mean that 47.1% of people get married. Of women born in 1940, 90% were married by age 30.

In contrast, of women born in 1990, only 27% were married by age 30 (look here).

As is often the case the big story obscures many disturbing subplots because marital decline is not evenly distributed. It affects Black Americans more than any other demographic; it affects some jobs more than others; it falls off a cliff during recessions. That said, the big story holds true: in the last 50 years, marriage has all but imploded.

And it is just the last fifty years, because near-universal marriage wasn’t a twentieth century phenomenon. It is the norm in *almost* every culture in *almost* every age. As David Herily argues in his encyclopedic Medieval Households, only 10-15% of the Medieval population remained unmarried (500-1500 AD). Likewise, in the Roman world long-term singleness was virtually unheard of, especially for women. As the editors of The Single Life in the Roman and Later Roman World admit, “In the non-Christian tradition, testimonies on the joy and happiness of unmarried life for women are virtually absent.” Similarly, studies of Stone Age cultures suggest that a two-person, regulated (if not exclusive), male-female partnership may be the defining human institution. Excavations of the El Argar culture in Spain, for example, found that unrelated male-female partners who had children together were buried together as early as 2200 BC, and genetic mapping of those couples revealed that an institution that looked a lot like marriage structured the family tree.

That is a fact that points beyond itself because marriage is a sacramental reality. God designed human nature; He made bodies nuptially significant; He fashioned the human desire for companionship and for communion. And so we know that this near-universal desire of people to get married is an icon. It points to the marriage of Christ and his people and the coming together of Heaven and Earth. It is significant because it is a real means of God’s grace.

Does that mean singleness is bad? Of course not. But the swift and merciless decline of marriage is bad, because marriage is not simply a fruitful institution. In spite of so much human failure, in spite of so many bad Western marriages, in spite of all the disappointment, marriage remains the fruitful institution.

By age fifty married men and women have 10x the assets of their single peers. According to numerous studies married men and women are more than 2x as likely to be “very happy” with their lives. University of Chicago economist Sam Peltzman studied marriage and observed that marriage is “the most important differentiator” of who is happy.

It’s not just money and happiness: Married people live significantly longer, are healthier, have lower rates of psychopathology, smoke less, drink less, and—at least according to the data—generally enjoy their lives more when compared with their single peers.

Read around, and you’ll find some scholars deriding the old idea that marriage is good for society's most physically vulnerable people, like the elderly, women, and children. But it is. Children with married parents graduate high school more, go to college more, and stay out of jail more. In 2023 the economist Melissa Kearney made waves with her book The Two-Parent Privilege by pointing out the obvious: Children of married parents do better than children of unmarried parents on almost every level of attainment.

That wouldn't be alarming, except that, according to recent PEW data, the US has the highest rate of children living in single-parent households in the world.

(Note: “Kearney's endorsement of the institution of marriage seems antiquated and out of touch,” wrote the NPR, while acknowledging “on the aggregate, the data shows that the odds of graduating from high school, getting a college degree and having high earnings in adulthood are substantially lower for children who grow up in single-mother homes.”)

Similarly, marriage is good for women (in spite of the fact you’ll find Western elites sliming it). I read one paper (by credentialed authors) that claimed “Depression status is not the same in different stages in women's life. Married women suffer more depression than unmarried ones,” a finding they predicated on a study of a whopping 100 working individuals.

That is ridiculous. It is indicative of a trend we’ll soon explore, but to put matters in perspective, another study—including 106,556 cross-sectional participants and 20,865 longitudinal participants from seven countries—found that unmarried people are 80% more likely to experience depressive symptoms. You wanna know who the most sexually satisfied demographic in the USA is? Married Protestant women (follow this link to nine studies as evidence).

And by the way, marriage is good for men. In fact, it’s so good for men scholars used to assume men made it up. There are the health benefits (like living longer), the social benefits (like more communal support), and the spiritual benefits (like more faithful church attendance), but there are also some surprising measures. For example, “research generally finds that after men marry they report less criminal behavior, are less likely to be arrested or incarcerated, and are less involved with drugs and deviant peer groups.” Similarly, unmarried but sexually-active men are the most likely group not only to perpetuate violence but to suffer violence from other men.

I could go on but by now you see the point: Historically, marriage is practically universal; marriage is really good for people; marriage is especially good for otherwise vulnerable people.

In contrast, though Late Modern Singleness is stressful for everyone, for women and children, it’s worse. A summary paper published by the Yale Law School, for example, observed:

“By many objective measures the lives of women in the United States have improved over the past 35 years, yet we show that measures of subjective well‐being indicate that women’s happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to men. The paradox of women’s declining relative well‐being is found across various datasets, measures of subjective well‐being, and is pervasive across demographic groups and industrialized countries. Relative declines in female happiness have eroded a gender gap in happiness in which women in the 1970s typically reported higher subjective well‐being than did men. These declines have continued and a new gender gap is emerging—one with higher subjective well‐being for men.”

That’s true, but it’s still a surprise, because in recent decades men have fallen behind women in terms of education and economic advancement. Even so, women report higher rates of psychopathology (and even stress).

And we’re going to explore why that is.

But before we do, it’s time to define Late Modern Singleness.

II. Late Modern Singleness

Late Modern Singleness is economic and political singleness—it means single people provide for themselves when they can work and the state provides for them when they cannot. As such, Late Modern Singleness is a confounding combination of unlimited freedom and absolute dependency.

It is also the most extreme, undiluted, and expansive form of singleness humans have tried.

Historically a single person—whether a man or a woman—would (pretty much) never be economically independent. If someone couldn’t marry, he or she remained a part of his or her original household. You can think of all those unmarried aunts knitting in the background of Victorian novels; you can think of Uncle George, living with Laura Ingalls Wilder's grandparents in the Little House series.

You can also think of Eliezer of Damascus in the Bible. Remember him? He’s a member of Abram’s household. But he’s not Abram’s “flesh and blood,” meaning, he’s not biologically or even ethnically related to Abram. Quite recently, anthropologists were intrigued to discover that adult members of indigenous tribes are for the most part biologically unrelated. That finding really surprised scholars because they had come to assume that genetic relationships defined human communities.

But they don’t. At least not exclusively. What that means is that in the past you could belong to a community—and even a family—even if you weren’t related to that community. We’ll come back to that in Part 2. But it’s a big deal: Late Modern Singleness is also household singleness.

It’s not just that you’re unmarried; it’s that you’re not vocationally united to a larger household, making Late Modern Singleness uniquely, well, single.

At this point we can look back at Jesus’s “eunuchs for the kingdom” and Paul’s single men from 1 Corinthians 7:7-8 to make some important contrasts. In both cases the New Testament has celibacy in mind. There’s a debate here, but it’s pretty clear that ancient Jews didn’t practice castration—even their word for “eunuch,” saris, means “court official,” and some of those were married and had children (like Joseph). But for the most part they were officials who had made vows to treat the royal household as their primary household. That sounds a lot like celibacy and, in fact, ancient Judaism did have a precedent for vows of celibacy. They show up in places like Numbers 30 (it’s in that “pledge to deny herself”) and Jeremiah 16 (though Rabbinical Judaism is, as far as I can tell, very much opposed to celibacy).

To be clear, it’s not as if single people who wanted to get married but couldn't never showed up in the early Church. They did. That happened with women in particular, who often forfeited the social advantages and security of marriage when they chose to follow Jesus. But if you’d like to know what happened to such people most of the time, I can tell you: they took vows of celibacy. In most times, in most places, a single person in the Church had one of two options: marriage (or remarriage, in the case of widows), and celibacy. Both options were held in high esteem and both options were vigorously supported by the wider community. And in both cases single people were grafted into an identifiable household: either a human household, or the Church.

I think this is part of the reason the Church in the West has had a hard time fully accommodating Late Modern Singles: She hasn’t had time to figure it out.

Unfortunately, there’s more to Late Modern Singleness than economic and political and even household singleness. Late Modern Singleness is also ideological singleness. It is Modernity’s child, and it has exacerbated a rift between men and women.

Since that’s true, it’s time to say something about what happens to nations when they modernize generally and embrace Liberalism in particular.

III. Liberalism be Like

Marriage isn’t the only institution that’s declined in the west. For a long time churches, community groups, social clubs, and everything else have been in decline, too. Remember Bowling Alone? The process of unmaking community is called "atomization." Atomization means that individuals replace communities as society’s basic unit.

To me, the interesting thing about atomization is that nobody knows how to stop it. At least not on a macro level. Since 2018, the UK has had a loneliness minister; in 2023, the WHO declared loneliness a global emergency (which it is) and set up an international commission to address the problem; the German Federal Institute for Population Research has been tracking loneliness for some time and is trying to help the nation deal with it.

And nothing’s working, probably because loneliness is an intrinsic part of Liberalism.

We’ve talked before about Liberalism, which is the West’s founding political doctrine. Liberalism is a theory centered on the free individual. People, in this theory, exist to express their autonomy, and states exist to protect their ability to do so.

As cultures embrace Liberalism they embark upon a predictable journey. At first, there’s a boom: Creativity explodes. Industries innovate. A nation makes money. It’s a lot like the first thirty seconds of a church Easter Egg hunt if you let the teenagers participate.

Then the boom ends. Creativity tapers. Industries stagnate. The infighting starts. Though the Liberal experiment has yet to run its course the most likely future is that Liberal states simply stop existing.

I mean, it’s probably too obvious an example, but you can’t find a better illustration of Liberalism’s boom-crash progression than South Korea. South Korea’s “Miracle on the Han River” story is famous: it went from being one of the poorest nations in the world to one of the top-ten richest in, gosh—fifty years? Then Liberalism’s destructive energies caught up. In the 2010s the country’s GDP growth rate fell to 3%. By 2020 it had fallen to 2%. In the past two years it’s fallen behind North Korea.

Everyone knows why: There aren’t enough people.

(Note: Though nobody knows what the future holds, the most informed projections don’t see these trends reversing. According to the Korea Development Institute, which is the nation’s leading think tank, “the ‘baseline’ prediction for the country’s average economic growth rate between 2023 and 2030 is 1.9 percent, dropping to 1.3 percent between 2031 and 2040, and then to 0.7 percent from 2041 to 2050.”)

As nations become more Liberal people stop getting married and having children. This trend is so reliable you can literally track it by studying maps of political affiliation. In general, the more enthusiastically Liberal a state, the less people get married. Look:

(Note: You can also track it by evaluating the media. A now famous study in Brazil set out to study the impact of technology on fertility rates. Some people hypothesized that once nations got TVs they stopped having children. It turned out to be more complicated than that. The television does have an impact on a nation's Total Fertility Rate, but only if it streams certain content. As soon as a nation starts to stream Liberal content, people stop having children.)

That’s culture at work. All cultures organize and direct power, and as the West has increasingly invested power in unrestrained individuals people have stopped getting married. It’s not hard to see why. To get married (and have children) you have to embrace radical constraints and surrender most of your freedoms. If you view constraints and surrender as undesirable and even immoral, you probably won’t get married or have kids.

But there’s more to it than power. Liberal Individualism isn’t possible without prosperity. In premodern contexts free individuals die.

(Note: Make it a tribal context, and free individuals are executed. At Lascaux, there is a painting that displays a tribal execution, almost certainly of an actualized individual.)

To emancipate individuals, cultures need cash. And so things like industrialization, technologization, and capitalism also directly contribute to the dissolution of marriage. When people are all but commanded to actualize themselves and given the resources to do so, that’s what they tend to do.

Is there more to it than that? Of course. But the point holds: Western Liberal Modernity is built around free individuals. It has hardwired Liberal Individualism into society's very structure. And by doing that, it has tended to create individuals.

And by the way, it’s not as if those individuals get along. The individualism we have is an individualism of conflict, and that conflict is particularly bad for men and women.

IV: Men and Women in Rebellion Against God

In its early phases Liberalism plays to typically masculine sin patterns. In its later phases, it plays to typically feminine sin patterns. What that means for marriage is that in Liberalism’s early phases women get left behind and men stop marrying; in Liberalism’s later phases men get left behind and women stop marrying. What it means for men and women generally is that Modernity has set them at odds.

Let me explain how that works.

In Liberalism Phase 1 the emphasis lands, unmistakably, on individual freedom over and against corporate responsibility, and during that phase men do better. As an intriguing example, you can look at American pioneers. In his book Tribe Sebastian Junger pointed out that while men gravitated to the unstructured, unconstrained, wild life of the frontier, women struggled there. “"The men and the dogs have a fine time,” wrote one pioneer wife, “but the poor women have to suffer.”

(Note: Junger goes on: “She complained that her husband—a man named George-refused to make their newborn son a plank cradle, and just gave her a hollowed-out log instead. The boy's only shirt was woven of nettle bark and his pillow was carved out of wood. When his mother pointed out that he was getting sores and rashes, George said that the hardships would just toughen him up for hunting later in life. "George has got himself a buckskin shirt and pants," this woman added. "He is gone hunting day and night.")

You can also look at something like the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Scholars call the desire to have multiple sexual partners “sociosexuality,” and in study after study researchers have found that men are—in general—far more sociosexual than women and that “Women generally experience more negative psychological consequences than men following casual sex.”

A lot of that has to do with how men are wired. In general, men are more risk tolerant, less neurotic, more sociosexual, and less agreeable. And so in Liberalism’s Phase 1 men stop getting married because life is working for them just fine, thank you. You get Lord Byrons shacking up with everyone; you get Benjamin Franklins and Thomas Edisons sleeping on the shop floor, losing friends, and eating gruel because it means that in a few years’ time they’ll make it big.

Then things change.

Liberalism is built on a paradox: To protect free individuals, you need powerful governments. Otherwise, how will you stop all those unrestrained individuals from killing each other? When Liberalism spreads, the state eventually catches up to those rowdy pioneers, and when it does, you get Liberalism Phase 2. The momentum shifts; women do better.

As evidence you can look at the American university system which has, for the past few decades, been occupied more and more by women. In 1995, men and women were equally likely to have a bachelor’s degree (27%). By 2023, “47% of U.S. women ages 25 to 34 have a bachelor’s degree, compared with 37% of men,” and by the way “The gender gap in bachelor’s degree completion appears in every major racial or ethnic group.”

A lot of that has to do with how women are wired, because Liberalism Phase 2 plays to femininity’s destructive energies. As Louise Perry argued, Cancel Culture is Girl Culture, and what that means is that women in general prefer compassion to truth (read the article), stability to innovation, and cooperation (aka relationship) to exploration.

And you do have to balance those things, by the way. Emotional processing is a part of discovering truth. As the neurologist Antonio Damasio discovered, when people lose touch (via surgery, in his case), with their emotional powers, they don’t find it easier to navigate life. They find it impossible. No, the problems come when one set of preferences is allowed to dominate the other.

“The gallows and the gulag,” writes Perry, “are the usual masculine tools of repression. The feminine tools, in contrast, are far less direct: spreading rumours, badmouthing in private, disinviting or otherwise excluding wrongdoers, the ‘you can’t sit with us’ school of politics. All of which are abundantly evident on Twitter, a platform that, by foreclosing the possibility of physical aggression, channels its users towards the use of non-physical aggression instead, encouraging them to behave like women.”

And so what happens in Liberalism Phase 2 is that men fall behind and women don’t want to marry them. As evidence, here’s actress Mindy Kaling: “They want to set me up with some loser they know. And I’m like, ‘I’m okay. I’m a rich, successful woman with great clothes and a nice family.’ Honestly, what more could a gal want?” You can also think of your Hilary Clinton’s and Kamala Harris’ here. Are men in the background? Sure. But they’ve faded so far they’re practically nonexistent.

By the way, this is part of the answer to the “where are all the good men?” question. Though there are usually more women than men in the Church, right now Western Modernity is in a phase that’s bad for men—especially working class men. It’s true that nations have lost a generation to the unholy trinity of porn, pot, and video games. And nations know that; in fact, they know that so much that when nations set out to boost marriage the best thing they know to do is create good working class jobs for men.

Of course, we recognize these two Liberal Phases. They’re duking it out in the public sphere. But if it isn’t clear, when it comes to Liberalism Phase 1 and Phase 2, we’re talking about sin in both cases.

And it’s serious business, because when men and women are isolated from each other they turn into the worst version of themselves.

You can see this from the sociological angle, as Nancy Pearcey did in The Toxic War on Masculinity. In her research, Pearcy noticed that classically destructive male behaviors—aggression, violence, the ones associated with “Toxic Masculinity”—got a lot worse during the Industrial Revolution, when men left the home to live in micro-societies by themselves. In fact, prior to the Industrial Revolution, behaviors like violence and aggression were associated with children, not men, and were the kind of thing adults were expected to grow out of.

Unfortunately, destructive femininity hasn’t been as thoroughly studied as destructive masculinity, probably because destructive femininity is still regnant. “Toxic femininity, if it exists,” said a scholar at Psychology Today, "encourages silent acceptance of violence and domination in order to survive.” Um—no. Toxic femininity expresses itself most often as emotional abuse, manipulation, and mind control. But you can still find evidence that it gets a lot worse in all-female societies—things like sororities and families with absentee fathers. For example, one study of single mothers found that “Single mothers were more likely to engage in psychologically controlling behaviors, which predicted to their adolescent offspring experiencing higher rates of depressive symptoms and externalizing disorders…Further, single mothers were more likely to engage in rejecting parenting behaviors, which predicted to a higher prevalence of adolescent externalizing disorders.”

To be clear, this isn’t about the civilizing effects of men and women or the angel of the home or anything like that. Instead, it’s about a reality the Bible discloses. In Genesis 1, we learn that humanity is a unity—the human—that exists in a duality—male and female. “So God created man,” singular, “in His own image, in the image of God He created him,” singular again, “male and female He created them,” plural. In other words, it takes men and women in relationship to express and grow into the full extent of our humanity.

You don’t have to be married to image God. You don’t. You are made in the image of God, and you can image Him right now.

But for humanity to image God as a whole, you need men and women in loving relationship: aunts, uncles, grandmas, grandpas, cousins, neighbors, friends, and so on. And by the way, you can confirm this on the neurobiological level.

Here in 2025 it’s no secret that male and female brains differ in significant ways. Those differences go all the way down to the molecular and neurochemical level, and they include differences in visual processing, emotional reasoning, navigation, motor control, verbal reasoning, and even memory. Basically, men and women do process reality differently.

But they don’t process reality more accurately. Intriguingly, men and women make gender-specific mistakes in the above categories: emotional reasoning, verbal reasoning, navigation, etc.

However! When men and women relate in love, their brains start to resemble each other, and the result is they come into alignment with reality. For example, married men and women both gain emotional processing skills (meaning, they’re able to see whether or not their emotions correspond to reality), get a longer-lasting and more accurate memory, and have a higher cognitive reserve.

In simple terms, in harmonious relationship men and women come home to and stay grounded in reality. And that’s a good thing.

That’s our call as Christians, too: To relate to all people in a way that honors the image of God in them, understanding that when we do we actually become more like Jesus—and therefore more human—ourselves.

V: But…What About Me?

All that’s in the background when you’re talking to singles in your local church: There is a tsunami of a cultural current that makes people more individualistic and sets men and women against each other. Late Modernity is built to keep people single.

But it’s not the whole story.

If your church is anything like mine, the singles in it are virtuous, hardworking, Christ-loving people. They’d make good spouses and good parents.

What about them?

Well. Here’s the interesting thing: if you were to study marriage in, say, the Roman Catholic Church, you would learn that marriage is normally but not evenly distributed.

Translation: Most of the marriages are happening in a handful of parishes.

There’s a reason for that: marriage is not primarily an issue of healthy individuals. It’s primarily an issue of healthy communities. And so to orientate ourselves, we have to explore one more part of the picture, which is the Domestic Church. In the West, our understanding of the household, the family, and marriage has transformed at least as much as our understanding of singleness. Most of the changes are bad, and they have very much leaked into the Church. That’s had consequences for singles, married folks, and children.

And that’s what we’ll explore next time.