All the Cool Girls Are Single in Their 40s

And that doesn’t mean they just got divorced. 

If I look around at the current singlehood zeitgeist, and I often do, I notice something that always happens to women: We’re still seen, discussed, and created for in relation to our proximity to men. Which, for the record…barf. 

If you’re being celebrated in your 20s, you’re probably getting engaged and married. Celebrated in your 30s? You likely became a parent. And if you see a woman celebrated in her 40s, she’s probably reclaiming and reinventing herself post-divorce. But what about the significantly sized cohort of women who are single in their 40s because they never got married in the first place?

Even if we’ve had significant relationships, we’ve never had proximity to men in the kind of way that is praised and celebrated. And if you were to explore the cultural discussion of single women in their 40s, it would appear we don’t exist. 

We have come a long way from the greeting card aisles of our youth. Forty is no longer “over the hill,” we don’t shame people anymore for [checks notes] not dying yet. But a new groundswell of singlehood is emerging—census data shows that in 2021, 25 percent of 40-year-olds had never been married, which is up from 20 percent in 2010, and 6 percent in 1980—and I think it’s worth noting that there are a fuckton of single women in our 40s who deserve to be seen and celebrated. We’re just as valid and inspiring as every woman who people find more familiar reasons to pay attention to.  

All the cool girls are single in their 40s. Have you noticed? Have you seen how much shit we don’t take from men anymore? Have you seen how complaining about something wildly rotten that your husband has done (or does routinely) is no longer commiserated with, but met with one very specific response: When are you leaving him, babe?

Seeing as how leaving a spouse is a privilege that not everyone can afford either financially or physically, I don’t take it for granted that I never legally bound myself to someone who cannot, on a moment’s notice, recall what day I was born or where we store the vacuum. I’m not coming back into a self-determined life that feels amazing, I’ve been living one this entire time. Why do we celebrate women for overcoming adversity but not for bucking the system altogether?

If you’re single in your 40s, you’ve had a drone’s vantage point on love and relationships, witnessing everything from above and flying right past it. We’ve seen people meet, fall in love, break up, get back together, get engaged, plan a wedding, almost call off the wedding because planning it sucked so much, then the kids thing happens, sometimes cheating happens, sometimes falling out of love for no documentable reason happens—and the entire time that was happening to other people, none of it was happening to us. We’ve held friends’ hands in labor and delivery wards and in the hallways of divorce court. We’ve seen it all from a distance we never catch up to, as if life itself isn’t really happening to us, and I’m tired of nobody noticing.  

I am unquestionably lucky and grateful for everything I have not been through by still being single at 43. I’m allowed to think that’s cool. (I experienced plenty of my own shit, don’t worry.) It isn’t selfish to recognize everything I haven’t had to go through as a result of my continued singlehood, because calling me selfish is still equating my value with my proximity to men. I am tired of the world only noticing, praising, and helping women because of men. I’m tired of the world expecting single women to bow and step aside for women who have found and agreed to that proximity, whether it worked out for them or not. 

I’m not single because I didn’t want to get married, I’m single because despite 18 years of wanting romantic companionship, I couldn’t find it. That is insane. Can you imagine looking for anything else that long? To be fair, I only actively looked for a partner for 10 of those years, the other eight I’ve spent looking forward to connecting with the right partner during the natural course of living my life, but neither strategy was fruitful.

Changing your mindset and perspective to see singlehood as a gift instead of a problem—that’s cool to me. Everything that didn’t happen is allowed to make me grateful and happy. That doesn’t mean I hate married women or divorced women; it means that single and never married women are entering a new phase of life, in numbers. We deserve more narratives than “reclaiming” ourselves in our 40s because some of us never gave anything away. 

Women in our 40s get to be celebrated and lifted up for more reasons than leaving a man or raising kids. You impress me, too. You, the person who is single and never married in her 30s, 40s, 50s. You, the woman who has lived the most stressful, pressured, hustle-centric years of human life 100 percent on her own? My god, you’re a rockstar. Everything everyone has done with someone else—every decision, every purchase, every bill, every medical event, every mortgage, every rent payment, every natural disaster, every terrifying news report—you did alone. Don’t insult yourself by ignoring that. 

The flip side of this pancake is, of course, the fact that if we want love and companionship, and we haven’t been able to find it despite an entire adulthood looking for it, that’s not cool. That’s allowed to hurt. There are a thousand things causing the chasm in human connection that our generation bore the brunt of, but none of them are allowed to rob us of our own happiness and contentment. We’re literally trailblazing through singlehood in ways that weren’t possible in prior generations. We’re building a new version of the future for ourselves, and I think we get to love it. 

If you enjoyed this essay, Shani’s newest book, What If We Never Get Married? A Happily Ever Answer, is available now. 

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