You’ll probably die alone

Part 2 of How to Find a Husband

Read my latest piece for Works in Progress on animal longevity. It’s full of fun facts about animals and should, by the end, give you a good intuitive grasp of the science of aging and what can be done to improve human longevity.

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I promise that I will deliver useful advice soon. But first, I must give you a blackpill.

In the era of good sitcoms, probably when most of our parents were hooking up, you could just accidentally fall into a marriage. If you were born in 1960, over three quarters of your peers would be married by 30. Only about 15% of people should expect to be terminally unwed.

This is the world of Sex in the City and Friends and it’s totally lost to us.

Just 90s things

One of my friends jokes that if you ask anyone how their parents got together, the story sounds insane. This is certainly true of my parents. They met in the spring of 1995, they were engaged by the summer, married in the winter, and I was born nine and a half months after that. It all worked out alright.

Marriage rates have fallen so quickly that you can assume that if you’re a single woman today, you probably won’t get married at all.

Source here. Fun for playing around with.

If you were born in 1960, you had an 85% chance of getting married by the time you turned 40.¹ This fell by over 10% for women born in 1970 and by over 10% again for women born in 1980. At every age from 25 on, women born in 1990 were about 10% less likely to be married than women from 1980. So if 62% of women born in 1980 were married by 40 what does that leave me to predict …..

My guess is that only half of people born in 1990 will end up married. For every year after 1990, knock another percentage point off.

This means that for literally every age cohort, if you aren’t already married, you probably won’t get married.

So let’s say you’re about 30. About a quarter of your friends are already married. Only another fifth or so are going to get married. Look around and take stock. Are you in the most-marrying fifth? (Or quarter of remaining unmarried women) Are you going to beat all the girls with boyfriends and fiancées?

I’m not writing this to upset you. I’m writing this to light a fire in you.

The future steps of this guide are going to recommend that you put in some serious effort. I’m going to tell you lose some weight, go on a lot of dates, and even do some maths.

I hope I’ve convinced you that you want a husband. That alone shouldn’t persuade you to put in lots of work. You probably also want a steady flow of oxygen to your lungs but only in dire emergencies do you expend any effort to ensure this happens.

This is a dire emergency. Something has gone horribly wrong with our matching technology and/or our settling-down technology. Dropping a percentage point every year, we have been frogboiled into accepting this as normal. This is actually a disaster, the likes of which our civilisation has never seen. I think you should take seriously the idea that this might not work out for you and respond accordingly.’

“I’m not an average person so I don’t have average odds of getting married”

Lots of people on the internet seem to think their very high IQ social circle is an island protected from general trends, as though your A* in GSCE Geography protects you from spinsterhood, just as your careers counsellor promised. Some people are one bad customer service interaction away from thinking that tradies can’t understand hypothetical questions. Honestly, it’s a wonder you people get into Ubers.

I expect my audience to be pulled in opposite directions. High education levels increase your odds of getting married, mostly by protecting you from intractable unwed cohabitation. But city living and faithlessness are a bad combination for the nuptially inclined.

My friend and colleague Will Hewitt has vibecoded an excellent calculator. Claude uses data beyond our ONS but is just as pessimistic about the numbers as I am.

Have a play around (if you dare).

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Help me gather empirical data to improve future episodes. Fill out the survey. I will give one randomly selected person £100 or give £200 to an effective charity of their choice.

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Appendix for sociopaths

If you want some proper motivation, get out a pen and paper and do something a bit fucked up. Write down the names and relationship statuses of all your friends and work out where you fall on the distribution for odd of getting married.

I just wrote down the names of all my female friends who are roughly my age. Of thirty eight women, eleven are married, two are engaged, thirteen are in relationships and twelve are single.

It we were nationally representative, I should expect about 45% to end up married, 20% long-term cohabiting and 35% single. But actually we’re an unusually educated, south asian, and religious group, so I’m going to say it’s more like 55%, 5% and 40%.

My napkin maths tells me that about twenty one are going to end up married, two in long-term cohabitations and the rest single. I think the two who are engaged are definitely going to get married and, knowing the people involved, I think that six of those couples are headed marriage-ward too. (I’ve even been privy to some exciting ring chat.) I have my suspicions about who the two unmarried cohabiters will be.

Of the seventeen remaining, only two more will make it down the aisle. If I were single now, I would look at my friends and internalise the fact that there a lot of beautiful and interesting women who are going to end up single. And I would be trying my best to be more cunning, diligent, and beautiful than them.

1. I use age 40 as the mark here for three reasons. First, marriage rates for each cohort seem to plateau at about 40. Only a small handful of 40 year olds who have never been married go on to marry. Second, by 40, most women are past their natural fertility window. And third, with life expectancy persistently in the low 80s, if you aren’t married by 40, you will probably spend most of your life unmarried.