Why more women are choosing single over settling

In late December, 2025, British Vogue published a piece that caught fire online: a collage of women describing why they’d stepped away from dating, relationships, and the emotional tug-of-war of “maybe he’ll change.” One line landed especially hard: a woman describing her ex as a “peace thief.” Another said, flatly, “There’s no way a man could make my life better.”

It was easy to read those quotes as just another viral breakup moment. But what made the essay travel wasn’t the drama. It was recognition.

Because for a lot of women, 2025 didn’t feel like the year they “gave up on love.” It felt like the year they stopped negotiating with exhaustion. Like they stopped auditioning for basic consideration. Like they finally treated their peace as something worth protecting.

And behind that shift lies a bigger truth: when relationships are built on unequal labour - emotional, domestic, caregiving, financial - opting out stops being a personal preference and starts looking like a rational response.

What “choosing yourself” actually means (and what it doesn’t)

The internet loves a clean storyline: women are choosing themselves, end of discussion. But real life is messier.

“Choosing yourself” can mean leaving a relationship that slowly shrinks your nervous system. It can mean refusing to be someone’s therapist, mother, scheduler, reminder app, and career coach while your own needs stay “too much.” It can mean deciding you’d rather live with a quiet home and a full group chat than a partner who adds more work than warmth.

But it also needs nuance: not everyone is single by choice. Loneliness is real. So is desire. So is the grief of wanting partnership and not finding it safely or sustainably.

What’s changing isn’t that women have stopped wanting love. It’s that more women are publicly saying: love can’t require self-erasure.

The data behind the mood: marriage is no longer the default “fulfilling life”.

In a Pew Research Center survey (April, 2023) about what Americans think contributes to a fulfilling life, people ranked job satisfaction and close friendships far above marriage or having children. Only about 23% of US adults said being married is “extremely” or “very” important for a fulfilling life. 44% said it’s “not too” or “not at all” important. Women, in that survey, were less likely than men to rank marriage as highly important.

That’s not the death of marriage. It’s the end of marriage as a universal life requirement - at least in how many people imagine meaning, stability, and “a good life”.

And it aligns with a second trend: the growing visibility of life paths that don’t revolve around coupledom. People are building futures around community, work, creativity, chosen family, non-traditional partnerships, co-living, or simply space to breathe.

Why more women are walking away: the unpaid labour math

For decades, women have been told relationships are where they’ll find support. But many have experienced the opposite: relationships as a second job.

Globally, women and girls shoulder 76% of unpaid care responsibilities, amounting to billions of hours of unpaid work each day, according to UN human rights experts.

That statistic isn’t just about chores. It’s about how society is structured: who is expected to remember birthdays, manage elders’ health appointments, keep track of school forms, notice the empty fridge, absorb emotional fallout, and smooth over conflict.

This is why “peace” shows up so often in women’s language now. Because what many women are naming isn’t a lack of romance. It’s time poverty, role overload, and the slow drain of being the one who holds everything together.

Research also links unequal domestic labour to women’s well-being. A large review of research on “invisible household labor” notes that unequal division of labor at home is associated with women’s psychological distress, depression, and role overload, especially in parenting contexts where demands intensify.

So yes, some women are choosing singlehood. But often they’re choosing something even more basic: a life that doesn’t run on their unpaid labour.

“It’s not a dating trend. It’s a reckoning.”

That’s what the British Vogue essay captured so sharply, the feeling that women are done treating disappointment as normal. Done being told that a man being “not that bad” is something to be grateful for. Done being socialized to stay, soften, tolerate, and translate.

In the piece, the author describes ending things after a man showed up two hours late to a date. Not because it was the worst betrayal imaginable, but because she realized she didn’t have to swallow her needs to keep someone around.

That’s the emotional heart of this cultural moment: women noticing the small disrespect that used to be normalized, and deciding it’s not the price of love anymore.

The safety context we can’t ignore: “intimate life” can carry real risk.

There’s another layer here that doesn’t trend as easily: relationships aren’t just emotionally costly. In many parts of the world, they can be physically dangerous.

A UNODC and UN Women femicide brief (released November 2025) reported that in 2024, 83,000 women and girls were intentionally killed, and 60% (50,000) were killed by intimate partners or family members.

That’s one woman or girl killed by a partner or family member almost every 10 minutes.

This doesn’t mean relationships are inherently unsafe. But it does mean that “just get married” or “just compromise” is not neutral advice. When women say they’re protecting their peace, sometimes they mean they’re protecting their lives.

For disabled and neurodivergent women, the stakes can be even higher.

Disabled and neurodivergent women often face a uniquely tangled set of pressures:

• Being told partnership is “security” while also being more vulnerable to control, dependency, or infantilization.

• Being expected to overcompensate in relationships to be seen as “worth loving”.

• Having access needs dismissed as “too much”, “too sensitive”, or “dramatic”.

• Carrying caregiving responsibilities while also needing care, and being shamed either way.

When mainstream culture frames single women as “sad” or “left behind”, it misses how many women are actively building safer, softer, more regulated lives with friendships, community, chosen family, and self-trust as the infrastructure.

The internet didn’t start this, but it made it visible.

One of the most interesting parts of this shift is how loudly it’s happening in public now.

Online, women are sharing “divorce diaries”, “anti-marriage memes”, and glow-up singlehood stories, not because they’re performing bitterness, but because they’re unlearning shame. They’re exchanging scripts: how to leave, how to live alone, how to make a village, how to stop romanticizing struggle.

In Pew’s 2023 survey, Americans ranked close friendships as a major pillar of a fulfilling life... far above marriage. That doesn’t feel abstract when you look at how women are actually living: calling friends after bad dates, moving in with roommates by choice, planning group trips, building mutual aid networks, choosing community over coupledom.

When women stop begging for the bare minimum, it doesn’t mean romance is dead. It means the bar is finally where it should’ve been.

At Much Much Spectrum, we hold space for all of it. The relief of leaving, the grief of wanting, the anger at unequal labour, the tenderness of friendship, the complicated reality that “choice” isn’t equally available to everyone. But we also believe something simple and radical:

A relationship should add life to your life, not take it from you.

If this story made you feel seen, tell us what “peace” looks like for you right now. In love, in friendship, in family, in solitude.