Many single women over 45 notice a shift in how people talk to them. People stop asking whether you’re seeing anyone and stop wondering whether you’ll meet someone or get married. By 50, your relationship status can start to feel like a settled matter, whether or not you settled it yourself.
For women who are also childfree or childless, the assumptions often go further. Childfree women have chosen not to have children, while childless women wanted children but don’t have them. Many childless women carry feelings about that experience that have little to do with their relationship status. In either case, some people assume something must be missing, and a few go so far as to respond with pity. Both reactions arrive with confidence from people who may not know anything about the woman’s actual life.
A midlife woman we spoke with recently confided that she’d hidden two years of IVF from her family because she didn’t want more of their pity if it didn’t take. When she gave up trying, she grieved in private the life she’d imagined for herself, a loss she described as nearly as painful as the failed attempts. She preferred that her family focus on her lack of a relationship, because at least that could change at any time.
Why do these judgments come so readily? Part of the answer may be this: in 2013, psychologists Kristin Laurin, David Kille, and Richard Eibach found that people who saw their relationship status as unlikely to change were more inclined to idealize it, treating their own arrangement as the way things ought to be.¹ The finding applies to everyone. People often treat their own circumstances as evidence of how life should work, then measure others against them.
A 2021 Michigan State University study of nearly 1,000 Michigan adults pointed in the same direction. After controlling for demographic factors, including age, education, gender, and relationship status, parents, childless adults, and childfree adults reported similar life satisfaction. Still, people who had or wanted children felt less warmth toward childfree adults than childfree adults felt toward one another.² The negative judgment appeared with no matching gap in satisfaction. The study covered one state, and the satisfaction gap disappeared only after those controls were applied, so it’s a meaningful signal and not the final word.
The picture is more complicated for single adults. A 2022 study found that, on average, singles reported lower perceived social support and more experiences of discrimination than partnered adults, and those differences were statistically linked to part of their lower life satisfaction.³ The data cannot prove cause, but they point to a real cost: some of what makes single life harder may be how single people are treated.
The stereotype that women without children are selfish is a familiar one. One single, childless woman we spoke with was called selfish by colleagues for leaving her desk 20 minutes early, which her coworkers with children did routinely. She’d left to help a recently widowed friend who’d needed emergency surgery, while she was managing her friend’s household, communicating with hospital staff, and making daily trips to and from the hospital. Her circumstances illustrate how little a person’s parental status tells us about their relationships or how they spend their time. Her story also points to whose obligations get taken seriously, and whose get questioned.
Taken together, the studies and stories point to a pattern: assumptions about a woman’s life travel faster than facts about it. Whether she has a partner or children is easy to find out. How she spends her time, what matters to her, and how she feels about her life are far less apparent.
A partner or children, or the lack of them, is a fact about her life, not an assessment of it. Has everyone decided for you? The bigger question is why they’re so certain they know.
Footnotes
- Laurin, Kristin, David R. Kille, and Richard P. Eibach. “The Way I Am Is the Way You Ought to Be: Perceiving One’s Relational Status as Unchangeable Motivates Normative Idealization of That Status.” Psychological Science, 2013. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23804959/
- Watling Neal, Jennifer, and Zachary P. Neal. “Prevalence and Characteristics of Childfree Adults in Michigan (USA).” PLOS ONE, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0252528
- Girme, Yuthika U., Chris G. Sibley, Benjamin W. Hadden, Michael T. Schmitt, and Jeffrey M. Hunger. “Unsupported and Stigmatized? The Association Between Relationship Status and Well-Being Is Mediated by Social Support and Social Discrimination.” Social Psychological and Personality Science 13, no. 2 (2022): 425–435. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35251490/
