How young singles shape city culture, lifestyles and economies

“Bridget Jones’s Diary”, depicts the life of a young woman who fails over and over again to keep the new year’s resolutions that open the book on which the film is based. “I will not”, Bridget promises herself, “Drink more than 14 alcohol units a week. Smoke. Spend more than earn. Fall for any of the following: alcoholics, workaholics, commitment phobics, people with girlfriends or wives, misogynists, egalomaniacs, chauvinists, freeloaders, perverts. Sulk about having no boyfriend.” Bridget lives alone in London, worries constantly about being 30-something but still single, resents “Smug Marrieds”, lives mainly on chocolate, cigarettes and wine, and occasionally tries to dump the resulting cellulite with a trip to the gym. When her affair with her dreadful boss ends in the inevitable disaster, she is propped up by her gang of friends: two single women and a gay man.

Bridget may be a caricature, but only just. It portrays the people who now dominate and shape the rich world’s city life, not just in New York and London, but increasingly in Tokyo, Stockholm, Paris and Santiago: well-educated, single professionals in their 20s and 30s.

Moralists fret about them; marketing folk court them; urban developers want to lure them. They are the main consumers and producers of the creative economy that revolves around advertising, publishing, entertainment and media. More than any other social group, they have time, money and a passion for spending on whatever is fashionable, frivolous and fun.

Bridget and her friends have begun to show up in the census figures. Spotting them is tricky: many of those who live alone are not Bridgets, and many Bridgets share a pad with someone else. However, the evidence adds up. In America’s 2000 Census, one-person households outnumbered for the first time married families with children. Many of these households consist of divorced, widowed or elderly people. But the biggest rise in the 1990s was in the proportion of young people who are living alone.

In the past three decades, says Jason Fields of the US Census Bureau, the proportion of 20-24-year-old American women who have not married doubled from 36% to 73%; and that of 30-34-year-olds more than tripled, from 6% to 22%. Some of these singles—but again, not all—are single mothers, another fast-growing group. The 1990s saw a rise in the proportion of households in which people live with someone to whom they are not related, either by blood or marriage.

What explains the trend? The key seems to be the higher education of women. In most rich countries, more women than men now go to university; in particular, women make up more than half the students taking professional qualifications in subjects such as law and medicine. As new job opportunities unfold, they often earn as much as similarly qualified men. They find work is fun and it pays well, so they put off marriage. Husbands and babies can wait. “Today, people know that they are going to be married till they are 80. So 40 is the new 30,” says Marcus Matthews of Kaagan Research, a market-research firm.

Up to now, that has been a strategy that makes sense. More people marry today—at least once—than ever before. Thus fewer than 7% of Americans in their early 50s have never married. The result has been a sort of democratisation of marriage and motherhood, where almost all women marry and most have at least one child.

But the longer women delay, the bigger the chance of failing to do either. Bridget sums up the problem. “The trouble with trying to go out with people when you get older is that everything is so loaded,” she grumbles.

When you are partnerless in your 30s, the mild bore of not being in a relationship—no sex, not having anyone to hang out with on Sundays, going home from parties on your own all the time—gets infused with the paranoid notion that the reason you are not in a relationship is your age. The whole thing builds up out of all proportion, so finding a relationship seems a dazzling, almost insurmountable goal, and when you do start going out with someone it cannot possibly live up to expectations.

The odds are further stacked by the fact that the cities which attract Bridgets are also inevitably places where a disproportionate number of the men are gay. In “Boiler Room”, a film about life in New York, a group of beefy stockbrokers teases the gay men at the next table. “You guys ought to find your own island,” jeers one. “You’re on it,” retorts one of his targets. No wonder young New York women, already a majority, fret so much about the difficulties of finding a partner.

Because young singles have so much disposable money and because they set so many trends, they are a market that many companies long to sell to. But their independence and unpredictability make them hard to define and capture.

Bridget’s taste for booze makes her prime quarry for companies such as Allied Domecq, where Matt Wiant, head of American marketing, argues that the drinking tastes of young women are the key to creating a market for various spirits that were once drunk mainly by middle-aged men after dinner and with a cigar. Courvoisier brandy is a case in point: his company is trying to reinvent it by persuading young women to order it mixed with Cointreau and cranberry juice. Young men, he argues, look to their girlfriends for suggestions on what is and isn’t fashionable to quaff.

Young single women drink plenty: figures from the Life Style study by DDB, a market-research firm in Chicago, suggest that 45% of single 24-35-year-old women who earn at least $20,000 a year confess to having too much to drink sometimes, compared with 24% of women in general. “Blurry goofun tonight,” slurs Bridget after a binge. And they eat sporadically, when they are not dieting: Bridget is no whiz at maths, but she knows the calorific value of an olive to within a decimal point. Because cooking for one is a bore, and eating alone is miserable, singles are big buyers of pre-prepared food. Their ovens are for extra storage; the main cooking utensil is the microwave. Bridget Jones and her friends raid Marks & Spencer, a big British retailer, for “two bottles of wine (1 fizzy, 1 white)” and 1 tub hummus & pkt of mini-pittas 12 smoked salmon and cream cheese pin-wheels 1 raspberry pavlova
1 tiramisu (party size) 2 Swiss Mountain Bars Marks & Spencer took rather longer than Ms Fielding to notice the part that it plays in stuffing calories into British singles. But the store recently realised that its portions-for-one of pre-prepared food were designed for the bird-like and conservative appetites of the elderly, and not for young women (let alone young men). It now does a good trade in large one-person helpings of ethnic goodies such as noodles and lamb tagine.

But the main thing that distinguishes Bridget from her married sisters is the amount of time and money she spends on simply having fun. Most of that fun happens outside the apartment. Scott McDonald, head of marketing research at Conde Nast, publishers of Vogue and other Bridget mind-fodder, is impressed by how much single professional women in their 30s spend on holidays, art classes, music lessons, health clubs, concerts, yoga classes, movies, eating out—and, of course, shopping and shopping.

In future, Bridget Jones may be more willing to settle sooner for marriage and less eager to find self-fulfilment at work. Young women reared to believe that a career is their birthright have done better in the job market than the marriage market. At the end of her day, Bridget is hugely relieved to find that Mark Darcy really loves her. Could that really be what matters most to single women in their 30s?

a) Why do women put off marriage nowadays?

b) Why is it difficult for a woman like Bridget to find a partner?

c) What makes such women as Bridget different from married women?

III 1. How is the problem of generation gap described in “Bridget Jones’s Diary”?

2.Speak on the “married vs. single” problem.

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