“We are still wired to see marriages as the (happy) endings to women’s stories,” writes Rebecca Traister in her 2016 book All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation.14 Traister points out that our assumptions about single women are often guided by “an unconscious conviction that, if a woman is not wed, it’s not because she’s made a set of active choices, but rather that she has not been selected—chosen, desired, valued enough.”
