Articles

Especially around Valentine’s Day, it’s easy to find advice about sustaining a successful marriage, with suggestions for "date nights" and romantic dinners for two.But as we spend more and more of our lives outside marriage, it’s equally important to cultivate the skills of successful singlehood. And doing that doesn’t benefit just people who never marry. It can also make for more satisfying marriages.

It wasn't long ago that being single after a certain age was considered a recipe for lifelong misery. Up until 1970, the average woman married before she was legally old enough to have a drink at her wedding, and the average man married at 23. A woman still single at the ripe old age of 26 was what the Japanese call Christmas Cake -- past her pull date and destined to spoil. A man not married by the end of his 20s was considered irresponsible, if not "deviant."

In 1973, when President Richard Nixon proclaimed August 26 Women's Equality Day -- commemorating the day in 1920 that women won the right to vote -- a woman could still be denied housing by a real estate broker or credit by a bank, simply because of her gender.

In a letter to The Wall Street Journal this week, Ivanka Trump gave a robust defense of the Trump administration's proposed paid family leave program. The Journal's editorial board had denounced it as a government "entitlement" that "could create another disincentive for work and advancement."

Millennials, generally defined as people born between 1982 and 2000, were supposed to be the generation that forged what has been called "a new national consensus" in favor of gender equality.

I first discovered "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" when I was 25, and I immediately fell in love with it. But a few years ago, when I showed some episodes to a family studies class I was teaching, my students were far less impressed than I had expected them to be. I explained what a revelation it had been in 1970 to see a show about an unmarried working woman in her early 30s who was devoted to her job, was attractive to men and well-liked by her fellow workers, and who turned out to be the most…