A new portrait of single Americans, drawn from a major new survey, suggests the attitudes and behaviors of today'

Clipped from yourlife.usatoday.com

A new portrait of single Americans, drawn from a major new survey, suggests the attitudes and behaviors of today's singles are quite unlike their counterparts just a few decades ago.

Findings show men are more interested in love, marriage and children than their peers in earlier times; women want more independence in their relationships than their mothers did; and hooking up and one-night stands aren't necessarily meaningless sexual encounters.

"Men are now expressing some traditionally female attitudes, while women are adopting some of those long attributed to men," says biological anthropologist Helen Fisher, who helped develop the survey with social historian Stephanie Coontz and Justin Garcia, a doctoral fellow with the Institute for Evolutionary Studies at Binghamton (N.Y.) University.

Data show men are quicker to fall in love and more likely than women to want children: 54% of men say they have experienced love at first sight, compared with 44% of women; among singles without children under 18, more men (24%) than women (15%) say they want children.

And, across every age group, women want more independence than men in their relationships: 77% of women say having their personal space is "very important," vs. 58% for men; 78% of women say the same about having their own interests and hobbies (vs. 64% for men). And 35% of women (vs. 23% of men) say regular nights out with the guys/girls are important.

Roles overlap

"Men do feel more empowered to acknowledge their desires for commitment and their desires for connection," says Gerson, author of The Unfinished Revolution: Coming of Age in a New Era of Gender, Work, and Family, out in March.

"Men and women are looking for similar assets and are not judging a potential partner on the basis of gender-related traits — that a woman is looking for a paycheck object or a man is looking for a sex object," she says. "They're both looking for the whole package, more so than in the past."

Sara Barrett, 34, of Washington, says she and her women friends — both single and married — do talk about maintaining their individuality to make sure they don't get "totally lost in their relationships."

"The independence is really, really important to us," she says, noting that the "girls' night out" for a handful of friends is usually once a week.

Barrett, a reading and math teacher, says she mentions the need for "space" from the get-go in a new relationship.

"With some friends, it's been an issue. They dated a guy who was clingier than they wanted."

June Ashley, 57, a single in Fort Worth, agrees that men appear more focused on committed relationships.

"I think men are more needy for a relationship than women," says Ashley, who married at 17 and was divorced after nine years. She remarried and was widowed after seven years.

Sherri Langburt of New York, founder of SingleEdition.com, a lifestyle website for singles, says she has noticed the changes in what men and women ask the site's panel of experts.

"Men are writing us more about the emotional relationships than women. Women are writing us about the one-night stands," Langburt says. "Women are (asking) if it's OK — 'Can I have a one-night stand?' Men are writing, 'I'm single and I'm lonely and want to find love and can't admit it to anyone.' "

Love at first sight

Mary Catenacci, 24, of South Pasadena, Calif., who works in fundraising for a non-profit group, says men she has dated have confided to her that they've experienced love at first sight.

Women, she says, aren't as eager to admit strong feelings as they might have been years ago. "Girls are little bit more cautious because they are more educated and have more opportunities. They're a bit more discerning."

Men are more visual than women, which could explain the "love at first sight" disparity, say both Fisher and Langburt.

The 5,199 singles surveyed include the never married (56%), divorced (31%), widowed (10%) and separated (3%) who were not in a serious relationship at the time. Of the total, 5% were gay or lesbian; 4% were bisexual; and 0.1% identified as transgender.

Among other findings:

•Singles can fall in love with a friend. Seventy-one percent fell in love with someone they did not initially find attractive after having great conversations or shared interests or both; 35% fell in love with someone even though they felt no sparks initially.

•Love can last. Twenty-nine percent report remaining intensely in love with their last partner two to five years; 8% for six to 10 years; and 18% for more than 10 years.

•Hookups and one-night stands can turn into partnerships. Thirty-five percent have had a one-night stand that turned into a long-term relationship.

Garcia, an evolutionary biologist, says young people "want romantic love" and are finding it "through sexual encounters."

"They are finding relationships through hookups," he says, noting that more than half of the young men and women in his research say they hooked up to start a romantic relationship.

The survey did not define a "hookup" for participants, but Garcia's research calls it "a sexual encounter between people who are not dating or in a relationship, and where a more traditional romantic relationship is not an explicit condition of the encounter."

With singles making up about one-third of the U.S. population — about 105 million singles ages 18 and older, according to the most recent Census data — there is great interest in this group.

"It may be because marriage is more fragile that people may want to maintain their separateness, even within marriage," she says. Read more at yourlife.usatoday.com

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