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A friend mentioned a while back that "there are lots of lonely older women out there." Seemed like a truism I've heard before, but it didn't sound reasonable. Why aren't there just as many lonely older men?

Turns out my sense of "reasonable" was wrong (as that sense often is, in many people and about many things).

Sex ratios by age
I found a website by a statistician from Brooklyn called Jonathan Soma that purports to analyze the number of single persons in America by age. He did it by compiling census data and then charting the number of "unmatched" singles in various age ranges for various metropolitan areas, controlled for population. Here's what that means: say you have 1,000 single people (never married, or divorced). Four hundred and fifty of them are women. If you then "match" an equal number of single men to the number of women, you have 900 people split equally between the sexes. In this instance, that means you have 100 single men left over—or 100 "unmatched" males.

On the graphs below, of the Eastern half of the United States, the number of unmatched males per 1,000 single people is represented by blue circles of various sizes; the number of unmatched females is represented by red circles.

I first set the sliders for an age range of 25–34. Look at that picture:

Just as young men always suspected! Lots of unmatched males almost everywhere—a shortage of females. (For me it was even worse. When I arrived at Dartmouth in 1975, coeducation had only recently begun, and the ratio of male to female undergraduate students was 3:1. Not a problem for the suave and sophisticated, but for us bumbling and underexperienced males, cruel!)

Why? Well, the sex ratio at birth in the United States, as in Britain, is 105, meaning 105:100, or 105 males born for every 100 females. And women statistically marry at a somewhat younger age. Beyond that, I dunno.

But as the age range goes up, gradually the excess of males evens out and then begins to be replaced by an overabundance of females. By the time people are in their 50s, the situation has thoroughly flipped. Look at the graph for the age range of 50–59:

By this age, there are unmatched females almost everywhere. That giant red circle in the far lower left represents McAllen, Texas, a city of 136,000 where in 2012 there were unmatched single women at a rate of a whopping 372 per every 1,000 singles. Even after you discount for independent Texan ladies who'd sooner cope with a rattlesnake bite than a grumpy old male critter messing up the house, that still leaves a disconcerting number of lonesome fiftysomething women yodeling plaintively by the fencerail in the moonlight. If you're a female in your 50s in McAllen and you're hoping to get hitched, your best first step might be to move.

Maybe try Evansville, Indiana, the site of that tiny blue circle in the middle of the map. That represents 17 unmatched men per thousand singles in their 50s. All seventeen of whom are probably puzzled as to why they can't get a date. (Sorry, am I anthropomorphizing statistics here?)

Not only that, but the situation for women in their 50s might be even worse than the graph shows. Wealth and power are known aphrodisiacs; without getting into the issue of whether the effect works both ways equally, it's at least true that gender inequity has meant that more males enjoy wealth and power than females. Presumably, some wealthy and powerful single males in the 50–59 age range might be competing for younger females, further reducing the number of same-age singles available to women in that age range.

Risk-takers, loggers, and dudes who won't go to the doctor
But the question that fascinated me was: why are there so many more older single women?

And it turns out: men die.

We just die more. Throughout our lives, men engage in more risk-taking behaviors; we have a higher rate of drug abuse* and are about twice as likely to become alcoholics**. Men commit suicide at a greater rate than women. More men die in combat. More than three times as many men as women are murder victims. Congress still prohibits the Centers for Disease Control from studying gun deaths, but no one disagrees that gun violence kills more males than females. We aren't typically as anxious or as careful as our distaff counterparts, or as constrained by what other people think. We're apparently stupider: most Darwin Awards go to men. Injury from many causes (fighting, traffic accidents, political violence, crime, showing off, extreme sports, playing with fire or firearms or fireworks, etc.) is a major cause of death worldwide (about 10% of all deaths), and far more men die of injury than women. Men tend to more heavily populate the most hazardous professions (like the three most lethal jobs in America, which are logging, commercial fishing, and piloting airplanes, in that order). In addition, some men have a tendency to be stoic or macho about their own healthcare, and do things such as neglect routine medical checkups even when they can afford them.

Although not dead, far more men are in prison than women, and that presumably takes the single ones out of circulation. In most cases, anyway. And prison populations are aging: "prisoners above 55" has been the fastest-growing group among incarcerated men throughout the 2000s.

Also—I find this poignant—being single itself is something of a health risk. Married men tend to be a little healthier and live a little longer than their same-age single counterparts.

Apparently all this adds up as the years get behind us.

[UPDATE: Tom Burke pointed this out: "There has been one huge change in female mortality in the last century or so. The great killer of women, the 'hazardous activity' that women engage in exclusively—that is, childbirth—has become much less hazardous in the last 150 years (thank goodness). This alone would affect the proportions, because the risk from the male-exclusive 'hazardous activities' hasn't similarly changed."]

Not destiny
If you're looking at those alarming charts with a personal interest, however, bear in mind that statistics aren't destiny. Just because the odds might not be entirely with you doesn't mean you can't succeed. Young men find girlfriends all the time, and older women find new love—even in McAllen, Texas, there are still 314 men per 1,000 single people. A female family friend of ours found love in her late 60s, and began a rich and rewarding relationship that continues a decade and a half later; and my own dear mum got remarried at 57 to a man her own age, and they've been together for going on 24 years now.

But if you're a single man over age 60 trying to find a woman your own age and can't, well, you're probably not trying hard enough. Most likely, you don't even have to move to McAllen.

Mike

"Open Mike" is the "whatever durn thing Mike's got himself interested in this week" off-topic section of TOP.

*Men and women seem to become addicted at equal rates once people experience addictive drugs past certain thresholds, but more males expose themselves to the experiences than females do.

**Alcoholics do dangerous things when drunk and die younger so reliably that the gene for alcoholism gradually gets weeded out of ethnic populations: rates of alcoholism are highly correlated to the length of time a population group has been exposed to alcohol. In China, for example, where people have been exposed to alcohol for 5,000 years, deaths from alcoholism are low. But many American Indian tribes have been exposed to alcohol only for a few hundred years, and alcoholism is rampant among them because the gene predisposing them to it hasn't gone through millennia of negative natural selection. The Navajo Nation, America's most populous Indian tribe (the Navajo reservation is larger than the State of West Virginia), estimates its tribal members die of alcohol-related causes at a rate 514% higher than other Americans—and America as a whole is already in the high range for both alcoholism and alcohol-related deaths.

Original contents copyright 2015 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Featured Comments from:

Geoff Wittig: "The male/female disparity is really just a powerful example of the brilliant effectiveness of natural selection. It works like this: There is indeed an imbalance in male/female numbers at birth, 105 males per 100 females. But it starts earlier than that; the disparity is more striking in utero, where early in gestation it's more like 120:100. It turns out male fetuses are less 'fit,' less likely to survive than female, at any stage of pregnancy. Hence a substantial majority of extremely premature infants who survive are female. (One theory holds that the nearly useless Y chromosome leaves males handicapped with only one copy of the functional X chromosome genes, where women get two, and the increased attrition of males is partly due to this 'sub clinical' x-linked disease).

"The increased mortality in males from birth onward due to our relative frailty and stupidity, not coincidentally, evens out exactly at reproductive age, where males=females. Nature is smart. Once we're done reproducing, males are relatively speaking more redundant than females, hence there is less evolutionary pressure to maintain our life expectancy."

Martyn: "Ha! At college (in the UK) I had the opposite situation—it was a teacher training college (as they were called in the '70s) which had transitioned from a 'Home Economics' college to one for general teacher training. The emphasis was still on HE so the ratio was around 10:1 female to male.... Happy days indeed."

Steve Jacob: "I think eventually the idea that there is something wrong with being single wears off, especially for women. As a recent divorcee friend of mine said... 'My kids eventually grew up, became self-sufficient and left home. I just wish my husband had done the same thing.'"