As the second decade of the twenty-first century has worn on, politicians of all stripes, aware of the political power of the unmarried woman yet seemingly incapable of understanding female life outside a marital context, have come to rely on a metaphor in which American women, no longer bound to men, are binding themselves to government.

— Rebecca Traister

In fact, it is the progressive nature of a nation that permits continuing revisions to its bedrock institutions –– its constitution, its electorate, its definition of marriage –– that has allowed marriage to evolve, to become more inclusive, more equal, and potentially more appealing to more people.

— Rebecca Traister

In part, that's because when we delay marriage, it's not just women who become independent. It's also men, who, like women, learn to clothe and feed themselves, to clean their homes iron their shirts and pack their own suitcases.

— Rebecca Traister

In work, it is possible to find commitment, attachment, chemistry, and connection. In fact, it's high time that more people acknowledged the electric pull that women can feel for their profession, the exciting heat of ambition and frisson of success.

— Rebecca Traister

I think that technology - computers and smartphones and 24-hour availability - often leaves me, and others I know, feeling blank and depressed at the end of a day. I also believe that hyped expectations for raising children leaves many women and men feeling as if their days are a blur of carpools and play-groups and tutors.

— Rebecca Traister

It's a controversial issue: many feminists reasonably worry that by taking the concentration off gender as an independent locus of oppression, we dilute the strength of a women's movement, or of women's rights advocacy.

— Rebecca Traister

It's true that increasing one's number of sexual partners almost certainly increases the risk of sexually transmitted disease and of unintended pregnancy. It increases the chance of having your soul stomped on, and of having terrible sex. Furthermore, it also, I should add, increases the odds of finding someone with whom you have terrific sex, and learning more about what turns you on and what turns you off, how your body works and how other people's bodies work.

— Rebecca Traister

Joel Kotlin, a professor of urban development, argued in the daily beast that the power of the single voter is destined to fade, since single people "Have no heirs," while their religious, conservative, counterparts will repopulate the nation with children who will replicate their parents' politics, ensuring that "conservative, more familial-oriented values inevitably prevail." Kotlin's error, of course, is both in assuming that unmarried people do not reproduce -- in fact, they are doing so in ever greater numbers -- but also in failing to consider whence the gravitation away from married norms derived. A move toward independent life did not simply emerge from the clamshell: it was born of generations of dissatisfaction with the inequalities of religious, conservative, social practice.

— Rebecca Traister

One of the favorite conservative themes is that the cure for poverty is more marriage and earlier marriage. We hear that all the time; there have been billions of dollars now, between the Bush administration and the Obama administration, which has continued the marriage education program, on trying to get more people to get married.

— Rebecca Traister

O'Rourke's alienation from the married woman comes in part because she's filling in the imaginative blank of that woman's union with a fantasy of fulfillment. If loneliness is a want of intimacy, then being single lends itself to loneliness because the loving partnerships we imagine in comparison are always, in our minds, intimate; they are not distant or empty of abusive or dysfunctional. We don't fantasize about being in bad marriages, or about being in what were once good marriages that have since gone stale or sexless or hard, creating their own profound emotional pain.

— Rebecca Traister