"That's great news for the 86 million single adults, who have become the new majority."

Which means that the total adult population of the US is less than 172 million. Where did everyone go?

Every time I hear about the sleazy, vomit-inducing machinations of the diamond cartel (and particularly the misery and suffering it generates) I am happy that the engagement ring I've been wearing lo these past eighteen years belonged to my husband's great-grandmother.

If you're single, want diamond jewelry, and would like to piss off the deBeers corporation, buy your cocktail ring at an estate sale.

If married couples comprise 51% of the households in the US, then explain to me how are single people the majority?

Please forgive me, I spent my college years deconstructing Yeats poems and writing long-winded bullshit PoMo papers on Henry Fielding.

Math *is* hard, especially when you're mixing statistics -- households versus people. A houshold containing a married couple actually contains two people, right?

Married couples equal 51% of HOUSEHOLDS, therefore presumably single people equal 49%? If each "married household" contains two people, that's still roughly twice as many married people as single.

The 49% makes some sense if you're talking about households (not people), because then:

86m = 49% of 175m

Therefore

89m(ish)= 51% of 175m

But, that 51% actually is two people per percentage point, so the total number of married people is actually 178m.

Right?

Please feel free to point out my wrong-ness, if necessary. I have to take my GREs in six months, so I need the pointers.

...that the US adult population is well over 200 million, so 86 million single people do not make a majority.

(Not that it matters, but there are many households that have more than one single adult, and plenty of households with one married couple and one or more single adults [grown children, elderly parents, etc.]).

My point was that the author came up with a bizarre statistic based on a combination of two totally different measurables: individuals and households. Even if you take all those household variants into account, you still either have to count people OR households, not people AND households in order to come up with a number that means anything.

I'd still like to know if my math was faulty. I was pretty good at it in high school (straight As) but that was fifteen years ago and the dumbening has begun.

The U.S. population in 2000 was 281,491,906. 221,148,671 people were 15 years old or older. 27.1 percent of these, or 59,913,370 had never been married. 54.4 percent, or 120,231,273 were married. The remaining 18.5 percent, or 41,004,028, had been married, but were separated, widowed, or divorced. That means there were 100,917,398 single people over the age of 15, 40 percent of whom had been married at some time.

The numbers are also skewed by including people between the ages of 15 and 18. There are only 209,128,094 people over the age of 18, and very few people under the age of 18 are married. That means the single group is overstated by about 12,020,577 (the number of people 15-18 years old).

I'm sorry, but single people are not the majority, and never-married people are definitely *not* the majority.

This isn't to make any kind of judgement about single people--I'm 29 and have never been married--but just to say that the article got the numbers wrong. If you want to do a more detailed analysis of the stats, the U.S. Census Bureau web site has all the numbers you could possibly want.

that single people can be happy and fulfilled. What, you needed validation from a magazine to be happy? I'm almost 30 and single, and, although I hope to be married, I never let the lack of a ring get in the way of having a fulfilling life. Also, I laughed at the people who bought into the whole "right-hand ring" trend--it's just another marketing ploy by the diamond industry. Remember--the same people who convinced men AND women that a diamond engagement ring, the bigger the better, is de rigeur.

Not content with not knowing that 'media' is a plural noun, now Broadsheet has forgotten that 'data' is plural as well. Memo to SER: "The data SHOW..." not "The data shows."

Lots of people never get married, whatever their relationship status, and really, apart from whatever convenient or as the case may be inconvenient, legal and tax arrangements are conferred, why should they. DNA will settle any parenthood issues and "everyone" is economically productive (or not) irrespective of their married state, and being married doesn't force people to live together, spend time with their kids, etc. so what difference does it make if people get married or not.

I, for one, am thrilled to see such an article. As a happily single woman of 31 with no intention of ever marrying, I get really tired of being treated like a freak. It's not a phase or a wound, it's a choice. Most people I meet assume that I just haven't met the right man, as if it's just impossible that I could be truly happy as a single woman. It was refreshing to see my choice acknowledged, for once.

The bit about right-hand diamonds was a bit grotesque, though.

Obviously there are no men in this category voluntarily unless they are gay. It would be interesting to know if increased female economic indepence has removed the incentive for serious interest in men from a segment of the female population.

You must be joking that there are no men single voluntarily. Today and historically, men married at a later age than women, often because they had to establish themselves financially and be able to support a wife and children, and many men were and are older than their wives when they marry. Economic independence means that women may delay marriage, and may marry for reasons other than financial necessity--which is good, right?

unless they are gay, and women who claim to be straight sometimes do, and some always have. In the past this meant they didn't get married. Now that women and men can have these relationships without marriage what does "single" now mean

"Single" here means "not married." The Census Bureau marital status category doesn't measure if you are seriously romantically involved with someone or not; it measures whether you are married or not.

And "serious relationship" is not coterminous with "sexual relationship." I know guys who have abstained from the former but not the latter.