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Not too long ago, a New York Times article touched off a skirmish between the sexes by announcing that slightly more than half of American women were not living with spouses - implying they were single.
Thousands of people commented through the Times Web site and on blogs, many of them admonishing today's women for being "selfish," others celebrating us for being "independent." Accusations of man-hating flew.
But the real reason for the excess number of single women has less to do with any female disillusionment with marriage than with a population imbalance rooted in our evolutionary past.
The Times analysis found that 53 percent of men were living with spouses, compared with only 49 percent of women.
Oddly, they lumped in teenage girls as young as 15, elderly widows, married women with spouses fighting in Iraq, separated women, and women living with partners. That certainly stretches the definition of "single."
In any case, if I make the reasonable assumption that we have equal numbers of married men and married women, then this disparity in the proportion of singles is due to a simple imbalance in the population: women outnumber men.
As the census data show, even though a few more boys are born every year than girls, men start to be outnumbered as you ascend the age groups. In the 90 and older category, women outnumber men more than 3 to 1.
So maybe what we should be worried about here isn't the dying institution of marriage, or women's dying interest in wedlock - but dying men.
One researcher who has looked closely at this phenomenon is Daniel Kruger, a social scientist at the University of Michigan. In a recent study, he found that thousands of American men died prematurely. Some were shot, some stabbed, some killed in car crashes. Some had heart attacks, some strokes, some drank themselves to death.
"Men tend to die at higher rates than women across the whole life course from each of these major causes with the exception of cancer in middle adulthood," he says.
Kruger also looked at mortality data for 11 countries and the Ache Indians of South America. He found many more men than women die before age 50 from accidents or illness. This is true for most other animal species as well, he says.
The reason goes back to evolution, he says. We're shaped by two evolutionary forces - natural selection, which favors survival ability, and sexual selection, which favors mating success.
For human males, Kruger says, high status is sexy, so men with the most status would attract the most mates - and thus leave behind the most offspring. One way men achieved status was by doing daring, attention-getting feats. So the daredevils among our ancestors - if they survived long enough - had many mates and spread their risk-taking genes.
And then there's testosterone, which, while it makes men strong and masculine, also interferes with fat metabolism and immune function, Kruger says. That makes fast food much more dangerous to men than women.
So if men would please stop with the supersized fries and risky, show-off behavior (driving too fast, getting drunk, picking fights) maybe the numbers of single females and males would be more equal.
And humans can change. Just because something is bred into us by evolution doesn't mean we can't work to alter it, says Kruger. He advocates a new focus on men's health, similar to the push for women's health in the 1990s.
In the meantime, maybe we should be glad that women are increasingly comfortable with being single.
Which brings to mind a conversation overheard not long ago at an airport waiting area. "You lost your husband, too," I heard one elderly woman say to another.
I braced for something wrenching.Instead, she brightly shared that she now relished leaving the television on. Her late husband always hated the noise. The two women exchanged stories of the tiny pleasures to be found in single living.
Perhaps this is how evolution shaped women - to be adaptable and, when necessary, independent. Perhaps this is how it's been for eons.
By Faye Flam
Inquirer Staff Writer
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