The challenges facing young adults have shifted over the years. While many of the young adults we know will receive questions at family gatherings about their relationship status (alongside of their studies and job prospects), they [particularly women] are likely to feel more pressure to not commit to a permanent relationship from other corners of their lives (from peers, academia, and society in general).
Freya India, in a recent substack article on the pressure to stay single notes that she’s rarely asked about when she’s settling down, but instead has “only ever felt the opposite, an overwhelming pressure to be single. In the secular liberal world I used to think there were no expectations, no pressure. There is, though: the pressure today is to avoid anything that might stick, to run through life without getting snagged on any responsibilities, without getting tethered to someone else too early.”
In her world, “the young woman who settles down has always been seen as wasting her potential; the single, childfree, even divorced woman is strong, wise, knows her worth. Most of the time people aren’t wondering why young women aren’t having kids but why we would at all. Nobody really mentions it, let alone pushes it. And I’m sure it wasn’t always like this, but lately I see young men praised for committing, while young women are warned.”
She points out that this is a natural outworking of our culture: “Fundamental to liberalism is a suspicion of restraint, which inevitably becomes suspicion of human relationships. It promises liberation from every last tie until we are free of everything, including each other. The position we idolise is one of being permanently suspended, in time, in place; voluntarily stepping out of that state and making yourself vulnerable is suspect. Both sexes feel this, I think, but because women were seen as having more to be liberated from, our devotion in particular became dangerous, a liability. The dominant pressure in liberal culture, then, is to delay, to detach, to stay permanently available. We are permitted only one loyalty, and that’s to ourselves.”
I expect that these expectations are affecting not only young adults but all of society, with each of us being somehow affected by this strange call to love ourselves without loving our neighbour (or God).