Single Women Can Be Happy

Lori Gottlieb’s argument about why women should panic if they’re not married at some particular age makes claims that are not consistent with the data. It’s also a prominent example of the Maureen Dowd fallacy, i.e. blaming feminism for idiosyncratic relationship problems that have nothing to do with feminism. And I think Ruth Franklin and Liesl Schillinger make an even more important point: Gottlieb doesn’t seem to consider the obvious possibility that being in a crappy relationship is substantially worse than being single. And as Franklin says, especially for women failure to consider this is not merely suboptimal but potentially dangerous.