A growing population of women over 40 are choosing to stay single, and many are not treating it as a temporary gap between relationships — surveys find older single women are far less likely than men their age to be looking for a partner at all

Something shifts hard once women cross into their 40s, and it isn’t a shift toward men suddenly becoming more appealing. “Liking being single” isn’t the same sentence as “still healing” or “haven’t met the right person yet.” If a big share of older single women are actively choosing not to date, “psychologically rich” is a more honest description of what’s happening than “still looking, just pickier.” The data says a majority of older single women would tell you otherwise, if anyone bothered to ask the actual question instead of the polite one. Applied here, the question worth asking a single woman in her 40s isn’t “still nothing?”