Here’s a number that surprised me more than it probably should have.

Among single Americans age 40 and older, 71 percent of women say they aren’t looking to date right now, compared with 42 percent of men in the same age bracket. Under 40, men and women are roughly even. Something shifts hard once women cross into their 40s, and it isn’t a shift toward men suddenly becoming more appealing.

I’ve watched this play out around me in a scattered, unscientific way, mostly through friends and their mothers. The pattern the numbers describe is real enough that it’s worth walking through what’s actually going on with it.

The gap is bigger than the stereotype admits

A study led by Pew Research Center researcher Anna Brown, drawing on survey responses from thousands of single American adults, reports that a majority of older women “aren’t looking to date right now,” at a rate more than 1.5 times higher than men their age. Among people who’ve stepped away from dating altogether, the two most common reasons given are having other priorities and simply liking being single, cited by 47 percent and 44 percent of non-daters respectively.

That second reason is the one that undercuts the old assumption. “Liking being single” isn’t the same sentence as “still healing” or “haven’t met the right person yet.” It’s a stated preference, not a waiting room.

For a lot of these women, it was never a waiting room

Bella DePaulo, a social scientist at UC Santa Barbara who coined the term “single at heart,” puts a name to exactly this group: people for whom living unpartnered isn’t a phase between relationships but the actual shape of a good life. Her research describes people who feel this way, saying that for them, being unpartnered “is key to their most joyful, fulfilling, authentic and psychologically rich life.”

I’m not a psychologist, so I’ll say this carefully: that’s a claim about a specific group of people who identify strongly with single life, not a universal truth about everyone over 40 who happens to be unattached. But it lines up with the survey data. 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.”

Nobody’s advertising it, so the shift stays invisible

Part of why this pattern still catches people off guard, myself included, is that almost nobody announces it. A woman who gets married throws a party. A woman who decides thirteen years into being single that she’s genuinely happy there doesn’t get an equivalent moment, so the decision never really becomes visible to the people around her. It just looks, from the outside, like nothing has happened yet.

That invisibility does some quiet damage. It keeps the old story alive, the one where a woman on her own past a certain age is assumed to be between chapters rather than settled into one she picked. 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.

Compare that with how quickly a man’s long-term singlehood gets waved off as normal, sometimes even admired as independence, and the asymmetry gets a little sharper. Both patterns are describing real people making a real choice. Only one of them keeps needing to explain itself at every family dinner.

The question people ask says more about them than about her

“Anyone special in your life?” is such a normal thing to ask a woman in her 40s or 50s that most people don’t register it as an assumption. But it is one. It assumes the answer she wants is yes, and that a no comes with an unspoken apology attached. Nobody asks a 45-year-old man that question expecting him to look embarrassed either way.

I grew up in a household that valued personal responsibility over performing for other people’s expectations, and it’s a lens I still use: someone else’s version of a good life doesn’t need to look like mine, or match a script I didn’t write, for it to actually be good. Applied here, the question worth asking a single woman in her 40s isn’t “still nothing?” It’s closer to “is this what you want?” Those are different conversations entirely.

Having grown up across a few different countries myself, I’ve noticed the question travels well. The accent changes, the phrasing changes, but the underlying assumption, that a woman alone past a certain age must be missing something, shows up almost everywhere I’ve lived. What doesn’t travel nearly as well is curiosity about whether she actually wants what everyone assumes she’s missing.

Success on her own terms isn’t a consolation prize

My own read on success, in general, is that it’s personal rather than a fixed target everyone should be racing toward on the same clock. Somebody else’s version, whether that’s a packed dating calendar or a quiet apartment with no one else’s schedule to negotiate around, is just as legitimate as mine, as long as it’s actually the version they chose. Living out of step with your own definition of a good life, married or not, is the actual failure mode here. Staying single was never it.

None of this erases the fact that plenty of women over 40 are single by circumstance rather than preference, and would rather not be. That’s a real and different experience, and if that’s closer to where you are, it deserves its own honest attention rather than a pep talk about how great singlehood can be.

But for the growing share of women the surveys describe as genuinely done looking, the real story is a decision nobody bothered to throw a party for, not a loss anyone needs to grieve on her behalf.