The Future Childless Cat Guys

Single, childless older women have long been the cruel cultural avatar of loneliness and social failure. But as rates of single young men rise, that portrait is going to change.

Biology has afforded men certain existential comforts. We are obsessed with women’s reproductive clocks, the idea that if they get married and have children when they’re still young they’ll be relegated to Cat Lady status forever. And in truth, we do have less time. We do have less hypothetical freedom. Men can enter into their 40s, 50s and onward and decide they’re finally ready to settle down. They can probably even still have kids into their 60s, 70s and 80s, if they want. Whatever life they’ve been living can be traded for the more traditional one they’ve been holding out on all along — they’re just waiting for the right moment to emerge. But for many of them, it won’t.

As of 2023, 31 percent of the American adult population is single. There are two demographics that make up the widest proportion of single people: women over the age of 65, 39 percent of whom are single, and men under 29, 63 percent of whom are single. There are several confounding factors about this data, namely that the comparative stats for men over 65 and women under 29 don’t mirror this trend, at all. People are either dating outside of their age range or lying. A lot of those women over 65 could be widowed. Regardless, the trend for young men has become noticeably worse in recent years: in 2019, only 51 percent of men under 29 reported being single. Young men are moreover the only demographic with such a significant increase — the percentage of single women over 65 actually decreased by 10 percent.

All of this data suggests that there is a problem unique to young men, specifically. And in addition to asking all if the questions I tend to focus on here, like how we can address this discrepancy and challenge the animosity between genders and sexlessness and loneliness, I think we also need to be looking ahead. If nothing changes, who do these young men become, ten years from now? Twenty?

They become our culture’s new “cat ladies.”

I don’t mean this with any vitriol toward either the “cat ladies” of the present or the young men who may represent the lifestyle. And while I’m obviously playing up the gender twist on the term here, my intention isn’t to imply that there will be some sort of broad gender transition here wherein these young men come to identify as ladies. Rather, the icon of childless solitude may no longer be a woman. It may become these young men, a few decades on.

Manosphere figures have never been too kind to the cat lady. She represents the perceived downfall of all the women who turned them down, and they relish in that. Most other people, though, don’t look at her with such scorn. There is perhaps some pity or disgust, especially for the extreme end of the trope that you might see on TV or in movies where an elderly woman houses dozens of cats who eat her when she inevitably dies alone. There are also the comments from conservatives like J.D. Vance, who see the role as emblematic of the Democratic party and their lack of stake in the future. Still, the majority of people probably know a single older woman with a cat and understand that she is relatively happy with her situation, or could otherwise envision finding contentment in the dynamic, themselves.

With any hope. those who come to represent this lifestyle in the future will also feel similarly. Still, there’s reason for concern. There are already over 16 million elderly Americans living alone, more than there’s ever been, a figure that increasingly represents a childless aging population. Of course, plenty of them are perfectly fine with that, but just as many aren’t. Just as many live not only in isolation but in ill-health and poverty. Would coupling up and having kids have saved them from this fate? Not necessarily. But it’s worth considering what portion of today’s single young men will become these often-lonely seniors of the future. Who will care for them?

What if we continue on this route of believing these young men and the issues they face aren’t worth our attention? What if their economic prospects continue to decline along with their education levels, as has happened over the last several decades? Who is this population, then? Are they angry? Do we resent them still?

I’m sure there are some readers who, like the Manosphere does today toward female loneliness, delight in the idea of this collective of cat men. They think it’s what they deserve. And like with the cat ladies of today, these men will likely serve as some sort of political caricature that isn’t representative of the whole.

Some of these men will be once-eligible bachelors for whom life has slipped by. Some of these will be aggressive, misogynistic men who never made any real effort to connect with women on a human level and yet continue to resent them out of entitlement. But a good many will be something else: guys who teetered on the edge of these worlds, guys who felt limited by their shyness or their career or their looks or some other factor that they believed prohibited them from having a shot, guys who frankly just never quite figured it out.

Yes, some of them will have chosen this fate. For others it will be the punishment they’ve earned. But not all of them, though. Probably not even most. It will instead just be what happened, the way that getting married young and having several kids in quick succession used to just be what happened to the generations before us, whether they really wanted it or were suited for parenthood or even liked their partner.

The difference between the childless cat ladies who defined the prior paradigm we’ve come to know and the childless cat men of the future is that the childless cat ladies often became such as an intentional shirking of expectations — avoiding the “what happens” that has long pushed women toward marriage and motherhood. The childless cat men will become such as a matter of ease. They are not defying expectations, but existing exactly according to the structural isolation and anomie society is bending toward.

All of these men will make up the fabric of our future culture. They will live in our communities, vote in our elections. They will require public help as they age, with few friends or family to fulfill the role of elder care. They will be the old men sitting alone by themselves at the diner, if by the grace of God there are still diners to speak of.

None of this is to say that women’s issues ought to be brushed aside in favor of addressing male loneliness. Give your energy and compassion where your heart and time allow. I suspect there is room for all of us to care about each other than we think. Don’t trade your happiness for someone else’s, but perhaps consider that your own happiness may be interconnected to that of the collective other. Including these men.

I don’t know exactly that I have some sort of prescription to offer. I don’t wish to suggest that women must take it upon themselves to date and marry men who treat them poorly in favor of the collective, or to say that any of us should deal with “reforming” bad men. But maybe, at least, we can take each other’s loneliness seriously. One day, we might not have a choice.