Single Men and Single Women: The Double Standard

We hold unmarried men and women to different standards. Faced with societal pressure to be coupled up, I told my friends I wanted to be George Clooney: if I found someone, great, but I was not going to center my life around finding a mate. After Clooney divorced his first wife in 1993, he was single for 21 years until his second marriage at the age of 52. During those two decades, he was widely admired as an eligible bachelor with a successful acting career and interest in activism. Jennifer Aniston, who was single for ten years between her first and second marriages, also had a successful acting career and interest in philanthropy. But rather than focus on her professional accomplishments, the media obsessed about her weight, diet, lack of marriage, then possibly falling apart marriage, and whether she was pregnant or simply had a food baby from eating a large meal.