The holiday questions about husbands and babies are coming again. At home in her own life and secure in Christ, she owes the family table no apology.
By EEW Magazine Online Editors
About four in 10 Black women ages 40 to 44 have never married, according to an analysis of 2024 Census Bureau data. (Aleksandar Nakic/Getty Images)
She knows the questions before she walks through the door. An aunt will ask whether she is seeing anybody. A cousin will ask when she plans to have a baby, as if 43 were 23. A church mother will pat her hand and say God still has somebody for her. A Black woman over 40 who is single and has no children can expect some version of this at family gatherings, and the holidays are coming.
The assumption behind every question is that something went wrong.
Marriage and motherhood have grown less common among Black women in midlife. About four in 10 Black women ages 40 to 44 have never married, according to an analysis of 2024 Census Bureau data by the National Center for Family & Marriage Research at Bowling Green State University. One in five has never given birth. The groups overlap only in part. In 1979, 89% of Black women that age had married and 89% had given birth.
The pressure is well documented. In a national 2024 Pew Research Center survey of adults 50 and older who never had children, 42% of women said they had at least sometimes felt pressure from society to have children when they were younger, compared with 27% of men. Their most common reason was that it just never happened.
Behind those figures are different women. One wanted to marry and never met a man she could build a life with. Another lost a pregnancy and told almost no one at church. A third weighed marriage and motherhood, chose neither and has no regrets. At the dinner table, all three get the same questions.
The encouragement can be as hard to take as the questions. "Your time is coming" is meant kindly, and a woman praying for a husband may welcome it. For a woman who has grieved that hope, it reopens the loss. A woman who is content hears that the life she built does not count yet.
The pressure follows her to church. Black women are among the most devout Americans, and 78% identify as Christian, according to Pew. She may teach Sunday school or sing in the choir. On Mother's Day, when the mothers are asked to stand, she stays in her seat.
Scripture does not treat marriage or motherhood as the measure of a woman. Jesus never married and had no children. Paul commended the single life in 1 Corinthians 7 as room for undivided devotion to the Lord.
Through Isaiah, God spoke to the eunuchs who kept His covenant, people who would never have children. He promised them "a place and a name better than of sons and of daughters" in His house (Isaiah 56:5).
A church that takes those passages seriously can ask single women to lead because of their gifts and greet them without asking who they are dating.
None of this rules out a wedding. Pew found that about one in four Americans who had never married at 40 in 2001 had done so by 60. Three in four had not. Some women will marry late or adopt. Many will do neither.
A record 25% of U.S. 40-year-olds had never married in 2021, up from 6% in 1980, according to Pew Research Center. (Aleksandar Nakic/Getty Images)
The woman at the table already has a life. She may be at peace with how it turned out. She may still hope for a husband or a child and mention it to no one. She does not have to be the family caregiver or anyone's success story to deserve respect.
The questions will come anyway. Scripture says believers are "complete in him" (Colossians 2:10). She was complete before anyone asked, and she owes no one at the table an explanation.
