Sociological Study of the Singlehood Consequences Among the Never-Married Women

In recent years there has been generally an increase in the number of years people continue to be unmarried and, in particular, a rise in girls’ marriage age is being observed. In view of the fact that a rise in marriage age leads to decreasing women ’s fertility and consequently population will be declining and the society will face the phenomenon of population aging in long term, the investigation of single life style and its pros and cons for those who will choose to live it, is of crucial importance. The present study is a research into the lived experiences of single women i.e.those who are over 35 years of old and have not been married. This study adopted the phenomenological approach, and phenomenological method,since by taking ontological tenets into account, it mainly focuses on the first hand or lived experiences and keeps away from secondary issues. Findings were obtained through in-depth phenomenologically-oriented interviews with fifteen never-married women from Tehran city who were selected by purposive snowball-dependent sampling. The results suggest that contrary to other countries research findings, singlehood in Iran have posed problems for never-married women. In fact, women don’t take a positive view toward the phenomenon of singlehood .