Used to be that the most famous old maid in the world was a gawky cartoon character who fell hard for a man whose affections were largely devoted to canned spinach. Olive Oyl was a woman of open heart and flapper feet, an awkward eyelash-batting coquette with skinny legs and a tight bun, but try as she might, she never could land her pipe-puffing sailor man, Popeye.

Used to be that old maids were the sad-sack left-behinds, the dried-up shells who drifted on the edges of society while neighbours on street corners whispered about their sad fate, about their lonely days as pale accounting clerks and midi-skirted kindergarten teachers, about their lonely nights behind drawn curtains in quiet apartments, comforted by cats and, sometimes, a favourite niece.

Because in a world where love and marriage are the holy grail of societal harmony and personal fulfilment, there is surely nothing more pitiful than a woman who can't find a man.

But that was before Jennifer Aniston became the poster girl for Spinsterhood 2.0.

In an age when women are chasing careers instead of men, when some marriages last no longer than a butterfly's breath, when the most popular place to meet someone is on a computer screen, it can be no surprise to learn that single women are taking over the world.

Statistics Canada has reported an upward trend in the rise of singles in our country over the past decade or so, a shift that has seen single adults - women mostly - outnumbering married ones in Canadian households for the first time.

It's a sucker punch of reality to the lovelorn heart of the average single woman, and it's one that is shared with our sisters to the south, where recent U.S. Census figures revealed that 51 per cent of adult women in that country were unmarried.

Or put another way, single women now outnumber married women.

Experts also explain, and sometimes blame, the demographic phenomenon as the wreckage from the feminist and sexual revolutions of the 1960s, along with high divorce rates, the huge population bulge of older women not marrying after widowhood or divorce, and a vexing combination of Prince Charming and Peter Pan syndrome, where young women want to marry perfect men and young men want to marry their mothers.

And so we have eHarmony and The Bachelorette and a surfeit of singleton movies such as Knocked Up and No Strings Attached, and relationships referred to as "friends with benefits" and an avalanche of other 21st-century cultural spinoffs owing their existence to this new social anomaly.

And we have Jennifer Aniston, loud and proud in singlehood.

If Aniston, who has beauty, wealth and fame but still no love, is riding the crest of this demographic wave, the millions of women who are surfing anonymously in the shallows are oddly comforted in knowing that she is helping redefine the once-pitied profile of the unmarried woman.

After all, Aniston has been the epitome of the lovely lithe girl next door, from the moment she was beamed into our living rooms as Rachel Green, in 1994, on the sitcom Friends. For 10 fictional years, she chased love all over Manhattan. When the popular show ended, her storyline just kept going.

There was the doomed five-year, baby-less marriage to that other Hollywood work of art, Brad Pitt, who dumped her for hot mama Angelina Jolie and is now scruffy and raising a château full of hellions.

There were the paparazzi-dogged romances with Vince Vaughn, John Mayer and Gerard Butler, the jubilant dates, the sad breakups, the pregnancy speculation, the adoption gossip, all of it chronicled in the tabloids, on TMZ and the cover of People, which just last week reported, in Jen's Most Revealing Interview Ever on Dating, Babies and Exes that the 42-year-old beaming blond with the bikini bod, couture closet and the big bank account is "happy, really."

As if she has to assure the world that it's okay to be in your 40s and not married (something we don't seem to demand from George Clooney), to have been dateless for more than a year, to be content in the company of an Architectural Digest house in Beverly Hills, a yoga mat, and dogs named Norman and Dolly.

If Jennifer Aniston can't seal the deal, maybe that's proof that there really isn't someone for everyone, that love - at least the kind of love that we are programmed to spend our lives looking for - isn't everything.

sfralic@vancouversun.com