FEW things in life are more irritating than the unsolicited comments I get that black women, like me, are unlikely to marry. Family members ask, “Are you ever going to get married?” as if I am remaining single purposely to keep them from attending my wedding. Well-meaning married friends try to sell me on the idea that being single is liberating. And then there is my octogenarian aunt whom I love, but who also manages to unintentionally sucker punch me whenever I visit with the comment, “Maybe if you’d just straighten your hair you’d be able to find a man.”

I’m almost positive the people in my life don’t mean to add to the anxiety I already feel about being single in my 30s without children. Implicit in some of their comments is the idea that my failure to marry is beyond my control, a function of being born black and female.

It’s not simply an unhelpful observation. This culturally popular notion that 70 percent of black women don’t marry is just a myth. For the last few years, I have been hearing from every source imaginable that the vast majority of black women will never marry. This never made sense to me because so many black women I know are married. And indeed, eventually, most black women do marry.

A look at recent census data will tell you that the 70 percent we keep hearing about has been misconstrued. According to 2009 data from the Census Bureau, 70.5 percent of black women in the United States had never been married — but those were women between the ages of 25 and 29. Black women marry later, but they do marry. By age 55 and above, those numbers showed, only 13 percent of black women had never been married. In fact, people who have never married in their lifetimes are in the clear minority, regardless of race.