In a 2010 cover story in this magazine, Hanna Rosin predicted “The End of Men,” arguing that a post-industrial society, in which manual-labor jobs are disappearing and those requiring nurturing and communication skills are growing, is more suited to women than to men. At the time that Rosin was writing, women held more than half of managerial and professional jobs in the country, and their share was growing in fields like medicine and law. They earned nearly 60 percent of all bachelor’s degrees in the country, 60 percent of master’s degrees, and 42 percent of all MBAs. Women, she wrote, would soon be in the position that men once were: running more companies, supporting families, and sometimes, deciding not to seek a partner and going it alone.

Recent data is bearing out Rosin’s predictions. But this role reversal is often not a positive one. For many women, going it alone has meant poverty and loneliness, not empowerment. “Sometimes, it hits me, that this is really happening,” Kemper-Hermann told me. “I have to remind myself that this is my life now.”

Places like Ross County that have been hit by manufacturing declines are the leading edge of the future Rosin describes. Joblessness makes men less desirable partners, theorizes the MIT economist David Autor, who investigated why marriage rates are declining in areas that have seen high shares of manufacturing job losses. In addition, there are just fewer men now in these places, which include much of the Midwest. Autor’s research shows that as men join the military, go to jail, or leave the area in search of work, women are outnumbering men. “The number of high-quality men whom you would want to marry is declining,” Autor told me in February.

While some women aren’t marrying, others are married to men who have little or no income, which means the women have to pick up the slack. When she was first married to her husband, Jesse, Angela Pryor, now 41, didn’t work. Jesse had a good job as a carpenter and they agreed she’d stay home and raise their children. But as his addiction to heroin worsened, she had to increasingly contribute financially, and eventually went back to work at Walmart after he went to prison for selling drugs. “I had to work, I had to do it all, and I had to take care of him, which was harder than taking care of my kids,” Pryor told me. Jesse died of an overdose in 2015, and Pryor has since lost her house. She is now raising five children alone.

The opioid epidemic is one of the biggest contributors to the decline of men in places like Ohio. According to data compiled by the Kaiser Family Foundation, men accounted for two-thirds of all opioid overdose deaths in Ohio in 2015, and the share is similar in many states across the country. Teri Minney, whose group, the Heroin Partnership Project, visits homes after people have either died from or survived overdoses of heroin and opioids in Ross County, says 70 percent of the calls she gets are for men who have overdosed. To be sure, opioid deaths aren’t only a men’s problem—women have increasingly gotten addicted and moved into drugs like heroin, too. But in states like Ohio, deaths are much more concentrated among men.