So did the story itself, as it delved into the details that formed the meat of the article: considerations of the consequences of women putting careers before family, insinuations of women waiting too long for their Misters Right, blunt declarations that “super-achieving women set impossibly high standards.” It framed “white, college-educated women born in the mid-’50s” as Single Women, a nebulous monolith. It came up with the “better chances of getting killed by a terrorist” line, which had not appeared in the original study. “Too Late for Prince Charming?” was ultimately a proof of Betteridge’s law: It presented a single and unpublished statistical analysis under the guise of demographic determinism. Newsweek’s thesis was that women were panicking about some news, and it proved—“proved”—that thesis not by focusing on the news, but by focusing on the panic. And panic, being what it is, has a way of proving itself.

What happened post-publication was a pre-web form of viral spread: The article’s scare-stats were shared and amplified via articles in wire services (UPI dutifully repeated the story’s “profound crisis of confidence among America’s growing ranks of single women” line) and in other magazines. Its ideas and insinuations made their way to pop culture, whose own products were reckoning with the same phenomena the journalistic media were.

All of which helped that single article to extend far beyond 1986. When Harry Met Sally, in 1989, found Sally—having just broken up with a long-term boyfriend—wailing to Harry that 40 is “just sitting there, like some big dead end!” (She was 32 at the time.) Sleepless in Seattle, in 1993, knew enough to cite Newsweek’s terrorism stat as bogus, but not enough to fully reject its truth. As Candace Bushnell, the author of the New York Observer column that gave rise to Sex and the City, put it in 2006: “That Newsweek cover struck terror in the hearts of single women everywhere.”

Because, gah, it felt true! And what’s most jarring, today—30 years after the article was published, and 10 years after it was officially retracted—is how true it feels, still. Not in terms of the debunked stats themselves, or of the women quoted in the article (many of whom, the Wall Street Journal reported, went on to get married), but rather in the subtler, stickier elements of the article. Its vaguely accusatory tone. Its framing of marriage and career as being fundamentally at odds with each other. Its insinuation that single women have been, essentially, undermining their romantic goals by focusing on their professional ones.

The piece, though it made passing reference to women who choose to remain single, pretty much took it for granted that marriage is not just a social institution or an economic arrangement or the atomic bond at the center of the nuclear family, but something broader and more aspirational: a mark of social success. It assumed a cultural attitude that remains with us, today, in news accounts and the products of pop culture: that to be married is not just to love someone or to have a partner or a companion or a co-parent, but also to have unlocked a level in the great game of life. That to be married is to choose, but also to have been chosen. That matrimony is, on top of everything else, a social status that can be conferred only when another person willingly weaves their life to yours.