With a national disaster taking all the headlines lately, a little press release from the Census Bureau went all but ignored. But the news is significant indeed. According to its analysis of 2000 data, adult households with no children now comprise the largest segment of the population.

This means: The nuclear family -- which contains 2.5 children, one soccer mom and one NASCAR dad -- is no longer the model for our nation. According to the report, individual households (single people without children) represent 31.6 percent of the population. Married or unmarried couples with children accounted for a mere 31.3 percent.

Wow, guess it's time to change the TV channel from "Everyone Loves Raymond" back to "Friends" and "Seinfeld" reruns. Politicians, refocus your speeches. Right-wingers, wring your hands at the decline of your preferred way of life. But single people are the demographic of the day.

The analysis also found that the number of single-person households in the United States grew 21 percent in the 1990s, eclipsing the growth rates for all other types of living arrangements. It's hard to imagine that in 1950, just 9.3 percent of U.S. households consisted of people living alone. No wonder the unmarried minority was viewed as freakish at the time.

The news was greeted by singles advocacy organizations with huzzahs. Thomas Coleman, executive director of Unmarried America, said this is another reason for unmarried people -- especially single women -- to hold their heads high. "Self-esteem isn't based on having children and being married anymore," Coleman said.

So what does "the new majority" base its self-esteem on, if not the offspring's great report card or the spouse's promotion? Personal success, would be my guess. I would guess that this is a very upwardly mobile group. And hopefully, personal growth. Harness the power of unmarried people without kids and fix global warming!

But where are all these single people coming from? Certainly, urban singles skew the numbers skyward. In big cities, with their bubbling social scenes, marriage may not be as omnipresent in singles' minds as dating. New York City is chief among singles meccas: 354,336 people -- 48 percent of all households -- were living alone in Manhattan at the time of the 2000 Census. After the Big Apple comes Washington, D.C., St. Louis (St. Louis?), Denver and San Francisco in popularity as good places to live alone.

But why has marriage fallen out of favor? Divorce is the first thing most people would point to. And the fact that many people who divorce nowadays (especially those older than 40 choose not to remarry. But at the same time, the divorce rate is roughly the same now as it was in 1990. So that's not the entire picture.

Economics might actually play a larger hand. More people are going to college these days, which means that they eventually get higher-paying jobs that allow them to live by themselves. In addition, older people today have better assets, meaning they can more easily afford to live in their own homes after they become divorced or widowed.

The report did not say what the income level of these single householders is -- but it takes money to live like this. Many stories have been written about how single women are buying houses in droves: the National Association of Realtors reports that women are twice as likely as single men to own their own homes. Of those women, three-fourths are childless. It's doubtful that single mothers have the kind of chump change to buy up real estate.

It's nice to live the "Sex and the City" lifestyle, but let's get real. That group must be just a small percentage of the new majority. Those of us who live alone and love it know it takes bucks to do so.

One unanswerable question about all this is: If there are huge numbers of single people, and those single people are spending huge amounts of money on dating services, why aren't there fewer people on the market? Is it possible that online dating is a waste of time and money? I'll grant you that the online dating boom only hit boom time since this census was taken in 2000. So perhaps time will tell if our frantic search for unmarried status alters our majority status.

Meanwhile, if you hear these figures and feel despair -- i.e. you're sick of living in single land and want to go where people still get married in droves -- there are places in the country that buck the national trend. Take Hidalgo County, Texas, an agricultural section of the Rio Grande Valley along the Mexican border where more than a third of residents live in poverty, only 13 percent of the households are unmarried. And only 11 percent of all households belong to singles in Utah County, Utah, which covers nearly 2,000 square miles south of Salt Lake City and includes Provo, the home of Brigham Young University.

That's pretty much it.

Or you could move to Manhattan and learn to love it.