Congratulations on your engagement!  Median individual income is about 50k.  That corresponds to a monthly take home pay of about 3k/month.  If you are very careful, you should be able to live on that in most of the country.  I'm in Chicago, and it is doable here, but yes not comfortable.  I know someone who does it with slightly less.

To your point, it was much more comfortable to live on three median individual income 5 years ago, and probably even more so 10 years ago.  Fiat is terrible.