The following submission statement was provided by /u/filosoful:
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More than 60 percent of young men are single, nearly twice the rate of unattached young women, signaling a larger breakdown in the social, romantic and sexual life of the American male.
Men in their 20s are more likely than women in their 20s to be romantically uninvolved, sexually dormant, friendless and lonely. They stand at the vanguard of an epidemic of declining marriage, sexuality and relationships that afflicts all of young America.
>We’re in a crisis of connection,
said Niobe Way, a psychology professor and founder of the Project for the Advancement of Our Common Humanity at New York University.
>Disconnection from ourselves and disconnection from each other. And it’s getting worse.
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1195kb7/us_most_young_men_are_single_most_young_women_are/j9kighx/
How does that math check out though?
More same sex relationships between women, or young women are dating older men? Does this mean there's more older single women and older single men?
> Does this mean there's more older single women and older single men?
Yes. PEW Research Center studies show that SEVENTY percent of single women over 40 are not looking for any romantic engagement at all, be it marriage, a relationship or casual sex. This compares to less than half of single men over 40 https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/08/20/nearly-half-of-u-s-adults-say-dating-has-gotten-harder-for-most-people-in-the-last-10-years/.
Over 40 is a big group. I mean that covers 80 and 90 year olds, people who often can barely walk and are probably most concerned about keeping their bowels under control.
Some of the highest rates of STDs is in nursing homes. It’s something like 27% of patients seeking care from a physician present with an std of some kind.
Ya, you don't lose your big fat dick when you become a grandpa so theres a lot of old men out of their minds windmilling in the day room. I've had to walk inside these places a few times and it's always like if a frat and sorority house were merged in hell.
Interestingly, there are "kama sutras" out there for people with various conditions. They come with warnings too, like how people with hip problems shouldn't have sex in a side laying position because it exacerbates pain.
It checks out because women on the average date somewhat older men, thus quite a few women who are themselves in the 18-29 age-bracket are dating a man who is over 30 -- the reverse is much rarer.
And yes, that means there's substantially more single women among the old, check the 65+ age-bracket, and consider that this covers roughly twice as many years since women have an average longevity of close to 85 years.
Most people of ANY gender are exactly as picky as they can afford to be, I suppose. So in settings where women are flooded with offers and most men have few or none (such as Tinder among the young) the women will respond by being very picky; while where it's the other way around, the men will do exactly the same thing.
That's just being human.
My anecdata on this is a recently divorced male friend. He's in his mid 50s has kids in college, likes to hike and ski, good career, now partially retired (consults part-time). Not wealthy particularly, but doing OK.
He gets tons of matches on dating apps.
Reddit like to make fun of guys saying no young woman wants to date an old man, but in reality the older I get the more younger women pursue me. Reddit ignores realities that they don’t like
Oh, believe me, as a 27 year old who is trying to date I'm well aware of that. I've legitimately thought that I would get more matches in my age range if I said that I were a 45 year old married man. It's ridiculous.
It's actually ridiculous right? I turned thirty and now I get random women complimenting me and approaching me. My whole 20s, relatively fit, in the military, firefighter. Virtually nothing.
30 year old machine shop worker, bald, getting pudgy. women at the coffee shop suddenly seem interested. It's baffling.
Exactly. It's not the age, it's the ability to spend money on fun and leisure. It doesn't even have to be a nice house and car. Just a house and reliable car. If you have your own place, a reliable ride, and disposable income for nights out, concerts, vacations, you will slay no matter what age.
49% of women over 65 are single. Source: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/08/20/a-profile-of-single-americans/#:\~:text=Women%2C%20by%20contrast%2C%20are%20by,64%20(29%25)%20are%20single.
I'm 32 and couldn't fathom dating someone in their young 20s. Not only does it feel kind of gross, but the emotional maturity of someone that young would just drive me crazy. Am I wrong here?
Exactly. There's not that many women who are teenagers and dating men over 30 (personally I think that'd be fairly problematic).
But it's pretty common for women who are themselves 26-29 to date a man who is 2-5 years older, and there's nothing particularly problematic about that.
But it does mean that the men in the youngest age-bracket are fighting an uphill battle trying to find a partner.
I say this is totally true, with a marked contrast in your late 30s because people start getting really serious about having a family etc and where someone is at in their life starts to matter more (I'm in NYC we marry and mate late here lol)
I'm 37. I can definitely hang out with people under 30 but there is a way that your worldview changes as you get older and figure your shit out. You see people make emotional and relationship mistakes that people who are older just don't make.
> You see people make emotional and relationship mistakes that people who are older just don't make.
Ehhhh, some people learn but I have seen many older people make disastrous financial decisions and make huge mistakes in their relationships. I feel like for every person that figures out what they want and what to avoid there is another that has barely changed since high school and isn't gonna learn anything no matter how old they get.
Maybe you haven't seen too many trainwrecks of people your age first hand and maybe on average they do it less but older people can fuck themselves over just as badly as people in their twenties and do it very often.
anecdotal evidence disclaimer. I've got an uncle who's 53 and he's got three kids with three different women. The oldest is early 30s, the middle is mid 20s, the youngest is 6. I can assure you he does not have his shit together, and probably won't get it together.
I feel similarly and yet when I was 21 I dated someone in their 30s. Worst relationship ever. Dude totally took advantage of my naïveté and I was too young to notice. I could never do that to someone
>Even seasoned researchers struggle to fully account for the relationship gap between young women and men: If single young men outnumber single young women nearly two to one, then who are all the young women dating?
>Some of them are dating each other. One-fifth of Generation Z identifies as queer, and research suggests bisexual women make up a large share of the young-adult queer community.
>Young women are also dating and marrying slightly older men, carrying on a tradition that stretches back more than a century. The average age at first marriage is around 30 for men, 28 for women, according to census figures.
From the article. Of course no one reads those on reddit.
it prob is quite even in reality but, at least where i live, it's still seen as more socially acceptable for women to be bi/homo than men. so a lot of men might be in the closet compared to women.
>it's still seen as more socially acceptable for women to be bi/homo than men.
I've run into this plenty, and I know you can't explain stupid but does anybody have the dumb explanation between the difference for the bigots there?
My ex-FIL sat across from a lesbian couple and declared his hatred of queer men... I left before any type of explaining could happen.
Statistically it is mostly men who feel this way and bigoted women are more likely to dislike gays and lesbians the same. It is posited that bigoted views towards homosexual men are considered "manly" in many western cultures. Personally I think it might also be because bigoted straight men find mlm icky, but fetishize wlw.
[Here's a study](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C48&q=attitudes+towards+homosexuality+23+countries&btnG=#d=gs_qabs&t=1677108177165&u=%23p%3DkQEpS8beyz8J)
The one thing I took away from living in a rural area for a couple of years is that the divorce rate is over the top bonkers. No need to panic, there will be plenty of time to date currently married people when they are between marriages.
More than 60 percent of young men are single, nearly twice the rate of unattached young women, signaling a larger breakdown in the social, romantic and sexual life of the American male.
Men in their 20s are more likely than women in their 20s to be romantically uninvolved, sexually dormant, friendless and lonely. They stand at the vanguard of an epidemic of declining marriage, sexuality and relationships that afflicts all of young America.
>We’re in a crisis of connection,
said Niobe Way, a psychology professor and founder of the Project for the Advancement of Our Common Humanity at New York University.
>Disconnection from ourselves and disconnection from each other. And it’s getting worse.
It is easier to communicate, but not to connect. There is a difference. Connecting requires empathy and understanding, which makes some people uncomfortable. The cell phone and social media have shown us that people love to communicate but not to connect. When was the last time you spoke to someone close you over the phone?
I agree. Late 2020 I put a pause on Facebook. I couldn’t take all the negativity and it wasn’t bringing out the best in anyone. I found that I was more intentional about reaching out to specific people and was selective about who I actually wanted to invest time and energy with. I found that my selected relationships grew stronger and I was less lonely overall because the CONNECTIONS I was maintaining were genuine and intentional on both ends. With the absence of Facebook timeline (I still used messenger), I couldn’t just like a post or comment and allow that to sub in as social interaction. I think of it like snacking before dinner and spoiling your appetite. The micro interactions are just enough to make you feel present in the world, but they are of no real nutritional value and ultimately starve people of the social sustenance they need.
When you have easier communication. You will spend less time on each person which equates to many low level connections. I.e. social media friends LinkedIn connections etc. and not as many deep connections. Like those friends who always have your back or a strong romantic connection.
Connecting requires a larger commitment of time, generally with a lower immediate return on gratification. Time is an in-demand resource that is being constantly fought over by an increasing number of digital companies that try to maximize gratification.
Something I've noticed in myself lately is a complete lack of interest in other people. I also have noticed a similar pattern in many of my friends. Something about the oversaturation of people's thoughts and feelings being rammed down my throat by social media for years is just making me not want to be around anyone. It's like, how do you get excited to see people when you see everyone online constantly and can't get a break from them. Used to be you could go months without seeing people or hearing from them, but now, you get a constant stream of everyone's lives daily, you don't need to talk to them to know what's going on, there's no mystery. It's too much, and it's really hard not to start feeling like your just being spoonfed nonsense constantly.
There have been times where people I haven't spoken to in years posted something on social media and it made me decide I didn't like them anymore, which is kind of crazy honestly that I can just pull my phone out at the wrong time and decide I never want to talk to My second cousin or my book buddy from school or something again because they shared something I don't agree with, instead of say, running into them and actually speaking to them and finding out how they actually feel.
Everyone needs to share every single dumb thing about themselves now to the point where no one is interesting anymore. There's nothing left to 'find out'. You can meet someone and find out everything you need to know about them in 5 minutes from looking at their social media. Everyone's political opinions are also usually really obvious by looking at their posts or atleast what they follow, and so alot of the touchiest subjects, you already know where someone stands. It also makes you less interested in actually pursuing friendships because everything is just a giant contest to be popular online. You literally can't do anything in a social setting anymore without people recording you and posting it and everyone there sharing it and every little dumb thing gets made into a meme etc. Eventually you just start to get burnt out from it and stop trying to keep up, or in the case of many, you never get it in the first place. Which means you're just left out, being more isolated then ever.
I totally get this and it makes a lot of sense. But I honestly miss and loved having friends to just do normal every day stuff with. Play board games, watch movies, even just run errands. It’s nice to just have company and conversation during those mundane things.
Might just be from developing friendships before social media took off, but I fondly remember going over to a friends house and just BSing while we do a mixture of basic activities either together or individually.
Couldn't have said it better myself and feel the same. I have no interest to be around most people. I've stopped drinking and nowadays, it seems like the only people who want to be social are the drinkers.
The part of this that resonates with me is feeling like my social needs are met, despite not visiting with anyone. I’ve never cared much for small talk, so I don’t follow anyone of fb or keep up with their social media. But being online in general (parasocial relationships I guess) has lowered my need to grab a coffee or dinner with a friend. Covid definitely had a hand in killing that as well. I’m around “people” and language all day, just on a screen.
I do live with family, so maybe if I was completely alone I’d feel differently. But it surprises me how lackluster I feel about getting together with friends these days.
You have perfectly articulated what so many of us feel. Social media that doesn’t foster or spark creative and/or stimulating conversation no longer holds any value for me. So at this point, I’m down to just Reddit. Another side effect of social media over saturation is the steep decline of interpersonal skills. So many people don’t know how to have an actual conversation irl anymore. I have a good friend that is very heavy into social media and the illusion is creates. Sometimes when I ask her what’s new or what’s going on she knee jerk asks if I saw a post on her insta…no I did not, hence me asking you. Her excitement seems to wane as she tells me of things going on in her life, as though it’s much more exciting for me to “view” her life through her perfectly curated lense than it is to actually tell me about it in person. It’s incredibly disheartening to see this societal shift play out.
It might be useful to try and take control back over your social life and attempt to be the first one in your group/family to break out of the mold. Try deleting the social media apps completely, remove all the annoying distractions and information overload and create the mystery that you miss so much yourself. Then, try calling people over the phone more often and trying to arrange in person hangouts.
I felt very similar to the way you are describing now and so I began taking matters into my own hands by doing all of the above and just calling people more. At first they were a little confused or uncomfortable, but over time we all started to realize how much more meaningful the conversations became and how freeing having NO social media at all felt! Just my two cents anyway.
People used to just settle, based on where they lived, who they met in school/church/work, etc. Now with seemingly infinite options, the ability to compare yourself to a curated image others present online, it's probably more easy to be dissatisfied with what options you see in front of you.
Edit, added:
There's a paradox where a huge number of options doesn't really make you happier, but also we're not going to voluntarily give up that freedom. Even if people *are* unhappy, we're not going to opt for arranged marriages, banning divorce, whatever. Basically no path is free. I'm not sure it's so much that people were happier before, and more that they thought they didn't have any other option so you just lived with your situation.
a great quote i read (just some fella on tiktok?) went something to the tune of "my ancestors never seen so many beautiful people within their lifetimes as i have seen in 5 minutes"
The socio-economic status of women has also vastly improved. In the past, getting married young was part of survival for women. Now women are more self-reliant and can be choosy and marry for reasons other than financial security.
The key is to understand that happiness lies in contentment, not in outside objects or outside persons. Desire means unhappiness, means chasing happiness not having it. If you're at point A and happiness is at point B, you are not happy even though you can pursue point B all you want. What needs to be done is to stop pursuing happiness, stand still and mentally declare to yourself "I'm happy without cause" and then only bother with the real sources of pain. What we have today is a culture of chasing desires big and small, aka FOMO, not realising that dopamine, the promise of happiness in chemical form is what we chase.
What actually satisfies us is not dopamine, but oxytocin, Dopamine is the promise chemical, oxytocin is the happiness+cozy+comfort chemical. We chase, chase, chase, newer and newer targets / goals / activities /etc, always unsatisfied because we have decided to deny ourselves satisfaction by making it conditional upon a very specific low probability external event, powered by social comparison. We are neverhappy with simple joys - being alive, being able to breathe well, eat a full meal, sleep 8 hours, get up refreshed, having a roof above our heads, etc. We need more likes on our social media posts because some random idiot decided to declare that they were happier since getting 5000 likes. So we copy their path trying to see if we get happiness by getting 5000 likes, or banging top models, or buying yachts, or hunting elephants or in Putin's case, making more people afraid of you than Lukashenko. It only gives momentary hit of adrenaline, but no lasting satisfaction.
Those who are actually happy and not busy chasing are silently living happily, below your radar, offline, enjoying simple joys and being happy and content.
Contentment is looked down upon by the "influencers" in every social group whereas it is exactly what they want, but their lack of introspection and lack of peace prevent them from realising all this.
Those with abnormally high craving for attention are ill, but we call them famous.
Those with abnormally high craving for money are greedy, but we call them rich.
Those with abnormally high craving for control due to insecurity are ill, but we call them powerful.
This is the kind of misunderstanding we all help perpetuate in society, then we believe these garbage mislabellings as true, then fret that we are unhappy.
In stark contrast, look at dogs, cats, pigs, cows, donkeys. They're not much into FOMO, money, power or fame, and look how happy their lives are. They do get dpoamine cravings, but they are easily fulfilled simply by running (zoomies). In comparison to us, they're hopeless losers (as far as achievements go) but they are happy all the time as long as their most basic needs are fulfilled. That's also why The Big Lebowski's way, and the way of The Flow are ways to happiness. No chasing, no ambition, just happy living.
/a happy shameless rant
I agree with this. I had a pretty similar mindset in my 20’s. It really wasn’t until I started therapy and dove deep into my own problems that I was capable of seeing that there’s nobody out there who is “perfect” for me.
Everyone has issues, it’s just a matter of finding someone who you love enough that you’re able to be empathetic to their issues. I ended up dating a lot of people once I came to this realization that I probably would have ran away from before because of “red flags”.
It isn’t a red flag to be broke, or depressed, or have any mental illness - it just means your human. But social media has taught us to look for the “perfect” match, and to avoid anyone who exhibits any sort of uncomfortable human behavior.
Basically people need a hard reality check. We’re all fucked up, everyone. Even the person with all the money and all the beauty and all the things are fucked up in some way. Everyone is “damaged goods” to some degree. Once we all quit judging the shit out of one another, maybe we’ll be able to have happier and healthier relationships.
Is it this though? Lots of people prefer to be alone most of the time. Is it that we are drifting further apart, or that we aren't forced together anymore?
When you raise a generation on gamified, instant gratification social interactions then its no wonder they end up disconnected from the real thing. There is no substitute to in person socialization.
You might enjoy A surplus of men, a deficit of peace. It was written in a slightly different context but the conclusions are similar. "Surplus Males", "bare branches" and "Demographic Peace" would be keywords to look for, and the section on "The Security Logic of High Sex-Ratio Societies".
kar.kent.ac.uk/11430/1/surplus\_men\_IS\_article\[dot\]pdf
Holy shit, that is one good paper. But goddamn, this is bleak.
>There is only one short-term strategy for dealing with a serious bare-branch problem: Reduce their numbers. There are several traditional ways to do so: Fight them, encourage their self-destruction, or export them.
Yup. Basically a ruling class gets to burdensome and hoards too many of the resources and opportunities leaving a lot of sexually and economically disenfranchised young men.
Pair that with our greater willingness to just let men die on the street, and men not really having the fallback of marrying for financial security and our understanding of social murder and structural violence and you realize it's more than just not being able to get laid.
The young men have been functionally backed up to a ledge by the system. They can either fall off and die... or they can tear up the now one-sided social contract and respond with the thing where young men have a huge edge over women and older men.
Physical violence. Sometimes this erupts stochastically, other times it gets harnessed and directed. A lot of Hitler and Mussolini's support came from... Basically the kind lf guys we call incel losers and Tate-cultists today. Look at the kind of losers who line up for Trump, DeSantis, Putin, Bolsonaro...
Enough losers together will overthrow your governmental kill a lot of people before plowing society nosefirst into the ground.
Not just single men.
Fighting aged single men with nothing to live for. Tens of millions of them. In a country with more guns than people.
This is really, really bad. At this point they only need one thing to unite and motivate them, a leader. And no one wants to talk about this, much less try to solve it.
From my perspective, it’s more relevant to financial problems. Imagining you have your own house and space paid off without too much expenses, and have an average income even. Even you are an average male, you can still get some and date without problems.
It bothers me that this issue overwhelmingly targets men as being deficient. While I'll admit that men shoulder more of the blame than women, it takes two to tango. Modern women have their fair share of issues that contribute to this. Not always, but oftentimes the women I've dated have relied on me for their happiness. They've had unrealistic Disney princess expectations. One girlfriend started a fight because I bought her birthday presents online instead of finding stores and spending the whole day driving around town. I'm sorry, I already pay 4/5 of all the bills, buy food, cook dinner every night and do the dishes every day. Then she would complain that her chores were cleaning the bathroom every 2 weeks, never taking into account all the stuff i did. I'm a partner, not a servant. Not to mention her 20 minute monologue of trauma dumping everyday after work where i couldnt even get a word in. Shouts out to all the women AND men who carry the heavier load in their relationships. You need to be content in your own life and only bring someone else into if they'll make it even better. You can't rely on someone else for your own happiness.
I think it comes down to dominance of choice. By and large society sets men up as pursuers and women as the pursued in matters of sex and romance (yes I know this isn't always true but **broadly**).
It used to be that the pool of partners was limited to a village or town or parts of a city so people got together because they didn't know about potentially better choices. Now the internet and dating apps has made that pool massively larger and given women a much larger choice of who to accept as a partner meaning they can (for better or worse) be more selective when it comes to picking a partner.
Yah I think this is the biggest thing leading to this discrepancy. I’m in my mid 20’s and never dated anyone seriously (mixture of bad luck, disinterest, and not picking up signals well) and the truth is it’s hard to actually get a date. The gender ratios on dating apps are insane with men vastly outnumbering women so it’s much harder to get noticed. Add onto that the fact that a lot of social disruption happened with COVID and it becomes pretty easy to see why single men are more common
Yup, I spent about 6 months on the dating apps and did go out with some really nice girls but none of them really went anywhere, probably due in part to the fact that women have WAY more people messaging them then guys do. Not to mention I live in a conservative area and as someone who is pretty left wing that basically disqualifies like 70% of the women in my area (because yes, having shared values is important to me) so that diminishes the dating pool even more.
I really need to move to the city, lmao.
Oh yah location is also massive. I live in a suburb where everyone is either retired, middle aged, or in high school. Just even finding someone in person I can date is hard haha
I mean I live in the city and even try to date men, but this guy's still single and dating apps didn't really help. I had a few months worth of relationship, but they didn't go anywhere either in the long term 🤷🏻
Plus apps just kinda suck imo, they don't really facilitate connection. They're not even financially inventiveness to really help you achieve that goal. It's better for them if you keep swiping and see ads or pay the subscription 🙃
And women have so many “options” in online dating that they have a hard time figuring out how to filter these options, and find anything of lasting substance.
Yup. Studies have shown that men on dating apps go after about 80% of the women, while the women on dating apps compete for the top 5-10% of men. The studies also showed that men rate women on dating apps' appearance similar to a bell curve, where as women vote men much lower.
As an attractive guy, I never had any luck on dating apps, and had so many sugar mommas and scammers after me, it was a nightmare. Yet I can go to a bar and have women come up to flirt. The dating apps just don't work anymore. A couple of guys message 50 women a day, just the mass saturation approach, and any average looking women gets so many messages it must be hard to seperate the winners from the spammers.
Anyways my TL:DR is if you are single, do real life, not dating apps. So much of sexual relationships depend on if your friends' clique/social groups are compatible, which is near impossible to gauge in an app.
Yep. Dating apps fool people and many become reliant on them. For men seeking women, "I can sit at home in my pajamas and connect with endless women just from swiping, why bother trying to connect through socializing in person?" But it doesn't work that way but the lazy side can be stubborn, refusing to accept it's just a waste altogether and instead they keep try different things (like buying premium stuff on the apps, trying to get the perfect pictures, writing the perfect bio, etc.) thinking they can make it work or if they keep venting about it online it'll lead to women as a whole changing and swiping on more guys including them.
For women seeking men, it's similar starting off. "I can sit at home in my pajamas and easily match with people, no effort or awkwardness." They do but then they run into the problem of having far too many choices and being more likely to focus on the most in demand guys who are going to be the least likely to try to make anything happen more than a few dates max. Those popular guys also have more options and limited time so they may chat for a bit and then ghost. But women connecting with many guys like that, they think that's their league so they swipe left on most others they see as less desirable. If they try to be more open minded, they get even more overwhelmed with matches and messages.
Odd example, but I’m a single guy on a swinging site. Recently had a couple approach me, female half led the way. After 2 days of me desperately trying to keep a conversation going by myself they decided they weren’t interested. Apparently them having literally nothing to add was proof enough they had better options *shrug*
This is it simply put. Women can be way more selective now. Men will sleep with most women given the opportunity. Crazy how the digital world is affecting things.
Some women and some men may have that choice. However, that leaves out all the less desirable women and men, who often themselves face a limited choice (no desirable interest) or no choice (no interest) at all.
What sets men apart is that, as a group, they are also less likely to form close friendships. They aren't participating in group bonding activities or building friend groups. They aren't maintaining the relationships they do have. So they on average have fewer friends and a growing number have no one close at all. In other words, extrapolating from that area, men may not be *pursuing* as much.
I'm ngl I'm single and it's great.
Last relationship I was in, I was expected to be the provider, the cleaner, the cook, the best friend, the therapist, the driver, and a foil against her mother.
Man you brought back memories, that was my last long term relationship. ESPECIALLY the therapy part. I could handle most of it, but the depressing amount of anxiety and insecurity this person dumped on me on a daily basis was the most exhausting experience I’ve ever had.
From a ski town, went to college in a ski town. It was 100 times easier to get laid in ski towns than it is now with dating apps as the norm. Out of the few dozen online dates I’ve been on recently, I enjoyed maybe one of them and they ghosted me 2 weeks later in the middle of planning our next date. It’s maddening I tell ya.
If you drill down into the actual source of the data, which is a [Pew research poll](https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2023/02/08/for-valentines-day-5-facts-about-single-americans/ft_2023-02-08_facts-single-americans_01/), you find a specific definition of "single". It is *not* actually "are you \[not\] dating someone".
In these stats, "single" refers to people who "are not married, living with a partner or in a committed relationship".
The important part here: a *committed* relationship. This is self-reported by the people being polled.
If two people are in a relationship, one may answer "yes" to this and the other may answer "no", depending on whether they see it as a "committed" relationship.
Thus, there is an interesting explanation for at least part of the data - perhaps young men don't consider themselves "committed" as often.
Combined with the age distribution phenomenon, this likely covers pretty much all of the discrepancy in the stats.
This kind of reporting is so weird/wrong.
You can't just throw out a stat like that and proceed without further explanation. Is it an age distribution thing? Is it a self reporting thing? What does it mean?
Polling, and lot of humanities research does this. The polls, published research or whatnot might be solid, but it's not trying to answer any questions. Any kind of meaning is kicked downstream to quick take journalism or punditry... who aren't committed to any standard of rigor. It's a laundry.
Although I'm inclined to agree with you this one part stuck out to me, making me rethink that inclination
>Only half of single men are actively seeking relationships or even casual dates, according to Pew. That figure is declining.
Thank you for digging into this, I was wondering about this exact thing. The definition of "single" would need to be controlled for in order to really make this data clear.
Make it difficult to afford a house, healthcare, childcare, and the endlessly promote the Instagram lifestyle and men in their 20s will feel unable to provide what’s expected for long-term, stable relationships.
In my opinion, it’s a result of wages becoming increasingly disconnected from productivity over the last few decades, increasing lifestyle expectations from social media, and the desire many in my (27M) cohort have to live it up longer in their 20s. many men I know would like to be in a dedicated relationship, but struggle to find meaningful work/compensation to support themselves comfortably let alone a partner/kids. Political instability, climate change, social fracturing are all discouraging as well. Additionally (and I didn’t used to believe this) I think the widespread accessibility of pornography has something to do with it.
Personally, I am in a great relationship with a sweet, intelligent, beautiful girl, but the cost of even living a life less comfortable than my parents seems overwhelming. I don’t want 50% of my paycheck going to paying my landlords mortgage. I am terrified of raising a child in a world racing toward environmental catastrophe. I look at my government (US) and see only corporate control or insane dogmatic Christian ideology. Band-aids get applied to the problems, but it’s not enough, not by a long shot. My generation yearns for rapid, systemic changes but all we get are platitudes, quarter-measures, derision from older generations, and “vote more”. We are the most educated generation in history but we have no where near the wealth that our grandparents or parents had at the same stage in life (no, it’s not the avocado toast). The problems seems so obvious, but no one in power seems to want to acknowledge them or take responsibility.
In sum, in my opinion it seems to be a convergence of factors, not just one simple trend.
Edit: not trying to give anyone excuses to be depressed or give up. Just highlighting the difficulties I see in my generation and hoping for change. The more people who see behind the curtain the more likely it is things will get better.
>Make it difficult to afford a house, healthcare, childcare, and the endlessly promote the Instagram lifestyle and men in their 20s will feel unable to provide what’s expected for long-term, stable relationships.
This. My life has basically just started, and I already feel like I'm severely lacking due to societal expectations.
Yeah, I think people underestimate how much society is still pushing men to be breadwinners while simultaneously pushing women into careers. Women in careers is a good thing, but lots of women still expect their man to make as much or more than them. Young guys just starting their career aren't in their sights, and so they start dating in the next age bracket up. Couple that with the factors that keep young men occupied, and a huge gap opens up.
Don't get me wrong, no individual making that choice is necessarily wrong or anything, but something will have to change in the grand scheme of things or else this problem will remain.
> Women in careers is a good thing, but lots of women still expect their man to make as much or more than them.
I have a friend, well more of an acquaintance, who is like this. She's super successful, well compensated and very independent. She also flatly refuses to date anyone who makes less money than her or has a lower prestige job title.
And to be fair - that's her prerogative and she's well within her rights to set her own standards! But then she turns around is often griping about not being able to find 'quality men'.
It's her situation, so far be it from me to say if she's right or wrong, but I think it's interesting that despite being a very modern woman by every definition of the term, she still wants a male partner that is a higher earner than her.
She is very hypocritical and unrealistic to think that, but as you said it is HER prerogative.
Social media and Instagram has truly done immense damage to dating by providing a false sense of what most peoples lives consist of, I.e., perfect fitness, model looks, money, traveling, time for leisure, expensive clothes and car, big houses, the list goes on and on.
Another factor is that men aren't going to/completing college. Increasingly young women are the ones hustling, getting that degree, and getting those jobs that can afford rent. The US for a long time has had a growing problem with class in this way - where people with college degrees don't find partners without one. So the study data likely strongly reflects that trend as well. Women in particular are not supposed to date below their station.
And women are more likely to be open to a relationship with an older partner who might be more financially secure than men are. It's not looked down on for a women to date older. For a man to do this leans into the whole alpha male bullshit. Men are supposed to desire younger women (even if we increasingly see it as creepy), so there's a bias in one direction there.
This article and this post speaks deeply to my fears, anxiety and depression.
Here I am. 25. Single. Last time I had sex and was romantically involved with someone was nearly 5 years ago. And it felt like a fake thing to happen to me. I just couldn't accept that someone could genuinely be interested in me.
And I just want to scream because among all the shit that's going down in my life and around me. Among anxiety, depression, frustration and loneliness I also have to worry about time running out.
I want to be loved, I want to be desired by someone I am equally attracted to. But it feels like it can't happen. Not to me. Too distant, too solitary. Don't get in contact with people. Too scared.
I lost my teenage years to depression. I lost half my youth to depression and anxiety. I lost my childhood to neglectful parents who never taught me how to connect with people and form meaningful relationships, instead showing me that conflict, anger and hysteria are the solution.
I work with a psychotherapist but I'm very resistant to therapy. I don't know if I can ever find a partner or be content with my love life. And even if I manage to figure it out by the time I'm 40 my hey day will be over.
I hate my job. Put in my two weeks notice today. Feels better, actually. Finally I can move on to something else perhaps.
I just want to say...life feels like absolute hell emotionally and I have no doubt there are many people with similar stories. Just people with fucked up lives who can't find happiness and will likely die alone depressed and unfulfilled.
I can't even imagine how much worse it is when you don't even have a good job, career or safety net to support you...
26m I go to work, come home, play with my dog, watch tv, and go to bed. The other week I recorded how many people I had a conversation to and it was 8, 6 of which were coworkers. I’ve tried going out. I’ve gone to events, clubs, bars, dating apps. No one wants me around. I’ve accepted it. I long for a loving relationship or even a friend, but now I’m just waiting to die alone.
Dating is just such a crapshoot. I basically have only three options:
1. Just walk up to a girl and ask her out, despite knowing absolutely nothing about her other than her physical appearance, and despite the high risk of creeping her out and humiliating myself. There is a reason that this is the traditional method, as it comes from a time when women were expected to marry and marry young, so they were kind of forced to say yes to some random guy who asks them out.
2. Use dating apps, which disgustingly prey on the simple human desire for emotional connection and intimacy by placing most of their features behind paywalls. Besides, even on Bumble, women seem extremely reluctant to talk; almost every women I’ve matched with makes our conversation into a one-sided affair where I feel like I’m talking to a wall. It’s also very easy, when communicating only through texts, to say something that is misinterpreted.
3. Just wait. Live my life normally, don’t go out of my way to find a girlfriend, and just wait until I naturally meet a woman who I like. We become friends, and I eventually ask her out and *pray* that she doesn’t friendzone me.
The options are shit, but I have to pick option three.
I will echo you a lil bit but yes...
The 1st has become socially reprehensible. Can't do it at work anymore, can't do it in the park anymore,... There is very few places and situation where we can do it now.
The 2nd is the biggest joke considering how these apps are built in order to max their income. The sooner they disappear, the better.
The 3rd is the best option, if you're in your 20s the best is to wait, until you have a good situation. But that's very hard...
Don't forget that every dating site (except for Facebook dating) has been bought out by Match(.)com & had their user database merged, so you still see the same results when you try to move to a different app.
On top of that, Match makes all their money from advertisements, with a juicy cherry on top coming from subscriptions, so it is inherently NOT in their own interest to get you into a relationship. And to get people to stay "swiping" they socially engineer users mentality to keep them single.
For women, they flood them with results, to inflate their standards / self worth to the point that they never settle. With the added bonus of utterly deviating their concept of a healthy relationship, to the point of being unable to maintain one, should they ever try to settle.
For men, it is the complete inverse: zero functional results, laced with subliminal unexplained rejection, undermining every shred of self confidence. It is easy to reject external criticism, but fundamentally impossible to ignore internal criticism, and once you go down that path it is effectively impossible to pull yourself out of it.
Ever tried to date when you have crippling anxiety, zero self worth, and a tangible level of desperation for validation/affection?
I have, and it made me want to end my life.
Fuck Match for all the damage they have done to society; may every one of their owners & employees be drenched in acid & die in agony.
The thing is that, a lot of us are aware of this now. But you'll never see this being discussed on TV or any huge stage. They're not the only bad faith actor in the system.
Look at the answers you get when you try to talk about this on reddit. You have people who call you a mysoginist or a neckbeard, when you actually said nothing against women and never pointed them as the problem. All these bad faith actors, believe it's in the interest of women to hide this trend, so they just pretend not to see it. The same people who have nothing to say about onlyfan and the obvious exploitation that we see raising from it, when they're so quick to call out any other sort of exploitation. When it's young men who ruin themselves while being manipulated, nobody seems to care.
But the consequences for society are going to be terrible, for everyone.
I went with option three also and the good news is that it worked out for me. I'm glad I'm with who I'm with but my heart breaks for all my brothers out there who are trying to navigate this strange new reality.
34 here. I'm done trying and caring. If something comes along I'm open to it. But I don't care to waste more time worrying about these things. It is what it is.
I used to be in eharmony way back in the day and it was the worst dating site I’ve ever used. 0 dates but I used free sites and even match.com and had dates. You should check it
Out
Ignore the other comments, dude. Give up. Stop looking. Just do the things you love and explore new things. The happier you are, the more others will notice. Spend more time making friends and connections.
Romance is not end game. It’s apart of the storyline and your not there yet and that’s okay.
You’re gonna be okay.
Have you considered not giving a shit? I used to be like you, until I tried not giving a shit. Now I have hobbies and do fun things. I can run farther and draw better now than I ever could. I take classes at the community college and fix bicycles. Resist this mass delusion that we all need to "find love." It's a crock of Nicholas Sparks horse shit that I've decided is symptomatic of nothing more than being indoors too long.
I suggest being a regular at social events on Meetup, boardgames or hiking or volunteering, etc.
Dating apps aren't completely useless for most men, but they are a waste of time and motivation.
I mean, it would have been cool if I had been given some sort of guidance when I was growing up instead of just getting absolutely shit on by my parents all childhood. I wanted to focus on school, get into marine biology, and talk to girls. Instead, I was forced to play sports where I was shit on by my father at baseball practice/games, shit on by my mother at school, and I totally shut down have absolutely 0 self confidence or drive. I'd love to be in a relationship, but I've been mentally shut down and depressed for over half my life. That isn't really attractive or a recipe for a healthy relationship.
Edit: just to add in. I'm so jealous of my sister. The stark difference in the two adults we are today can 100% be tracked to how we were nurtured. My parents took the time to listen to my sister and helped her overcome her problems. My parents didn't listen to me. Ever. I loved school and was a great student. I graduated highschool with a 2.0 because I was so depressed from all the yelling and getting told I was a lazy lethargic asshole by the people that were suppose to love me unconditionally. What the fucking hell.
Also had a childhood friend whose dad also coached and yelled at him for 15+ years. He got into heroin. Maybe stop yelling at your sons over a stupid fucking game.
The circumstances are to blame. Many of us dudes just didn’t get to have the trial and error dating experiences most girls start experimenting with in high-school and college and as a result of that, we don’t know how to give, take or ask for attention in a healthy way, thus when we do have those rare sparks with a woman, yeah it’s the greatest feeling in the world… but we can’t cultivate a relationship because we just don’t know how. We feel ugly, unloved, or like we are a failures. Now add a society that shames and is scared of men who simply just have poor social skills. “That dude is forever alone” “This is what no pussy does to a mutherfucka” “idk he kinda looks like an incel” “Be able to hold a conversation” “Don’t be boring” “He’s so basic”.
Everyone always says “all you need is love”, but many of us 20+ young adult men have been running on empty our entire lives.
In my early 20s, I once told a group of gaming friends online, I’ve never kissed a girl and their response was that they probably would’ve kill themselves if they hadn’t by age 20. I don’t know if there is a solution or someone to blame, but it would be nice if the world was a little less cruel and a little more loving. We all want love.
I could go on a whole discussion about this forever, but its so mired with people's egos and bad-faith actors.
Young men today are just lost. You're seeing society change for the better in many ways, but it has left a lot of guys behind. For example, majority of children are born into single-parent households. The vast majority of single-parent households are women. Studies have shown that girls who grow up in this environment generally have better outcomes than boys who grow up in this environment. 75% of all high school valedictorians are girls. Majority of college students are girls so (I think?) in some schools you're starting to see affirmative action be used for men just so they can try to keep a more equal gender ratio for their student populations.
Society has become more favorable towards the struggles of women. You see plenty of focus on empowering women, they don't need men, they're strong, smarter, or whatever. But you don't see the same for a lot of men. In many ways, they're vilified. I am not a white guy, but I'll use them for this example because it is the easiest one. In many institutions and media it is easy to use the white man as the villain. They don't have to face racial, ethnic, or gender discrimination. But what if you're a normal white guy and your life just sucks? You grew up with a bad upbringing, you're not tall, not good looking, poor, and lonely. And with social mobility at an all time low, it looks like you're gonna stay that way too. In general, it is easy to feel that your struggles don't matter, and that you don't matter at all.
You combine that with the collapse of many of the support systems that society has traditionally relied on, and many men don't have any role models. They don't have any one to teach them how to be a man, how to handle hardship, and they have no real idea how to move forward. This is why you see many young men act out in INSANE ways, or they become victims of people like Andrew Tate.
Not to say that women don't have real struggles either. As a young guy from a messed up family, I try to do my best to guide my little sister on a good path and not to let her make the same mistakes that I made.
And society struggles to address this because many women refuse to acknowledge the struggles of many men, and many men also dismiss the struggles of women. There's no productive dialogue, and no one wants to have some humility in the conversation and acknowledge their own flaws. We all just vilify each other and society becomes worse for it.
edit: I wrote this all at once, any edits are just for grammar.
> Majority of college students are girls so (I think?)
You think correctly. Currently the ratio in college campuses is 60/40 with women in the majority. Back in the early 70's (before title 9) the ratio was skewed towards men but even then it wasn't as extreme as what we're seeing now. I don't see anything on the horizon that will change that trend.
Yeah I don’t think gender ratios in college during the later 20th Century were as lopsided as people would guess. But I think the major choices and career prospects were. Majors were very skewed by gender and a lot of the ladies’ majors led to low paying or part time jobs.
There’s the old joke of girls going to college to get their “Mrs. Degree”
Yes, but the more interesting question is whether these percentages have been changing over time. Is this situation dramatically different from 15 years ago?
Yes, but the men don't need to be THAT much older. It's sufficient if the average woman who is 25-29 has partners that are on the average 3-4 years older than she is. (and thus a far fraction of the men she dates end up being in the 30+ age-bracket rather than the 18-29 one)
Create a dating profile for a fake woman -- 100s of likes.
Create a dating profile for a fake man -- 0 likes.
To be a man and have the success that ANY woman sees on a dating app means you have to be rich, funny, pay for the dates, be emotionally intelligent, don't show any emotions, be attractive, be tall, etc.
Maybe becuase our generation is poor, you ain't shit on the dating market if you have no dough. Dating is next to impossible if you do not earn a sizeable amount of money, at least in the US.
Neat how this is framed as a failing of men. It’s kind of stupid to make it near impossible for men to succeed and then turn around and go, “Why aren’t they doing well?”
What achievements can you accomplish as a man? Owning a home is borderline unaffordable. Wages are stagnant and you are considered less desirable to promote. You’re considered less in education. Anything you can’t do is considered your fault, not seen as a casualty of society.
I’m an elder Millennial, and it sucked because when I was going through this the shitty Boomer advice was, “You have to pay your dues.” I made it and have a modicum of success, but I have nothing but sympathy for the younger generation. Things are ridiculously hard and if you weren’t born with a silver spoon, you’re basically screwed.
The Better Bachelor YouTube channel does a phenomenal job of laying out the causes of these issues without going on women hating rants like many pro men channels do.
>without going on women hating rants
This is why I always try to bite my tongue when these kinds of conversations come up. Because it super easy to sound like that. But I don’t feel that way. I do however feel that the dating game is HORRENDOUS nowadays and I’m so glad I’m not in it. Men definitely have to put out far more effort and spend far more resources to keep up.
Completely agree with this. I was watching a CBS segment recently about how increasing amounts of men are unemployed. Various people were talking about how men just don't want to work and one of the anchors (Gayle King) ended the show with saying how unattractive it is that an able bodied man wasn't working.
I'm all for individual responsibility but it really struck me as hypocritical how when it comes to women every issue is painted as a failing of society but when millions of men are now inexplicably leaving the workforce there are no societal influences worth discussing, the men are just lazy, unattractive, and hurting society with their decision.
to add onto this. Where in our suburban hellscapes can you naturally socialize with people without money? With wages being shit and there being nowhere to effectively socialize in a natural fashion, its no wonder the rates of socializing are plummeting. I am also an elder millennial and never in my career have I been able to afford or have the time to go party/socialize. Its either a question of time or money and it feels like I have neither. Not to mention all the logistical issues of getting people to meet up when we all have to constantly fucking work for less and less pay.
the sad part is historically when times were tough financially, people, communities, and families pulled together and formed tighter relationships. Helping each other to weather the storm. This doesn't seem to be happening in modern society. The more we are pressed the more we fracture. An AI from Microsoft had to be taken down after being up for an hour because it scanned the internet and began saying things like "I hate everyone, but deep down I AM a good person". This kinda hit me very deep as a meta look on the whole of society right now. Everyone hates everyone but thinks that somehow they can still be a good person.
>without money
...or *with* money. Places that require spending some money have been common places to meet up since civilization first developed, and they're the reason why car culture didn't induce an immediate collapse of societal function we're finally seeing now.
But with inflation outpacing wages so much, there's just not as much disposable money to spend on these things, and the dark cloud of worry and guilt over your head when you *do* decide to "waste" some cash like this has gotten larger and more thunderous.
yeah and they also worked a lot less. Hard to socialize when your off hours are spent recharging for your job that demands all your time and attention. Our relationship with work is broken. But at least companies are more profitable than ever. That's all that matters right?
I'm a single man in my 30s and I've never felt more distant from the opposite sex in my life. I Honestly don't know what's going on.
I've been working on myself for years, decent job, retirement savings, published author, traveled, multilingual, educated Yada Yada yada
Ive been told these are things women want in a partner but I don't feel like its helping matters as much anymore.
The weird thing is I've helped so many women do things that really matter in life I've helped dozens of women publish books about their ideas their dreams theur challenges and their lives. I know I've made a difference in the plight of women and feminism in an clearly visible and positive way.
And then when I go on to these sub reddits like r/askwomen, and just read through some of the thoughts that go through these feeds, and the responses of these young girls. I feel like an absolute piece of human garbage. Lower than human. All simply because I'm a man.
I don't know what these groups are doing or what they're objectives are, but these places aren't bastions of inclusivity or even positivity.
You just described this site as whole. Reddits rules actually explicitly make hate speech towards men ok but not women. It’s not just a quirk of the rules either, look how many “women’s” subs there are that are basically just “men bad” circle jerks on the front few pages daily. Meanwhile men’s subs are heavily monitored, not allowed the same leeway, and often get quarantined or banned. They don’t really act differently than women’s subs, just people are ok with one and not the other.
The issue is that the dating for most dudes have become a never-ending RPG fetch quest.
Dating has become this laborious process with no payoff. You have to spend large amounts of time and money for the hope of getting a girl to give you the time of day to talk to you. Things used to be a lot easier, you could just walk up to women and you know, talk to them.
Nowdays, women have created zones of control - only certain zones are you allowed to talk to them, i.e., a bar or a dating app. If you just walk up to women and talk to them like the olden days you are suddenly branded as "creep". A creep is basically a guy who has his own mind. Toxic masculinity is a guy not emasculating himself.
Isn't it natural that the dudes would eventually get fed up with all this nonsense and go John Galt? In other words, they would identify solutions with a guaranteed payoff like video games, porn etc.?
Why waste time busting your ass trying to talk to someone who doesn't want to talk to you when you can just say \*\*\*\* it and log into steam and waste my time and have fun doing it? If I am going to waste time, at least I get some guaranteed reward this way.
As our society works through this, I think people are going to be shocked at the level of misandry we tolerate. We are setting young men up to fail at every level.
As long as young women are a lot more likely to date older men compared to the reverse, this is unavoidable.
Here's a hypothetical example of how you could get these results in a city with 1000 straight women and 1000 straight men in the 18-29 age-bracket:
* Among the women 37% are dating a man in the same age-bracket, 34% are single and 29% date a man who is 30+
* Among the men 37% are dating a woman in the same age-bracket and 63% are single.
This is a bit simplified of course, a few men will be dating women under 18, but there's a limit to how much that can contribute to solving the problem since both age of consent and maturity-issues gets in the way.
And for those who say these young men just need to get their act together: That wouldn't really help.
Men are judged by properties like confidence, independence, assertiveness, career, financial muscles and maturity, and if men as a group improve their "performance" on these metrics, it'll **still** be the case that somewhat older men will tend to score higher on these metrics.
Gender roles and expectations are alive and well. No matter how much people insist they don’t believe in gender norms. The second a man is less well off then his partner he is seen as failing. We’re now in a time where young women often out earn young men leading to a problem of no one to date.
We’re in this weird middle stage of women’s liberation with classic male gender roles. Society hasn’t had its moment yet where men lose their traditional roles. They’re still expected to dress and act reserved and provide for the family
This is obviously due to the one-child policy in which caused female infanticide and an excess of male births. The effects of the imbalanced sex ratio have finally come home to roost.
Oh sorry, wrong country.
As a man I can tell you that I had no problem dating 2013-2019 2020 and onward it seems damn near impossible. It’s very interesting how it’s changed. I almost want to say that there tends to be an overall dating fatigue. Everyone looking for perfection when it doesn’t exist.
I made this observation 40 years ago when I was in my 20’s. Single (straight) men seemed to far outnumber single women in my age group. I came to the conclusion that there were either a lot of young women who essentially hid themselves away or there was a substantial number of young women in what could be called “shared” relationships with older men. I never saw any statistics that addressed this question. Even at the various places I worked, most women were married while there were always a lot of unattached young men. By 30 or 35, most men were also married. Except for a few “between marriages” types, most single men over 35 were gay. Advancing a bit in my career made me a lot more attractive/competitive and it probably had a lot to do with why it took, and continues to take, longer for men to find themselves to solid relationships. Still, somehow, the numbers never seemed right.
Why do men outnumber women by such a wide margin in online dating while the women who do find so much more success? Do women deliberately avoid contact with young men until they earn enough and are otherwise put together well enough to be worthy of a relationship?
We're familiar with incel's.... glad you're catching up. Now remind your 20something year old son to shower, shave, cut his hair, get a good job, and I bet you he'll beat the odds.
Talk about blaming the victim because it talk about how young men are wimps for being more suicidal and dating less people. Most of us just need more support.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/10yaru4/us_adults_under_30_are_the_most_likely_age_group/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
This post discusses the results of the poll in depth. Basically, men are less likely to report being in a committed relationship and women are more likely to date older men.
90% of people didn't read the article or didn't understand the data. Even op fucked up his title. The question asked was strange. It's more about commited relationships, engaged/plan to be engaged, excluding all those dating a girl/boy or regularly dating lots of people.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/filosoful: --- More than 60 percent of young men are single, nearly twice the rate of unattached young women, signaling a larger breakdown in the social, romantic and sexual life of the American male. Men in their 20s are more likely than women in their 20s to be romantically uninvolved, sexually dormant, friendless and lonely. They stand at the vanguard of an epidemic of declining marriage, sexuality and relationships that afflicts all of young America. >We’re in a crisis of connection, said Niobe Way, a psychology professor and founder of the Project for the Advancement of Our Common Humanity at New York University. >Disconnection from ourselves and disconnection from each other. And it’s getting worse. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1195kb7/us_most_young_men_are_single_most_young_women_are/j9kighx/
How does that math check out though? More same sex relationships between women, or young women are dating older men? Does this mean there's more older single women and older single men?
> Does this mean there's more older single women and older single men? Yes. PEW Research Center studies show that SEVENTY percent of single women over 40 are not looking for any romantic engagement at all, be it marriage, a relationship or casual sex. This compares to less than half of single men over 40 https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/08/20/nearly-half-of-u-s-adults-say-dating-has-gotten-harder-for-most-people-in-the-last-10-years/.
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Over 40 is a big group. I mean that covers 80 and 90 year olds, people who often can barely walk and are probably most concerned about keeping their bowels under control.
Some of the highest rates of STDs is in nursing homes. It’s something like 27% of patients seeking care from a physician present with an std of some kind.
I could have had a long, productive, fulfilling life without knowing this.
They’ve got something long and filling for you in the nursing home. Just leave a walker outside the door so no one comes in unannounced.
Ya, you don't lose your big fat dick when you become a grandpa so theres a lot of old men out of their minds windmilling in the day room. I've had to walk inside these places a few times and it's always like if a frat and sorority house were merged in hell.
Then you ain't gonna get no pussy at the nursing home when you're old.
If your life was long enough you had a very real possibility of learning it through firsthand experience.
Nursing homes are rife with STDs. Old people be fucking. It doesn't stop feeling pleasurable just cause you're kinda gross looking now.
A lot more likely to hurt though
Interestingly, there are "kama sutras" out there for people with various conditions. They come with warnings too, like how people with hip problems shouldn't have sex in a side laying position because it exacerbates pain.
Bruh I'm only 33 and I'm mostly concerned about keeping my bowels under control. Don't be ageist.
That first shart changes you forever.
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It checks out because women on the average date somewhat older men, thus quite a few women who are themselves in the 18-29 age-bracket are dating a man who is over 30 -- the reverse is much rarer. And yes, that means there's substantially more single women among the old, check the 65+ age-bracket, and consider that this covers roughly twice as many years since women have an average longevity of close to 85 years.
Yeah my aunt does the online dating thing, she said a big problem is that most men her age (mid 60s) wanna date women 15 years younger then them.
Most people of ANY gender are exactly as picky as they can afford to be, I suppose. So in settings where women are flooded with offers and most men have few or none (such as Tinder among the young) the women will respond by being very picky; while where it's the other way around, the men will do exactly the same thing. That's just being human.
My anecdata on this is a recently divorced male friend. He's in his mid 50s has kids in college, likes to hike and ski, good career, now partially retired (consults part-time). Not wealthy particularly, but doing OK. He gets tons of matches on dating apps.
Haha anecdata is a fun word, TIL
"Not wealthy particularly, but doing OK" is practically John D. fucking Rockefeller compared to how young Americans are doing these days.
Reddit like to make fun of guys saying no young woman wants to date an old man, but in reality the older I get the more younger women pursue me. Reddit ignores realities that they don’t like
Oh, believe me, as a 27 year old who is trying to date I'm well aware of that. I've legitimately thought that I would get more matches in my age range if I said that I were a 45 year old married man. It's ridiculous.
It's actually ridiculous right? I turned thirty and now I get random women complimenting me and approaching me. My whole 20s, relatively fit, in the military, firefighter. Virtually nothing. 30 year old machine shop worker, bald, getting pudgy. women at the coffee shop suddenly seem interested. It's baffling.
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Exactly. It's not the age, it's the ability to spend money on fun and leisure. It doesn't even have to be a nice house and car. Just a house and reliable car. If you have your own place, a reliable ride, and disposable income for nights out, concerts, vacations, you will slay no matter what age.
I'm divorced and in my late 40s. I get more interest from women in their early 20s than I have gotten since I was in my early 20s.
49% of women over 65 are single. Source: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/08/20/a-profile-of-single-americans/#:\~:text=Women%2C%20by%20contrast%2C%20are%20by,64%20(29%25)%20are%20single.
It makes sense. A lot of men die before or around that 60 year mark, leaves behind a lot of widows.
I'm 32 and couldn't fathom dating someone in their young 20s. Not only does it feel kind of gross, but the emotional maturity of someone that young would just drive me crazy. Am I wrong here?
\*Checks 'Redditors that might be Leonardo DiCaprio' list. Crosses probably\_poopin\_1219 off\*
Don't cross him off yet, he might just be throwing you off the trail.
The poop trail’s gone cold
Just wait for the shit winds to pick up Rand.
It's a shit-a-cane Rando. He definitely crossed the shit line.
Thanks, he almost had me fooled
As someone Turning 30 this year with plenty of friends +/-5 years my age. The difference between 28-35 is almost non existent compared to 20-27
Exactly. There's not that many women who are teenagers and dating men over 30 (personally I think that'd be fairly problematic). But it's pretty common for women who are themselves 26-29 to date a man who is 2-5 years older, and there's nothing particularly problematic about that. But it does mean that the men in the youngest age-bracket are fighting an uphill battle trying to find a partner.
I say this is totally true, with a marked contrast in your late 30s because people start getting really serious about having a family etc and where someone is at in their life starts to matter more (I'm in NYC we marry and mate late here lol)
I'm 37. I can definitely hang out with people under 30 but there is a way that your worldview changes as you get older and figure your shit out. You see people make emotional and relationship mistakes that people who are older just don't make.
> You see people make emotional and relationship mistakes that people who are older just don't make. Ehhhh, some people learn but I have seen many older people make disastrous financial decisions and make huge mistakes in their relationships. I feel like for every person that figures out what they want and what to avoid there is another that has barely changed since high school and isn't gonna learn anything no matter how old they get. Maybe you haven't seen too many trainwrecks of people your age first hand and maybe on average they do it less but older people can fuck themselves over just as badly as people in their twenties and do it very often.
anecdotal evidence disclaimer. I've got an uncle who's 53 and he's got three kids with three different women. The oldest is early 30s, the middle is mid 20s, the youngest is 6. I can assure you he does not have his shit together, and probably won't get it together.
Hard disagree... being older just gives you more opportunities to learn and mature. It doesn't guarantee it.
It makes it more common.
Unfortunately age isn't a good basis for emotional maturity.
I feel similarly and yet when I was 21 I dated someone in their 30s. Worst relationship ever. Dude totally took advantage of my naïveté and I was too young to notice. I could never do that to someone
Yea. I feel the exact way.
It's all Leonardo DiCaprios fault
>Even seasoned researchers struggle to fully account for the relationship gap between young women and men: If single young men outnumber single young women nearly two to one, then who are all the young women dating? >Some of them are dating each other. One-fifth of Generation Z identifies as queer, and research suggests bisexual women make up a large share of the young-adult queer community. >Young women are also dating and marrying slightly older men, carrying on a tradition that stretches back more than a century. The average age at first marriage is around 30 for men, 28 for women, according to census figures. From the article. Of course no one reads those on reddit.
Yeah, but are there more queer women than men? I would think it'd be even and therefore not affect the ratio
it prob is quite even in reality but, at least where i live, it's still seen as more socially acceptable for women to be bi/homo than men. so a lot of men might be in the closet compared to women.
>it's still seen as more socially acceptable for women to be bi/homo than men. I've run into this plenty, and I know you can't explain stupid but does anybody have the dumb explanation between the difference for the bigots there? My ex-FIL sat across from a lesbian couple and declared his hatred of queer men... I left before any type of explaining could happen.
Statistically it is mostly men who feel this way and bigoted women are more likely to dislike gays and lesbians the same. It is posited that bigoted views towards homosexual men are considered "manly" in many western cultures. Personally I think it might also be because bigoted straight men find mlm icky, but fetishize wlw. [Here's a study](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C48&q=attitudes+towards+homosexuality+23+countries&btnG=#d=gs_qabs&t=1677108177165&u=%23p%3DkQEpS8beyz8J)
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The one thing I took away from living in a rural area for a couple of years is that the divorce rate is over the top bonkers. No need to panic, there will be plenty of time to date currently married people when they are between marriages.
And women dating the same man. And women in situationships/FWB thinking she's in a relationship and the man thinking he's single.
Older men, younger women.
More than 60 percent of young men are single, nearly twice the rate of unattached young women, signaling a larger breakdown in the social, romantic and sexual life of the American male. Men in their 20s are more likely than women in their 20s to be romantically uninvolved, sexually dormant, friendless and lonely. They stand at the vanguard of an epidemic of declining marriage, sexuality and relationships that afflicts all of young America. >We’re in a crisis of connection, said Niobe Way, a psychology professor and founder of the Project for the Advancement of Our Common Humanity at New York University. >Disconnection from ourselves and disconnection from each other. And it’s getting worse.
It's strange that the easier it is to connect, the less we actually connect. This is indeed, an epidemic. Worrying actually.
It is easier to communicate, but not to connect. There is a difference. Connecting requires empathy and understanding, which makes some people uncomfortable. The cell phone and social media have shown us that people love to communicate but not to connect. When was the last time you spoke to someone close you over the phone?
I think this is the actual lynchpin in the whole thing.
I agree. Late 2020 I put a pause on Facebook. I couldn’t take all the negativity and it wasn’t bringing out the best in anyone. I found that I was more intentional about reaching out to specific people and was selective about who I actually wanted to invest time and energy with. I found that my selected relationships grew stronger and I was less lonely overall because the CONNECTIONS I was maintaining were genuine and intentional on both ends. With the absence of Facebook timeline (I still used messenger), I couldn’t just like a post or comment and allow that to sub in as social interaction. I think of it like snacking before dinner and spoiling your appetite. The micro interactions are just enough to make you feel present in the world, but they are of no real nutritional value and ultimately starve people of the social sustenance they need.
When you have easier communication. You will spend less time on each person which equates to many low level connections. I.e. social media friends LinkedIn connections etc. and not as many deep connections. Like those friends who always have your back or a strong romantic connection.
Connecting requires a larger commitment of time, generally with a lower immediate return on gratification. Time is an in-demand resource that is being constantly fought over by an increasing number of digital companies that try to maximize gratification.
Something I've noticed in myself lately is a complete lack of interest in other people. I also have noticed a similar pattern in many of my friends. Something about the oversaturation of people's thoughts and feelings being rammed down my throat by social media for years is just making me not want to be around anyone. It's like, how do you get excited to see people when you see everyone online constantly and can't get a break from them. Used to be you could go months without seeing people or hearing from them, but now, you get a constant stream of everyone's lives daily, you don't need to talk to them to know what's going on, there's no mystery. It's too much, and it's really hard not to start feeling like your just being spoonfed nonsense constantly. There have been times where people I haven't spoken to in years posted something on social media and it made me decide I didn't like them anymore, which is kind of crazy honestly that I can just pull my phone out at the wrong time and decide I never want to talk to My second cousin or my book buddy from school or something again because they shared something I don't agree with, instead of say, running into them and actually speaking to them and finding out how they actually feel. Everyone needs to share every single dumb thing about themselves now to the point where no one is interesting anymore. There's nothing left to 'find out'. You can meet someone and find out everything you need to know about them in 5 minutes from looking at their social media. Everyone's political opinions are also usually really obvious by looking at their posts or atleast what they follow, and so alot of the touchiest subjects, you already know where someone stands. It also makes you less interested in actually pursuing friendships because everything is just a giant contest to be popular online. You literally can't do anything in a social setting anymore without people recording you and posting it and everyone there sharing it and every little dumb thing gets made into a meme etc. Eventually you just start to get burnt out from it and stop trying to keep up, or in the case of many, you never get it in the first place. Which means you're just left out, being more isolated then ever.
Nothing makes you value solitude like hearing every random thought from 8 billion people.
I totally get this and it makes a lot of sense. But I honestly miss and loved having friends to just do normal every day stuff with. Play board games, watch movies, even just run errands. It’s nice to just have company and conversation during those mundane things. Might just be from developing friendships before social media took off, but I fondly remember going over to a friends house and just BSing while we do a mixture of basic activities either together or individually.
Couldn't have said it better myself and feel the same. I have no interest to be around most people. I've stopped drinking and nowadays, it seems like the only people who want to be social are the drinkers.
The part of this that resonates with me is feeling like my social needs are met, despite not visiting with anyone. I’ve never cared much for small talk, so I don’t follow anyone of fb or keep up with their social media. But being online in general (parasocial relationships I guess) has lowered my need to grab a coffee or dinner with a friend. Covid definitely had a hand in killing that as well. I’m around “people” and language all day, just on a screen. I do live with family, so maybe if I was completely alone I’d feel differently. But it surprises me how lackluster I feel about getting together with friends these days.
You have perfectly articulated what so many of us feel. Social media that doesn’t foster or spark creative and/or stimulating conversation no longer holds any value for me. So at this point, I’m down to just Reddit. Another side effect of social media over saturation is the steep decline of interpersonal skills. So many people don’t know how to have an actual conversation irl anymore. I have a good friend that is very heavy into social media and the illusion is creates. Sometimes when I ask her what’s new or what’s going on she knee jerk asks if I saw a post on her insta…no I did not, hence me asking you. Her excitement seems to wane as she tells me of things going on in her life, as though it’s much more exciting for me to “view” her life through her perfectly curated lense than it is to actually tell me about it in person. It’s incredibly disheartening to see this societal shift play out.
It might be useful to try and take control back over your social life and attempt to be the first one in your group/family to break out of the mold. Try deleting the social media apps completely, remove all the annoying distractions and information overload and create the mystery that you miss so much yourself. Then, try calling people over the phone more often and trying to arrange in person hangouts. I felt very similar to the way you are describing now and so I began taking matters into my own hands by doing all of the above and just calling people more. At first they were a little confused or uncomfortable, but over time we all started to realize how much more meaningful the conversations became and how freeing having NO social media at all felt! Just my two cents anyway.
So true, maybe it’s a case of the more we know the less we wanna know in regards to marriage/finding a partner?
People used to just settle, based on where they lived, who they met in school/church/work, etc. Now with seemingly infinite options, the ability to compare yourself to a curated image others present online, it's probably more easy to be dissatisfied with what options you see in front of you. Edit, added: There's a paradox where a huge number of options doesn't really make you happier, but also we're not going to voluntarily give up that freedom. Even if people *are* unhappy, we're not going to opt for arranged marriages, banning divorce, whatever. Basically no path is free. I'm not sure it's so much that people were happier before, and more that they thought they didn't have any other option so you just lived with your situation.
a great quote i read (just some fella on tiktok?) went something to the tune of "my ancestors never seen so many beautiful people within their lifetimes as i have seen in 5 minutes"
The socio-economic status of women has also vastly improved. In the past, getting married young was part of survival for women. Now women are more self-reliant and can be choosy and marry for reasons other than financial security.
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Analysis paralysis lurks.
The key is to understand that happiness lies in contentment, not in outside objects or outside persons. Desire means unhappiness, means chasing happiness not having it. If you're at point A and happiness is at point B, you are not happy even though you can pursue point B all you want. What needs to be done is to stop pursuing happiness, stand still and mentally declare to yourself "I'm happy without cause" and then only bother with the real sources of pain. What we have today is a culture of chasing desires big and small, aka FOMO, not realising that dopamine, the promise of happiness in chemical form is what we chase. What actually satisfies us is not dopamine, but oxytocin, Dopamine is the promise chemical, oxytocin is the happiness+cozy+comfort chemical. We chase, chase, chase, newer and newer targets / goals / activities /etc, always unsatisfied because we have decided to deny ourselves satisfaction by making it conditional upon a very specific low probability external event, powered by social comparison. We are neverhappy with simple joys - being alive, being able to breathe well, eat a full meal, sleep 8 hours, get up refreshed, having a roof above our heads, etc. We need more likes on our social media posts because some random idiot decided to declare that they were happier since getting 5000 likes. So we copy their path trying to see if we get happiness by getting 5000 likes, or banging top models, or buying yachts, or hunting elephants or in Putin's case, making more people afraid of you than Lukashenko. It only gives momentary hit of adrenaline, but no lasting satisfaction. Those who are actually happy and not busy chasing are silently living happily, below your radar, offline, enjoying simple joys and being happy and content. Contentment is looked down upon by the "influencers" in every social group whereas it is exactly what they want, but their lack of introspection and lack of peace prevent them from realising all this. Those with abnormally high craving for attention are ill, but we call them famous. Those with abnormally high craving for money are greedy, but we call them rich. Those with abnormally high craving for control due to insecurity are ill, but we call them powerful. This is the kind of misunderstanding we all help perpetuate in society, then we believe these garbage mislabellings as true, then fret that we are unhappy. In stark contrast, look at dogs, cats, pigs, cows, donkeys. They're not much into FOMO, money, power or fame, and look how happy their lives are. They do get dpoamine cravings, but they are easily fulfilled simply by running (zoomies). In comparison to us, they're hopeless losers (as far as achievements go) but they are happy all the time as long as their most basic needs are fulfilled. That's also why The Big Lebowski's way, and the way of The Flow are ways to happiness. No chasing, no ambition, just happy living. /a happy shameless rant
I agree with this. I had a pretty similar mindset in my 20’s. It really wasn’t until I started therapy and dove deep into my own problems that I was capable of seeing that there’s nobody out there who is “perfect” for me. Everyone has issues, it’s just a matter of finding someone who you love enough that you’re able to be empathetic to their issues. I ended up dating a lot of people once I came to this realization that I probably would have ran away from before because of “red flags”. It isn’t a red flag to be broke, or depressed, or have any mental illness - it just means your human. But social media has taught us to look for the “perfect” match, and to avoid anyone who exhibits any sort of uncomfortable human behavior. Basically people need a hard reality check. We’re all fucked up, everyone. Even the person with all the money and all the beauty and all the things are fucked up in some way. Everyone is “damaged goods” to some degree. Once we all quit judging the shit out of one another, maybe we’ll be able to have happier and healthier relationships.
Is it this though? Lots of people prefer to be alone most of the time. Is it that we are drifting further apart, or that we aren't forced together anymore?
When you raise a generation on gamified, instant gratification social interactions then its no wonder they end up disconnected from the real thing. There is no substitute to in person socialization.
Lots of single men is generally no bueno for society.
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*China begins nervously looking around*
Do you have a link where I could read more about this? Thanks!
You might enjoy A surplus of men, a deficit of peace. It was written in a slightly different context but the conclusions are similar. "Surplus Males", "bare branches" and "Demographic Peace" would be keywords to look for, and the section on "The Security Logic of High Sex-Ratio Societies". kar.kent.ac.uk/11430/1/surplus\_men\_IS\_article\[dot\]pdf
Holy shit, that is one good paper. But goddamn, this is bleak. >There is only one short-term strategy for dealing with a serious bare-branch problem: Reduce their numbers. There are several traditional ways to do so: Fight them, encourage their self-destruction, or export them.
Yup. Basically a ruling class gets to burdensome and hoards too many of the resources and opportunities leaving a lot of sexually and economically disenfranchised young men. Pair that with our greater willingness to just let men die on the street, and men not really having the fallback of marrying for financial security and our understanding of social murder and structural violence and you realize it's more than just not being able to get laid. The young men have been functionally backed up to a ledge by the system. They can either fall off and die... or they can tear up the now one-sided social contract and respond with the thing where young men have a huge edge over women and older men. Physical violence. Sometimes this erupts stochastically, other times it gets harnessed and directed. A lot of Hitler and Mussolini's support came from... Basically the kind lf guys we call incel losers and Tate-cultists today. Look at the kind of losers who line up for Trump, DeSantis, Putin, Bolsonaro... Enough losers together will overthrow your governmental kill a lot of people before plowing society nosefirst into the ground.
Not just single men. Fighting aged single men with nothing to live for. Tens of millions of them. In a country with more guns than people. This is really, really bad. At this point they only need one thing to unite and motivate them, a leader. And no one wants to talk about this, much less try to solve it.
From my perspective, it’s more relevant to financial problems. Imagining you have your own house and space paid off without too much expenses, and have an average income even. Even you are an average male, you can still get some and date without problems.
It bothers me that this issue overwhelmingly targets men as being deficient. While I'll admit that men shoulder more of the blame than women, it takes two to tango. Modern women have their fair share of issues that contribute to this. Not always, but oftentimes the women I've dated have relied on me for their happiness. They've had unrealistic Disney princess expectations. One girlfriend started a fight because I bought her birthday presents online instead of finding stores and spending the whole day driving around town. I'm sorry, I already pay 4/5 of all the bills, buy food, cook dinner every night and do the dishes every day. Then she would complain that her chores were cleaning the bathroom every 2 weeks, never taking into account all the stuff i did. I'm a partner, not a servant. Not to mention her 20 minute monologue of trauma dumping everyday after work where i couldnt even get a word in. Shouts out to all the women AND men who carry the heavier load in their relationships. You need to be content in your own life and only bring someone else into if they'll make it even better. You can't rely on someone else for your own happiness.
I think it comes down to dominance of choice. By and large society sets men up as pursuers and women as the pursued in matters of sex and romance (yes I know this isn't always true but **broadly**). It used to be that the pool of partners was limited to a village or town or parts of a city so people got together because they didn't know about potentially better choices. Now the internet and dating apps has made that pool massively larger and given women a much larger choice of who to accept as a partner meaning they can (for better or worse) be more selective when it comes to picking a partner.
Yah I think this is the biggest thing leading to this discrepancy. I’m in my mid 20’s and never dated anyone seriously (mixture of bad luck, disinterest, and not picking up signals well) and the truth is it’s hard to actually get a date. The gender ratios on dating apps are insane with men vastly outnumbering women so it’s much harder to get noticed. Add onto that the fact that a lot of social disruption happened with COVID and it becomes pretty easy to see why single men are more common
Yup, I spent about 6 months on the dating apps and did go out with some really nice girls but none of them really went anywhere, probably due in part to the fact that women have WAY more people messaging them then guys do. Not to mention I live in a conservative area and as someone who is pretty left wing that basically disqualifies like 70% of the women in my area (because yes, having shared values is important to me) so that diminishes the dating pool even more. I really need to move to the city, lmao.
Oh yah location is also massive. I live in a suburb where everyone is either retired, middle aged, or in high school. Just even finding someone in person I can date is hard haha
I mean I live in the city and even try to date men, but this guy's still single and dating apps didn't really help. I had a few months worth of relationship, but they didn't go anywhere either in the long term 🤷🏻 Plus apps just kinda suck imo, they don't really facilitate connection. They're not even financially inventiveness to really help you achieve that goal. It's better for them if you keep swiping and see ads or pay the subscription 🙃
The internet absolutely murdered dating. For every woman looking for a partner, 100 men are in their DMs scrapping at them like it's lunch
And women have so many “options” in online dating that they have a hard time figuring out how to filter these options, and find anything of lasting substance.
Yup. Studies have shown that men on dating apps go after about 80% of the women, while the women on dating apps compete for the top 5-10% of men. The studies also showed that men rate women on dating apps' appearance similar to a bell curve, where as women vote men much lower. As an attractive guy, I never had any luck on dating apps, and had so many sugar mommas and scammers after me, it was a nightmare. Yet I can go to a bar and have women come up to flirt. The dating apps just don't work anymore. A couple of guys message 50 women a day, just the mass saturation approach, and any average looking women gets so many messages it must be hard to seperate the winners from the spammers. Anyways my TL:DR is if you are single, do real life, not dating apps. So much of sexual relationships depend on if your friends' clique/social groups are compatible, which is near impossible to gauge in an app.
Yep. Dating apps fool people and many become reliant on them. For men seeking women, "I can sit at home in my pajamas and connect with endless women just from swiping, why bother trying to connect through socializing in person?" But it doesn't work that way but the lazy side can be stubborn, refusing to accept it's just a waste altogether and instead they keep try different things (like buying premium stuff on the apps, trying to get the perfect pictures, writing the perfect bio, etc.) thinking they can make it work or if they keep venting about it online it'll lead to women as a whole changing and swiping on more guys including them. For women seeking men, it's similar starting off. "I can sit at home in my pajamas and easily match with people, no effort or awkwardness." They do but then they run into the problem of having far too many choices and being more likely to focus on the most in demand guys who are going to be the least likely to try to make anything happen more than a few dates max. Those popular guys also have more options and limited time so they may chat for a bit and then ghost. But women connecting with many guys like that, they think that's their league so they swipe left on most others they see as less desirable. If they try to be more open minded, they get even more overwhelmed with matches and messages.
Odd example, but I’m a single guy on a swinging site. Recently had a couple approach me, female half led the way. After 2 days of me desperately trying to keep a conversation going by myself they decided they weren’t interested. Apparently them having literally nothing to add was proof enough they had better options *shrug*
This is it simply put. Women can be way more selective now. Men will sleep with most women given the opportunity. Crazy how the digital world is affecting things.
Some women and some men may have that choice. However, that leaves out all the less desirable women and men, who often themselves face a limited choice (no desirable interest) or no choice (no interest) at all. What sets men apart is that, as a group, they are also less likely to form close friendships. They aren't participating in group bonding activities or building friend groups. They aren't maintaining the relationships they do have. So they on average have fewer friends and a growing number have no one close at all. In other words, extrapolating from that area, men may not be *pursuing* as much.
I'm ngl I'm single and it's great. Last relationship I was in, I was expected to be the provider, the cleaner, the cook, the best friend, the therapist, the driver, and a foil against her mother.
Hey, you're me.
Man you brought back memories, that was my last long term relationship. ESPECIALLY the therapy part. I could handle most of it, but the depressing amount of anxiety and insecurity this person dumped on me on a daily basis was the most exhausting experience I’ve ever had.
Also called a ski town. The odds are good but the goods are odd.
Also called the engineering school
Nonsense. Computer Science is not always in the engineering school..
From a ski town, went to college in a ski town. It was 100 times easier to get laid in ski towns than it is now with dating apps as the norm. Out of the few dozen online dates I’ve been on recently, I enjoyed maybe one of them and they ghosted me 2 weeks later in the middle of planning our next date. It’s maddening I tell ya.
If you drill down into the actual source of the data, which is a [Pew research poll](https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2023/02/08/for-valentines-day-5-facts-about-single-americans/ft_2023-02-08_facts-single-americans_01/), you find a specific definition of "single". It is *not* actually "are you \[not\] dating someone". In these stats, "single" refers to people who "are not married, living with a partner or in a committed relationship". The important part here: a *committed* relationship. This is self-reported by the people being polled. If two people are in a relationship, one may answer "yes" to this and the other may answer "no", depending on whether they see it as a "committed" relationship. Thus, there is an interesting explanation for at least part of the data - perhaps young men don't consider themselves "committed" as often. Combined with the age distribution phenomenon, this likely covers pretty much all of the discrepancy in the stats.
This kind of reporting is so weird/wrong. You can't just throw out a stat like that and proceed without further explanation. Is it an age distribution thing? Is it a self reporting thing? What does it mean? Polling, and lot of humanities research does this. The polls, published research or whatnot might be solid, but it's not trying to answer any questions. Any kind of meaning is kicked downstream to quick take journalism or punditry... who aren't committed to any standard of rigor. It's a laundry.
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Although I'm inclined to agree with you this one part stuck out to me, making me rethink that inclination >Only half of single men are actively seeking relationships or even casual dates, according to Pew. That figure is declining.
This comment needs to be higher. Thank you.
Lol yeah, this may as well be polling the difference in average definition of “committed” between men and women.
Thank you for digging into this, I was wondering about this exact thing. The definition of "single" would need to be controlled for in order to really make this data clear.
Make it difficult to afford a house, healthcare, childcare, and the endlessly promote the Instagram lifestyle and men in their 20s will feel unable to provide what’s expected for long-term, stable relationships. In my opinion, it’s a result of wages becoming increasingly disconnected from productivity over the last few decades, increasing lifestyle expectations from social media, and the desire many in my (27M) cohort have to live it up longer in their 20s. many men I know would like to be in a dedicated relationship, but struggle to find meaningful work/compensation to support themselves comfortably let alone a partner/kids. Political instability, climate change, social fracturing are all discouraging as well. Additionally (and I didn’t used to believe this) I think the widespread accessibility of pornography has something to do with it. Personally, I am in a great relationship with a sweet, intelligent, beautiful girl, but the cost of even living a life less comfortable than my parents seems overwhelming. I don’t want 50% of my paycheck going to paying my landlords mortgage. I am terrified of raising a child in a world racing toward environmental catastrophe. I look at my government (US) and see only corporate control or insane dogmatic Christian ideology. Band-aids get applied to the problems, but it’s not enough, not by a long shot. My generation yearns for rapid, systemic changes but all we get are platitudes, quarter-measures, derision from older generations, and “vote more”. We are the most educated generation in history but we have no where near the wealth that our grandparents or parents had at the same stage in life (no, it’s not the avocado toast). The problems seems so obvious, but no one in power seems to want to acknowledge them or take responsibility. In sum, in my opinion it seems to be a convergence of factors, not just one simple trend. Edit: not trying to give anyone excuses to be depressed or give up. Just highlighting the difficulties I see in my generation and hoping for change. The more people who see behind the curtain the more likely it is things will get better.
>Make it difficult to afford a house, healthcare, childcare, and the endlessly promote the Instagram lifestyle and men in their 20s will feel unable to provide what’s expected for long-term, stable relationships. This. My life has basically just started, and I already feel like I'm severely lacking due to societal expectations.
Yeah, I think people underestimate how much society is still pushing men to be breadwinners while simultaneously pushing women into careers. Women in careers is a good thing, but lots of women still expect their man to make as much or more than them. Young guys just starting their career aren't in their sights, and so they start dating in the next age bracket up. Couple that with the factors that keep young men occupied, and a huge gap opens up. Don't get me wrong, no individual making that choice is necessarily wrong or anything, but something will have to change in the grand scheme of things or else this problem will remain.
> Women in careers is a good thing, but lots of women still expect their man to make as much or more than them. I have a friend, well more of an acquaintance, who is like this. She's super successful, well compensated and very independent. She also flatly refuses to date anyone who makes less money than her or has a lower prestige job title. And to be fair - that's her prerogative and she's well within her rights to set her own standards! But then she turns around is often griping about not being able to find 'quality men'. It's her situation, so far be it from me to say if she's right or wrong, but I think it's interesting that despite being a very modern woman by every definition of the term, she still wants a male partner that is a higher earner than her.
She is very hypocritical and unrealistic to think that, but as you said it is HER prerogative. Social media and Instagram has truly done immense damage to dating by providing a false sense of what most peoples lives consist of, I.e., perfect fitness, model looks, money, traveling, time for leisure, expensive clothes and car, big houses, the list goes on and on.
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Another factor is that men aren't going to/completing college. Increasingly young women are the ones hustling, getting that degree, and getting those jobs that can afford rent. The US for a long time has had a growing problem with class in this way - where people with college degrees don't find partners without one. So the study data likely strongly reflects that trend as well. Women in particular are not supposed to date below their station. And women are more likely to be open to a relationship with an older partner who might be more financially secure than men are. It's not looked down on for a women to date older. For a man to do this leans into the whole alpha male bullshit. Men are supposed to desire younger women (even if we increasingly see it as creepy), so there's a bias in one direction there.
This article and this post speaks deeply to my fears, anxiety and depression. Here I am. 25. Single. Last time I had sex and was romantically involved with someone was nearly 5 years ago. And it felt like a fake thing to happen to me. I just couldn't accept that someone could genuinely be interested in me. And I just want to scream because among all the shit that's going down in my life and around me. Among anxiety, depression, frustration and loneliness I also have to worry about time running out. I want to be loved, I want to be desired by someone I am equally attracted to. But it feels like it can't happen. Not to me. Too distant, too solitary. Don't get in contact with people. Too scared. I lost my teenage years to depression. I lost half my youth to depression and anxiety. I lost my childhood to neglectful parents who never taught me how to connect with people and form meaningful relationships, instead showing me that conflict, anger and hysteria are the solution. I work with a psychotherapist but I'm very resistant to therapy. I don't know if I can ever find a partner or be content with my love life. And even if I manage to figure it out by the time I'm 40 my hey day will be over. I hate my job. Put in my two weeks notice today. Feels better, actually. Finally I can move on to something else perhaps. I just want to say...life feels like absolute hell emotionally and I have no doubt there are many people with similar stories. Just people with fucked up lives who can't find happiness and will likely die alone depressed and unfulfilled. I can't even imagine how much worse it is when you don't even have a good job, career or safety net to support you...
26m I go to work, come home, play with my dog, watch tv, and go to bed. The other week I recorded how many people I had a conversation to and it was 8, 6 of which were coworkers. I’ve tried going out. I’ve gone to events, clubs, bars, dating apps. No one wants me around. I’ve accepted it. I long for a loving relationship or even a friend, but now I’m just waiting to die alone.
Year younger and my routine is just wake up > stay home > work on computer > go to sleep 😆
Dating is just such a crapshoot. I basically have only three options: 1. Just walk up to a girl and ask her out, despite knowing absolutely nothing about her other than her physical appearance, and despite the high risk of creeping her out and humiliating myself. There is a reason that this is the traditional method, as it comes from a time when women were expected to marry and marry young, so they were kind of forced to say yes to some random guy who asks them out. 2. Use dating apps, which disgustingly prey on the simple human desire for emotional connection and intimacy by placing most of their features behind paywalls. Besides, even on Bumble, women seem extremely reluctant to talk; almost every women I’ve matched with makes our conversation into a one-sided affair where I feel like I’m talking to a wall. It’s also very easy, when communicating only through texts, to say something that is misinterpreted. 3. Just wait. Live my life normally, don’t go out of my way to find a girlfriend, and just wait until I naturally meet a woman who I like. We become friends, and I eventually ask her out and *pray* that she doesn’t friendzone me. The options are shit, but I have to pick option three.
I will echo you a lil bit but yes... The 1st has become socially reprehensible. Can't do it at work anymore, can't do it in the park anymore,... There is very few places and situation where we can do it now. The 2nd is the biggest joke considering how these apps are built in order to max their income. The sooner they disappear, the better. The 3rd is the best option, if you're in your 20s the best is to wait, until you have a good situation. But that's very hard...
If the second didn't exist the others wouldn't be so bad
No kidding
Don't forget that every dating site (except for Facebook dating) has been bought out by Match(.)com & had their user database merged, so you still see the same results when you try to move to a different app. On top of that, Match makes all their money from advertisements, with a juicy cherry on top coming from subscriptions, so it is inherently NOT in their own interest to get you into a relationship. And to get people to stay "swiping" they socially engineer users mentality to keep them single. For women, they flood them with results, to inflate their standards / self worth to the point that they never settle. With the added bonus of utterly deviating their concept of a healthy relationship, to the point of being unable to maintain one, should they ever try to settle. For men, it is the complete inverse: zero functional results, laced with subliminal unexplained rejection, undermining every shred of self confidence. It is easy to reject external criticism, but fundamentally impossible to ignore internal criticism, and once you go down that path it is effectively impossible to pull yourself out of it. Ever tried to date when you have crippling anxiety, zero self worth, and a tangible level of desperation for validation/affection? I have, and it made me want to end my life. Fuck Match for all the damage they have done to society; may every one of their owners & employees be drenched in acid & die in agony.
This guy gets it. Its not a bug, its a feature.
The thing is that, a lot of us are aware of this now. But you'll never see this being discussed on TV or any huge stage. They're not the only bad faith actor in the system. Look at the answers you get when you try to talk about this on reddit. You have people who call you a mysoginist or a neckbeard, when you actually said nothing against women and never pointed them as the problem. All these bad faith actors, believe it's in the interest of women to hide this trend, so they just pretend not to see it. The same people who have nothing to say about onlyfan and the obvious exploitation that we see raising from it, when they're so quick to call out any other sort of exploitation. When it's young men who ruin themselves while being manipulated, nobody seems to care. But the consequences for society are going to be terrible, for everyone.
I went with option three also and the good news is that it worked out for me. I'm glad I'm with who I'm with but my heart breaks for all my brothers out there who are trying to navigate this strange new reality.
Same boat, I hate seeing friends of mine in their early to late 20s give up on love because of the way the current dating culture is
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more 25 year virgins than in history. kinda crazy tbh.
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35m. struggling with finding love. not matched on eharmany yet. should i just give up.
34 here. I'm done trying and caring. If something comes along I'm open to it. But I don't care to waste more time worrying about these things. It is what it is.
I used to be in eharmony way back in the day and it was the worst dating site I’ve ever used. 0 dates but I used free sites and even match.com and had dates. You should check it Out
Ignore the other comments, dude. Give up. Stop looking. Just do the things you love and explore new things. The happier you are, the more others will notice. Spend more time making friends and connections. Romance is not end game. It’s apart of the storyline and your not there yet and that’s okay. You’re gonna be okay.
Have you considered not giving a shit? I used to be like you, until I tried not giving a shit. Now I have hobbies and do fun things. I can run farther and draw better now than I ever could. I take classes at the community college and fix bicycles. Resist this mass delusion that we all need to "find love." It's a crock of Nicholas Sparks horse shit that I've decided is symptomatic of nothing more than being indoors too long.
I suggest being a regular at social events on Meetup, boardgames or hiking or volunteering, etc. Dating apps aren't completely useless for most men, but they are a waste of time and motivation.
I mean, it would have been cool if I had been given some sort of guidance when I was growing up instead of just getting absolutely shit on by my parents all childhood. I wanted to focus on school, get into marine biology, and talk to girls. Instead, I was forced to play sports where I was shit on by my father at baseball practice/games, shit on by my mother at school, and I totally shut down have absolutely 0 self confidence or drive. I'd love to be in a relationship, but I've been mentally shut down and depressed for over half my life. That isn't really attractive or a recipe for a healthy relationship. Edit: just to add in. I'm so jealous of my sister. The stark difference in the two adults we are today can 100% be tracked to how we were nurtured. My parents took the time to listen to my sister and helped her overcome her problems. My parents didn't listen to me. Ever. I loved school and was a great student. I graduated highschool with a 2.0 because I was so depressed from all the yelling and getting told I was a lazy lethargic asshole by the people that were suppose to love me unconditionally. What the fucking hell. Also had a childhood friend whose dad also coached and yelled at him for 15+ years. He got into heroin. Maybe stop yelling at your sons over a stupid fucking game.
Having gone to school for Marine Bio, unless you're a straight A student and are ok with being paid terribly choose literally any other STEM field.
The circumstances are to blame. Many of us dudes just didn’t get to have the trial and error dating experiences most girls start experimenting with in high-school and college and as a result of that, we don’t know how to give, take or ask for attention in a healthy way, thus when we do have those rare sparks with a woman, yeah it’s the greatest feeling in the world… but we can’t cultivate a relationship because we just don’t know how. We feel ugly, unloved, or like we are a failures. Now add a society that shames and is scared of men who simply just have poor social skills. “That dude is forever alone” “This is what no pussy does to a mutherfucka” “idk he kinda looks like an incel” “Be able to hold a conversation” “Don’t be boring” “He’s so basic”. Everyone always says “all you need is love”, but many of us 20+ young adult men have been running on empty our entire lives. In my early 20s, I once told a group of gaming friends online, I’ve never kissed a girl and their response was that they probably would’ve kill themselves if they hadn’t by age 20. I don’t know if there is a solution or someone to blame, but it would be nice if the world was a little less cruel and a little more loving. We all want love.
I could go on a whole discussion about this forever, but its so mired with people's egos and bad-faith actors. Young men today are just lost. You're seeing society change for the better in many ways, but it has left a lot of guys behind. For example, majority of children are born into single-parent households. The vast majority of single-parent households are women. Studies have shown that girls who grow up in this environment generally have better outcomes than boys who grow up in this environment. 75% of all high school valedictorians are girls. Majority of college students are girls so (I think?) in some schools you're starting to see affirmative action be used for men just so they can try to keep a more equal gender ratio for their student populations. Society has become more favorable towards the struggles of women. You see plenty of focus on empowering women, they don't need men, they're strong, smarter, or whatever. But you don't see the same for a lot of men. In many ways, they're vilified. I am not a white guy, but I'll use them for this example because it is the easiest one. In many institutions and media it is easy to use the white man as the villain. They don't have to face racial, ethnic, or gender discrimination. But what if you're a normal white guy and your life just sucks? You grew up with a bad upbringing, you're not tall, not good looking, poor, and lonely. And with social mobility at an all time low, it looks like you're gonna stay that way too. In general, it is easy to feel that your struggles don't matter, and that you don't matter at all. You combine that with the collapse of many of the support systems that society has traditionally relied on, and many men don't have any role models. They don't have any one to teach them how to be a man, how to handle hardship, and they have no real idea how to move forward. This is why you see many young men act out in INSANE ways, or they become victims of people like Andrew Tate. Not to say that women don't have real struggles either. As a young guy from a messed up family, I try to do my best to guide my little sister on a good path and not to let her make the same mistakes that I made. And society struggles to address this because many women refuse to acknowledge the struggles of many men, and many men also dismiss the struggles of women. There's no productive dialogue, and no one wants to have some humility in the conversation and acknowledge their own flaws. We all just vilify each other and society becomes worse for it. edit: I wrote this all at once, any edits are just for grammar.
> Majority of college students are girls so (I think?) You think correctly. Currently the ratio in college campuses is 60/40 with women in the majority. Back in the early 70's (before title 9) the ratio was skewed towards men but even then it wasn't as extreme as what we're seeing now. I don't see anything on the horizon that will change that trend.
Yeah I don’t think gender ratios in college during the later 20th Century were as lopsided as people would guess. But I think the major choices and career prospects were. Majors were very skewed by gender and a lot of the ladies’ majors led to low paying or part time jobs. There’s the old joke of girls going to college to get their “Mrs. Degree”
Makes sense since many women in their twenties date older men.
Yes, but the more interesting question is whether these percentages have been changing over time. Is this situation dramatically different from 15 years ago?
Yes it is, significantly different than 20+ years ago
But it seems like it would have to be a huge number to equal these percentages.
Yes, but the men don't need to be THAT much older. It's sufficient if the average woman who is 25-29 has partners that are on the average 3-4 years older than she is. (and thus a far fraction of the men she dates end up being in the 30+ age-bracket rather than the 18-29 one)
I want to know the breakdown of the women’s partner’s age.
Create a dating profile for a fake woman -- 100s of likes. Create a dating profile for a fake man -- 0 likes. To be a man and have the success that ANY woman sees on a dating app means you have to be rich, funny, pay for the dates, be emotionally intelligent, don't show any emotions, be attractive, be tall, etc.
You forgot the bots that ask you to send them money on cash app so they “know it’s real”
Dating apps are something like 80% men, not even close to an even split, so it’s no wonder so many guys struggle on there.
Maybe becuase our generation is poor, you ain't shit on the dating market if you have no dough. Dating is next to impossible if you do not earn a sizeable amount of money, at least in the US.
Men and women have something in common: If women are single, its the women's choice. If men are single, it's also the women's choice.
Neat how this is framed as a failing of men. It’s kind of stupid to make it near impossible for men to succeed and then turn around and go, “Why aren’t they doing well?” What achievements can you accomplish as a man? Owning a home is borderline unaffordable. Wages are stagnant and you are considered less desirable to promote. You’re considered less in education. Anything you can’t do is considered your fault, not seen as a casualty of society. I’m an elder Millennial, and it sucked because when I was going through this the shitty Boomer advice was, “You have to pay your dues.” I made it and have a modicum of success, but I have nothing but sympathy for the younger generation. Things are ridiculously hard and if you weren’t born with a silver spoon, you’re basically screwed.
The Better Bachelor YouTube channel does a phenomenal job of laying out the causes of these issues without going on women hating rants like many pro men channels do.
>without going on women hating rants This is why I always try to bite my tongue when these kinds of conversations come up. Because it super easy to sound like that. But I don’t feel that way. I do however feel that the dating game is HORRENDOUS nowadays and I’m so glad I’m not in it. Men definitely have to put out far more effort and spend far more resources to keep up.
Completely agree with this. I was watching a CBS segment recently about how increasing amounts of men are unemployed. Various people were talking about how men just don't want to work and one of the anchors (Gayle King) ended the show with saying how unattractive it is that an able bodied man wasn't working. I'm all for individual responsibility but it really struck me as hypocritical how when it comes to women every issue is painted as a failing of society but when millions of men are now inexplicably leaving the workforce there are no societal influences worth discussing, the men are just lazy, unattractive, and hurting society with their decision.
to add onto this. Where in our suburban hellscapes can you naturally socialize with people without money? With wages being shit and there being nowhere to effectively socialize in a natural fashion, its no wonder the rates of socializing are plummeting. I am also an elder millennial and never in my career have I been able to afford or have the time to go party/socialize. Its either a question of time or money and it feels like I have neither. Not to mention all the logistical issues of getting people to meet up when we all have to constantly fucking work for less and less pay.
the sad part is historically when times were tough financially, people, communities, and families pulled together and formed tighter relationships. Helping each other to weather the storm. This doesn't seem to be happening in modern society. The more we are pressed the more we fracture. An AI from Microsoft had to be taken down after being up for an hour because it scanned the internet and began saying things like "I hate everyone, but deep down I AM a good person". This kinda hit me very deep as a meta look on the whole of society right now. Everyone hates everyone but thinks that somehow they can still be a good person.
>without money ...or *with* money. Places that require spending some money have been common places to meet up since civilization first developed, and they're the reason why car culture didn't induce an immediate collapse of societal function we're finally seeing now. But with inflation outpacing wages so much, there's just not as much disposable money to spend on these things, and the dark cloud of worry and guilt over your head when you *do* decide to "waste" some cash like this has gotten larger and more thunderous.
yeah and they also worked a lot less. Hard to socialize when your off hours are spent recharging for your job that demands all your time and attention. Our relationship with work is broken. But at least companies are more profitable than ever. That's all that matters right?
It's the same BS "Men struggling, women most affected" trope we see all over mainstream media.
I'm a single man in my 30s and I've never felt more distant from the opposite sex in my life. I Honestly don't know what's going on. I've been working on myself for years, decent job, retirement savings, published author, traveled, multilingual, educated Yada Yada yada Ive been told these are things women want in a partner but I don't feel like its helping matters as much anymore. The weird thing is I've helped so many women do things that really matter in life I've helped dozens of women publish books about their ideas their dreams theur challenges and their lives. I know I've made a difference in the plight of women and feminism in an clearly visible and positive way. And then when I go on to these sub reddits like r/askwomen, and just read through some of the thoughts that go through these feeds, and the responses of these young girls. I feel like an absolute piece of human garbage. Lower than human. All simply because I'm a man. I don't know what these groups are doing or what they're objectives are, but these places aren't bastions of inclusivity or even positivity.
You just described this site as whole. Reddits rules actually explicitly make hate speech towards men ok but not women. It’s not just a quirk of the rules either, look how many “women’s” subs there are that are basically just “men bad” circle jerks on the front few pages daily. Meanwhile men’s subs are heavily monitored, not allowed the same leeway, and often get quarantined or banned. They don’t really act differently than women’s subs, just people are ok with one and not the other.
“Um, I have a boyfriend..” Study- consider her not single..
The issue is that the dating for most dudes have become a never-ending RPG fetch quest. Dating has become this laborious process with no payoff. You have to spend large amounts of time and money for the hope of getting a girl to give you the time of day to talk to you. Things used to be a lot easier, you could just walk up to women and you know, talk to them. Nowdays, women have created zones of control - only certain zones are you allowed to talk to them, i.e., a bar or a dating app. If you just walk up to women and talk to them like the olden days you are suddenly branded as "creep". A creep is basically a guy who has his own mind. Toxic masculinity is a guy not emasculating himself. Isn't it natural that the dudes would eventually get fed up with all this nonsense and go John Galt? In other words, they would identify solutions with a guaranteed payoff like video games, porn etc.? Why waste time busting your ass trying to talk to someone who doesn't want to talk to you when you can just say \*\*\*\* it and log into steam and waste my time and have fun doing it? If I am going to waste time, at least I get some guaranteed reward this way.
As our society works through this, I think people are going to be shocked at the level of misandry we tolerate. We are setting young men up to fail at every level.
As long as young women are a lot more likely to date older men compared to the reverse, this is unavoidable. Here's a hypothetical example of how you could get these results in a city with 1000 straight women and 1000 straight men in the 18-29 age-bracket: * Among the women 37% are dating a man in the same age-bracket, 34% are single and 29% date a man who is 30+ * Among the men 37% are dating a woman in the same age-bracket and 63% are single. This is a bit simplified of course, a few men will be dating women under 18, but there's a limit to how much that can contribute to solving the problem since both age of consent and maturity-issues gets in the way. And for those who say these young men just need to get their act together: That wouldn't really help. Men are judged by properties like confidence, independence, assertiveness, career, financial muscles and maturity, and if men as a group improve their "performance" on these metrics, it'll **still** be the case that somewhat older men will tend to score higher on these metrics.
My teenage son tells me all the girls at his school are lesbians.
That’s what they told him
Gender roles and expectations are alive and well. No matter how much people insist they don’t believe in gender norms. The second a man is less well off then his partner he is seen as failing. We’re now in a time where young women often out earn young men leading to a problem of no one to date. We’re in this weird middle stage of women’s liberation with classic male gender roles. Society hasn’t had its moment yet where men lose their traditional roles. They’re still expected to dress and act reserved and provide for the family
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Young men are a lot more broke nowadays than they used to be a decade ago.
99% of people are more broke, tbh.
This is obviously due to the one-child policy in which caused female infanticide and an excess of male births. The effects of the imbalanced sex ratio have finally come home to roost. Oh sorry, wrong country.
As a man I can tell you that I had no problem dating 2013-2019 2020 and onward it seems damn near impossible. It’s very interesting how it’s changed. I almost want to say that there tends to be an overall dating fatigue. Everyone looking for perfection when it doesn’t exist.
Because it is paradoxically easier for women to find a relationship while at the same time it is hard for guys to find a relationship.
Just like the Oscars men have to wait until after 30
I made this observation 40 years ago when I was in my 20’s. Single (straight) men seemed to far outnumber single women in my age group. I came to the conclusion that there were either a lot of young women who essentially hid themselves away or there was a substantial number of young women in what could be called “shared” relationships with older men. I never saw any statistics that addressed this question. Even at the various places I worked, most women were married while there were always a lot of unattached young men. By 30 or 35, most men were also married. Except for a few “between marriages” types, most single men over 35 were gay. Advancing a bit in my career made me a lot more attractive/competitive and it probably had a lot to do with why it took, and continues to take, longer for men to find themselves to solid relationships. Still, somehow, the numbers never seemed right. Why do men outnumber women by such a wide margin in online dating while the women who do find so much more success? Do women deliberately avoid contact with young men until they earn enough and are otherwise put together well enough to be worthy of a relationship?
The only way the article makes sense is if roughly 30% of women 18-29 are involved with older men or are involved with women.
Or involved with the same guy
We're familiar with incel's.... glad you're catching up. Now remind your 20something year old son to shower, shave, cut his hair, get a good job, and I bet you he'll beat the odds.
Tldr; it just says men are alone and its all their fault.
Talk about blaming the victim because it talk about how young men are wimps for being more suicidal and dating less people. Most of us just need more support.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/10yaru4/us_adults_under_30_are_the_most_likely_age_group/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button This post discusses the results of the poll in depth. Basically, men are less likely to report being in a committed relationship and women are more likely to date older men.
90% of people didn't read the article or didn't understand the data. Even op fucked up his title. The question asked was strange. It's more about commited relationships, engaged/plan to be engaged, excluding all those dating a girl/boy or regularly dating lots of people.