The real reason so many women have given up on dating

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On Medium, I came across Why So Many Women Have Given Up On Dating.

First, let’s do some fact-checking. How many women have given up on dating? A 2020 Pew survey finds that 61% of single men are looking for a relationship or dates vs 38% of single women. The gender gap is even wider for older singles. One 2022 Pew survey says “a majority of single Americans overall are off the dating market – 56% say they are not currently looking for a relationship or casual dates, up slightly from 50% in 2019.” Another study

https://twitter.com/datepsych/status/1659673964807966720?s=46&t=mzC3hPIZqViNIMyjrws4XA

of singles found single women are less interested in dating than single men.

So, yeah. Apparently, a lot of women have given up on dating.

So what does Medium author Laura Wellington believe are the main culprits?

1. Feminism has gone too far

2. Women are exhausted

3. Online dating

4. Gender role confusion

5. Men dating younger women

6. Economic malaise/cost disease

7. Kids from previous relationships

8. Time crunch

9. Women spurning vaccinated men

I’d group 1, 2, 4, 6, and 8 together under the banner of feminism + macroeconomic changes. I’ll give her 3, 5, and 7. As for 9, according to Pew:

A majority of daters (56%) say it wouldn’t matter to them whether or not someone was vaccinated against COVID-19 when deciding whether to go on a date with them, but a sizable minority (41%) say they would only consider going out with someone who is vaccinated. Just 2% say they would only go on a date with someone who is not vaccinated against COVID-19.

So let’s talk about 1, 2, 4, 6, and 8, because I think this is really the heart of it.

It all started in the 1970’s when women, especially married white women, entered the paid labor market in unprecedented numbers. Conservatives will say it was the birth control pill or feminism. But the reality, I believe, is that these women were motivated mostly by stagflation, which made families need the money, and technological innovation which increased aggregate demand for women’s labor.

Stagflation ended the 1950s and 60s boom era of American capitalism. Starting then, costs kept rising for everything major (healthcare, education, housing) while average wages stayed flat for the bottom half of earners. From then until today, the economy funnels new wealth disproportionately to the wealthy and economic mobility continues to decline. (If you wanna read more about this Google “the great decoupling/divergence/uncoupling 1970s”.)

Feminism, I believe, emerged from this economic reality. Women entered the labor force and quickly found it was sexist as all hell. White, middle-class women suddenly had a reason to complain that wasn’t their husband and coworkers with whom they could organize.

Now we’re getting into the time crunch and exhaustion part of the story. Women entered the labor market and then still did (and do) most of the childcare and domestic labor. Today, women spend more time than their husbands on childcare and domestic labor. This is true even when the husband doesn’t work at all.

Now add that bottom half women’s average wages have risen since 1970 while bottom half men’s have stagnated. And women have earned more degrees than men since the 1970s. And most straight Americans want the man to be better educated and higher earning than the woman.

The reality is that the majority of high-earning, college-educated American men are already partnered. Single men are disproportionately lower income and have a high school diploma or less.

So the average single woman is looking at a pool of single men who, by and large, have less education and lower wages than her, and won’t do even half of the childcare and domestic labor. And the older she is, the less likely she is to find someone with more education and higher wages because those men can find equally economically attractive women who are also younger.

Look, man. I’m no expert. But if I were guessing, and I am, I think the main reason so many women have given up on dating is math. If most women won’t settle for a man with a lower income and less education than her and there aren’t enough to go around, those women are going to have to go without.

As always, I think the solution is for women to look for qualities in a partner beyond income and education. And for men to provide more to their partners than income and education. Men are still socialized, by and large, for a world that no longer exists. They’re not taught domestic skills and emotional intelligence the way women are, and it shows. Luckily, this is entirely fixable. But we first need to stop worrying about vaccination status and “feminism going too far” and start seeing the problem for what it is.

Header images come from me putting the headline or some body copy when the headline violates the TOS into OpenAI’s DALL-E. Today’s prompt was “surrealist painting of a woman turning her back on men.”

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