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Far be it from me to be so unrealistic as to expect all relationships or even marriages to be founded on love - but I do find it disturbing that your thorough analysis of the costs and benefits of pursuing a girl completely omits love from the list. Across history and fiction, what leads men to risk life, limb, and reputation in pursuit of a woman - the 1000 gold pieces reward - is love. Actual, passionate love, which can only be satisfied by entering a relationship with that specific woman. It's not a desire for the social status a relationship brings, and it's certainly not sheer undirected lust. The Internet didn't invent masturbation, and if that wasn't enough, brothels and prostitution were commonplace in the old world.
I myself have never asked a girl out because I generically wanted-to-have-a-girlfriend for nebulous status reasons, or because I idly wanted to have sex with her. That always seemed stupid to me, like forcing yourself to eat when you're not hungry. I asked girls out if and when I had crushes on them, because having a crush made me really want to spend time with her, and that in itself was a big enough reward to get over the rejection anxiety. Is that really so rare? Have people stopped falling in love? I'm not asking for sweeping fairy-tale romances, but even a flimsy, fickle crush would do. You just need a push of confidence at the crucial moment. Lust or social ambition alone can't get you there, unless you're exactly the kind of lecherous, materialistic creep which any sane girl would turn down as a serious romantic prospect!
('Course, in pre-modern times, another powerful factor you leave out was literally just money. If "figure out why boys don't fall in love anymore" is too hard a piece of social engineering, there's always that.)
It wasn't supposed to be a thorough analysis (who can thoroughly investigate such a huge topic?), though I guess that this line was a little pathetic as a qualifier when I spend the rest of my words saying the opposite: "Obviously there are many exceptions and many people who are perfectly happy in relationships."
Love is powerful but its strength is finite and its effectiveness context-dependent, that's what I'm trying to get at. There are going to be easier and harder environments to fall in love and have that work out. People are still capable of falling in love but we live in a society that redirects or suppresses much of that energy. Consider the simps moderating Pokimane's twitch chat for free or sending their money to onlyfans girls who provide a (often outsourced to low-paid Pakistani men) simulacrum of a relationship with a woman. On the female side there are those who fall into a Stockholm syndrome like infatuation with their rapist/abuser. That's a kind of love but it's not quite what we're talking about, it's not achieving what it's supposed to be and it's pretty pathetic. Circumstances matter.
"Don't people love their country, why aren't they joining the army?"
Some people of course love their country and will fight and die for it regardless. But money and glory help get others over the line and keeps them in the trenches. Being assured that you won't be prosecuted for war crimes helps. Adventure helps. Watching people die writhing from FPV drones hurts... Siegfried Sassoon poems hurt... Chaotic military bureaucracy hurts... Seeing other people boo veterans, support the enemy and flout the draft hurts...
And people come to love their country less and less if the latter is more prevalent.
These all seem like social diseases of the disaffected twenty-something. I don't think it explains what is preventing high-schoolers from getting crushes on their classmates. (Of course, the pastor from the OP was talking about homeschooled teens.)
Fair dos on your opening disclaimer, but besides being very cursory, it's also addressing a somewhat different points. Many people nowadays wind up in loving relationships that started as casual dating not motivated by anybody having an organic crush on anybody else. That's fine, but not the same thing as relationships starting because one party falls for the other, and therefore gets sufficient motivation to ask their crush out from the prospect of dating that person alone. (And of course there's no guarantee that a relationship which $starts* this way will be a long-lasting, happy relationship!)
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Sure! But love is very rarely 'at first sight' and even more rarely 'at first sight' in a way that is totally requited. You have to have a base of initial attraction, interest, and liking for love to blossom. Seeing romance as something that just falls out of the sky and immediately demands passion from both sides is actually a big part of the problem -- it usually doesn't!
I'm as big an advocate for romantic love as can possibly be conceived, but I'm also a realist. Young people aren't falling in love not because they're "lecherous, materialistic creeps," but because they learn to silence the impulse based on frequent rejection or messaging that, as you do, tells them that "the worst thing she can say" isn't "no thanks," but "you're a creep!" As it turns out, people are responsive to operant conditioning and social messaging.
If I understand him correctly, @RandomRanger is talking about people not even getting to the stage where love can develop. That's the problem.
I never said anything about it being requited or demanding passion from both sides! What I'm talking about is one person (typically, the boy) developing an infatuation, and being motivated thereby to ask out the other one (typically, the girl). Hopefully, in the course of dating, the askee comes to reciprocate. Hopefully, if she doesn't, it's because the two of them don't really click in a romantic context, and this causes the initial crush to fade. Perhaps using the L-word confused things; I'm not speaking about the full bells and whistles, necessarily. Just about its precursor. A crush. An infatuation. Whatever you want to call it.
Of course, falling-in-love with/developing-a-crush-on someone necessitates already knowing them and hanging out with them frequently for non-dating-related reasons. Luckily, we have a social institution for locking largeish numbers of boys and girls together in a room for months on end until they are forced to get to know each other; it is called "school". By the end of any given year of middle school or high school I'd spoken to most of my opposite-sex classmates a few times, worked on class projects with several, and befriended a few platonically. Even without direct interactions, I'd seen enough of literally all of them to have a working sense of their vibe and personality. That's quite enough to develop a romantic infatuation that goes beyond the carnal (as it did yearly for me) and might motivate you to eventually ask one of these girls out on a date (as it did a few times).
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That brings up part of the oddity of the story about the homeschool prom. Do the teens not know each other? Are they strangers?
I don't remember ever dancing as a homeschooled teen. There was an evangelical youth group event where we were playing games like musical winks, where the girls were in a circle, and then the boys were around them in a larger circle, and when the music stopped we had to make eye contact and wink. Something like that. I didn't like it at all, but maybe they had a point. Several of the youth group members did in fact get married to each other.
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