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I'm dragging up the gender, dating, and fertility discourse for one last rodeo.
The below analysis is a possible infohazard for young single males. It contains analysis done by LLMs, but I solemnly swear I drafted this through my own brainpower, using AI only for the analysis I was too lazy to do myself.
I'm following upon a comment I made about a year ago that pulled out some raw numbers on the quality of women in the U.S., and how this might impact the desire of men to actually develop themselves and find one of those women and settle down.
At the time I didn't bother doing the work to produce an actual estimate of how many women would match the basic crtieria, given that these are NOT independent variables. The though occurred to me that AIs are the perfect solution for exactly this type of laziness, and now have the capability to do this task without completely making up numbers.
So, based on my old post, I chose 9 particular criteria that I think would ‘fairly’ qualify a woman as ‘marriageable.':
Single and looking (of course).
Cishet, and thus not LGBT identified.
Not ‘obese.’
Not a mother already.
No ‘acute’ mental illness.
No STI.
Less than $50,000 in student loan debt.
5 or fewer sex partners (‘bodies’).
Under age 30.
And ask both ChatGPT and Grok to attempt to estimate the actual population of women in the U.S. that pass all these filters, accounting for how highly correlated each of the variables are.
Notable criteria I omitted:
Religious affiliation
Race
Political affiliation
Career
Drug use
Sex work/Onlyfans
I argue that a reasonable man would NOT want to ‘compromise’ on any of the original criteria, whereas the omitted ones are comparatively negotiable, or alternatively, are already captured in one of the original criteria.
Would you accept a woman who was carrying $50k in student loan debt into the relationship? I guess maybe if she was a doctor or lawyer or made enough money to justify it. Much higher than that and it starts to suggest financial recklessness.
5 as a body count is definitely an ‘arbitrary’ number, but again, you get much above that and it implies more bad decision-making. Ditto for being STI positive.
The age one is probably the most ‘unfair,’ but if having kids is a goal then this is pretty close to the ‘reasonable’ cutoff given the ticking fertility clock. Adjust upward if needed, I guess.
Here is the ChatGPT conversation. I used o3 in this case.
Here is Grok, specifically Grok 3.
In each case I used the “Deep Research” mode for the main query. I used identical prompts to start them off, they each seemingly did slightly different interpretations of the prompt. I was not using any fancy, complex prompt engineering to try and force it to think like a statistician or avoid hallucinations.
ChatGPT Gives this conclusion:
Grok comes to quite the similar conclusion:
Then I asked the truly cursed followup question: “how many men in the U.S. might be seeking these eligible women and thus how much competition is there for this population? How many are likely to ‘fail.’"
ChatGPT:
Emphasis Mine.
Grok:
Then the followup, when I tell it to extend the age range:
The error bars are pretty large on this one... the 9-out-of-10 number doesn't quite pass the smell test... but I think the point speaks for itself.
I don’t want to say that this is bleak, per se. I mean, 1 million or so women in the U.S. with some decent marriageable bonafides. That’s not a small pool! The problem stems from noticing that said women will have somewhere upwards of 5 men, possibly near 27 who will be competing for their affections, or more if they’re near the absolute peak of physical attractiveness.
Hence my increasing annoyance with the bog standard advice proffered to young males “become worthy and put in some effort and you will find a good woman” as it becomes increasingly divorced from the actual reality on the ground.
It’s not wrong. It is incomplete. Insufficient. If we increase the number of “worthy” men, that’s just intensifying the competition for the desirable women… while ALSO ensuring that more of those ‘worthy’ men will lose and go unfulfilled, DESPITE applying their efforts towards “worthiness.”
You CAN’T tell young men both “be better, improve, you have to DESERVE a good woman before you get one!” and then, when he improves:
“oh, you have to lower your standards, just because you thought you deserved a stable, chaste(ish), physically fit partner doesn’t mean you’re entitled to one, world ain’t fair.”
That dog won’t hunt.
Thems the numbers. I’m not making this up wholesale or whining about advice because I find it uncomfortable. No. The math is directly belying the platitudes. I’m too autistic NOT to notice.
So where am I going with this?
First, I’m hoping, praying someone can actually show me evidence that this is wrong. All of my personal experience, anecdotal observations, research, and my gut fucking instinct all points to this being an accurate model of reality. But I am fallible.
If I’m wrong I want to know!
I’m also not particularly worried about ME in general. I am in a good position to find a good woman, even though I’m sick of all the numerous frustrations and inanities one has to endure to do so. I get annoyed when someone, even in good faith, tries to suggest that my complaints are more mental than real. I can see the numbers, I've been in the trenches for years, this is a true phenomena, the competition is heavy, the prizes are... lacking.
And finally and most importantly, I genuinely feel the only way we keep the Ferris Wheel of organized civilization turning is if average women are willing to marry average men, and stay married, and help raise kids. I’m all for pushing the ‘average’ quality up, as long as actual relationships are forming.
Objectively, that is not happening. And so I’m worried because if society breaks down... well, I live here and I don't like what that implies for me, either.
(Yes, AGI is possibly/probably going to make this all a moot point before it all really collapses)
Very arbitrary. A 26-year-old woman who became sexually active at 16 and slept with one guy every two years would exceed it.
It's much more likely to reflect the reality of serial monogamy than bad decision making.
Not unreasonable to include, but remember that obesity is an equal opportunities offender. Most non-overweight men aren't going to want a fat wife, but then most men are fat too.
This is also true, to a lesser extent, with mental illness. Women have more mental illness than men (or at least they say they do) but the numbers for men aren't zero.
In fact, we can really apply this filter to most things you've listed. Men have high levels of obesity, student loan debt, mental illness, existing paternity and STIs. We can't apply it to everything of course. Men want a woman below 30 for obvious biological reasons that don't apply exactly to women, but broadly the way you've framed the question implies an average eligible man and an average ineligible woman. Whereas in reality, most of these things affect the numerator as well as the denominator. Loads of women are fat, but so are an equal number of men, which reduces the competion for the slim women.
And statistically she'd be more likely to divorce her partner later. You've kind of underscored how simple it would be for a woman, starting at 16, to rack up comically large numbers, and there is almost ZERO external pressure to NOT sleep around.
And it didn't used to be this way, women are just sleeping around more on average. We went from about 64% of women having 0-1 partners by marriage... to 27%. So hey, you've got about 1 in 4 shot if you get married. But your granddad had a 2/3 shot.
Unless you think this is a good thing the best you can argue is that its neutral and can be ignored.
Sure thing.
But men don't have to bear kids.
And men can make up for this issue in a lot of other ways.
I do hope that Ozempic comes to help out with this.
Oh, and guess what, obese women won't settle for an obese man, even though the reverse isn't true.
So the problem is, ONCE AGAIN, that men are told to 'get better' but women aren't pressured to settle for the so-called 'looksmatch.'
Not precisely. This is my point about competition.
Any attractive women are a target for men of virtually all ages.
The sheer amount of choice she'll have, thanks to this competition, makes her less likely to settle.
Add in the effects of hypergamy and this explains almost ALL of the current strife in the dating market: Women get bombarded with attention during their most attractive, fertile years, decline to settle, and as time comes on become less marriageable overall.
Every single major cultural institution, Hollywood, Academia, Tikok/social media, dating apps(!) and every U.S. Corporation is telling them to never settle, never compromise, and they should delay marriage and kids so they can have money/career/travel etc.
Aside from the Catholic Church there are zero large cultural institutions sending the message “you should settle for a man who is decent and forgo other opportunities to bear children."
Not a huge surprise that the former message is internalized.
That's not what the link you posted says. A woman who has slept with six men is (statistically) a safer bet than a woman who has slept with two. Although even then the effect is small. The only significant effect is for women who have slept with 0 men, which is pretty clearly a proxy for conservative religiosity. If you want that kind of woman, they're pretty easy to find, they all go to the same place on a Sunday...
Women on dating sites won't settle, but men apparently will? Aside from a few fetishists, men don't like fat women. This seems more of an effect of the imbalanced ratios on dating sites than actual preferences. Nobody prefers a fat partner, but beggars can't be choosers.
And yet according to surveys, both men and women are equally likely to want to marry, and women are more likely to want to marry now (as opposed to some vague time in the future).
And speaking more personally, my experience has been that the most attractive women are most likely to have boyfriends or husbands, because it's much easier for them to attract said boyfriends and husbands. Women don't actually like the modern promiscuous dating market. It's an inadequate equilibrium that benefits womanisers to the detriment of basically everyone else.
There has been a decline in partnering and marriage. The decline in partnering seems to be a consequence of atomisation, digital interaction replacing real-life interaction and perhaps excessive female pickiness due to social media. But crucially, it's not because women are sleeping around, because they're not sleeping around.
Your link isn't about sleeping around, and even if you want to try and infer that the numbers aren't broken out by gender
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The Catholic Church does not advise its female membership to settle for a man who is ‘decent’. Factually the preference of the Catholic Church is for unmarried laywomen to become nuns, but for those who don’t have a vocation the idea of ‘settling’ is not much pushed.
The Catholic Church raises the marriage rate by having a theoretically hard ban on cohabitation, not by reducing standards for men.
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Look at the graph in the link you shared that shows divorce rate by number of premarital partners. It shows that the divorce rate for women who had 2 partners exceeds that of women had 6-9!
There is a 10 percentage point difference for the arbitrary cut off of 4-5 and the maximum at 10+ partners. The difference between 4-5 and 6-9 is negligible, maybe 1 PP.
This makes the choice of 4-5 very hard to justify. After all, you should also rule out women who have had precisely 2 partners by the same logic.
Note that you also need to account for the fact that a minority of people divorce multiple times and drive up the average.
I've linked the image in question here.
/images/1748284134725351.webp
This in particular was addressed here for example:
https://alphagameplan.blogspot.com/2016/06/n-matters-lot.html
The images in the post are no longer available as it's from 2016 but it doesn't matter much.
There's food for thought in the comments as well such as:
The odds doubling for the 10+ set likely is due to a woman who has that many partners has some other mental short circuit that causes her to either seek personal validation through sex, daddy issues, follow and unquestioningly accept some nonsensical ideology like slut feminism, is bipolar, or has some other issue not listed here. Where the n=2 may be a relatively normal woman who has a basis of comparison, the n=10+ is a strong indicator of some kind of mental/emotional instability.
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I wonder if "2 prior partners" is the sexual equivalent of "just 2 beers".
///
Two theories:
1) Those may be fairly conservative religious girls who were brought up being told premarital sex and divorce was bad and held off sex to an extent, but went nuts with the divorce as an adult. But they didn't have enough time to accumulate 4-5 partners like the secular women did.
2) Women with 4-5 partners are less likely to get married AT ALL than those with 2 partners, choosing cohabitation instead. If marriage and cohabitation are considered together, those with 4-5 partners are still higher breakup risks than those with 2.
Here you go.
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I'm actually wondering how different the statistics are between "had 5 boyfriends for 2 years each, with almost no gaps of singleness" (the well-known "serial monogamy") and "had 5 one-night-stands with no relationships inbetween". Intuitively, it feels like one could argue either way - "she wanted to keep a man but can't" vs. "she had NSA sex".
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Yeah, I've been single for a long time, and if it had been "as easy" for me in my moments of peak horniness/loneliness to go out and find someone at least acceptable looking for a one-night-stand that no else has to know about as it seems to be for women, my body count would have effortlessly cracked the double digits. And I'm far from a libido monster.
5 by 26 for a single girl seems like a girl with a good amount of restraint to be honest.
Have you considered that women, by and large, don’t have much desire for casual sex?
Of course, but while it's not as strong as men's, they do still have it. I know because I know some women. I'm married. I have friends with wives and girlfriends.
I would not consider it strange for a single woman to, in her 20s, have a strong urge to fuck, at least once every two years. I'm not judging women by the same standard as men here, because frankly when I was single and in my 20s I had that strong urge weekly.
Combine that with opportunity, and it doesn't look extraordinary to have 5 partners in 10 years.
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Yes, that's what it takes to be marriable.
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