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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)
I find some of the cutoff criteria rather questionable. Is >=5 sexual partners that bad? Wouldn't be a deal breaker to me, but if they broke double digits and weren't unlucky serial monogamists, I'd raise an eyebrow.
A hard cutoff of the age of 30? Nonsense, you can cross that by half a decade before having at least 2 kids becomes an uphill struggle.
Obesity? Not ideal, but we live in the Age of Ozempic. It's a solvable issue, if everything else was fine.
I feel like a more realistic model would use a point or percentile system, weighted by how much the average man cares about things. Has had 8 sexual partners, but is hot and filthy rich? I bet my ass 9/10 men would overlook that.
At any rate, my experience is that assortative matching works pretty well, and whatever someone's "sexual market value" is, they tend to find someone else who is a close fit. This can entail compromises on different axes, maybe you'd accept someone being below average looking if they were smart and kind. Or a hot model snagging a balding and chubby multimillionaire.
I only observe the US dating scene from a great distance, but as others point out, people aren't suffering that badly.
At the end of the day, if you're trying to sell yourself for more than others think you're worth, you'll find yourself with no buyers. And in the marriage market, your value will inevitably decline at some point, age being the most likely reason. Of course, if some 37 year old career woman malds about not finding a 6'3 witty finance guy with a strong family orientation, then she either settles for less, or decides that she won't settle and goes unmarried. This applies both ways.
Your analysis strikes me as catastrophizing, directionally correct but magnitudinally wrong.
If in ${CurrentYear} due to hoeflation, a woman's Wonderfulness as a potential wife doesn't start losing its shine until she's been railed by enough men to field a full-court 5-on-5 basketball game, things are bleaker than I thought.
Sure, trade-offs can hypothetically exist. However, men take what they can get, even if they'd prefer a chaste wife. The opportunity cost for 9+/10 men of an 8-body-count hot and filthy rich wife is not an almost-as-hot almost-as-rich chaste wife, but a plain, non-rich wife with ~8ish partners.
I grew up in a very different society and culture, even if I ended up Western-adjacent by preference. I don't think 5 partners is a big deal at all, at least for a girl who isn't like 16 years old and making her way through the entire football team. By the cutoff age of 30, that's less than a partner ever 2 years (counting from 18). Even at 25, that's just a string of serial monogamy, each relationship over a year. Of course, in an Indian context that would be a serious concern to most suitors, this is a sexually conservative country.
I also take "fairness" seriously. I have well over 5 sexual partners, and I'm only in my late 20s, and I spent most of the last decade in 3 committed relationships. I find it hard to condemn women for the same behavior I engage in. I don't condemn other men for seeking different things, but they're going to have to pay a very heavy tax on their preferences. If they hold them that strongly? Well, such is their lot.
I still ask if they consider carefully what they're asking for. If someone tells you they have seen individual people for years, and it didn't pan out, that is very different from "hoeing around" in a non-commital manner. Especially when the age of marriage has shot up, such that it's socially expected that high school and college flings don't necessarily end in matrimony.
There are a significant number of "almost-as-hot almost-as-rich chaste wives" around in India. Less so in the West. And at least @2rafa, who probably mogs us in the net worth department, doesn't think that's a revealed preference.
Besides, unless they tell you, or you know them for a long time, how would you even know exactly or approximately how many men they slept with? It's the easiest thing in the world to lie about.
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