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They're stats from literally everywhere I look. Stats that have been tracked for decades. Unless something radical changed with definitions or analysis (possible, I grant), then the trends are all pointing the same way, and demonstrating the same underlying phenomenon.
I've been through it, I've had multiple close friends and acquaintances who are all having the same difficulties. I find it on reddit forums, I find it on my groupchats, I find it when I hear from people in my age cohort and younger in here.
Its a rising chorus of voices that some people claim not to hear.
When the stats are lining up with the anecdotes are lining up with the personal observations, and EVERY SINGLE person on the other side says "No, can't be true, I know a guy that is doing fine" while offering zero verifiable evidence...
I'm not going to update very heavily in favor of that.
There is literally not a single piece of statistical evidence that supports the idea that relationship formation is improving.
I can't find ANY single person who is having a 'good time' in the 'find a partner' game.
None.
Zero.
Marriage rates are about the most objective stat you can find that are tracked by the Census, and the definition of marriage is about as standardized as you can get.
They're in the tank., especially among the younger generation.
This is downstream of something.
Offer me an alternative hypothesis.
If you say so.
Anyway, here's an extremely recent article from The Economist bemoaning the fact that despite the fact women are now outperforming men in EVERY school subject, but can't seem to keep up in Math, so OBVIOUSLY we need to close that gap.
Very evenhanded analysis.
Here's direct evidence that Lockheed Martin very directly discriminates against White Males in deciding on who gets bonuses.
Would you wager on them being the only major company doing this?
What does 'rigging the game' look like, to you?
Never have I said anything remotely like that.
What I HAVE said is that the competition for the pool of 'acceptable' single women is high enough that its guaranteed that many men will lose out.
And women having the perception of more choice makes the average woman less likely to settle, at all.
Too many men chasing too small a pool of women, full stop.
That's just objectively true if we restrict our examination to dating apps
They've been choosing quite freely for a long time, and they're less happy than ever. TFR is in the gutter. Women are suffering from more mental illnesses than ever.
What now? Shall we try even harder to give them MORE choice?
Or just let the status quo continue?
You tell me.
It's not "I know a guy," it's "most guys I know are not experiencing this."
Marriage rates have been falling because younger generations don't value marriage as much, and more and more people live in "situationships" without ever getting married. There is certainly an argument to be made (and frequently is made) that this is bad for society and does not promote stable families, but falling marriage rates do not in themselves indicate that "no one is finding a partner." They indicate people are not marrying their partners, and that most people are having many more relationships of shorter duration.
Okay, so women get unfair perks in the name of ending sexism. We talk about that a lot here. I don't see that having a lot to do with whether or not men can get a date.
Dating apps are hellish, as I said. There probably is something commodifying and unhealthy about treating a potential relationship the same way you treat looking for an appliance on Amazon. If you were proposing we ban dating apps, I'd have qualms about the legality and the implementation, but I'd probably approve in principle. But I have it on good authority it is actually still possible to meet a fellow human being in real life.
I've already told you. Why don't you tell me, in unambiguous language without waffling. Do you want to go full Dread Jim (literally make women property)? Do you want to retvrn to traditional (pre-Enlightenment) Church rules? You've thrown together a lot of correlations to fit your narrative, but you don't seem willing to commit to a solution. If you think women just shouldn't be allowed to choose, say so. If you think fathers should decide who their daughters marry, say so. If you think something vaguer like "Women should be persuaded to be less picky and settle for an 80% guy instead of demanding 100% of what they want" - okay, that probably is not a bad idea. How do you propose getting there? (And would it apply to men also having to settle for women who might not check all their boxes?)
My vote, naturally, is the Hock. If you can't or won't Hock, maybe you can do something equally challenging to prove yourself worthy.
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the argument would be 'if women are attracted to men who have higher social status, money, property, etc., than they have, and we've created a society which makes women better off than men (at the expense of men), then women will not find the men the society has made worse off attractive and therefore more men cannot get dates and women will only be satisfied with a continuously shrinking pool of men'
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Yeah, the increasing numbers of people who report not having a partner indicate that actually.
If you think this data is just wrong, fine.
But its all kinda points in the same direction. Fewer relationships, women being more choosy, men losing ground, and marriage rates tumbling, along with birth rates.
I keep posting data from various countries, from various sources, and asking someone to find me data that disagrees with this, that shows a different story.
And about the best that I've seen is that SOME PARTICULAR SUB-POPULATIONS, say the Amish, the Mormons, other religious sects, are doing pretty well overall.
Well here yah go, from me:
I'm standing by each of these suggestions.
No.
I'd like to return the a legal status quo of approximately 30ish years ago, where there wasn't nearly as much direct economic support for women to pursue additional degrees, or hang around in the long term in corporate jobs, or to remain unmarried even with kids b/c the state and the corporation will pay their bills regardless.
I'm not hiding the ball, I've stated my main position/suggestions openly. I'm not out here yelling "REPEAL THE 19TH." I know guys who are.
Just even the playing field and the incentives and I think we see improvement. Women need some reason to prefer marrying a guy and sticking with him, rather than being able to just extract the same resources via the state, or from hundreds of microhusbands on Onlyfans.
But Gen Z men are turning further and further right. (Caveat, of course, Gen Z women have made an even more pronounced swing left, which makes them even less appealing as partners.)
And let me just point out. These are men who were raised, in some large portion, by single moms. As in, steeped in female influence literally from birth.
They were taught mostly by female teachers.
They've had their lives guided by female academic administrators, HR staff, hiring managers, and they've had their dating lives governed pretty much completely by female standards since they hit their teen years.
They have their entire upbringing defined completely and utterly in terms of female guidance and authority. I won't go into the concept of "the longhouse," but that's just the facts.
And they're turning right. They're listening to Andrew Tate, and they're voting for Trump and Co.
What do YOU think this cohort of men will do if they hit their 30's and find themselves unable to form families or hit the other life goals that they'd expect to achieve by then?
Just throw some thoughts out there.
I'm offering the moderate options, but these guys are even less likely to give a shit about women's input.
Why do you think the 90s legal mores will be a stable equilibrium this time?
Griggs v. Duke power was in 1971. Price Waterhouse v Cooper was in 1989. The 90s saw the CRA of 1991 which put into statute bad court decisions around disparate impact and mixed-motivation being enough to show discrimination under the law. VAWA was in 1994. At best, the 90s were the last hurrah before social institutions had decayed to the point where they could no longer provide guiderails to the radical legal environment which had been created over the last two or so decades. And even if that's not true, there was a reason why these were passed in the early 90s and it's because the 80s wasn't a stable equilibrium either nor was the 70s or 60s or 50s. The legal environment had been pretty bad on this front for pretty long, but it wasn't until social conventions, communities, and institutions decayed to the point they could no longer provide sufficient guardrails that we saw the significant effects of them.
I was only cognizant near the end of the 90s so I don't have much experience with what they were like. When I speak to young people now in the real world about these topics, many of them have views which are similar to how you describe them on all sides of the divide. When I see others discussing the topic on this forum, it just comes off as older people who caught the last train out of the station before the power went off and they're on the right side of the bell curve on top of it. They really do not have a clue how bad it is out there for a whole lot of people.
In the past, older generations thought pairing off the younger generations into prosocial relationships was near the most important thing they could do for their children. Now, the best on offer appears to be "look 'em in the eye and give 'em a firm handshake" boomerisms directed almost entirely at males and general denial about the reality the younger generation is describing to them.
You're absolutely on point that the early 90's was clearly not a stable equilibrium, as it still led us to where we are.
But, no joke, the change that I think screwed us in a few different ways was The Student Loan Reform Act of 1993.
This made it FAR simpler for the average citizen to get student loans regardless of financial situation or the academic path they chose... or the economic viability of their major.
You can flipping SEE THE INFLECTION POINT when student loans became way more common and thus more people attended college on loans.
So I'd suggest this has a number of impacts:
Women start attending college more often. Which has them burn more of their most fertile years, and the added debt load makes them less appealing as partners and less able to support kids.
Men start accruing more debt too, which stunts their personal wealth acquisition in their 20's and thus makes them less appealing to women... and just less able to support a partner/kids in general.
Obviously this allows economically nonviable majors like "Women's studies" to grow, which has some clear downstream impacts.
Probably causes women's standards to rise, they wouldn't accept a partner without a degree if they have one.
Of course turned College into the 'default' life path rather than hopping into a career and getting married as the best practice for advancing socially.
So putting us back to the status-quo ante of 1990, and NOT expanding access to loans for college, we might be able to avoid the worst excesses of Feminism entering the mainstream. I dunno.
1994 also saw The Gender Equity in Education Act which made it actual policy to push for more education programs geared towards women, and might be attributable to the general decline in male performance in school, which would then play into the college issue.
And the 1994 Violence Against Women Act which I'm definitely not saying was a bad idea, but might have shifted incentives that led to, e.g. the eventual MeToo movement.
You know that a post is going to be a banger when it starts out like this.
Indeed. Once a woman has a diploma, she thinks herself too good for a man without a diploma. Which is a problem, because more women than men are getting degrees.
University educated women demand more from men, but offer less.
Men are attracted to youth, purity, and fertility. A bachelor's degree means a woman who is four years older and four years closer to menopause, not to mention one who has a negligible chance of being a virgin (college as an institution is almost perfectly designed to increase a woman's body count, first by making her break up with her high school boyfriend when they inevitably go to different schools, then by making her spend four years away from any sort of male relative supervision, then making her break up AGAIN when she and her current boyfriend find work in different states). And God forbid she falls for the grad school meme; talk about hoeflation!
At a certain point, this market is not going to clear. We have reached that point.
On an individual level, any father who is aware of these issues should seriously consider not sending his daughters to university. On a collective level, college delenda est.
Yeah.
One thing about the sexual marketplace for women. They're both an inelastic good... AND there's a fixed supply.
The supply can't increase very quickly, and heterosexual men will still have high demand for them even as the price creeps up.
Now we've got a large portion of women who have effectively set a 'price floor' for themselves that is above what many men are able to provide, and in many cases what men are willing to provide, given that many of the options on offer are also 'damaged goods.'
Throw in the evolutionary pressure on men to reproduce and there's just huge amounts of underserved demand.
The market is trying to provide substitute goods like porn, prostitutes, AI girlfriends, but I think the problem is that a good woman is a 'package' or 'bundle' of goods in one.
And most women now want to provide only a couple of those goods/services while still demanding the complete package on the other side.
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Dealing with that will require tackling the education-managerial complex- it's a feedback loop, where the same women who benefited from the initial windfall are now in charge of expanding the problem.
It'll also require dealing with the Boomers. Boomers (and especially Boomer women) see education as an unqualified good because it was good for them, and that's the long and short of it. Of course, their preferred policies of "throwing all youth productivity into a hole because once upon a time someone was mean to a woman" is evidence that education is not the unqualified good they believe it to be.
And that they rose artificially is the main problem here.
I had a reply to something about "progressive women having the most to offer over homemakers; they have degrees in journalism" which illuminates the issue perfectly- they think they have more to offer, but are only useful as an artifact of law- completely useless otherwise.
And nobody likes being taken down a peg, much less universally co-ordinating to do so to themselves... but that said, men have a history in the early 20th century of having done this, and we're back to that sociofinancial situation, so I don't believe expecting women to have to do that for themselves is exceptional in any way. (Men and women are equal, are we not?)
Yeah.
I really don't know how to get it through to a woman's status-seeking brain that all degrees are not created equal, and indeed some credentials are just fake all the way through. A degree in agricultural science from a state university can genuinely be more useful and impressive than a finance degree from an Ivy league, let alone a political science degree from an Ivy.
And worse, some of the most important roles in society don't come with a fancy piece of paper declaring them such.
Yep. But it sure looks like the early '90s was the one point in time we had the ability to adjust course as a nation... and most of the adjustments were in the wrong direction, it just wouldn't be clear until 2010 or so.
In the early '90s the GI Bill generation was rising to power: this was inevitable.
But I do agree that the women themselves will need to fix it, much as men did for women in the early 1900s. The catalyst for such a cascade is one I cannot guess, and I believe that the current US administration's support is underwritten by a populace that wants to take an off-ramp from this rather than collapse like the rest of the West prefers.
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Not the commenter you were responding to, but I'll bite:
First, re-create high social penalties for promiscuity for both men and women. I'm not the first to say this but the sexual revolution of the 1960s can be accurately viewed as the fight to let women behave in the same ways as the absolute worst of men. Being a "cad" or a "cocksman" should be socially treated the exact same as being a homewrecker. Dating is fine, but it should be used to figure out if there is an alignment of values and a shared vision for the future.
But, but, consenting adults! Who cares if two people just want to f*ck! Well, everyone, judging by this thread and many others like it. You have the situation now where promiscuity is not only tolerated, but lauded as some sort of expression of personal discovery, autonomy, and that most meaningless of words, _"empowering." Leaving aside the fact that this isn't true, the circumstances create a situation where the most antisocial of people can hit "defect" a million times and benefit greatly from it while those who are looking to cooperate are in a constant state of paranoid suspicion about any sort of medium length relationship they may find themselves in.
Second, get rid of no fault divorce. I know this is politically untenable, but I'm offering what I think is a correct solution. Marriage has to be meaningful and a real commitment, or else it's just a temporary tax arrangement with unbalanced incentives for the two people in it. Because of the history of marriage and family law in the US, women are usually the one's with the counter-incentive to staying in a marriage long term.
Much like @Amadan, I'm not actually that worried about following marriage rates because 1) I think most marriages today are shams anyway and 2) We're approaching a situation where 1/3 to nearly 1/5 of children are born out of wedlock. Marriage is so hollow now that policy positions that try to nudge people toward it aren't really serious about solving the problem.
I also agree with @Amadan in another way - blackpilling is not only (by its own definition) futile, I think it's just wrong. Once you pair secular materialism with battle-of-the-sexes blackpilling, the question has to be asked; why not just blow it all out in a cocaine-and-hookers weekend and then end it with a 9mm breakfast? Usually, the responses I hear are along the lines of, "I don't want to take such a cowardly way out", "I still want my life to mean something", "You should still try to be a good person." Hmmm, interesting how that kind of sounds like there's actually a higher level moral and ethical framework in play. Maybe these hardcore secular materialists really are trying to both fill and not acknowledge the God Shaped Hole.
Not to blow the scope of this comment into the stratosphere, but I do often think that we might be living through an inflection point in human history on par with the invention of writing, if not even moreso. The technological and political change over the last 100 years (which is a single long lifetime or about 1.5 - 2 "standard" lifetimes) is truly a phase change when compared to all of human history before. We've mostly outpaced our cognitive hard-wiring. So we see the effects of that across nearly every facet of life. I don't doubt that in 1000 years, it's likely some humans, looking at our times, will say "lolol, they totally had no idea wtf was going on during pre-Nuke early-AI." But this is no excuse to smash the like button on fuckItAll.mpeg. Do the best you can and try to find genuine happiness where you can. Even better do the "right" thing, so long as what you define as the right thing is a self-contained and demanding moral framework.
Because those are illegal, I don't know where I'd find them in my area, and don't have the money to afford them anyway?
Because I'd worry about missing the right spot, and ending up still alive but with seriously incapacitating brain damage — which is why I'm more likely to go with helium and an "exit bag" instead.
And as for why I don't do that, mostly because my family would get stuck with the bill for disposing of my corpse, which exceeds my (SSI-limited) net worth. Once my parents are both gone, though…
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They're just flailing around the fact suicide is scary and they'd rather not die, even if the world around them sucks. The self-preservation instinct is quite strong, and has nothing to do with God or higher level morals.
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