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In my experience, when a woman claims that she is unable to find a husband, it's almost always because she has standards which are mathematically unreasonable. e.g. she is a 5/10 in desirability but wants a man who is an 8/10 in desirability.
Or is it because neither she, not her would-be suitor, are going outside?
Women have always had higher standards than men, and yet the fertilty collapse is (very) recent. In the 2000s, birth rates in the western world were going up, not down.
'Women be too picky' explanations have the same problem as 'people be too lazy' explanations for obesity. You can't simply point to an eternal characteristic (women are picky, people are lazy) and use it to explain a time-restricted phenomenon. You have to explain why the characteristic matters now when it didn't matter in say, 2005.
I tend to doubt it. If you are a 5/10 who will only marry an 8/10, the deck is going to be stacked against you no matter where you look.
I am pretty sure that in recent years, it's become much more socially acceptable and economically feasible for a woman to live her life alone without a husband. You disagree?
I would say it's similar to obesity. People have always had the propensity to pig out on unhealthy, addictive foods, but in the last 30 years such foods have become widely available.
Analogously, women have always had hypergamous instincts, it's just become much more socially and economically feasible to act on those instincts.
Did you look at the link? Men and women are both socialising less. That's not my opinion, it's a fact. What about that fact do you doubt?
Yes I disagree, the birth rate collapse started around 2010, before then, birth rates were going up. Has the world really changed that much in 15 years? I'm not talking about the 1950s here.
What's hypergamous about sitting at home, alone, scrolling for hours and hours?
The addictive digitisation of life has harmed everyone, and it has harmed the ability of men and women to socialise and couple up. To blame that on women's hypergamy* is like blaming inflation on greedy corporations.
*Incidentally, I'm not sure you can describe women's dating preferences as hypergamous. Women prefer men who are taller and earn more than they do, and men prefer women who are younger and more beautiful than they are. In that sense, both men and women are 'hypergamous' but about different things. But regardless, assortative mating is extremely strong. Rich men don't marry beautiful young waitresses, they marry women of their own age and their own class. The beautiful waitresses marry handsome working class men.
Nothing at all. But socializing more won't change the basic mathematics of the situation. No matter how much people socialize, there will never be enough 8/10 men to marry all the 5/10 women who want to marry them.
I think you are completely 100% wrong on this point. Here is a graph from the CDC:
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6901a5.htm
Birth rates in the US have been on a downward trend since the late 1950s. There have been small ups and downs, but the biggest drop (by far) took place between 1960 and 1980.
And yes, the world has changed a lot since the 1950s.
What I mean by "hypergamous" is that man is a naturally tournament species just like most other species of apes. In the absence of economic and social constraints, what you would see is that the top roughly 20% of men would mate polygynously with substantially all of the women.
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