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Aren't those pretty similar categories? Guy dates two or three women casually (from his perspective), while the women each consider him their monogamous boyfriend.
I think most of the disparity between young men and women is driven by women dating older men, for what it's worth. In a highly simplified model, if women all date two years older, and you've got an age cohort that's twelve years wide, you immediately get a 17% gap, as the men in the bottom two years have no eligible partners. That does assume that men can't date women younger than 18, but it does a good job of explaining why the large gap in the youngest cohort pretty much disappears in the next youngest cohort.
From the little I see online, it's as likely to be "couple are dating for a few years but not living together, woman is sure this is a relationship and maybe leading to marriage, guy just thinks of it as 'yeah I'm seeing someone but we're not, like, boyfriend and girlfriend or anything'".
Reminds me of the joke, "it takes a woman to fake an orgasm, but it takes a man to fake an entire relationship."
Men will often complain that being nice doesn't land them a shot with the ladies, despite being raised with the understanding that good and ethical conduct correlates with varying degrees of success in the different spheres of life. It's a shocking revelation to most of them when they learn that not only is that not true, all too often, the exact 'opposite' of that was true.
Women on the other hand don't understand that sex isn't some kind of vending machine, wherein you offer it up to an attractive dating prospect and a relationship is expected to fall out of it. Women have sex for many more different reasons than men do, but the only valid one to be concerned with is where there's mutual attraction between both parties, otherwise it's a letdown when women give it away, only for them not to have gotten out of the act what they were trying to manipulate their partner into doing by giving it away in the first place. Mutual attraction on the other hand, satisfies both parties.
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I think a lot of these guys are actually being monogamous, they’re just not offering the kind of commitment we associate with it.
Would it be possible for you to elaborate? Most of the guys I know who have been in such situations are only monogamous in so far as "having a sexual relationship with only one partner at a time" could be stretched to only mean "someone who does not partake in group sex."
I think there are a lot of guys who women think are in a relationship, but the guys aren't having sex with anybody else because nobody is directly approaching them, and the woman is good enough. Ironically, this is far more likely than what many online MRA/incel/PUA types are worried about, which is a chad swooping in and stealing your girlfriend via Instagram DM's or whatever.
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