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I think this is exactly right. Apps like Tinder that normalized online "dating" (before the apps it was much less common among younger people) have allowed the

I think this is exactly right. Apps like Tinder that normalized online "dating" (before the apps it was much less common among younger people) have allowed the "apex predator" men with good jobs/looks/personalities to have sex on demand with virtually unlimited numbers of women. This has also been made possible because a lot more women are now willing to be in non-exclusive sexual relationships at the beginning when they are first getting to know someone. The data from old OK-Cupid studies clearly show that most women are only immediately attracted to a very small subset of men. It is these men who are having all the sex. Seems like a powder keg over time as the excluded men become bitter and forced to postpone getting married and starting a family. I believe many of these men will eventually find someone once enough of the women who are now rejecting them face biological realities and are forced to settle if they want to have children.

toomuchtodo 6y ago
Some citations for your thesis below. To your last point, IMHO, you're going to continue to see a decline in the total fertility rate (US is roughly ~1.77 this year, lowest on record) as women shift from casual seeking in their 20s to relationship/nesting in their 30s and find the market for partners to be much smaller than they would've anticipated, while also nearing the end of natural fertility (fertility rates start to drop ~35 years old) [1]. > As I stated previously the average female “likes” 12% of men on Tinder. This doesn't mean though that most males will get “liked” back by 12% of all the women they “like” on Tinder. This would only be the case if “likes” were equally distributed. In reality, the bottom 80% of men are fighting over the bottom 22% of women and the top 78% of women are fighting over the top 20% of men. We can see this trend in Figure 1. The area in blue represents the situations where women are more likely to “like” the men. The area in pink represents the situations where men are more likely to “like” women. The curve doesn’t go down linearly, but instead drops quickly after the top 20% of men. Comparing the blue area and the pink area we can see that for a random female/male Tinder interaction the male is likely to “like” the female 6.2 times more often than the female “likes” the male. [2] > The researchers determined that while men’s sexual desirability peaks at age 50, women’s starts high at 18 and falls from there. [3] > “The age gradient for women definitely surprised us — both in terms of the fact that it steadily declined from the time women were 18 to the time they were 65, and also how steep it was,” said Elizabeth Bruch, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Michigan and an author of the study. [3] [1] https://www.acog.org/patient-resources/faqs/pregnancy/having-a-baby-after-age-35-how-aging-affects-fertility-and-pregnancy https://www.acog.org/patient-resources/faqs/pregnancy/having... [2] https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-guys-unless-you-are-really-hot-you-are-probably-better-off-not-wasting-your-2ddf370a6e9a https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-g... [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/15/style/dating-apps-online-men-women-age.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/15/style/dating-apps-online-...
- GuiA 6y ago
  > you're going to continue to see a decline in the total fertility rate as women shift from casual seeking to relationship/nesting in their 30s and find the market for partners to be much smaller than they would've anticipated These women tend to be wealthier on average, and thus have access to various “artificial” methods for conception. Egg freezing is becoming mainstream.
  - toomuchtodo 6y ago
    True, but there's not that many as a percentage of their age cohort [1], and egg/embryo freezing combined IVF is no guarantee you can carry a fetus to term [2]. Maybe you can afford a surrogate (~$30k-120k depending on the arrangements), but the math continues to work against you as you age. This is the unfortunate medical reality, that you can buy possibilities but not guarantees. The amount of wealth you need to "hack" a family together (biologically and a support system after birth) in older age is significant. [1] https://socwomen.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/fact_2-2010-wealth.pdf https://socwomen.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/fact_2-2010-... [2] https://www.cdc.gov/art/artdata/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/art/artdata/index.html
    - eigenvalue 6y ago
      Not only that, but your risk of having a child with autism supposedly increases by more than 3x.
  - nradov 6y ago
    Apple and Facebook now offer egg freezing as an employee benefit.
    - toomuchtodo 6y ago
      I would very much be interested in stats on employees who use this benefit, and if they're unable to have kids in the future regardless of having their eggs frozen, regret their decision to prioritize their career over starting a family. We had a friend over to our home, who earlier in life judged my partner for leaving a career to have children, and could not have a child of their own now. The regret during our conversation was palpable while she watched our children play in our backyard, and frankly it hurt my heart.
ryandrake 6y ago
I've heard it put succinctly (from more than one person): "I'd rather have 25% of a winner than 100% of a loser". Absent any artificial pressure for monogamy, the data and outcomes described in this thread don't seem too surprising.
cambalache 6y ago
> believe many of these men will eventually find someone once enough of the women who are now rejecting them face biological realities and are forced to settle if they want to have children. Who wants to be last choice? Maybe many of these men will wise up and marry a foreign girl(despite the usual shaming) or just hire sexual workers.
- tomp 6y ago
  > Who wants to be last choice? Maybe many of these men will wise up and marry a foreign girl Is being a desperate choice of someone who faces "economic realities" so much better than being a desperate choice of someone who faces "biological realities"?
  - luckylion 6y ago
    Given that apparently quite a few men have an issue if their wife makes more money than them, probably. Being a provider is generally valued by men, being a romantic fallback not so much.
    - tomp 6y ago
      Well, it's a scale. My prior is that most men (people, really) would feel proud providing for their family and feel empty being "loved" by (what is essentially) a prostitute. Marrying a foreign girl (on purpose, not because you just happened to meet and fall in love) sounds to me more like the latter. But I could be wrong.
    - downerending 6y ago
      I've never heard of a man having an issue with a wife that makes more.
      - selimthegrim 6y ago
        It's usually not the man that has the issue in that case...
      - 6y ago
cabite 6y ago
> "apex predator" men The chad
ponker 6y ago
Still could be a powder keg. Lack of sex will drive young men crazier than lack of wealth. “Incel” terrorism is already much more common than class terrorism where poor people just start killing rich people.
- michaelmrose 6y ago
  Them being defective is a problem we can only address by making mental health services more available not by fixing imaginary social problems. If you have ever talked with someone like this every one of them is someone who you would want to spend 10 seconds with their problem isn't done defect in women or society.
  - luckylion 6y ago
    > Them being defective is a problem we can only address by making mental health services more available not by fixing imaginary social problems. I feel like 100% of your comments in this thread could be applied to any current social justice protests and they would be just as out of place, but you'd get shot down. There are studies, there's data, but for you it appears being able to imagine other reasons has more weight, and the studies get waved away with as "imaginary social problems". Why the hate?
    - michaelmrose 6y ago
      Incel communities absent moderation devolve quickly into hate for women, imaginary "facts", and veneration for acts of terrorism and murder. Those who promote the same fake facts as say the kkk but don't directly call for lynching arouse the same visceral reaction if you recognize the similarities. It is exactly like visiting a white supremacist online community with a different target population.
      - luckylion 6y ago
        > Incel communities absent moderation devolve quickly into hate for women, imaginary "facts", and veneration for acts of terrorism and murder. Right, right, but nothing like that has happened here, yet you've imagined, shall we say, alternative facts as possible explanations of what has been scientifically studied. Why? > It is exactly like visiting a white supremacist online community with a different target population. To be honest, you sound like one, only with a slightly different perspective. They'd replace "incel" with "nigger" and spout pretty much the same stuff. If you showed them studies on police violence, they'd say "Maybe that isn't real and many in fact are just criminals", making up some random thing that may or may not explain something (without offering any statistics, of course, and ignoring statistics that suggest the opposite) and speak of "imaginary social issues".
vsareto 6y ago
It's not really a powder keg because we really don't suffer as a society if the excluded men don't get to have kids.
- wutbrodo 6y ago
  That's not how it's worked out in any society where family formation has been limited for large numbers of young men. The research on the calming effect of family formation on young men is very straightforward: when a population of young men doesn't have the opportunity to form families, _they_ become the powder keg. It's true at multiple scales, from individual criminality to societal unrest.
  - bjourne 6y ago
    The theory has not borne out in reality. Japan and China are the countries with the most young incels/sexless men/male virgins per capita are among the most peaceful in the world. It's a good theory, sexual frustration => violence, but it's just not happening.
    - wutbrodo 6y ago
      That's not really how theory works; the claim isn't that this is the single and sole determinant of civil unrest. This Atlantic article[1] looks more broadly at the effect of the young male subpopulation's size on unrest, this[2] paper references the mitigating effect of family formation on individual crime rate, this[3] one both covers unrest due to low family formation (generally through the mechanism of uneven sex ratios, given how out of favor polygamy currently is), as well as effects on individual crime. That being said, this little excursion into Google turned up some nascent evidence that this historical dynamic is shifting. The modern world is very odd in lots of different ways: wealth, recreational opportunities, the incredibly wide social circles one's exposed to. It's entirely possible that this dynamic has changed, but the research hasn't caught up yet. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/03/angry-young-men-are-making-the-world-less-stable/284364/ https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/03/an... [2] https://d101vc9winf8ln.cloudfront.net/documents/33306/original/FamilyFormationAndCrime.pdf?1573569980 https://d101vc9winf8ln.cloudfront.net/documents/33306/origin... [3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5983495/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5983495/
tenebrisalietum 6y ago
> getting married and starting a family This assumes people really want to do that. Children are too expensive unless you have a lot of resources already. I think if costs of basic living keep increasing the future is increasingly childless for many people.
- eigenvalue 6y ago
  There is immense pressure from most parents to have their children settle down and have kids. If that requires the parents to make financial contributions to enable this, that will increasingly happen.
  - tenebrisalietum 6y ago
    Meh, parents are broke too.
- CoolGuySteve 6y ago
  The four biggest expenses for childcare are medical care, daycare, university, and housing. It's harder to compare housing but fertility rates are declining even in countries with free/cheap healthcare, daycare, and university.
  - newguy1234 6y ago
    This has been studied by sociologists and it basically comes down to people having more opportunities outside of the home to make money. For poor families, kids are viewed as an asset since you can use their labor to earn income through farming or other services. For higher-income homes, having a kid means you might have to reduce hours at work, miss promotion opportunities and so on. So people decide to not have kids.
- ravenstine 6y ago
  I'm 30, and I only know one person in my peer group whom owns a home, and he can only afford it because it's way out in the boonies. If people my age find things like home ownership out of reach, having children becomes a roadblock and therefore becomes undesirable.
csharptwdec19 6y ago
> It is these men who are having all the sex. Seems like a powder keg over time as the excluded men become bitter and forced to postpone getting married and starting a family. I believe many of these men will eventually find someone once enough of the women who are now rejecting them face biological realities and are forced to settle if they want to have children. Yep. The problems will be generational. On one hand you have the possibility that the men are very aware of this problem, and any relationship they find will be tainted by knowing they weren't good enough to party with but good enough to marry. But more important than that is the time a couple spends actually getting to know each other is greatly cut down. Which then impacts how the children are raised. I wouldn't be surprised if we see an increase in divorce and/or single family rates over time.
- cortesoft 6y ago
  > any relationship they find will be tainted by knowing they weren't good enough to party with but good enough to marry. I am confused by this.... I would feel much better about myself knowing I was the one good enough to marry rather than the one who was only good enough to party with.
  - bradlys 6y ago
    Ultimately, it usually means you're not that desirable - just reliable. Almost everyone wants to be desirable.
    - Jommi 6y ago
      What? Cant reliability be a desirable attribute?
      - bradlys 6y ago
        It can. But is reliability really the #1 attribute for people out there? Most people want a partner who excites them and who makes them happy. If they're unreliable then that can be a problem but usually a very desirable person has reliability in addition to everything else. When you're settling - you're usually settling for someone who is at least reliable but isn't very exciting.
selimthegrim 6y ago
You say forced to settle, but why is it that women never get to "grow up" in this scenario?
- cy_hauser 6y ago
  I'd suggest they're synonymous in this scenario.
newguy1234 6y ago
The problem is most men go after women 18-25 years old. They don't want the women that are 25+. This is important because it is often men who select which women to go after. Women typically don't go after men in terms of dating selection.
- dogma1138 6y ago
  Depending on the purpose and their age. 18-25 is a lot of fun, but if you want a relationship you either have to find a trust fund baby or become a sugar daddy which most men don’t want. Hookups and casual dating with someone that is just getting by is fine proper relationships is much harder. My current partner is just under 7 years younger than me (I’ve just turned 34) she has good enough of a career that if we can go to Tenerife or Ibiza on a whim for a weekend we don’t have to plan for it and even if I end up spending a bit more money she doesn’t feel like she’s selling herself out and I don’t feel exploited. Even after 1 year in a relationship there is a big difference between buying a girl a drink or paying for dinner and paying for a flight and a hotel. The good ones won’t be comfortable with the latter and you probably don’t want to get into a relationship with those who would expect you too.
verst 6y ago
Do most people meet on apps to have casual sex or are they looking for a romantic relationship and sex is part of the dating process? I believe sex is an integral part of getting to know someone and determining long term relationship viability. That does not mean the connection with the person was made in pursuit of sex. This of course doesn't change who is having all the sex, but the intention may be very different.
tarsinge 6y ago
It’s only my anecdotal experience but part of the reason for me is that a lot of men are not even trying (edit: anymore) and simply more or less consciously gave up. In my days even as a nerd I tried to fit in, go to parties, bars, tried to hang with popular guys, or just do interesting thing (my hack was playing in a band, but doing art or skateboard, was ok too, you see the point). Nowadays I feel like you either have young boys hanging without girls, thinking that behaving like in a music video with shiny cars is what is attractive, or men simply staying in front of their computer not doing any social activity. Sure the picture is important on Tinder, but in my experience the most important thing is having an “interesting“ life and being social (or at least socially validated). It‘s as if a lot of men have simply chosen to forget what is attractive and think being good looking is everything.
- geodel 6y ago
  I think it is quite reasonable approach that these men are taking. I'd think of myself in that category. With society going in direction where social norms are evolving faster than many have mental bandwidth to deal with, it would be wise to just save time, money and energy to acquire that fake attractiveness. May be men have also taken cue from pop song 'You are beautiful just the way you are...'
  - asdff 6y ago
    What social norms are really changing that are so very overwhelming? The only really changing social norm is wider acceptance of different lifestyles and people, and if it takes some people serious bandwidth to process the golden rule, maybe these people really should be sitting out on the outset of society for better or worse. It seems harsh, but I see a lot of people externalize all their personal issues on perceived societal changes outside of their control, when really the the only change happening to society is the expectation that you treat everyone with equal respect.
    - geodel 6y ago
      > maybe these people really should be sitting out on the outset of society for better or worse. Well they are already kind of sitting out. > the expectation that you treat everyone with equal respect. Thats an old humbug. IMO it merely means respect for people or group who are ideological flavor of the season.

toomuchtodo 6y ago

Some citations for your thesis below. To your last point, IMHO, you're going to continue to see a decline in the total fertility rate (US is roughly ~1.77 this year, lowest on record) as women shift from casual seeking in their 20s to relationship/nesting in their 30s and find the market for partners to be much smaller than they would've anticipated, while also nearing the end of natural fertility (fertility rates start to drop ~35 years old) [1]. > As I stated previously the average female “likes” 12% of men on Tinder. This doesn't mean though that most males will get “liked” back by 12% of all the women they “like” on Tinder. This would only be the case if “likes” were equally distributed. In reality, the bottom 80% of men are fighting over the bottom 22% of women and the top 78% of women are fighting over the top 20% of men. We can see this trend in Figure 1. The area in blue represents the situations where women are more likely to “like” the men. The area in pink represents the situations where men are more likely to “like” women. The curve doesn’t go down linearly, but instead drops quickly after the top 20% of men. Comparing the blue area and the pink area we can see that for a random female/male Tinder interaction the male is likely to “like” the female 6.2 times more often than the female “likes” the male. [2] > The researchers determined that while men’s sexual desirability peaks at age 50, women’s starts high at 18 and falls from there. [3] > “The age gradient for women definitely surprised us — both in terms of the fact that it steadily declined from the time women were 18 to the time they were 65, and also how steep it was,” said Elizabeth Bruch, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Michigan and an author of the study. [3] [1] https://www.acog.org/patient-resources/faqs/pregnancy/having-a-baby-after-age-35-how-aging-affects-fertility-and-pregnancy https://www.acog.org/patient-resources/faqs/pregnancy/having... [2] https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-guys-unless-you-are-really-hot-you-are-probably-better-off-not-wasting-your-2ddf370a6e9a https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-g... [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/15/style/dating-apps-online-men-women-age.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/15/style/dating-apps-online-...

GuiA 6y ago
> you're going to continue to see a decline in the total fertility rate as women shift from casual seeking to relationship/nesting in their 30s and find the market for partners to be much smaller than they would've anticipated These women tend to be wealthier on average, and thus have access to various “artificial” methods for conception. Egg freezing is becoming mainstream.
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  True, but there's not that many as a percentage of their age cohort [1], and egg/embryo freezing combined IVF is no guarantee you can carry a fetus to term [2]. Maybe you can afford a surrogate (~$30k-120k depending on the arrangements), but the math continues to work against you as you age. This is the unfortunate medical reality, that you can buy possibilities but not guarantees. The amount of wealth you need to "hack" a family together (biologically and a support system after birth) in older age is significant. [1] https://socwomen.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/fact_2-2010-wealth.pdf https://socwomen.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/fact_2-2010-... [2] https://www.cdc.gov/art/artdata/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/art/artdata/index.html
  - eigenvalue 6y ago
    Not only that, but your risk of having a child with autism supposedly increases by more than 3x.
- nradov 6y ago
  Apple and Facebook now offer egg freezing as an employee benefit.
  - toomuchtodo 6y ago
    I would very much be interested in stats on employees who use this benefit, and if they're unable to have kids in the future regardless of having their eggs frozen, regret their decision to prioritize their career over starting a family. We had a friend over to our home, who earlier in life judged my partner for leaving a career to have children, and could not have a child of their own now. The regret during our conversation was palpable while she watched our children play in our backyard, and frankly it hurt my heart.

ryandrake 6y ago

I've heard it put succinctly (from more than one person): "I'd rather have 25% of a winner than 100% of a loser". Absent any artificial pressure for monogamy, the data and outcomes described in this thread don't seem too surprising.

cambalache 6y ago

> believe many of these men will eventually find someone once enough of the women who are now rejecting them face biological realities and are forced to settle if they want to have children. Who wants to be last choice? Maybe many of these men will wise up and marry a foreign girl(despite the usual shaming) or just hire sexual workers.

tomp 6y ago
> Who wants to be last choice? Maybe many of these men will wise up and marry a foreign girl Is being a desperate choice of someone who faces "economic realities" so much better than being a desperate choice of someone who faces "biological realities"?
- luckylion 6y ago
  Given that apparently quite a few men have an issue if their wife makes more money than them, probably. Being a provider is generally valued by men, being a romantic fallback not so much.
  - tomp 6y ago
    Well, it's a scale. My prior is that most men (people, really) would feel proud providing for their family and feel empty being "loved" by (what is essentially) a prostitute. Marrying a foreign girl (on purpose, not because you just happened to meet and fall in love) sounds to me more like the latter. But I could be wrong.
  - downerending 6y ago
    I've never heard of a man having an issue with a wife that makes more.
    - selimthegrim 6y ago
      It's usually not the man that has the issue in that case...
    - 6y ago

cabite 6y ago

> "apex predator" men The chad

ponker 6y ago

Still could be a powder keg. Lack of sex will drive young men crazier than lack of wealth. “Incel” terrorism is already much more common than class terrorism where poor people just start killing rich people.

michaelmrose 6y ago
Them being defective is a problem we can only address by making mental health services more available not by fixing imaginary social problems. If you have ever talked with someone like this every one of them is someone who you would want to spend 10 seconds with their problem isn't done defect in women or society.
- luckylion 6y ago
  > Them being defective is a problem we can only address by making mental health services more available not by fixing imaginary social problems. I feel like 100% of your comments in this thread could be applied to any current social justice protests and they would be just as out of place, but you'd get shot down. There are studies, there's data, but for you it appears being able to imagine other reasons has more weight, and the studies get waved away with as "imaginary social problems". Why the hate?
  - michaelmrose 6y ago
    Incel communities absent moderation devolve quickly into hate for women, imaginary "facts", and veneration for acts of terrorism and murder. Those who promote the same fake facts as say the kkk but don't directly call for lynching arouse the same visceral reaction if you recognize the similarities. It is exactly like visiting a white supremacist online community with a different target population.
    - luckylion 6y ago
      > Incel communities absent moderation devolve quickly into hate for women, imaginary "facts", and veneration for acts of terrorism and murder. Right, right, but nothing like that has happened here, yet you've imagined, shall we say, alternative facts as possible explanations of what has been scientifically studied. Why? > It is exactly like visiting a white supremacist online community with a different target population. To be honest, you sound like one, only with a slightly different perspective. They'd replace "incel" with "nigger" and spout pretty much the same stuff. If you showed them studies on police violence, they'd say "Maybe that isn't real and many in fact are just criminals", making up some random thing that may or may not explain something (without offering any statistics, of course, and ignoring statistics that suggest the opposite) and speak of "imaginary social issues".

vsareto 6y ago

It's not really a powder keg because we really don't suffer as a society if the excluded men don't get to have kids.

wutbrodo 6y ago
That's not how it's worked out in any society where family formation has been limited for large numbers of young men. The research on the calming effect of family formation on young men is very straightforward: when a population of young men doesn't have the opportunity to form families, _they_ become the powder keg. It's true at multiple scales, from individual criminality to societal unrest.
- bjourne 6y ago
  The theory has not borne out in reality. Japan and China are the countries with the most young incels/sexless men/male virgins per capita are among the most peaceful in the world. It's a good theory, sexual frustration => violence, but it's just not happening.
  - wutbrodo 6y ago
    That's not really how theory works; the claim isn't that this is the single and sole determinant of civil unrest. This Atlantic article[1] looks more broadly at the effect of the young male subpopulation's size on unrest, this[2] paper references the mitigating effect of family formation on individual crime rate, this[3] one both covers unrest due to low family formation (generally through the mechanism of uneven sex ratios, given how out of favor polygamy currently is), as well as effects on individual crime. That being said, this little excursion into Google turned up some nascent evidence that this historical dynamic is shifting. The modern world is very odd in lots of different ways: wealth, recreational opportunities, the incredibly wide social circles one's exposed to. It's entirely possible that this dynamic has changed, but the research hasn't caught up yet. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/03/angry-young-men-are-making-the-world-less-stable/284364/ https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/03/an... [2] https://d101vc9winf8ln.cloudfront.net/documents/33306/original/FamilyFormationAndCrime.pdf?1573569980 https://d101vc9winf8ln.cloudfront.net/documents/33306/origin... [3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5983495/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5983495/

tenebrisalietum 6y ago

> getting married and starting a family This assumes people really want to do that. Children are too expensive unless you have a lot of resources already. I think if costs of basic living keep increasing the future is increasingly childless for many people.

eigenvalue 6y ago
There is immense pressure from most parents to have their children settle down and have kids. If that requires the parents to make financial contributions to enable this, that will increasingly happen.
- tenebrisalietum 6y ago
  Meh, parents are broke too.
CoolGuySteve 6y ago
The four biggest expenses for childcare are medical care, daycare, university, and housing. It's harder to compare housing but fertility rates are declining even in countries with free/cheap healthcare, daycare, and university.
- newguy1234 6y ago
  This has been studied by sociologists and it basically comes down to people having more opportunities outside of the home to make money. For poor families, kids are viewed as an asset since you can use their labor to earn income through farming or other services. For higher-income homes, having a kid means you might have to reduce hours at work, miss promotion opportunities and so on. So people decide to not have kids.
ravenstine 6y ago
I'm 30, and I only know one person in my peer group whom owns a home, and he can only afford it because it's way out in the boonies. If people my age find things like home ownership out of reach, having children becomes a roadblock and therefore becomes undesirable.

csharptwdec19 6y ago

> It is these men who are having all the sex. Seems like a powder keg over time as the excluded men become bitter and forced to postpone getting married and starting a family. I believe many of these men will eventually find someone once enough of the women who are now rejecting them face biological realities and are forced to settle if they want to have children. Yep. The problems will be generational. On one hand you have the possibility that the men are very aware of this problem, and any relationship they find will be tainted by knowing they weren't good enough to party with but good enough to marry. But more important than that is the time a couple spends actually getting to know each other is greatly cut down. Which then impacts how the children are raised. I wouldn't be surprised if we see an increase in divorce and/or single family rates over time.

cortesoft 6y ago
> any relationship they find will be tainted by knowing they weren't good enough to party with but good enough to marry. I am confused by this.... I would feel much better about myself knowing I was the one good enough to marry rather than the one who was only good enough to party with.
- bradlys 6y ago
  Ultimately, it usually means you're not that desirable - just reliable. Almost everyone wants to be desirable.
  - Jommi 6y ago
    What? Cant reliability be a desirable attribute?
    - bradlys 6y ago
      It can. But is reliability really the #1 attribute for people out there? Most people want a partner who excites them and who makes them happy. If they're unreliable then that can be a problem but usually a very desirable person has reliability in addition to everything else. When you're settling - you're usually settling for someone who is at least reliable but isn't very exciting.

selimthegrim 6y ago

You say forced to settle, but why is it that women never get to "grow up" in this scenario?

cy_hauser 6y ago
I'd suggest they're synonymous in this scenario.

newguy1234 6y ago

The problem is most men go after women 18-25 years old. They don't want the women that are 25+. This is important because it is often men who select which women to go after. Women typically don't go after men in terms of dating selection.

dogma1138 6y ago
Depending on the purpose and their age. 18-25 is a lot of fun, but if you want a relationship you either have to find a trust fund baby or become a sugar daddy which most men don’t want. Hookups and casual dating with someone that is just getting by is fine proper relationships is much harder. My current partner is just under 7 years younger than me (I’ve just turned 34) she has good enough of a career that if we can go to Tenerife or Ibiza on a whim for a weekend we don’t have to plan for it and even if I end up spending a bit more money she doesn’t feel like she’s selling herself out and I don’t feel exploited. Even after 1 year in a relationship there is a big difference between buying a girl a drink or paying for dinner and paying for a flight and a hotel. The good ones won’t be comfortable with the latter and you probably don’t want to get into a relationship with those who would expect you too.

verst 6y ago

Do most people meet on apps to have casual sex or are they looking for a romantic relationship and sex is part of the dating process? I believe sex is an integral part of getting to know someone and determining long term relationship viability. That does not mean the connection with the person was made in pursuit of sex. This of course doesn't change who is having all the sex, but the intention may be very different.

tarsinge 6y ago

It’s only my anecdotal experience but part of the reason for me is that a lot of men are not even trying (edit: anymore) and simply more or less consciously gave up. In my days even as a nerd I tried to fit in, go to parties, bars, tried to hang with popular guys, or just do interesting thing (my hack was playing in a band, but doing art or skateboard, was ok too, you see the point). Nowadays I feel like you either have young boys hanging without girls, thinking that behaving like in a music video with shiny cars is what is attractive, or men simply staying in front of their computer not doing any social activity. Sure the picture is important on Tinder, but in my experience the most important thing is having an “interesting“ life and being social (or at least socially validated). It‘s as if a lot of men have simply chosen to forget what is attractive and think being good looking is everything.

geodel 6y ago
I think it is quite reasonable approach that these men are taking. I'd think of myself in that category. With society going in direction where social norms are evolving faster than many have mental bandwidth to deal with, it would be wise to just save time, money and energy to acquire that fake attractiveness. May be men have also taken cue from pop song 'You are beautiful just the way you are...'
- asdff 6y ago
  What social norms are really changing that are so very overwhelming? The only really changing social norm is wider acceptance of different lifestyles and people, and if it takes some people serious bandwidth to process the golden rule, maybe these people really should be sitting out on the outset of society for better or worse. It seems harsh, but I see a lot of people externalize all their personal issues on perceived societal changes outside of their control, when really the the only change happening to society is the expectation that you treat everyone with equal respect.
  - geodel 6y ago
    > maybe these people really should be sitting out on the outset of society for better or worse. Well they are already kind of sitting out. > the expectation that you treat everyone with equal respect. Thats an old humbug. IMO it merely means respect for people or group who are ideological flavor of the season.