Why are fewer men in their 20s having sex?
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Others we know are in even more limited circumstances, who put off even dating due to how tight their finances are. Money just isn’t making it to the lower and middle classes any more in any real capacity.
To be fair, I also didn't have any social pressure from my family to have children and since my gf, now wife, doesn't want to have any children either, it just worked out this way.
TBH, at least in the U.S., I look at my relatives and how expensive day care, etc. is, I don't know how they balance their budget.
So for just 3.5 kids, you'd need to pay 100% of a salary plus all the extras of running a business. (insurance, legal, finance, advertising, sewage, electricity, food, toys, etc.)
Given the overhead, you'd expect daycare for 2 kids to consume the working parent's entire pay. For a low-paid parent, just 1 kid might consume the entire pay.
Obviously that isn't viable. I know a handyman in Massachusetts who had at least 11 kids. It's perfectly legal for his wife to care for 11 kids.
FYI, it takes differing amounts of attention and work to care for children at different ages.
I don’t know if you have ever cared for a baby, but I have with a ratio of 2 kids under 3 years old and 1 adult (myself), and I don’t even know how people at daycare do it with a 4 to 1 ratio.
Babies are not difficult. Teenagers are difficult. I have experience with both.
Thus, balancing the budget in the context of having children often means skipping the absurd costs of daycare.
I inferred souprock’s initial comments as daycare costs being too high due to government regulations requiring excessive labor for childcare, and my comments are to show that the regulations are not excessive, or at least not anything out of the norm compared to parents who stayed home (I don’t know anyone who can handle 4 infants by themselves).
And balancing the budget also includes the present value of future income that can be earned by a parent that stays home during toddler years versus one that continues to work and pays for daycare. Clearly, many people are betting that even the high costs of daycare are worth paying in exchange for the (increased) security of future cash flow from working.
I imagine most people are not sufficiently saving for retirement, and/or don't have sufficient savings for emergency (medical/loss of income/disability/legal/etc) expenses either.
I definitely understand 100%... I just thought it sounded extremely familiar. In my personal scenario, I had my first kid (unplanned) when I was 25. It definitely changed the trajectory of my life, and in a good way in my case. Once I knew I was having a kid I really started to take things more seriously and tried to set up as good of an environment as I could. That meant studying a lot, surrounding myself with good families, moving into a place with more exposure to nature, etc. We never owned a home, had retirement saved up, or a lot of the other things one would consider good "nest egg" scenarios. We just made it work when we had to, and have 2 awesome teenagers now.
With the rise of remote work in the past year, people (not necessarily you) have more options than ever before for housing, yet they continue to cluster in small, desirable, high-rent areas rather than living less glamorously in exurban or rural areas.
House prices in my neighborhood have broken the $500k mark (and much more in other places nearby), yet a quick zillow search shows housing in several areas less than an hour from my house available for below $100k with stagnant prices. If I were willing to live even further afield, I could get a mobile home for below $75k, and in the eastern half of the US I see hundreds (thousands?) of places available for below $50k.
If you want the prices to improve then stop paying high prices.
"Pregnancy intention was defined according to a respondent's answers to a series of retrospective survey questions about her desire to become pregnant right before each pregnancy occurred. If she reported that she did not want to become pregnant at the time the pregnancy occurred, but wanted to become pregnant in the future, the pregnancy was categorized as mistimed. If a respondent reported that she did not want to become pregnant then or at any time in the future, the pregnancy was categorized as unwanted. We classified a pregnancy as unintended if it was either mistimed or unwanted; an intended pregnancy was one that was desired at the time it occurred or sooner."
When others cite statistics from this paper, this definition of "unintended" is nearly impossible to de-tangle from poverty: a reasonable respondent may very well indicate that their pregnancy was mistimed because of well-founded concerns, such as that they were not in a financially secure environment at the time. The paper treats such a response as an "unintended" pregnancy.
Careful reading of the paper reveals that there is evidence that poverty (at the time of surveying and/or at the time of pregnancy) causes respondents to retroactively rate their pregnancies as "unintended". This is a far less radical result than one may glean from casual discussion of such statistics.
https://m.imgur.com/L9Vu4Zo graphs like this dont inspire hope either and serve to support my previous points
Perhaps tinder is not the place to find a guy for settling down.
There are more women in their 20s having sex with men in their 30s, than men in their 20s having sex with women in their 30s. In most states it's not legal to have sex with women under 18, so (assuming serial monogamy) at any given time there just aren't enough women that are younger than a 20-something male who aren't in a relationship with someone older than that 20-something male.
(31 states vs. 13 states; the remaining six set their age of consent at 17.)
"Americans overall are having less sex than they used to. Young people, in particular young men, appear to be driving this trend."
"As per the chart below, the percentage of young women who hadn't had sex in the previous year increased as well, though not nearly as much as it did for men."
I can't speak to the unrealistic demands from men, but, if you aren't from an area with a surplus of women, the dating demands of women who are effectively average are absurd. I seem to remember that there was some dating site analysis that basically backed that up--men mis-estimate average-ness some but most women are just way off.
Ding: Thanks to adflux for finding the OKCupid data: https://m.imgur.com/L9Vu4Zo
You clearly don't know what the inside of a gym even looks like, but you want me to have six pack abs? Your degree barely qualifies you for Amazon warehouse worker, but you want me to be pulling six figures? Oh, and I also have to be over 6 foot tall.
Uh, yeah, I think I've got lots to do until someone a little more grounded in reality comes along.
It's pretty clear what is happening: Online dating has become the main way romantic partners meet online [1] and the average man finds it far more difficult to find a partner than, say, in a bar or the workplace [2]
[1] https://news.stanford.edu/2019/08/21/online-dating-popular-w...
[2] https://qz.com/1051462/these-statistics-show-why-its-so-hard...
The article has four ideas on why men like me have fewer partners. That men lack the money for partners, that the top 10% of men outcompete the bottom 90% on social media apps, that at least some of these men are homosexuals, that men prefer pornography over the actual act.
The answer for me (maybe not you) is the fourth one, "Rise of the tube sites." It is easy to fit a tube site into my schedule. It is hard to fit another human in to my schedule. After going on a tube site, I have no incentive to go to parties, go on tinder or to otherwise meet women. If I did not have tube sites, I likely would have gotten married in college when my future earnings potential became obvious.
Doesn't fill the mental needs, but you just get better at suppressing them over the years.
Would be nice to meet someone who shared my interests and take on life, but the only ones I've found don't find me particularly attractive or already got snatched up. And what's the point of starting a relationship with someone who doesn't share your interests and take on life? Fear of dying alone? That doesn't seem to me to be a good enough reason.
Eh, well, dying alone doesn't seem too bad in an era where you can literally pursue any fascinating hobby you want with relatively low startup costs (FPV drones, dirt bikes, rock climbing, backpacking around the world, you name it).
The problem I see is the lack of genuine interest in many. I don't really think that (in general) "video games" or "the office" or "anime" are interests, unless it becomes either uncomfortably obsessive (negative) or creation (positive). Same can go for things like hiking, board games, partying... these are activities, not really interests. People seem afraid to expose what truly interests them even long into a relationship.
What would you consider an interest that would catch your attention?
If hiking is an activity, then would the interest be 'getting outdoors.'
This suggests there are parts of the brains of (some, perhaps most men) looking for something which you can't get from orgasming.
It seems reasonable to me to not have children if you do not feel secure about your housing prospects and overall cash flow projections.
Many, many women prefer not to use birth control (for a variety of reasons), and many men find that the decreased sensation from condoms doesn't make the experience worth all of the effort.
As a result, after going through a few pregnancy scares, sex may just not be worth the trouble. Especially if you're not past a threshold of attractiveness and have to put in a ton of effort to be able to have that sex in the first place.
If sex is going to wind up being only a marginally-pleasurable activity that requires an enormous amount of effort to secure and is accompanied by regular pregnancy scares, then why bother?
Fuck the species. Why not just smoke some week, sip a beer, and play videogames with your buddies (guys or gals)? Sounds like a much better way to spend an evening to me!
I don't know what we could do to fix this but completely ban dating apps, which is impractical. Optimally in the far future we'd be able to rewrite the human genome to update our standards of attraction from the stone age - beefy muscles, tall height, other such signals are generally irrelevant to life today yet they're still such strong factors for men to be able to break into dating.
You might want to read The Moral Animal by Robert Wright for a more nuanced view of human nature by an evolutionary psychologist. (A field which is controversial at the best of times- but if you're going to believe something controversial but possibly true you can do a lot better than what you posted here)
If I wasn't on my phone i'd type more, but in brief you have a weird idea of what fitness means for a woman looking for a mate. It doesn't necessarily mean "big muscles" but could mean something like a guy who loves her and will raise the kids with her. Because that's optimal for passing on genes.
Furthermore fitness for a male in search of a woman might mean a guy who is monogomous and caring (because faking those traits to manipulate a woman might be too difficult) because he can convince a woman to mate with him because he will help her with the kids.
There's a lot more to a Tinder photo than physical attributes. A picture, as they say, is worth a thousand words. A photo can convey a lot about your personality. What you're doing in the photo is a big clue. So is your emotional state. Just choosing a photo that's well composed and makes you look your best means a lot.
Tinder photos aren't mug shots for identification. You're not just comparing a person's physical features. Even the simple expedient of smiling will do you a lot of good. You'd be stunned at how many people (of both sexes) will choose a random grainy photo and slap it up there.
There's more to success on Tinder than a photo, but it's not the simple box-ticking of attractiveness that people make it out to be. A good photo gets you to the point where you can talk with somebody. Then your personality matters.
But the book does suggest, If I recall, that the best way to convince a woman you will stick around and raise kids with her is for your genes to make you very much in love with her and make you want to raise kids with her.
Some men supposedly have genes that make them fake being in love, but the book suggests women have genes that will try to sort out these fakers through natural lie detection, with varying result.
Of course, you could choose to take what I just stated with a grain of salt.
It's a discovery problem: people on today's mainstream dating sites select first on looks, then on profile substance, then on digital communication style and/or availability, and then on in-person compatibility. People filtered out from someone's potential matches at earlier stages in the process do not make it to later stages.
People in real life choose dates using the same criteria, but the order of filtering stages is more flexible to the circumstances. In real life, it's also more likely to benefit from a trusted third party who introduces you to a match.
But I don't feel anger towards women or feel upset about it, rather I devote my life to the things I enjoy doing.
The funny thing is that there are both:
- communities of men who think women are shallow (they spend all their time on instagram, they only care about their looks and about how wealthy and good looking their partner is);
- communities of women who think men are shallow (they only want to fuck, they don't care about you at all, they spend more time on their cars than on their girlfriends).
Both communities are wrong.
There's a certain survivorship bias there: such men don't get removed from the market. Men genuinely seeking long term commitments, or even medium term ones, will often find them and leave.
Some women do do. That was the one and only point of my comment: to show that there are both men and women who fall prey to the exact same inductive fallacy.
But you're right not all of them is, but the majority I have meet country wide are from all the professions one can think of and all the life backgrounds you can imagine.
Because most of them are ignoring nice guys, at least while the women are in their 20-s. The book "Land of the Losers" nailed it.
Not to say that they necessarily are, and to be fair, almost all dating app advice I’ve seen comes down to building a copy/paste format. I’ve seen a a few apps that seem entirely populated by people a certain “archetype” in my area.
Add in the moral panic surrounding consent and sex, and you get a chilling effect on courtship and socializing.
What incentive do men have to interact with women, when the social climate makes it a tight-rope walk where even the slightest false impression of impropriety will forever destroy your reputation?
Especially when you can get off to porn? Sorry, it's obvious why things are the way they are and only politically invested types would care to argue otherwise.