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Comment by zeroonetwothree | Hacker News Reader

That doesn’t really make sense statistically speaking

Non-monogamy is a thing, especially since most 'dating' is ambiguous/casual now. Multiple women can share the same 'boyfriend'. Twice as many young men are single compared to young women.

Many young women these days don't realize their 'boyfriend' just sees them as an friends with benefits and is seeing multiple women simultaneously.

"Most young men are single. Most young women are not."

https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/3868557-most-yo...

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/02/08/for-valen...

That isn’t what the article you linked ascribes the 60% single male to 30% single female (among the young). They ascribe it to prevalence of bi sexuality in genz females (I.e., cut the boys out entirely), and dating increasingly older men (I.e., bypass the boys for the men). Also women are increasingly improving their own educational and career attainment, looking for partners similarly successful, and are less interested in propping up the emotional life of the emotionally stunted young men our society turns out. I don’t think infidelity is a modern issue.

" looking for partners similarly successful, and are less interested in propping up the emotional life of the emotionally stunted young men our society turns out."

There's no need to use such angry and charged words when a single word suffices: "Hypergamy".

Female education is the absolute decisive and consistent factor across all societies in suppressing marriage and fertility rates, for good and bad. It both takes away prime fertility years, as well as raises female expectations (Because females always prefer a higher status/earning man than themselves).

So the more females earn, the fewer males they can accept emotionally. Hence the general collapse of marriage/fertility rates when this happens.

This phenomenon is very good for developing countries, preventing catostrophic malthusian booms. Even Muslim countries like Bangladesh and Saudi Arabia now have normal and sustainable fertility rates. For highly developed industrial economies, like South Korea, China, or most of the west, its terrible in the other direction.

I think the assertion was “at least as good,” not better. Most of the women I know aren’t gold diggers but are looking for people to have a meaningful relationship with, and it’s hard for a graduate educated woman to have that with a community college dropout.

Given males are doing worse year over year educationally and presumably career wise as a result, fewer men are meeting the standard - at least among their age cohort. It sounds like women are dating and marrying older men as a result.

But honestly, fertility rates don’t worry me, and shouldn’t worry anyone. We have enough people. More than enough. A flattening or even decline would ease a lot of pressure on our planet and our social institutions that are both buckling under the load. The GDP growth through population growth model doesn’t value per capita value creation, and we should be optimizing for per captia growth.

While many Gen Z women identify as bisexual, very few are actually dating women. Most bisexual women have never dated or done anything sexual with a woman.

It's a fallacy to assume because a man can get with women, he is not emotionally stunted. Plenty of women are dating/sleeping with emotionally stunted men by their own admission and complaints. Many of the attributes it takes to get with a lot of women (especially arguably the most important: be hot) have very little correlation with being emotionally intelligent or a good person/partner to women. Hence the many "f-boy" archetype experiences many women have and complain about.

They realize it, and woman tolerate their male having multiple partners to an extent (as long as the male is high-status). However their preference is absolutely the monogamous commitment of their partners. And the long term lack of it, causes severe emotional pain and neuroticism.

The more low status males withdraw from the market, the harder woman have to compete over the high-status males with no fallback, and the more anguished they'll be at the end (Because in the end the male can only pick one to marry).

AI will absolutely first cause male withdrawals from the sexual market. As men are more visually stimulated (Male porn only requires a minimum of story), AI generated art is advancing far ahead of human artist capabilities, so will soon be able to generate an infinite variety of 10/10 girlfriends in any pose or expression or environment you want.

But woman will start to withdraw too. Female 'porn' is erotica, which have to portray the man's status, and the general story, for females to gain any enjoyment, which is why they are generally always in some sort of novel format. AI is quite far from being able to write engaging fiction, but only say 5 years away. In East Asia, there is already "Otome games" where the female roleplays in a human written visual novel (And pays money each month to buy their virtual boyfriend stuff). So the progression to AI, just makes the stories far better written and genuinely reactive to the female consumer. This is also incredibly attractive to many females, compared to chasing a real life high status man who can be incredibly callous and brutal given the choices they have.

I'd upvote this twice if I could. Young male here and dating is rough; most of my friends are male and single...

But I find it a little ungenerous to interpret that young women are dating men who are cheating. I think it's more likely the case that single women who are in their 20s are willing to date men in their 30s, and so if you have to choose between a 23 year old who just graduated or a 33 year old well established in their career...

Just my guess. And copium.

I don't mean to say they are cheating. I'm saying, in my experience, a lot of 'dating' nowadays in Gen Z is ambiguous. Zoomers call them 'situationships'.

Basically they're dating for a while and having sex, but never have a conversation about exclusivity or 'making it official'.

So in such a situation, one side might be under the impression they are 'boyfriend/girlfriend' because they are seeing each other frequently for months, having sex and so on, but the other side might think they're still just 'casually dating' and assume they're both free to play the field/'date around' still.

So it's not necessarily cheating. There's ambiguity/poor communication skills and one side thinks they're in a serious relationship, while the other thinks it's casual and therefore is seeing other people.

Those are good articles. I don’t think the numbers support non-monogamy as a major cause - men are not looking for “relationships or casual dating”, and things like poly communities are quite small outside of a few big US cities. The stat that 20% of gen Z identifies as queer is pretty fascinating. That’s going to be a big voting bloc in a few decades.

In general, men and women are single at the same rate, about 31% for the population 18 and older. The gaps are found when you look into demographic information.

According to Pew Research data from 2020, in the 18-29 age group 51% of men are single compared to 32% of women. The ratio improves in the 30-49 age group where 27% of men are single compared to 19% of women. 50-64 has the smallest gap where 27% of men are single compared to 29% of women. When you look at 65+, 21% of men of single compared to 49% of women.

In other words, women have more success finding a partner until about 50, when men begin to have more success.

https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/08/20/a-profi...

Being single is not the same as trying, and failing, to find a mate.

Sure it can! It comes down to the various ways that different people define "single" and "in a relationship" for themselves, and the different ways that people select potential partners. Here's a (contrived, but still demonstrative) toy example:

There's a population of 2 men and 2 women, all of whom want to date someone of the opposite gender. Over the course of one year, woman A finds both men attractive, and flip flops between dating them, one at a time. In this scenario, for whatever reason, both men find woman A more attractive, and are just not interested in woman B, even in the periods of time where they are not seeing woman A. Half the female population in this scenario would report themselves as "involuntarily single". The entire male population would likely report themselves as "not single" despite statistically not being in a relationship half the time. Subjective experience and varying definitions are a factor here.

The exact thing happens in reality, but in a much more subdued manner. There are reams of studies* that demonstrate that men and women have vastly different approaches to selecting potential partners. It's certainly possible to acknowledge this, without empowering those who weaponize facts to fuel hatred against specific genders. One can instead have compassion for people of any gender who want, but cannot have a romantic relationship.

*You don't even need to believe any studies. Find two people in your friend group (one male, one female). Have them make the most basic profile on Tinder or whatever the dating app du jour is. Have each of them accept the same number of potential matches from the opposite sex. Observe the results. Repeat with different friends. I have a friend who has run this "experiment" the few times someone has asserted that "dating is equally easy for both genders". The results invariably do fit the vastly unbalanced perceptions. It's uncomfortable and unfortunate, but that is how our society works.

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