Why Modern Dating is So Hard

Men have been becoming increasingly frustrated with modern dating for at least a couple of decades now. It’s what drove the now largely defunct pick-up artist craze and more recently, red pill ideology, incels, and the rise of people like Andrew Tate. However intriguingly, there seem to be more and more signs that women are becoming less content with modern dating as well.

While at first glance, that might not seem to compute to guys who may feel like they’ve been getting the short end of the stick in the dating market, it actually makes perfect sense.

Yes, overall, it clearly is much easier for women to date than men. They are at least heavily in demand. However, on the flip side of it, if the goal of a woman is to find one guy they want to fall in love with, make babies, and live happily ever after, well, they’re not having great success either. We are reaching all-time lows in the number of people getting married and they’re getting married much later, which means there’s less opportunity to have kids:

That’s why we’re seeing increasing numbers of women complaining as well. Where’s their Prince Charming? Where’s their man to wife them up, make some babies, and buy them a house with a white picket fence? How is it that they can feel so in demand and still not be getting what they want?

When you see something that’s not working for a few people, it may be their fault, bad luck, or maybe they’re exceptions to the rule. However, when you see something that used to work very well, that’s now not working well for a large percentage of society, there’s almost certain to be a systemic problem.

This gets masked when it comes to dating because there are still plenty of people the system has worked for. This creates a survivorship bias among them. You know, “I married a girl I met in college and stayed married, so the dating world works great! You just have to pick the right girl!”

Did these people make all the right calls, or did they just essentially have a 50/50 chance of winning and came up on heads? That’s very difficult to say with certainty in a world where an awful lot of people who seemingly are doing “all the right things” are washing out in the dating market or getting divorced.

So, if something is going wrong systematically, what is it? That’s a complicated question, but the short answer is that the players and end goals of dating mostly stayed the same, but the incentives, rules, and the way the game is played completely changed. It’s like trying to drive from New York to Los Angeles, but all the roads have completely changed, there are no directions, there are landmines on a lot of the roads and carjackers will loot half your car if you drive through the wrong area.

If you go back far enough in America, there was a generally implicit, but well-understood relationship track that went something like this:

Men and women wanted to have sex and have families, but it wasn’t acceptable to do so outside of marriage. So, they met someone out and about, at church or through friends, married young, had some kids, and stayed married long-term because it was financially difficult to raise kids and take care of a house without being married, and getting divorced had a lot of stigma around it. Because manual laborers were paid COMPARATIVELY more than they are today AND because people had MUCH LOWER STANDARDS about what kind of living conditions were tolerable, a much higher percentage of the male population could afford to support having their wife and kids live at home while they supported the family. Additionally, our culture was much more homogenous. The population was almost 90% white, Christianity was the dominant religion, the political parties weren’t all that far apart and most people even had the same entertainment sources. Just to give you an example, per Tim Wu’s The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads, 71.3% of Americans who watched TV were viewing, “I Love Lucy” at the peak of its popularity. In other words, we had a very uniform culture, dating had a real long-term purpose, couples needed each other, getting married was very important and marriages lasted. 

This is essentially how dating and relationships used to work. Many people are still trying to act as if this is still the world we live in when things have radically changed and as a society, we really haven’t figured out how to adapt to it.

To explain this, let’s take the description of how things USED TO WORK and compare it piece by piece to how things work now.

Men and women wanted to have sex and have families, but it wasn’t acceptable to do so outside of marriage.

The stigma around having sex outside of marriage is mostly gone at this point. Yes, no woman wants to be called a “slut,” but assuming she’s not a sex worker, trying to steal her friend’s boyfriend in public, or running up an enormous body count, it’s unlikely she’s going to get tagged that way. What about having kids outside of marriage? It’s not considered ideal, but it’s also not considered stigmatizing anymore. Nobody is walking around going, “I’m not talking to that slut Jenny because she got knocked up and she wasn’t even married to the guy that did it!”

So, they met someone out and about, at church or through friends…

Now, the most common way to meet people is via online dating apps, which has dramatically changed the game, mostly for the worse:

This could be a whole article in and of itself, but let’s focus on a small component of it. Because online dating is MOSTLY a visual medium, it often leads to women on those websites basing their choices largely on looks. Since this is the case, MOST MEN end up deflated as they have to send out an enormous number of emails to get any dates. On the other hand, a small number of particularly attractive men do extremely well. So well in fact, that they often end up having sex with a large number of women from these sites each year. This simultaneously leads to these women becoming frustrated (I really liked that guy! Why couldn’t I land him?) while also leading them not to “settle” for “lesser men” because, in their minds, even the best-looking, highest status men are attracted to them. This is why online dating often ends up being an unpleasant experience for a large percentage of the people who do it.

…(They) married young, had some kids, and stayed married long-term because it was financially difficult to raise kids and take care of a house without being married, and getting divorced had a lot of stigma around it.

The stigma around divorce is also mostly gone and in a world with child support, welfare, and women being prominently represented in the job force, marriage has gone from almost a “necessity” to raise kids to more of a “nice to have” in the eyes of many Americans.   

Because manual laborers were paid COMPARATIVELY more than they are today AND because people had MUCH LOWER STANDARDS about what kind of living conditions were tolerable, a much higher percentage of the male population could afford to support having their wife and kids live at home while they supported the family.

Women still very much want men who earn more than they do, but as what women make in the workplace has dramatically increased, fewer men than ever before meet that standard. Furthermore, with the ways that our economy has changed over the years and the higher expectations people have, it’s more difficult than it used to be for one man to make enough money to support himself, his wife, and two kids. Of course, estimates vary, but you’re probably talking about 80-100k per year to do it without really scrimping (arguably) and that’s definitely not going to be enough in some places. Saying, “I’m a good guy and I’ll go work to support the family, while you stay home and take care of the kids” used to genuinely be a core selling point for a lot of men. As men have become less able to do that and many women have lost the desire to go that route in the first place, many of those men have begun to feel locked out of the dating market.

Even our culture was much more homogenous. The population was almost 90% white, Christianity was the dominant religion, the political parties weren’t all that far apart and most people even had the same entertainment sources. Just to give you an example, per Tim Wu’s The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads, 71.3% of Americans who watched TV were viewing, “I Love Lucy” at the peak of its popularity.

As a general rule, the more similar people are, the easier it is for them to connect. People are more likely to marry a partner with similar interests and within their own race, religion, and ideology. As our society has fragmented in almost every way imaginable, it makes it harder for people to get together. A black, liberal atheist who loves Black Lives Matter, the NBA and rap is probably not going to end up in a long term relationship with a white, conservative, evangelical Christian who loves Civil War reenactments, NASCAR, and country music. 

On top of all this, keep in mind that having a divorce rate that is generally estimated to be between 40-50% of marriages creates all sorts of problems as well. If you’re a man with money, do you feel comfortable getting married without a pre-nup? For that matter, given that divorce court is heavily stacked against you, do you feel comfortable getting married at all if you’re a man? On the other hand, if you’re a woman, are you going to be reluctant to be a homemaker if you know that statistically, there’s a strong possibility your marriage may not work? Are you going to want to build a career first in your twenties, so you’ll have something to fall back on if the marriage fails? These are legitimate questions that would probably become largely irrelevant if say 90% of marriages succeeded. But they don’t.

Many people like to point the finger of blame at women or men for the way dating, relationships, and marriage have degraded over the last few decades, but the unfortunate reality is that the incentives of the whole system have just changed in a way that makes all these things much harder for people today than they were for past generations of Americans. Granted, “harder,” doesn’t mean impossible. There are still plenty of success stories in the dating marketplace. Hopefully, if people can see the way our system is currently broken, they can try to sidestep those areas and increase their odds of success.

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