Transcription
I did a video about social class and romantic relationships and the game theory behind it for last year's Valentine's Day special. The second part was about should you date within your own class. It's going to inform the context for this video.
And so, but for this one, I'm just going to go more into the structural breakdown of the modern dating market. So, I'm going to try to do a data and fact-based analysis here. I'm not going to cater to either manosphere or feminist rhetoric. The main fundamental problem in terms of why the dating market is broken is just because your typical person is a lower quality romantic partner than they were in the past. Economic forces are mainly what is driving people apart and is leading to more people trying to seek control seeking behavior. And I think this is going to continue because of the AI movement and how AI is going to play a role because AI can fill a lot of the roles that people want out of a romantic relationship without the required effort in return that is needed to maintain a romantic relationship.
So prior to the 70s, people mainly found their future husbands or wives through their community. You had a more standardized value set, more class stability, and more defined gender expectations. And the main thing that has disrupted that has been the internet. Before the internet, if you had some weird hobby, let's say you're obsessed with Pokemon Gold version and your local community generally found you weird for it, you wouldn't build your life around it. Whereas today, you could find a subreddit for Pokemon Gold version and say, "Hey, look, there's 20,000 people who are just as fanatic about this than I am, and so therefore, I'm not really as weird as I perceive to be." And as a byproduct of that, I don't have to socialize with the people in my own community. I could just hold out and hope that I bump into one of those 20,000 people on the subreddit who happens to be an attractive romantic partner as well. I know I'm using the Pokemon Gold version example to be facitious and a little bit humorous, but you get my general point.
Like the other thing really apart from the internet allowing people to hide in their cocoons, it has also provided a way to be more anonymous than in the past. You can live a functioning social life post 2009 without really having to talk to people. You can do a lot of basic services from how you interact with the government, how you interact with businesses, buying consumer products or insurance or running your day-to-day errands, all through the internet. You don't have to talk to people directly. This also has an impact on the fact that since people do not have to socialize, they will have less opportunities to run into people. And you just have this idea that like I moved to a town where I don't know anybody so I don't have to worry about my reputation and therefore I don't have to behave as honorably as I would if people weren't watching me. I'm not saying that nobody has integrity. There are plenty of people who do. But in a bigger urban environment where the repercussions of treating a bunch of people badly in romantic relationships or like say you have you you stiff a bunch of people on first dates and just don't show up, nobody will ever know because you live in a city of millions of people and you're just one of many and you met this person on a dating app. So it won't come back to your real life social circle. If that does happen, you could always just move to another city that's just as big where nobody knows you and reset from scratch. So, I think urban anonymity plays a role in a lot of this.
And the cultural fragmentation, not everybody, like 50 years ago, the chances that the people in your community, the prospective romantic partners and whatever age group you want to date were likely the same religion as you. They likely had similar general values as you, similar taste in food. They probably had similar views on family. That's not a given today anymore. We have people of several different cultural backgrounds. Even if they grew up in the same cultural background, maybe because they've adopted different subcultures in high school through the internet. You don't have what mass media did in the old days was homogenize the culture. The internet has done the opposite and has dehomogenized and made more people more niche. Anything that's a niche taste will be way more liked by those who like the niche taste. But niche taste has a smaller market. That's the downside. It makes it harder for people to pair. But that's the first point. You basically have infinite choice. There's no enforcement for bad behavior and no institutions or social pressures that stabilize things.
The next stage is the decline in partner quality and the traits that both genders actually want, not what they say they want. And so the traits that that men want in women, modern women are not doing as well as maybe in the past. And the traits that women want in men, men are not doing as well as in the past. Even if overall they might be doing better in different things, those things just don't matter as much for a romantic commitment. Let's do an example. Let's start with men. The main reason why men are perceived to be weaker romantic partners today than in the past is they have a general decline in the ability to provide, a decline in personal discipline, and they have a decline in longer term planning. And there's a lot of reasons why. One, you've had relative economic stagnation. Median wages, particularly for those in the bottom 70% of income earners, is pretty much flat since the 1980s. There's also a negative education gap. Only 42% of bachelor degrees now are given to men versus 58% to women. And that number has been widening consistently. So that has made men reluctant. And they also have significantly higher dropout rates out of school than women do. And education is not just like something that oh I'm being a snob. I have to have a man with more education than me. There's a reason why a lot of women value men with education. Education is proof that you could commit to doing something with deferred gratification for a three to four year period. And that's a sign of longer term success and personal discipline. Also, educated men tend to be higher incomes on average. Not always, especially in the way that college has become a little more saturated today, but it's still generally the case. And then on top of that, education rates also just maybe signal a certain level of social class or cultural sophistication. And a lot of women don't want to marry somebody in a class below them.
The other thing that's going on is you have a labor force retreat. The labor force participation rate for men under 55 is at close to a 70-year low. And so that is a problem. It doesn't show up necessarily in the unemployment rate with the way that it's calculated, but it is a problem that you see it like the whole NEET phenomenon, which is not an education, employment, or training. NEET rates have risen at a consistent pace basically since 2000 and that has accelerated really since 2008. And then there is a problem with substance abuse. Men are more likely to use lethally legalized things that are known to kill your ambition. The rates of it has gone up by 5x really over the last 20 years or so and that's really accelerated since 2015. Even more harder substances have gone up by 3x since 1990. And if you're on that kind of stuff, it's going to be bad for your health. It is going to make you less desirable to date. Third, it kills a lot of your motivation to do things and so you're less likely to progress in your career or personal goals. And lack of motivation and lack of actual accomplishment, especially once you surpass the age of 30, becomes an increasing liability in the dating market for men.
And then the other one is gaming of a certain degree, video games particularly. This is one that as somebody who does like video games himself but plays a lot less than I used to, I didn't really realize how much video games are a turnoff to a lot of younger women. It's like the number one hobby that is not completely destructive to your health that is the most negatively rated by women. In the, I think my view on video games and I've said this in my video. So, I think it is a low class signal to a certain degree, especially excess. But I think if you complete every other thing that you're supposed to do for the day, whether it's your work, your chores, your longer term projects, your socializing, and you have an extra hour before going to bed to play video games, it's not the end of the world. I think that some women can be unfair about men's video game habits, a lot better than other things that happen late at night. But if it dominates your entire life and it's your primary hobby to the detriment of more pro-social goals, then it becomes a problem. I know I wasted a lot of my teen years due to excess video games in my life. I snapped out of it in college, but a lot of people don't. It's also why you're seeing a problem in the dating market.
The other one is gambling, sports betting, and crypto addiction and the sense of day trading. Sports betting participation has more than doubled since 2018. People blowing up their financial nest eggs due to bad crypto trades has exploded as a problem that's also created more perceived financial instability or perceived financial irresponsibility. Financial irresponsibility is another severe turnoff for why a lot of women don't want to date younger men. The bottom line is that the traits women want in a husband are ambition, mental stability, the willingness to take care of a family, leadership, not always deferring to her for major life plan decisions and being able to have a plan and tell her this is what we're going to do. And like people like that and emotional self-regulation are all down. And then there's the economic problem, too. But I think it's more these personality traits that lead to the economic problem. So that is why a lot of men are perceived to have lower dating value for women than they did say 30 years ago.
Now we got to go to the other side of the coin when it comes to women and the traits that a lot of men value in women they want to marry. That's the key word. I'm not talking about short-term stuff. I'm talking about marriage-seeking men. They value loyalty and long-term orientation. This is the one thing I think is similar and it's also kind of a problem with proliftrift in general, which is the idea that you can tell what is prolift based on what is more short-term thinking versus long-term thinking and the decline in long-term thinking. Men and women who are marriage-minded and long-term minded, if you are marriage-minded, you're more likely to be long-term minded. They want a relationship that can be long-term because if they do things for the short term that focused, it's going to likely be at the expense of their long-term stability of their marriage. So like example would be like like I would say like the norms have shifted for the number of romantic partners. Like the percentage of women who had 10 or more partners before marriage was 5% or less in 1990, probably closer to 20 to 25% now. Those with more than five was less than 10% in 1990 and it's probably closer to 35 to 40% now. A lot of men just really don't like that because there's a lot of research to show that leads to higher rates of infidelity and divorce.
Another one is the tattoos. Among women under 30, tattoos have gone up from under 10% in the late 80s and early 90s to about 40 plus%. I've seen data as high as 44% of women under 35 have at least one tattoo. And that's also a turnoff to a lot of marriage-minded men. The other thing would be binge drinking and increased party culture. The rate of binge drinking among young women has doubled in the last 30 years and the number of hospital visits because of binge drinking has increased by more than 50%. There's also a decline in religiosity. The percentage of women who no longer affiliate with a traditional religion has gone up from less than 10% to over 30% over that kind of period. And there's also a general drop in the desire to have a family. Recent surveys show only about 35 to 40% of women under 30 say that marriage is important. You see these surveys that show the priority of having kids for young women and it's at the bottom below education, career, travel, and other things where it used to be like a top priority for women. And a lot of reason why men want to get married is to have a family because it doesn't make economic or rational sense for a man to get married if he's not having children. One in three women who are Gen Z say they never want to have children. If you never want to have children and most men who want to get married want to get married because they want to have children, that's going to lead to lower rates of marriage. And there's higher SSRI use. SSRI use has doubled since 2010. And that has shown some issues with pair bonding and romantic stability. So overall these traits show that the traits that men want in a future wife like emotional stability, modesty, religious faith, loyalty, family orientation are just a lot lower than they used to be.
So we're have, as I pointed out, men have weakened in quality because they're just less motivated and less ambitious. And women have gone down in quality because of certain traits that men value, mainly indicators of loyalty, trust, and family orientation have gone down. They've both equally declined in quality. And this is when I have a problem with modern dating discussions is that it heavily skews just blaming one gender or the other. And that doesn't really get anywhere. It just creates resentment without actually trying to solve the problems.
Social media is creating this perception of extreme levels of competition and relatively unrealistic dating standards. In general, young women get at least 10 times more attention on social media than young men of similar age and educational background. And when men feel like that any girl that is on Instagram is getting DM'd by the best looking or richest guy in town, it demotivates him to try. Whether that's accurate or not, that's a whole different discussion. But the perception of it is what motivates behavior. The perception is that dating has become a winner take all system where the top 1% of men get pretty much all of the women and rotate through them and everybody else is left behind. There is some data shows that online dating is Pareto distributed where basically the top 20% of men get almost all of the matches on dating apps and if you're in the bottom half you're getting basically nothing. And if you're a young guy, if you want to guess whether you're the top 20% of looks or not, just if you get more than one match a week on a dating app, you're in the top 20% of looks. That's probably a shortcut proxy to see where you stand. And if you're in the top like five to 1%, you're getting multiple a day. It's very skewed that way because a lot of more conventional ways that people used to meet each other, such as like third spaces are becoming less popular. Social circles have narrowed because people are less social and more introverted and like older school ways of meeting people you didn't know, like cold approach has become more stigmatized socially. It's harder for young men to meet people in real life than in the past.
The internet again has disintermediated. And like because of how skewed dating apps are and how people believe that because there's a random community on Reddit that agrees with you on everything that there should be one of those at least in your town. People put these very high expectations or these very weird niche things on their online dating profiles and if they don't find matches or they don't find them who fits that exact thing, they'll just hold out. It goes back to what I said before about the the internet disintermediating the culture and creating a lot of competing different value systems. The general shift on people willing to date people outside their political party has declined a lot over the last 10 years. I think it has to do with the nature of the difference between what a Democrat and Republican is now versus 20 years ago. It used to be a minor disagreement on taxes and foreign policy. Now it's like a value set because politics has become a substitute for religion for a lot of secular people. Since your political values are taken as seriously as previous generations took their religious faith, it makes sense not to date somebody with a different political platform than you. And so, as a result, with gender polarization and politics, it doesn't make sense to date somebody with complete opposite values, whether politically, religiously, or culturally. That is another kind of division is this whole gender politics and have women overwhelmingly moving to the left and men drifting to the right.
And basically the other thing is the general instability that all this creates makes deep romantic investment irrational because ghosting is fairly normalized and people will break up over relatively trivial things. They call this the "ick" and the existence of no-fault divorce. You have a lot of people who are very hesitant to stay loyal in a romantic relationship because why invest a lot of time and money and emotional capital in something that could end overnight because of something that you cannot control. Because of this fear, people are less willing to invest emotionally into relationships. And because people are willing to invest less in relationships, it makes it more likely for people to not stick together when they face adversity. They're likely to not persist when there's a minor disagreement or major life challenges because like part of dedicating your life to somebody is going through with them with tough life challenges on both sides. Like say for example, you're a young guy who loses his job. People lose their jobs a lot in the turn of the economy, even if they're very smart and capable people, or their income goes down to start a business. And if somebody leaves you because of that, then how can you really expect to put effort into commitment? If you know that as soon as times go south, they're going to be out. If somebody has an emotional problem going on in their life due to something happening and you think it's too much drama to deal with and you walk away, it goes back to the game theory of that I did on the video I talked about social class and dating is that this kind of instability prioritizes control seekers. I know that I can't really count on somebody to stick around. I just want to extract this much out of the relationship I get before it breaks up. The game basically the game theory shows no incentive to put in effort investment and therefore if you're not putting any effort or investment, people are not will want to in general if you don't want to commit and the relationship quality is lower because the higher the quality relationship is generally correlated to how much effort you are willing to put into it. The grass isn't always green on the other side. It's how much you water it. And it's not just with romantic relationships. It's really anything in life. Anything worth getting is usually hard to do. To accomplish any challenging goal is somewhat correlated to how much effort you are willing to put in. As a result, people feel like being insecure is rational because they know this is going on.
The other thing is you've seen a general decline in soft skills and emotional intelligence. I'm saying this to somebody who's not the highest EQ person on the face of the earth. The general decline in soft skills and emotional intelligence made me from probably being at the bottom level of EQ to probably closer to average. Maybe I've gotten a little better, but in general, I think the overall EQ of society's declining. I think there's a few reasons. More people are interacting socially online or via text instead of phone calls or in person. As a result, you don't have to directly deal with emotional things. Even if you're talking to somebody via text, you can always just put the phone away for a half an hour and come back to think about it. In general, you're seeing a decline in patience, conflict resolution, communication, and emotional regulation among men and women. I think it could have to do with helicopter parenting. It could do with people being locked down for a year plus due to the pandemic and therefore not interacting with people in their formative years as much as they should have like in high school and college using digital media to shield yourself from the ups and downs in society.
And the last point on this is mental health and instability. Gen Zers in general have a record level high of depression and anxiety. Loneliness is up about 60% to 80% for young men and women since 2010. And again, this identity fragmentation problem that I told you that's a byproduct of the internet. If you're on the internet, you can be whoever you want and perfectly optimize your image. But when you go into the real world and people call you out for your inconsistencies or you can't always show this perfect facade of what you want people to think yourself in real life, it creates cognitive dissonance and sometimes mental health issues. And also the normalization of mental health diagnosis is making people believe that they have some unsolvable mental health condition versus just a personality flaw that can be improved with dedicated emotional training or therapy. And I think also a lot of the therapy speak stuff is a problem too. The main consequence to this is people think their personalities are immutable and anything that is not perfect about them cannot be improved. As a result, you just people say, "Hey, this is just who I am and I'm a bad person. You have to just appreciate or I don't treat people well because of mental condition. I can't do anything about it. I'm not going to try to improve my behavior." And I think it's a cop out to a certain degree. That unwillingness to adjust is a problem.
It's also driving the looks maxing movement to a certain degree because the false assumption a lot of these young men make is that they might be right that it's harder for them to make more money than women at the same age. But the main assumption they're extremely wrong about is that their personality is immutable. If they spent that time investing and money and energy into improving their human capital or their personalities through more interesting life experiences or putting themselves through various challenges or continued education, the ROI, not just for their dating life, but for everything else would be much higher than some random extreme cosmetic surgery or other types of looks maxing elements.
There's a big class element to this too. The hollowing out of the middle class. The middle class historically is the most romantic social class because neither side had too much to lose or to gain from a financial perspective from dating one person or the other. When you have more economic polarization, a bigger gap in wealth or social status, one partner versus the other, it makes it a little bit less stable and it brings the control dynamics that I've talked about in previous videos. The hollowing out of the middle class makes it harder for people to pair. Second is the pearl drift and the cultural downshift. The societal movement towards low status impulsive and short-term behaviors. Nobody wants to marry somebody who has those behaviors if they have the choice otherwise. And so where I simply I'd summarize to this whole video basically saying is nobody wants to marry a pearl because the traits that result in a successful and happy marriage are the exact opposite of the ones in society that cause prolift.
The other thing you've seen as a byproduct of the more class bifurcated society is the increased level of transactional extraction-oriented dating versus true love which we talked about in last year's video. Most single people today don't want commitment. According to Pew Research, 63% of single adults are not seeking a committed relationship. And a similar study for Match in 2023 that 47% of daters actually prefer situationships. There could be a selection bias. The type of people who use dating apps are more likely to want some amorphous definition of their romantic relationship, but there's a general cultural trend for people not defining their relationships, which yeah, and I think it's kind of reflects people want less commitment. You've seen with women, they generally have become more preference for financial extraction. According to Lending Tree, 44% will not date a man with significant debt. That actually makes sense. And 30% require men who make more than 100k in income. Women are twice as likely to rate finances as a major factor for relationship viability. Men generally prefer autonomy over commitment. Like 65% of men would rather have casual dating than a serious relationship. Hobbies such as dating apps and video games have made non-reciprocal relationship preferences more normalized. In general, 52% of partners, male or female, expect the partner to prove their life, but only 28% feel obligated to do the same. And I think that really kind of summarizes a lot of the problems. You've seen this with a San Diego State study showing a sharp decline in agreeableness and conscientiousness among Gen Z, more direct transactional relationships becoming more popular. It's demotivating men to want to get married. The main critique of why, according to Pew Research, men don't want to get married is lack of loyalty and a perception of transactionality. And that is kind of the the issue.
I think the biggest problem that could be fixed the quickest was the decline in men willing to lead their relationships. Like in general, fewer men want to take the lead in their relationships. This is like the opposite problem of men complaining about women being transactional. A lot of women are complaining about men just being too passive. Like men under 30 are the least likely male cohort to prioritize being a provider or protector. Only 25% of men think that men should take the lead in a relationship or courtship. That's a drop from 50% among Gen X men at the same age. In 1990, 70% of people thought it was better for a man to take a lead in relationship versus 32% today of young men. Women generally want men with emotional leadership, not just paying bills, especially in an age when you can get a good paying job and not have to have a man do that. And that includes like things like initiating plans, like deciding where you're going to go out to dinner. Decisiveness, like when you have a tough choice that you got to make, you got to have a be decisive and stick to it. Conflict mediation, keeping promises, saying you're going to do something and then actually doing it. Just a trait very valued among men. If you just leave a vacuum in these kind of things, it leads to more emotional dissatisfaction and higher breakup rates.
I think there's a why are men opting out of leadership? Well, there's a few reasons. One, you have issues with the Me Too movement and the perception of being controlling or problematic economic stagnation. Like if you're making less money than your romantic partner as a man, it's harder to justify having leadership to a certain degree. And also digital escapism. You can go into digital environments where you do what you want with no questions asked. And so you don't have to have the pressure of making hard decisions because you can just delay it by not making the decision and kind of digitally numb yourself. So yeah, the main impact of why this shows that like a lot of women don't like men who are not decisive. And the top complaint for women in relationships apparently is men lack direction and initiative.