I think this is somewhat inevitable, as people wait longer and longer to pair up, or at least to commit. Proverbs 5:18 ("Let your fountain be blessed, And rejoice in the wife of your youth.") certainly deserves more attention.
My wife and I started going together at 17, senior year of high school. There's no substitute for that sort of history. We've been through so many struggles together, it builds a sort of confidence and appreciation and stability that's invaluable.
There's been a lot written recently about young women getting conned by dating apps into thinking they can get a husband way out of their league, because they don't understand the difference between a guy sleeping with them, and a guy committing to them. But I think young men, through porn and other influences, are themselves too often chasing the sizzle, rather than the steak, having failed to discern the difference. Then they wonder why they're never satisfied.
This brings to mind a story told me long ago by a 30-something engineer, who said he had had two girlfriends, one of whom was quite fun, but the other was far more responsible. He had decided to marry the responsible one, and after several years he was quite happy and wanted to tell me that story, I think because he had finally concluded he made the right decision. Guys don't need to marry the flashiest girl, who will wow all their friends, but one who is well-suited to them, responsible, and will make a good mother.
I disagree - it is the young women who are limiting or eliminating sexual or relationship access to the average and below average young man. It is not because young men are somehow satisfied by porn, they are not, as they too yearn for a real relationship. Nor is it that young men somehow convince themselves they deserve a supermodel, they can discern the difference between a porn video and a dating experience (unlike women it appears with regards to online dating and long-term genuine commitment potential).
If anything, rates of loneliness are so high for young men that are they absolutely desperate for something more than brief sexual access to a stranger.
There has been a complete market failure, and it is not a balanced contribution to that from the sexes, it's mostly a failure on one side of the supply/demand curve.
There are two sides to this "market", the men and the women, and it's my view that whenever there's a problem, it's a pretty good bet that each party is at least partly at fault.
Having said that, I am inclined to agree with your basic premise, if I understand it correctly, that women (on average) are much more out of touch with reality than men (on average) these days. Of course, this is a gross generalization, but we do see evidence of it not only in many of the recent studies about women's use of dating apps (as I noted), but more generally in the stunning bifurcation of young men and women currently, as men trend at least somewhat more conservative, and women continue to veer toward liberal extremes.
I do think the recent books on toxic empathy by Joe Rigney and Allie Beth Stuckey are pointing toward a considerable part of the problem. We can't love the whole world very well, it becomes a performative stunt at the extreme, but we can love our own family and the people around us, but that requires some backbone and perserverance, because it's not always easy. Loving real people in real life is not always going to result in everyone smiling at you, unlike just advancing in an academic or business career might.
My point is that yes, I would agree that many young women are really failing these days to approach life in a practical way that has much connection to reality. The constant putting off of marriage and having children, just a few more years, on and on, with little grasp, until too late, that the grace to have children is heavily weighted toward their 20s.
Again, this is a gross generalization, and I know there are many pretty great young Christian women who are just as frustrated, trying to find a mate, as the men are. But I think, on average, more men are now closer to the right mindset about this than women. This may not have been the case a couple decades ago, and it does likely represent a significant change in American society.
I do feel a considerable sympathy to the many young men, especially, who are struggling to navigate this difficult and perhaps even failed "market", as you put it. I raised nine children, including six sons, now all adults, so it has not been a merely theoretical concern of mine. Dating, courtship, whatever you want to call it, is certainly much harder in so many ways than it was a generation or two ago. I don't mean in any way to make light of the challenge.
Marrying late hurts the women and helps the men. In the end, though, it hurts everyone if you want to avoid national population collapse. Marry early, and as the Russian saying goes:
"How do you become the wife of a general? Marry a lieutenant."
When a woman's peak value is age 20-25, and a man's is age 33-38, this is sound advice. It's also sound advice to consider more separation in a couple's ages. Really "well-matched" might look more like 22F/ 35M.
I have a hard time imagining being 35 (many years older than I am now) and choosing to marry a 22-year-old woman. That sounds more like having a firstborn child than a spouse, with all the immaturity and idiocy that goes along with that.
I can see the shift. On the other side, I'd place these observations:
1) For many hundreds of years, "married mother at 22" has been utterly unremarkable. They can handle it. Some have been trained not to. Avoid those anyway, for other good and valid reasons.
2) Young women are always going on about how men their age aren't mature. At 35, you'd be about the age that trope slows way down.
3) In some respects, what you describe never really goes away. Note how Alphas treat women. In fairness, I've heard more than a few women say the same.
I’m thinking more that if I were that much older, I’d be a lot less patient with immaturity than if I were around the same age and thus in a similar place mentally, socially, and psychologically.
"For a lot of men, porn has done serious damage. It’s rewired their expectations. Makes them think they deserve a certain type of woman—usually one they’d never talk to in real life."
From my view porn makes men scared of women. They idolize the sexuality, and are intimidated by it.
If I could tell my 18-year-old self in the past one thing, it would be not to overestimate the supply of eligible women. Pick one from the ones available, rather than embarking on a lifelong quest to find one who meets my high standards. The same applies to young women looking for a spouse. The pool is a lot smaller than it seems.
I wouldn't put it quite that way. As long as one has not set impossible criteria, the pool of eligible spouses is not small, in total. But there are a couple of factors in play that throw people off. First, the number of prospects in a given size group is a lot less than people suspect.
For instance, my high school had a graduating class of 600, so about 1,800 people in that school in any given year. So even in just my class, 300 girls, and nearly a thousand were there long enough for me to have possibly bumped into them at some point. Still, I didn't find anyone I liked that much.
In college, the numbers are perhaps an order of magnitude bigger, big enough for maybe a quarter of folks who attend to find someone. That suggests one good potential mate in a pool of 10-20 thousand women (or men), which is a lot bigger number than most people think. Even in one's early 20s in a pool of folks that age, you need 20-50 thousand prospects to get those odds up close to one.
Don't lower moral standards, but be as open as possible to new opportunities and connections, new geographic areas, etc. And if using an app, set the geographical range very wide, which apparently no one wants to do.
The second factor of course is these numbers dwindle rapidly after 25, as people pair off, marry and remove themselves from the pool. And it's far harder to meet eligible prospects in most work environments.
The Smallest Change That Changed Everything for Me
People love big reinventions, but honestly, most of my progress came from one tiny shift: I started using my phone’s calendar for everything.
The twist isn’t just that I went digital. It’s that I took the time—no matter how small or random the task—to put appointments in one at a time. Coffee with a friend? Calendar. Dog’s vet checkup? Calendar. Even blocking out time to just breathe or go for a walk: Calendar.
It didn’t feel groundbreaking, but it slowly added up. Suddenly, I wasn’t missing calls or scrambling at the last second. The noise in my head started to quiet. Little by little, putting things in the calendar turned into having space to actually show up for my own life.
So, I’m curious: What’s the smallest thing you started doing that made a real difference? Maybe it was a habit, maybe just a way of seeing the world a little differently.
Share yours! Let’s see how much those baby steps add up—together.
(And if you like stories and conversations about real, practical progress, stick around and subscribe! The main content here is always free, with paid deep dives if you’re ever in the mood to go further.)
So many guys wanting a supermodel when if you look at them, and want the best for them, they should marry the plump cheerful women who makes the best casseroles at church.
I disagree - it is the young women who are limiting or eliminating sexual or relationship access to the average and below average young man. It is not because young men are somehow satisfied by porn, they are not, as they too yearn for a real relationship. Nor is it that young men somehow convince themselves they deserve a supermodel, they can discern the difference between a porn video and a dating experience (unlike women it appears with regards to online dating and long-term genuine commitment potential).
If anything, rates of loneliness are so high for young men that are they absolutely desperate for something more than brief sexual access to a stranger.
There has been a complete market failure, and it is not a balanced contribution to that from the sexes, it's mostly a failure on one side of the supply/demand curve.
I have see many many young men completely disregard women that were into them, who were thin and healthy but not classically beautiful. Then, let’s not even talk about the plump women, no interest at all. So no, the plump overweight man or the non classically handsome man is indeed waiting for their ten supermodel.
I am in hard disagreement here. This is completely contrary to all available empirical data, both past and current, in not only this subfield but the entire field of male and female intimate relationships.
Aside from this, a starkly obvious rebuttal to your anecdotal claim is... have you HONESTLY seen "many many" young women approach young men? What country do you live in? Further, how many young men who are average* or below average relative to their peers, get approached, EVER?
I'm a 29 year old male, and have had a lot of male friends across the entire spectrum of looks, status, socioeconomic class, education level... and I can count on one hand how many of us have ever* been approached, regardless of environment or the young woman in question.
Okay, how do I say this. Women who are interested hover? They wait for an approach, they ask you about your hobbies and initiate conversation. Other women almost always know when other women are interested. They make themselves available for approach? Direct asking out is rare, because women sense that if a man doesn’t like a woman enough to risk rejection he will not like her enough to marry her.
I always hear about the couple that flipped the script and the woman asked on the internet. But in meatspace I collect how we met stories from old couples who have never been divorced. You know the kind where they grin at each other like teens in love still. And the man always starts with something to the effect of ‘I saw her across the room and I knew she was the one’. Then it proceeds to him asking her out.
These men frequently had women who were fit, sweet, and chaste hovering. And ignored them.
Dude are you kidding. There’s a lot of plapjak bro’s out there with no hesitation of dating fat women. It’s the mid/overweight women with the ridiculous standards.
Great article, but I think a really important caveat needs to be made here.
There are very very few males on this planet who believe they need or deserve a wife who looks like a pornstar. It is the female sex who determine and create these "leagues", as they are the ones who select based on status, not men. Women even generally are far more selective than men, with far stricter standards and requirements when it comes to looks (contrary to what mainstream opinion would tell you). These differences in selectivity are unequivocally evidenced by the reproductive rates over the entire evolutionary history of our species; (40% men reproducing vs. 80% women reproducing), and modern day studies that show men find most women to be "attractive", whereas women find the overwhelming majority of men to be "unattractive". Online dating swipe statistics are merely the natural representation of the behaviour of what we see in real life; monogamy is not "natural" to our species (nor most primates, mammals, or animals at large). Polygyny is natural, with the female sex doing the majority of the legwork to instantiate this, and we've merely just socially placed monogamy as higher status for the benefit towards child rearing and society.
As soon as we've removed this cultural veneer, by becoming secular, reducing the sacredness of the institution of marriage, introduced no fault divorce, promoted radical feminism... we see nature screaming back.
I mourn the loss of marriage, lifelong monogamy, the sacredness of relationships. It is going to be absolutely devastating for our species, as demonstrated by the catastrophic reproductive rates being below replacement in every single developed country on the planet.
Not going to address everything in your post, but please try and remember that it is men who propose. Until someone studies how many long term relationships are ended not in a proposal, we don’t really have a good picture of who women are actively committing to. Most women have been in several long term relationships and would have said yes to those men. That’s not statistically insignificant.
Why men aren’t proposing and relationships drag on so long as to end, is more economic than anything else, but no one wants to have that discussion because it’s not sensational.
Solid post. I remember that phenomenon in my own high school in the 1990s. I remember thinking that, "Wow, unlike in middle school, here there's somebody for everybody."
Very timely!! Porn is one of the plagues of modern time. The book of Proverbs alone is so powerful, finding the right mate in life and staying on the difficult narrow path. Not easy but much preferable to empty and shallow.
i think the lost art of humility is a big player here. people were able to pair up with an equal because the social hierarchy wasn’t presently in their face 24/7/365. the performance that is social media means attention which often gets confused with care which gets confused with love which lights up a life and it pushes everyone to strive to achieve the safest position on the hierarchy; couple that with fear-mongering and doomsday egregores from a myriad of modern day problems and you get the soup of misanthropy that fuels the many vacuous relationships of today.
I will say that the delusion belongs primarily to women. Sure, there’s a few guys with ridiculous standards, but that’s not the norm. These days your average and even below average underwhelming woman believes she’s entitled to a 6 foot 5 Gigachad billionaire CEO. Thank cancerous Instagram for fueling and promoting this delusion.
Totally thought of Sam and Gilly on “Game of Thrones”. They were absolutely adorable. My most recent ex-boyfriend *hates* both these characters so much. I never understood why they sparked so much animosity from him
I think this is somewhat inevitable, as people wait longer and longer to pair up, or at least to commit. Proverbs 5:18 ("Let your fountain be blessed, And rejoice in the wife of your youth.") certainly deserves more attention.
My wife and I started going together at 17, senior year of high school. There's no substitute for that sort of history. We've been through so many struggles together, it builds a sort of confidence and appreciation and stability that's invaluable.
There's been a lot written recently about young women getting conned by dating apps into thinking they can get a husband way out of their league, because they don't understand the difference between a guy sleeping with them, and a guy committing to them. But I think young men, through porn and other influences, are themselves too often chasing the sizzle, rather than the steak, having failed to discern the difference. Then they wonder why they're never satisfied.
This brings to mind a story told me long ago by a 30-something engineer, who said he had had two girlfriends, one of whom was quite fun, but the other was far more responsible. He had decided to marry the responsible one, and after several years he was quite happy and wanted to tell me that story, I think because he had finally concluded he made the right decision. Guys don't need to marry the flashiest girl, who will wow all their friends, but one who is well-suited to them, responsible, and will make a good mother.
I disagree - it is the young women who are limiting or eliminating sexual or relationship access to the average and below average young man. It is not because young men are somehow satisfied by porn, they are not, as they too yearn for a real relationship. Nor is it that young men somehow convince themselves they deserve a supermodel, they can discern the difference between a porn video and a dating experience (unlike women it appears with regards to online dating and long-term genuine commitment potential).
If anything, rates of loneliness are so high for young men that are they absolutely desperate for something more than brief sexual access to a stranger.
There has been a complete market failure, and it is not a balanced contribution to that from the sexes, it's mostly a failure on one side of the supply/demand curve.
There are two sides to this "market", the men and the women, and it's my view that whenever there's a problem, it's a pretty good bet that each party is at least partly at fault.
Having said that, I am inclined to agree with your basic premise, if I understand it correctly, that women (on average) are much more out of touch with reality than men (on average) these days. Of course, this is a gross generalization, but we do see evidence of it not only in many of the recent studies about women's use of dating apps (as I noted), but more generally in the stunning bifurcation of young men and women currently, as men trend at least somewhat more conservative, and women continue to veer toward liberal extremes.
I do think the recent books on toxic empathy by Joe Rigney and Allie Beth Stuckey are pointing toward a considerable part of the problem. We can't love the whole world very well, it becomes a performative stunt at the extreme, but we can love our own family and the people around us, but that requires some backbone and perserverance, because it's not always easy. Loving real people in real life is not always going to result in everyone smiling at you, unlike just advancing in an academic or business career might.
My point is that yes, I would agree that many young women are really failing these days to approach life in a practical way that has much connection to reality. The constant putting off of marriage and having children, just a few more years, on and on, with little grasp, until too late, that the grace to have children is heavily weighted toward their 20s.
Again, this is a gross generalization, and I know there are many pretty great young Christian women who are just as frustrated, trying to find a mate, as the men are. But I think, on average, more men are now closer to the right mindset about this than women. This may not have been the case a couple decades ago, and it does likely represent a significant change in American society.
I do feel a considerable sympathy to the many young men, especially, who are struggling to navigate this difficult and perhaps even failed "market", as you put it. I raised nine children, including six sons, now all adults, so it has not been a merely theoretical concern of mine. Dating, courtship, whatever you want to call it, is certainly much harder in so many ways than it was a generation or two ago. I don't mean in any way to make light of the challenge.
Marrying late hurts the women and helps the men. In the end, though, it hurts everyone if you want to avoid national population collapse. Marry early, and as the Russian saying goes:
"How do you become the wife of a general? Marry a lieutenant."
When a woman's peak value is age 20-25, and a man's is age 33-38, this is sound advice. It's also sound advice to consider more separation in a couple's ages. Really "well-matched" might look more like 22F/ 35M.
I have a hard time imagining being 35 (many years older than I am now) and choosing to marry a 22-year-old woman. That sounds more like having a firstborn child than a spouse, with all the immaturity and idiocy that goes along with that.
I can see the shift. On the other side, I'd place these observations:
1) For many hundreds of years, "married mother at 22" has been utterly unremarkable. They can handle it. Some have been trained not to. Avoid those anyway, for other good and valid reasons.
2) Young women are always going on about how men their age aren't mature. At 35, you'd be about the age that trope slows way down.
3) In some respects, what you describe never really goes away. Note how Alphas treat women. In fairness, I've heard more than a few women say the same.
I’m thinking more that if I were that much older, I’d be a lot less patient with immaturity than if I were around the same age and thus in a similar place mentally, socially, and psychologically.
My experience has been that patience grows. How else can you become the stabilizing force that you increasingly need to be?
At the same time, tolerance of truly harmful stuff wanes, and real boundaries go up faster.
"For a lot of men, porn has done serious damage. It’s rewired their expectations. Makes them think they deserve a certain type of woman—usually one they’d never talk to in real life."
From my view porn makes men scared of women. They idolize the sexuality, and are intimidated by it.
If I could tell my 18-year-old self in the past one thing, it would be not to overestimate the supply of eligible women. Pick one from the ones available, rather than embarking on a lifelong quest to find one who meets my high standards. The same applies to young women looking for a spouse. The pool is a lot smaller than it seems.
I wouldn't put it quite that way. As long as one has not set impossible criteria, the pool of eligible spouses is not small, in total. But there are a couple of factors in play that throw people off. First, the number of prospects in a given size group is a lot less than people suspect.
For instance, my high school had a graduating class of 600, so about 1,800 people in that school in any given year. So even in just my class, 300 girls, and nearly a thousand were there long enough for me to have possibly bumped into them at some point. Still, I didn't find anyone I liked that much.
In college, the numbers are perhaps an order of magnitude bigger, big enough for maybe a quarter of folks who attend to find someone. That suggests one good potential mate in a pool of 10-20 thousand women (or men), which is a lot bigger number than most people think. Even in one's early 20s in a pool of folks that age, you need 20-50 thousand prospects to get those odds up close to one.
Don't lower moral standards, but be as open as possible to new opportunities and connections, new geographic areas, etc. And if using an app, set the geographical range very wide, which apparently no one wants to do.
The second factor of course is these numbers dwindle rapidly after 25, as people pair off, marry and remove themselves from the pool. And it's far harder to meet eligible prospects in most work environments.
The Smallest Change That Changed Everything for Me
People love big reinventions, but honestly, most of my progress came from one tiny shift: I started using my phone’s calendar for everything.
The twist isn’t just that I went digital. It’s that I took the time—no matter how small or random the task—to put appointments in one at a time. Coffee with a friend? Calendar. Dog’s vet checkup? Calendar. Even blocking out time to just breathe or go for a walk: Calendar.
It didn’t feel groundbreaking, but it slowly added up. Suddenly, I wasn’t missing calls or scrambling at the last second. The noise in my head started to quiet. Little by little, putting things in the calendar turned into having space to actually show up for my own life.
So, I’m curious: What’s the smallest thing you started doing that made a real difference? Maybe it was a habit, maybe just a way of seeing the world a little differently.
Share yours! Let’s see how much those baby steps add up—together.
(And if you like stories and conversations about real, practical progress, stick around and subscribe! The main content here is always free, with paid deep dives if you’re ever in the mood to go further.)
So many guys wanting a supermodel when if you look at them, and want the best for them, they should marry the plump cheerful women who makes the best casseroles at church.
I disagree - it is the young women who are limiting or eliminating sexual or relationship access to the average and below average young man. It is not because young men are somehow satisfied by porn, they are not, as they too yearn for a real relationship. Nor is it that young men somehow convince themselves they deserve a supermodel, they can discern the difference between a porn video and a dating experience (unlike women it appears with regards to online dating and long-term genuine commitment potential).
If anything, rates of loneliness are so high for young men that are they absolutely desperate for something more than brief sexual access to a stranger.
There has been a complete market failure, and it is not a balanced contribution to that from the sexes, it's mostly a failure on one side of the supply/demand curve.
I have see many many young men completely disregard women that were into them, who were thin and healthy but not classically beautiful. Then, let’s not even talk about the plump women, no interest at all. So no, the plump overweight man or the non classically handsome man is indeed waiting for their ten supermodel.
I am in hard disagreement here. This is completely contrary to all available empirical data, both past and current, in not only this subfield but the entire field of male and female intimate relationships.
Aside from this, a starkly obvious rebuttal to your anecdotal claim is... have you HONESTLY seen "many many" young women approach young men? What country do you live in? Further, how many young men who are average* or below average relative to their peers, get approached, EVER?
I'm a 29 year old male, and have had a lot of male friends across the entire spectrum of looks, status, socioeconomic class, education level... and I can count on one hand how many of us have ever* been approached, regardless of environment or the young woman in question.
Okay, how do I say this. Women who are interested hover? They wait for an approach, they ask you about your hobbies and initiate conversation. Other women almost always know when other women are interested. They make themselves available for approach? Direct asking out is rare, because women sense that if a man doesn’t like a woman enough to risk rejection he will not like her enough to marry her.
I always hear about the couple that flipped the script and the woman asked on the internet. But in meatspace I collect how we met stories from old couples who have never been divorced. You know the kind where they grin at each other like teens in love still. And the man always starts with something to the effect of ‘I saw her across the room and I knew she was the one’. Then it proceeds to him asking her out.
These men frequently had women who were fit, sweet, and chaste hovering. And ignored them.
This was in Christian young adult groups. Typically post college young men.
Dude are you kidding. There’s a lot of plapjak bro’s out there with no hesitation of dating fat women. It’s the mid/overweight women with the ridiculous standards.
Great article, but I think a really important caveat needs to be made here.
There are very very few males on this planet who believe they need or deserve a wife who looks like a pornstar. It is the female sex who determine and create these "leagues", as they are the ones who select based on status, not men. Women even generally are far more selective than men, with far stricter standards and requirements when it comes to looks (contrary to what mainstream opinion would tell you). These differences in selectivity are unequivocally evidenced by the reproductive rates over the entire evolutionary history of our species; (40% men reproducing vs. 80% women reproducing), and modern day studies that show men find most women to be "attractive", whereas women find the overwhelming majority of men to be "unattractive". Online dating swipe statistics are merely the natural representation of the behaviour of what we see in real life; monogamy is not "natural" to our species (nor most primates, mammals, or animals at large). Polygyny is natural, with the female sex doing the majority of the legwork to instantiate this, and we've merely just socially placed monogamy as higher status for the benefit towards child rearing and society.
As soon as we've removed this cultural veneer, by becoming secular, reducing the sacredness of the institution of marriage, introduced no fault divorce, promoted radical feminism... we see nature screaming back.
I mourn the loss of marriage, lifelong monogamy, the sacredness of relationships. It is going to be absolutely devastating for our species, as demonstrated by the catastrophic reproductive rates being below replacement in every single developed country on the planet.
Not going to address everything in your post, but please try and remember that it is men who propose. Until someone studies how many long term relationships are ended not in a proposal, we don’t really have a good picture of who women are actively committing to. Most women have been in several long term relationships and would have said yes to those men. That’s not statistically insignificant.
Why men aren’t proposing and relationships drag on so long as to end, is more economic than anything else, but no one wants to have that discussion because it’s not sensational.
Solid post. I remember that phenomenon in my own high school in the 1990s. I remember thinking that, "Wow, unlike in middle school, here there's somebody for everybody."
Very timely!! Porn is one of the plagues of modern time. The book of Proverbs alone is so powerful, finding the right mate in life and staying on the difficult narrow path. Not easy but much preferable to empty and shallow.
i think the lost art of humility is a big player here. people were able to pair up with an equal because the social hierarchy wasn’t presently in their face 24/7/365. the performance that is social media means attention which often gets confused with care which gets confused with love which lights up a life and it pushes everyone to strive to achieve the safest position on the hierarchy; couple that with fear-mongering and doomsday egregores from a myriad of modern day problems and you get the soup of misanthropy that fuels the many vacuous relationships of today.
I will say that the delusion belongs primarily to women. Sure, there’s a few guys with ridiculous standards, but that’s not the norm. These days your average and even below average underwhelming woman believes she’s entitled to a 6 foot 5 Gigachad billionaire CEO. Thank cancerous Instagram for fueling and promoting this delusion.
Totally thought of Sam and Gilly on “Game of Thrones”. They were absolutely adorable. My most recent ex-boyfriend *hates* both these characters so much. I never understood why they sparked so much animosity from him
thank you so writing this post. I have been thinking the same thing.
Amen Michael.
I know the truth of this post by direct experience.