The Dating Crisis

All right, team, welcome to the mantalks show. I am Connor Beaton, and today we're going to be talking about the mating crisis. We're going to be talking about what the hell is happening in modern dating. There's some very interesting research that we're going to talk about that's coming out that is showing a real discrepancy for young men in modern dating and also for women. And I get asked a lot to comment about relationships and dynamics, but sometimes it's good to go into the research, the science behind it. And so today I'm going to read you a piece by the professor of psychology at the University of Texas, Austin, and author of When Men Behave Badly, which is actually quite a good book, David M. Buss. And the title of this is called the Mating Crisis among Educated Women. I thought that this was interesting because in some ways it talks about the crisis that we are facing in terms of less men graduating from university than ever before. You know, there's some research that came out recently that showed that men only make up roughly 40.5% of college students in North America and that universities have reported a decline over the past couple years. Over the past several years, but specifically last year of over 1.5 million less applicants, less students in America, specifically. And of those 1.5 million less students, it was predominantly men. It was 71% men. So less men are going to college, less men are getting college degrees. And there's a number of reasons for that that we could talk about, but the implications of that are that less men are within that sort of dating pool where they would normally meet women. And according to some Pew research that came out recently, 51% of men between the ages of 18 and 29 are single, compared to 32% of women between ages 18 and 29 that are single. So very interesting. So there's a. There's a big sort of shift that's happening within modern culture, and there's a number of reasons for this, and we're going to dive into it. But I thought I would read you this article by David Buss because it's brief, but I think it's quite telling in terms of the sort of seismic shift that's happening socially within the dating scene. So here it is. The question that was asked was, what do you consider the most interesting recent scientific news? What makes it important? And this was a question posed back in 2016, and this article that David Buss wrote in 2016, again called the Mating Crisis among Educated Women. So here we go. Every year, more women than men become college educated. The disparity is almost prevalent across North America and Europe, and the trend is beginning to spread across the world more widely. At the University of Texas in Austin, where I teach, the sex ratio is 54% women to 46% men. Again, this is back in 2016. I would imagine if we check today, it's probably grown since then. This imbalance may not seem large at first blush, but when you do the math, it translates to a hefty 17% more women than men in the local mating pool. Speculations about reasons range widely. They include the gradual removal of gender discrimination barriers and women's higher levels of conscientiousness relative to men's that translate into better grades and superior college app qualifications. Whether cases turn out to be Whatever the cases turn out to be, the disparity is creating a dramatic an unintended mating crisis among educated women. Now, he poses it from the perspective of women, but as we're going to see, he actually talks about what's going on with men. And that's why I wanted to read this article. And then I also want to share a few thoughts on what I've noticed in working with men over the number of years. So he continues on, and he says we must look deeply into our meeting psychology to understand the far reaching consequences of the sex ratio imbalance. Women and men both have evolved multiple mating strategies, and this is interesting. Some of each gender pursue casual hookups, some committed partnerships, some alternate at different times of their life between committed partnerships and casual hookups, and some do both simultaneously. And although a few social scientists deny the data, research overwhelmingly shows that men harbor, on average, a greater desire for sexual partner variety. So on average, men are more likely to want a different variety of sexual partners, whether that's through casual hookups or dating or whatever it may be. He goes on to say, men experience more frequent sexual thoughts per day, have more sexual fantasies involving multiple partners, and more readily sign up for online dating sites for the goal of achieving casual sex. Again, this is all research based. This isn't fabricated. This isn't what we think men are or how men supposedly act. This is research backed over a number of years. And David Buss is, by the way, like, considered one of the fathers of evolutionary psychology. I mean, this man is no slouch when it comes to the educational field. So here we go. We're going to keep going. So he says a surplus of women among educated groups caters precisely to this dimension of men's sexual desires because the rarer gender is always better positioned to get what they want on the mating market. So the rarer gender, so the person, the gender that is.

Least prominent. So if you think about a university right now, and that university has much more women than it does men, which hasn't always been the case, right? Predominantly there has been more men within university institutions than there has been women. So what he's saying is that men have suddenly become the rare gender, which means that their mating preferences now become the dominant form within that environment. And we're going to talk about this more in a minute. He goes on to say, in places like large cities in China, with their surplus of men, women can better fulfill their desires, while many men remain frustrated and mateless. Context matters. For every surplus of women in places like Manhattan, there exist pockets where men outnumber the women, such as schools of engineering or the software companies of Silicon Valley. But when there are not enough men to go around, women predictably intensify their sexual competition. The rise of the hookup cultures on college campuses and online dating sites like Tinder, Adult Friend Finder, and Ashley Madison's is no consequence. So what he's saying is that as women enter in these spaces where there are fewer men to select from, fewer men to choose from, they're sort of forced into men's male selection, male mating preferences, which, as he talked about earlier on, is that men predominantly want to have a variety. When you look at some of the data that's out there around men's selection preferences, we tend to prioritize casual hookups more than women, just on average, because for the most part, women are looking for, depending on what stage of their life they're in, Women are generally looking for a long term relationship, a more secure relationship, and they might go through, you know, phases of casual hookups or not really looking for a relationship. But for the, for the most part, it is predominantly women looking for committed long term relationships and men looking for a greater variety in terms of partners. Okay, let's keep going. He says gender differences in sexual psychology are only part of the problem. Additional elements of the mating mind exacerbate the problem. A key cause stems from the qualities women seek in committed mateship. Now, I think this is quite important. And ladies, if you're watching this or listening to this, you can comment as to whether you agree with this or not. And guys, you can do the same thing. Have you found this to be true? He says most women are unwilling to settle for men who are less educated, less intelligent, and less professionally successful than they Are the flip side is that men are less exacting on precisely these dimensions, choosing to prioritize, for better or for worse, other evolved criteria, such as youth and appearance. So the initial sex ratio imbalance among educated groups gets worse for high achieving women. And I've seen quite a lot of this throughout my work. I mean, through social media, I get questions all the time from women, you know, asking me about how to be in a relationship with a man that she's more successful with, or, you know, the challenges that she's had finding a man that is equally as successful as her financially. So this brings up a very real challenge. So, you know, really what he's saying is that again, just to go back and reiterate this, most women are unwilling to settle for men who are less educated, less intelligent, and less professionally successful than they are. Right? So if you have predominantly less men graduating from college, less men that are educated, less intelligent men, less successful men financially, then the selection pool that women have to go off of is increasingly shrinking, right? There are increasingly less men that sort of fit the criteria that they are ultimately looking for. And what this means, based on what he's saying, and I don't even know if it's how I'm interpreting it, but based on how he's saying it, is that then it shifts into men's mating selections. So then it's about what men are looking for. Let's keep going. The depletion of educated men worsens when we add the impact of age and divorce to the mating matrix. As men age, they desire women who are increasingly younger than they are. Intelligent, educated women go for a less accomplished partner, for a casual fling. But for a committed partner, they typically want mates their own age or a few years older and at least as educated and career driven. Since education takes time, the sex ratio imbalance gets especially skewed among the higher educated. Those who seek advanced degrees to become doctors, lawyers or professors, or who climb the corporate ladder post mba. And because men are more likely than women to remarry following divorce, which actually I found quite interesting. And to marry women increasingly younger than they are, three years at first marriage, five at second, eight years younger at third, the gender bias mating ratio skews more sharply with increasing age. So this goes back to what I was talking about before, right? This stat that according to Pew Research, 51% of men between the ages of 18 and 29 are single compared to the 32%. So what the hell's happening there? How does that work? Well, a number of reasons. What this is pointing out is that women have more proclivity to dating older men. So women between 18 and 29, right, they might be 26, 27 years old, and they might be dating a man in their 30s or, you know, mid-30s, late-30s, 40s, whatever, whatever it is. And so men generally don't do that, right? You don't see many 18, 19, 20 year olds dating women in their 30s because generally women in their 30s are not looking for long term relationships with men that are in their early 20s. They might sleep with him, they might have sex with them, they might hook up with them, they might even hook up with him ongoing. Right? There's good reasons for that that we could, that we could talk about. But for the most part, that gap is happening because women are even between 18 and 29, looking for men that have that education, have that intelligence, have that success, and they are having a smaller pool to go by. So a lot of these women are either dating older men or they are in a relationship with a man who is dating multiple women, right? So all of a sudden, the guys that are successful, that are intelligent, that are sort of the pick of what women want, these men now have an abundance of women that they can choose from and they might be dating multiple women all, all at the same time. So we're almost done here and then we're going to wrap up with some thoughts. He goes on to say, different women react in different ways to the mating crisis. Some use sexual tactics to ramp up their competition for men. They dress more provocatively, send more sexually explicit texts, Consent to sex sooner, and hope that things turn into something more than a brief encounter. So sort of using sex as a doorway into hopefully a long term relationship. He says some women opt out of the mating game by choice because they are unwilling to compromise their careers in the service of mating. Although some progress has been made in it is still true that women suffer disproportionately from compromises between career and family. And some women hold out for an even smaller pool of men who are single, educated and emotionally stable, who are not sexual players, and who can engage their intellect, sense of humor, emotional complexities and sensual passions for more than just a night. Hmm, I can probably agree with that. I see a lot of. I just put a Q and A up yesterday and one of the things that I see a lot of women asking me is, where are the emotionally intelligent men? How do I meet men doing the work? How do I meet successful men that are doing the inner work? And so that's a big Sort of drive and desire. So he says the good news for those who succeed is that marriages among the educated tend to be more stable. They tend to be freer of conflict, less plagued by infidelity, and less likely to end in divorce. Interesting. Educated couples enjoy a higher standard of living. As dual professional incomes catapult them into the more affluent tiers of the economic strata. They suffer less financial stress than their less educated counterparts. And assortive coupling on education level does have an unintended downside. It's a major contributor to economic inequality in the larger society, widening the gap, the haves and haves nots. So he's just kind of going into the economic status right now with couples, et cetera. And he goes on to say, what are the potential. And this is the final piece. What are the potential solutions to the mating pool shortage for educated women adjust their mating preferences, expand the range of men they are willing to consider as mates. Mating psychology may not be that malleable. The same mating desires responsible for the skewed gender imbalance to begin with with continue to create unfortunate obstacles to human happiness. This is how he closes it. As successful women overcome barriers in the workplace, they encounter new dilemmas in the mating market. Huh? So lots of interesting stuff, right? Lots of interesting stuff in terms of women's mating preferences and mating desires, men's mating preferences and desires, and some of the challenges.

That most of us face. And so I kind of gave my thoughts throughout this, and I'm going to close off by just speaking directly to men.

I think it's important that we remember that your purpose, your direction, what it is that you want in your life is incredibly important. I've been saying this for years. Create direction in your life. Your direction is the aims that you have in life, your goals, what you're doing for your career, what you're building, what you're creating externally, how you're developing yourself, your direction for yourself within your health, within your finances. And when you focus on those things, you begin to manifest a sense of purpose, right? If you are using some gifts, if you are using your talents as you do so, you will begin to develop your value as a man. And what really stands out to this is that what really stands out to me about this article and about the work that he's putting out is what he's saying is there are less men of value that women are really looking for. So as less men graduate from college, as men earn less, as men are looking for more, more opportunities, the men who are still pursuing some of Those endeavors in terms of higher education, in terms of building their own business, in terms of dedicating themselves to continually learning, right? You don't have to go to university in order to get an education. I mean, there's other ways to do it, right? You can mentor with somebody. Apprenticeship still is a very real thing that I think a lot of men have hopefully are starting to revert to or are moving towards. Right? You can mentor an apprentice with other men and learn some valuable trades and skills. But the essence of this is that if you want to be successful as a man within the dating pool, within the mating space, you need to develop and prioritize building your value as a man. And that is the attraction point, right? Whether that value is your intelligence, your degrees and your education, the title that you hold within your profession, the monetary amount that you have within your bank, how you look, how you behave, how you act, right? All of those things are incredibly important. So it really is about how you begin to choose how you want to be as a man in the world, how you begin to develop your own worth, your own value, independent of what it is that you think that women want, right? Because I see a lot of young men running around scrambling, trying to figure out, what do women want, what do women want, what do women want? And then trying to adjust their life accordingly, right? Planning out their life to be successful in some way. For women, which actually isn't very rewarding, there's that piece. And the other piece is for the men that are out there that maybe feel lost, right? They hear this and they're like feeling 51% of men are single between 18 and 29. I mean, that's insane. And I think in some ways, and this is a bit of a different conversation that I'll say for a different time, it's dangerous. If you don't have men going to college, if you don't have men that are in the dating pool, that are vying for mating position, what the hell are they doing, right? What are they doing in society? What's occupying their time, their energy, their focus, within the hours of the days of the weeks, of the months of the years, right? So suddenly you have a large pool of men who aren't going to college or university, who aren't dating that women don't want to be in relationships with. Those men become social outcasts. And in some ways, that's a big threat, I would say, to society for a number of reasons, because those men then get conscripted into more extreme ideologies which are very easy to access in today's world. So for all the young men that are out there, I would say prioritize finding groups where you can find mentorship, where you can develop yourself into a man of value, where you can develop your own worth. That is going to be likely one of the best mating strategies that you can adopt. It's not swiping through Tinder endlessly for hours a day. Right. A lot of the Tinder data shows that it is developing value within yourself so that you have intelligence, that you have confidence, that you have your own version of success, and that those things become the magnetic pull that women are attracted to. So let me know what your thoughts are on this video. It's a little bit longer than normal. If you're watching on YouTube or if you are tuning in on the podcast, I would love to hear what you have to say, what you would add to this, what really stood out to you, and any other topic or offshoot from this conversation that you would like to hear more of. So until next week, this is Connor Beaton signing off.