I don't know if this alone explains your observations. The reason is that dating "markets" seem to be pretty segregated by class and subculture.
There may be more men than women overall, but there are more educated professional women than educated professional men (at least among under-40 people), and most educated professionals want to date within their class. So I wouldn't expect much of an imbalance in that group.
But on the flip side, certain subcultures have skewed gender ratios. You describe yourself as mathy and post-rat, so I suspect your circles tend to be nerdy (correct me if I'm wrong). It's well known that nerdy circles skew male, and so nerdy men either have to get lucky and meet a nerd girl who's into them, or do a lot of self-improvement to make themselves more appealing to comparatively less nerdy women. I suspect that more than overall demographics explains your observations.
You’re right that different groups have different skews, and that people tend to prefer dating in their group, AND that this would cause different cultural dynamics in the different groups. 100%. I do think there is a larger ‘people trying to date’ cultural group though. You could consider the other subcultures forming a partition of this culture. And the demographics of the ur-group still has some implications for norms (like, on hinge) My goal with this was to resolve my own confusion between (“there’s the same amount of men and women in the dating pool”, “men are having harder times getting paired. by a lot, anecdotally”)
Oh look a topic I have real world experience in! The shidduch crisis is especially fascinating because much of the coupling is influenced only late in the game by the primaries. When your whole community is trying to pair you off based purely on their perception of you, it can lead to a highly complex set of behaviors and subtext. How to signal your unique niche and interests without losing your market value. How to navigate complex values in outwardly stringent criteria. And my personal favorite how to make a life when your partner isn't who you first thought but you love them anyway. ❤️
i read your previous post on this and i was very happy to see such a levelheaded and judgement-free analysis of the situation! i was also very dismayed to scroll down to the comments and see some very rude people with a lot of pent up anger.
ive thought about this a lot myself, and i agree with you that there’s a false dichotomy between women, who supposedly do nothing but wait, and men, who supposedly have to spend months approaching random women, asking for dates.
in my experience (yeah ive had sex how could you tell?), womens “yin” can be super aggressive. i would honestly go so far as to say that neither party really has to be “aggressive”, and its much more about being socially intelligent enough to provide the other person opportunities to take things a step further, and signaling that you would be happy to go there. both the male and female side have culturally acceptable ways to do this.
my main difficulty in thinking through this, and maybe you relate to this, is that i have a very difficult time understanding the dating problems faced by “the average person” because i’m not exactly the average person. ive never had any problem finding people to date, and im not rich, not conventionally attractive (asian male), and my only exercise is going on daily walks. hearing male (and female!) influencers talking about dating is like seeing a parallel universe.
anyway i really just came here to thank you for your well thought out post! i hope to see more of them :)
I am flabbergasted by this post. It's appropriate that it ends with "no evopsych required" because reading it feels eerily similar to reading evopsych. It takes a (true) observation, then builds a whole conceptual edifice to explain it, based on pure speculation.
The main premise makes no sense. Assuming that women are in more demand than men (questionable, but I'll get to that), why would that imply that they shouldn't take an active role in seeking out the men they want to date? It's true that the more in-demand party doesn't need to seek out partners. Partner will come to them. But they won't be the highest-quality partners!
While there is less demand for men as a class than women, high-quality men are in great demand. Use whatever criteria you want, but as soon as you add in any filtering at all (e.g. education, intelligence, conscientiousness, EQ, fitness, facial features, etc.) , there aren't enough of them to go around. So if your theory was correct, those men, being high in demand, would passively sit back and allow women to approach them. Your theory predicts that the higher quality and in-demand a man is, the more passive he will be. Does this match your observations of the world?
Dating can often be analogized to employment matching. It's not a prefect analogy, but there is a similar dynamic at play. There tend to be more available workers than jobs, so most employers take a passive (yin) role. They'll post the job opening on a job board and wait for the applications to roll in. But the employers who need the best employees don't do that. They hire headhunters to go out and find the best employees, and approach them to ask if they're interested in a career change. They go to colleges and professional schools to actively find the most promising students. Mark Zuckerberg is out there offering unsolicited 9-figure deals to top AI researchers because he doesn't want the average employee. He wants the best, so he affirmatively seeks them out and makes an offer.
Dating works the same way. Even if your math checked out, by being passive, a women would be able to get a boyfriend or a husband, but it wouldn't be a top quality one. If you want the best partner, you have to be active about it.
Beyond that, your theory's main flaw is that it uses national data when dating pools tend to be local. If gender roles were actually determined by relative demand, you'd see wildly different roles in different cities. San Francisco is notoriously male-skewed, and New York City is famously female-skewed, at least in the relevant dating market. If your theory checked out, all the statistics you cite would be extra-skewed in SF and flipped in NYC. But that's not what we see. If anything, the gender roles are much more flexible in SF despite a vast oversupply of men.
The much more parsimonious explanation of the existing gender norms is that, on the aggregate, men and women want different things from the dating process. Men tend to want casual dates and novel sexual experiences, while women tend to want serious relationships leading to marriage. On average, men want to increase their body count while women want to keep theirs low. This means that men, as a group, are much less discriminating about who they are willing to date, because to them, the date (especially if sex is on the table) is the goal. That's why you see the dynamics where men are focused on how to "get" a woman and women are more focused on how to "keep" a man. Unless the gender ratio gets extremely skewed, dates with women will always be in higher demand than dates with men.
But that still doesn't mean women should be passive. Men and women are both cowards. Pretty much anyone who has the option to get dates without putting in effort, being vulnerable, or risking rejection will default to that mode. This applies to most women but also to the highest quality men. A man who passively gets lots of attention from women won't feel the need to affirmatively seek out and solicit dates. But unless your tastes are very different from other women, those are exactly the men you want. Of course you can define "high-quality" as including the part where he does the asking, but that's just overindexing on one trait to the exclusion of all others.
>Your theory predicts that the higher quality and in-demand a man is, the more passive he will be. Does this match your observations of the world?
i’m a music producer. i’m not very famous, but i know a lot of people who are. i’d say that yes, this matches my observation of the world very well.
>But that still doesn't mean women should be passive. Men and women are both cowards. Pretty much anyone who has the option to get dates without putting in effort, being vulnerable, or risking rejection will default to that mode. This applies to most women but also to the highest quality men. A man who passively gets lots of attention from women won't feel the need to affirmatively seek out and solicit dates. But unless your tastes are very different from other women, those are exactly the men you want. Of course you can define "high-quality" as including the part where he does the asking, but that's just overindexing on one trait to the exclusion of all others.
i think you’re being a little rude about it, but you make a good point. i think cyn wrote this after thinking about the orthodox jewish community where women are unable to find men. perhaps an important detail she missed there is that due to cultural reasons, the men there can’t just fuck around. if the men in that community would just have a bunch of casual sex, perhaps you would see that phenomenon disappear.
i clicked on your account and i see youve written about this, so ill go ahead and do that :) i havent thought all that much about gender from this perspective, so im probably just stating the obvious!
well, there is no 2D high/low quality axis. if you're looking for someone who has growing old together high on their list of priorities, it's not the best idea to approach a famous artist.
im afraid this line of reasoning leads us to quickly retrace evopsych again though, which is exactly what we were trying to avoid, hahah
it also implies, funnily enough, that there's an equilibrium where women have enough babies to ensure there's no male surplus, but people are also promiscuous enough to ensure there's no female surplus. ill make sure to make a very edgy joke about that at some point :)
what do you think? is dating too complex to really understand what the problem is, if there even is one?
The most confusing part of this post is that you assume a declining population based on a birth rate started in 2015 but the age of the that group of people would be 11 at this time and not at all representative of the dating population. A simple google search shows that the number of births in America have been roughly flat to increasing from 1996 to 2006 which would represent the 20-30 years that are actually mostly the dating pool.
Thanks, I did really enjoy your previous post! Though seeing the pattern between this one and the other one back to back, I want to (probably unnecessarily) caution against the bias I think we all have of having having a world view and then picking and choosing the data needed back that up
One thing also missing is that the skew of intelligence for men is more diffuse than the skew of intelligence for women. There are more men clustered at the high end and the low end of intelligence, whereas more women are clustered in the middle. This makes sense to me, as I work in disability services and there are far more men in the population with cognitive impairments. Intelligence correlates with all sorts of positive traits for a good life. (NOTE: If intelligence is something in-borne that we cannot control, then there's nothing morally virtuous about being high or low intelligence. So, I make no claims about the virtues of intelligence. But, if we believe in averages, we must also believe in below and above average. )
I think, in the era of more equal educational and occupational equality between women and men, that this difference in intelligence skew also affects the dating pool in ways we're seeing now. There are simply more women living near average intelligence, where there are fewer men.
In my own experience (aka anecdata), this means that I know far more men who are not good candidates for partnership. More men are NEETs. More men live in their mom's basement and mooch off their parents (it's not inherently bad to live with parents, but not if you're mooching and not helping out or being part of the household). More men are in jail and/or have a criminal history. More men have serious mental illness with functional limitations.
In the past, these men often - but not always - had access to relationships because women had limited choices and because early marriage meant that larger functional problems had not reared their heads yet.
I don't think these men deserve NOTHING. They deserve actual support and services, if they are willing to engage. But, they create an additional demographic hiccup.
Unrelated, but one upcoming variable that I'm looking forward to tracking is the effect of female bisexuality on the dating pool. Something like 30% of Gen Z women identify as bisexual. As a Millennial bisexual who came out at 30 and who only dates queer people, I can report that many bisexual millennials sought relationships with men in their 20s and 30s - likely because heterosexual marriage has more social status - - and then moved to queer relationships in their 30s and 40s after divorce or after the marriage market didn't work out.
I wonder what effect bisexuality will have on Gen Z women in this landscape. It's less stigmatized for Gen Z, and having a girlfriend isn't embarrassing like having a boyfriend is.
Apologies if I’m missing any key point in your essay, I mostly skimmed it and then got to the “no evo psych required” and felt compelled to chime in. The imbalance between male and female births is not due to random chance. This gap has been observed across cultures, time periods, and even in other mammals. If you look into Fisher’s Principle, species will predictably start producing more of one sex than the other if one sex is much less likely to reach reproductive age. In the case of humans, especially in our ancestral environments, males have *far* higher mortality rates than females and any given male is far less likely to reach reproductive age and reproduce than any given female. I think there is something interesting to be said about decreasing male mortality rates in developed countries created an imbalanced sex ratio, but I don’t really think there is no evo psych required exactly. You can decide to not use evo psych in your reasoning about why an imbalanced sex ratio would be a problem and just develop the same ideas that have been observed by evolutionary scientists from first principles, but why?
sorry, this really isn’t personal to you, but I just do take issue with people dismissing an entire academic field without knowing some of the most basic principles used in the field’s research (a simple google search would’ve led you to a plethora of existing research on sex ratios)
No, I think the problem is that people aren't honest with each other, and that dating would be easy if people were honest. That includes telling someone when you are interested, or at least not hiding it
These are all good points! Supply and demand definitely do affect behavior, in ways that will produce the outcomes you describe--if the guys are all trying to date down in age, the younger guys are going to have a much harder time. (And yes, I did date about half older women back when I was still trying. We got along well.)
There's also the online dating dynamic, which since men approach and the cost of approaching is near-zero is going to produce lots of men swiping into the void and lots of women sorting through hundreds of swipes with guys who haven't even read their profile.
Also, as others say, nerd/postrat circles are heavily male, so the fewer women are going to have a much easier time pairing off.
You don't have to assume 'gender essentialism' in the sense of 'all men are like X, all women are like Y', though. A small difference in the *mean* of personality traits will produce larger gaps at the tails, and given that people like to embody the mean of their gender because the opposite sex wants it, they'll get exaggerated from whatever the baseline is. But the curves always overlap.
You don't need to accept MORAL character differences, though--you only need to reject the right-wing assumption that *conforming to the mean of your gender is morally superior*. But there's no reason to believe that! (The big differences in the big five are on neuroticism and agreeableness anyway.) Nothing wrong with being a statistically atypical woman--it has many advantages, as you've probably noticed!
(Sorry, my personal biases run in the opposite direction as a result of personal experiences that were likely the opposite of yours.)
Your math is bad. Don’t date older as a man. Your competition actually gets worse. As you get older, the number of unmarried men to unmarried women gets much worse. You’ll see ratios like 2:1 in many areas and in many more rural places - it’s already 2:1 or more for the 25-34 demographic. It gets worse as you get older.
You need to dig through census data more.
Either way, you’re still being a coward and using the excuse of “I don’t have to because I have a favorable ratio that lets me feel entitled to such an outcome.” It’s cowardice and entitlement. Your picking of men who lack initiative or whatever nonsense is merely confirmation bias and poor filtering on your own part.
Just because someone asks for a dance doesn’t mean you have to lead the dance. Bad brain!!!
This also does a lot to explain the phenomenon of passport bros. Same way perhaps 10% of American women will go gaga for a guy with a British accent, there are a lot of countries where perhaps 10% of women are interested in dating an "exotic" (to them) guy from a western country. It's unlikely that the number of male western tourists will be so high as to reach 10% of the single female population. As a result, male western tourists will find themselves spoiled for choice on dating apps. And western women will find ways to moralize this state of affairs by explaining how passport bros are "exploitative", etc. If western feminists actually took the "my body my choice" slogan seriously, they wouldn't find passport bros particularly upsetting.
(Also if you look at Alice Evans' research, it suggests that many women in developing countries have been exposed to western media, regard the society they grew up in as oppressively patriarchical, and like the idea of dating a western guy in order to have a more egalitarian relationship.)
The passport bro also has a lot more money as a result of coming from a richer country (which is where at least part of the 'exploitation' thing comes from).
True, and if you go there the laws often let them exploit *you*, as the country of origin is going to be a lot more concerned about defending their own citizens than some horny foreigner (and an American to boot!).
Yeah I'm not claiming that becoming a passport bro is some sort of cheat code. Obviously people should do research into safety considerations and so forth. But the western women complaining about passport bros seem transparently self-serving and hypocritical.
I don't know if this alone explains your observations. The reason is that dating "markets" seem to be pretty segregated by class and subculture.
There may be more men than women overall, but there are more educated professional women than educated professional men (at least among under-40 people), and most educated professionals want to date within their class. So I wouldn't expect much of an imbalance in that group.
But on the flip side, certain subcultures have skewed gender ratios. You describe yourself as mathy and post-rat, so I suspect your circles tend to be nerdy (correct me if I'm wrong). It's well known that nerdy circles skew male, and so nerdy men either have to get lucky and meet a nerd girl who's into them, or do a lot of self-improvement to make themselves more appealing to comparatively less nerdy women. I suspect that more than overall demographics explains your observations.
You’re right that different groups have different skews, and that people tend to prefer dating in their group, AND that this would cause different cultural dynamics in the different groups. 100%. I do think there is a larger ‘people trying to date’ cultural group though. You could consider the other subcultures forming a partition of this culture. And the demographics of the ur-group still has some implications for norms (like, on hinge) My goal with this was to resolve my own confusion between (“there’s the same amount of men and women in the dating pool”, “men are having harder times getting paired. by a lot, anecdotally”)
I dislike that we treat all degrees equal. They certainly don’t have equal value in the market.
This is delightfully nerdy, objective, kind, and rational in all of my favourite ways. I love it!
The point about cohort sizes is a very interesting one that I have never seen before. Thank you for pointing this out.
I do have some unease about causality. Are the men dating younger because that is preferable or because that’s who’s available to them?
And I wonder how important this effect is compared to different rates of asexuality or interest more broadly.
Thank you for writing about this!
Oh look a topic I have real world experience in! The shidduch crisis is especially fascinating because much of the coupling is influenced only late in the game by the primaries. When your whole community is trying to pair you off based purely on their perception of you, it can lead to a highly complex set of behaviors and subtext. How to signal your unique niche and interests without losing your market value. How to navigate complex values in outwardly stringent criteria. And my personal favorite how to make a life when your partner isn't who you first thought but you love them anyway. ❤️
i read your previous post on this and i was very happy to see such a levelheaded and judgement-free analysis of the situation! i was also very dismayed to scroll down to the comments and see some very rude people with a lot of pent up anger.
ive thought about this a lot myself, and i agree with you that there’s a false dichotomy between women, who supposedly do nothing but wait, and men, who supposedly have to spend months approaching random women, asking for dates.
in my experience (yeah ive had sex how could you tell?), womens “yin” can be super aggressive. i would honestly go so far as to say that neither party really has to be “aggressive”, and its much more about being socially intelligent enough to provide the other person opportunities to take things a step further, and signaling that you would be happy to go there. both the male and female side have culturally acceptable ways to do this.
my main difficulty in thinking through this, and maybe you relate to this, is that i have a very difficult time understanding the dating problems faced by “the average person” because i’m not exactly the average person. ive never had any problem finding people to date, and im not rich, not conventionally attractive (asian male), and my only exercise is going on daily walks. hearing male (and female!) influencers talking about dating is like seeing a parallel universe.
anyway i really just came here to thank you for your well thought out post! i hope to see more of them :)
I am flabbergasted by this post. It's appropriate that it ends with "no evopsych required" because reading it feels eerily similar to reading evopsych. It takes a (true) observation, then builds a whole conceptual edifice to explain it, based on pure speculation.
The main premise makes no sense. Assuming that women are in more demand than men (questionable, but I'll get to that), why would that imply that they shouldn't take an active role in seeking out the men they want to date? It's true that the more in-demand party doesn't need to seek out partners. Partner will come to them. But they won't be the highest-quality partners!
While there is less demand for men as a class than women, high-quality men are in great demand. Use whatever criteria you want, but as soon as you add in any filtering at all (e.g. education, intelligence, conscientiousness, EQ, fitness, facial features, etc.) , there aren't enough of them to go around. So if your theory was correct, those men, being high in demand, would passively sit back and allow women to approach them. Your theory predicts that the higher quality and in-demand a man is, the more passive he will be. Does this match your observations of the world?
Dating can often be analogized to employment matching. It's not a prefect analogy, but there is a similar dynamic at play. There tend to be more available workers than jobs, so most employers take a passive (yin) role. They'll post the job opening on a job board and wait for the applications to roll in. But the employers who need the best employees don't do that. They hire headhunters to go out and find the best employees, and approach them to ask if they're interested in a career change. They go to colleges and professional schools to actively find the most promising students. Mark Zuckerberg is out there offering unsolicited 9-figure deals to top AI researchers because he doesn't want the average employee. He wants the best, so he affirmatively seeks them out and makes an offer.
Dating works the same way. Even if your math checked out, by being passive, a women would be able to get a boyfriend or a husband, but it wouldn't be a top quality one. If you want the best partner, you have to be active about it.
Beyond that, your theory's main flaw is that it uses national data when dating pools tend to be local. If gender roles were actually determined by relative demand, you'd see wildly different roles in different cities. San Francisco is notoriously male-skewed, and New York City is famously female-skewed, at least in the relevant dating market. If your theory checked out, all the statistics you cite would be extra-skewed in SF and flipped in NYC. But that's not what we see. If anything, the gender roles are much more flexible in SF despite a vast oversupply of men.
The much more parsimonious explanation of the existing gender norms is that, on the aggregate, men and women want different things from the dating process. Men tend to want casual dates and novel sexual experiences, while women tend to want serious relationships leading to marriage. On average, men want to increase their body count while women want to keep theirs low. This means that men, as a group, are much less discriminating about who they are willing to date, because to them, the date (especially if sex is on the table) is the goal. That's why you see the dynamics where men are focused on how to "get" a woman and women are more focused on how to "keep" a man. Unless the gender ratio gets extremely skewed, dates with women will always be in higher demand than dates with men.
But that still doesn't mean women should be passive. Men and women are both cowards. Pretty much anyone who has the option to get dates without putting in effort, being vulnerable, or risking rejection will default to that mode. This applies to most women but also to the highest quality men. A man who passively gets lots of attention from women won't feel the need to affirmatively seek out and solicit dates. But unless your tastes are very different from other women, those are exactly the men you want. Of course you can define "high-quality" as including the part where he does the asking, but that's just overindexing on one trait to the exclusion of all others.
>Your theory predicts that the higher quality and in-demand a man is, the more passive he will be. Does this match your observations of the world?
i’m a music producer. i’m not very famous, but i know a lot of people who are. i’d say that yes, this matches my observation of the world very well.
>But that still doesn't mean women should be passive. Men and women are both cowards. Pretty much anyone who has the option to get dates without putting in effort, being vulnerable, or risking rejection will default to that mode. This applies to most women but also to the highest quality men. A man who passively gets lots of attention from women won't feel the need to affirmatively seek out and solicit dates. But unless your tastes are very different from other women, those are exactly the men you want. Of course you can define "high-quality" as including the part where he does the asking, but that's just overindexing on one trait to the exclusion of all others.
i think you’re being a little rude about it, but you make a good point. i think cyn wrote this after thinking about the orthodox jewish community where women are unable to find men. perhaps an important detail she missed there is that due to cultural reasons, the men there can’t just fuck around. if the men in that community would just have a bunch of casual sex, perhaps you would see that phenomenon disappear.
That's very interesting because it implies if you want a high-quality man, you NEED to ask him out
i clicked on your account and i see youve written about this, so ill go ahead and do that :) i havent thought all that much about gender from this perspective, so im probably just stating the obvious!
well, there is no 2D high/low quality axis. if you're looking for someone who has growing old together high on their list of priorities, it's not the best idea to approach a famous artist.
im afraid this line of reasoning leads us to quickly retrace evopsych again though, which is exactly what we were trying to avoid, hahah
it also implies, funnily enough, that there's an equilibrium where women have enough babies to ensure there's no male surplus, but people are also promiscuous enough to ensure there's no female surplus. ill make sure to make a very edgy joke about that at some point :)
what do you think? is dating too complex to really understand what the problem is, if there even is one?
The most confusing part of this post is that you assume a declining population based on a birth rate started in 2015 but the age of the that group of people would be 11 at this time and not at all representative of the dating population. A simple google search shows that the number of births in America have been roughly flat to increasing from 1996 to 2006 which would represent the 20-30 years that are actually mostly the dating pool.
https://www.statista.com/graphic/1/195908/number-of-births-in-the-united-states-since-1990.jpg
Ya know . That's a really good point. I'll have to edit
Thanks, I did really enjoy your previous post! Though seeing the pattern between this one and the other one back to back, I want to (probably unnecessarily) caution against the bias I think we all have of having having a world view and then picking and choosing the data needed back that up
One thing also missing is that the skew of intelligence for men is more diffuse than the skew of intelligence for women. There are more men clustered at the high end and the low end of intelligence, whereas more women are clustered in the middle. This makes sense to me, as I work in disability services and there are far more men in the population with cognitive impairments. Intelligence correlates with all sorts of positive traits for a good life. (NOTE: If intelligence is something in-borne that we cannot control, then there's nothing morally virtuous about being high or low intelligence. So, I make no claims about the virtues of intelligence. But, if we believe in averages, we must also believe in below and above average. )
I think, in the era of more equal educational and occupational equality between women and men, that this difference in intelligence skew also affects the dating pool in ways we're seeing now. There are simply more women living near average intelligence, where there are fewer men.
In my own experience (aka anecdata), this means that I know far more men who are not good candidates for partnership. More men are NEETs. More men live in their mom's basement and mooch off their parents (it's not inherently bad to live with parents, but not if you're mooching and not helping out or being part of the household). More men are in jail and/or have a criminal history. More men have serious mental illness with functional limitations.
In the past, these men often - but not always - had access to relationships because women had limited choices and because early marriage meant that larger functional problems had not reared their heads yet.
I don't think these men deserve NOTHING. They deserve actual support and services, if they are willing to engage. But, they create an additional demographic hiccup.
Unrelated, but one upcoming variable that I'm looking forward to tracking is the effect of female bisexuality on the dating pool. Something like 30% of Gen Z women identify as bisexual. As a Millennial bisexual who came out at 30 and who only dates queer people, I can report that many bisexual millennials sought relationships with men in their 20s and 30s - likely because heterosexual marriage has more social status - - and then moved to queer relationships in their 30s and 40s after divorce or after the marriage market didn't work out.
I wonder what effect bisexuality will have on Gen Z women in this landscape. It's less stigmatized for Gen Z, and having a girlfriend isn't embarrassing like having a boyfriend is.
Apologies if I’m missing any key point in your essay, I mostly skimmed it and then got to the “no evo psych required” and felt compelled to chime in. The imbalance between male and female births is not due to random chance. This gap has been observed across cultures, time periods, and even in other mammals. If you look into Fisher’s Principle, species will predictably start producing more of one sex than the other if one sex is much less likely to reach reproductive age. In the case of humans, especially in our ancestral environments, males have *far* higher mortality rates than females and any given male is far less likely to reach reproductive age and reproduce than any given female. I think there is something interesting to be said about decreasing male mortality rates in developed countries created an imbalanced sex ratio, but I don’t really think there is no evo psych required exactly. You can decide to not use evo psych in your reasoning about why an imbalanced sex ratio would be a problem and just develop the same ideas that have been observed by evolutionary scientists from first principles, but why?
sorry, this really isn’t personal to you, but I just do take issue with people dismissing an entire academic field without knowing some of the most basic principles used in the field’s research (a simple google search would’ve led you to a plethora of existing research on sex ratios)
No, I think the problem is that people aren't honest with each other, and that dating would be easy if people were honest. That includes telling someone when you are interested, or at least not hiding it
These are all good points! Supply and demand definitely do affect behavior, in ways that will produce the outcomes you describe--if the guys are all trying to date down in age, the younger guys are going to have a much harder time. (And yes, I did date about half older women back when I was still trying. We got along well.)
There's also the online dating dynamic, which since men approach and the cost of approaching is near-zero is going to produce lots of men swiping into the void and lots of women sorting through hundreds of swipes with guys who haven't even read their profile.
Also, as others say, nerd/postrat circles are heavily male, so the fewer women are going to have a much easier time pairing off.
You don't have to assume 'gender essentialism' in the sense of 'all men are like X, all women are like Y', though. A small difference in the *mean* of personality traits will produce larger gaps at the tails, and given that people like to embody the mean of their gender because the opposite sex wants it, they'll get exaggerated from whatever the baseline is. But the curves always overlap.
You don't need to accept MORAL character differences, though--you only need to reject the right-wing assumption that *conforming to the mean of your gender is morally superior*. But there's no reason to believe that! (The big differences in the big five are on neuroticism and agreeableness anyway.) Nothing wrong with being a statistically atypical woman--it has many advantages, as you've probably noticed!
(Sorry, my personal biases run in the opposite direction as a result of personal experiences that were likely the opposite of yours.)
Your math is bad. Don’t date older as a man. Your competition actually gets worse. As you get older, the number of unmarried men to unmarried women gets much worse. You’ll see ratios like 2:1 in many areas and in many more rural places - it’s already 2:1 or more for the 25-34 demographic. It gets worse as you get older.
You need to dig through census data more.
Either way, you’re still being a coward and using the excuse of “I don’t have to because I have a favorable ratio that lets me feel entitled to such an outcome.” It’s cowardice and entitlement. Your picking of men who lack initiative or whatever nonsense is merely confirmation bias and poor filtering on your own part.
Just because someone asks for a dance doesn’t mean you have to lead the dance. Bad brain!!!
This also does a lot to explain the phenomenon of passport bros. Same way perhaps 10% of American women will go gaga for a guy with a British accent, there are a lot of countries where perhaps 10% of women are interested in dating an "exotic" (to them) guy from a western country. It's unlikely that the number of male western tourists will be so high as to reach 10% of the single female population. As a result, male western tourists will find themselves spoiled for choice on dating apps. And western women will find ways to moralize this state of affairs by explaining how passport bros are "exploitative", etc. If western feminists actually took the "my body my choice" slogan seriously, they wouldn't find passport bros particularly upsetting.
(Also if you look at Alice Evans' research, it suggests that many women in developing countries have been exposed to western media, regard the society they grew up in as oppressively patriarchical, and like the idea of dating a western guy in order to have a more egalitarian relationship.)
The passport bro also has a lot more money as a result of coming from a richer country (which is where at least part of the 'exploitation' thing comes from).
None of the women complaining about passport bros seem to feel they are exploited when they date a man who makes more money than them.
True, and if you go there the laws often let them exploit *you*, as the country of origin is going to be a lot more concerned about defending their own citizens than some horny foreigner (and an American to boot!).
Yeah I'm not claiming that becoming a passport bro is some sort of cheat code. Obviously people should do research into safety considerations and so forth. But the western women complaining about passport bros seem transparently self-serving and hypocritical.