Rachel Wolfe

So we really are seeing that men are more satisfied with their options than women are. In a survey from the American Enterprise Institute, fully half of college-educated women blamed their singlehood largely on an inability to find someone who meets their expectations. whereas only a quarter of single men said the same. It's a really big gap.

And, you know, it's not only younger women who are doing this, but I think that for younger people in particular who grew up with a little bit less stigma around remaining single, who had models of, like, really fabulous independent women, it's become... almost a trend. You know, we're seeing people touting their boy sober and off the market status on TikTok.

And we're really seeing a focus on self-improvement, friendship, the ability to find happiness on your own. It's no longer like, oh, you just can't get a man. Now there's real pride in creating an independent life and in not settling.

It's the case that more and more women just really seem to be saying, you know what? I'm not getting what I am putting in to dating. Or as I saw somebody's responded on Reddit, the juice isn't worth the squeeze. One of my sources said it's the only thing you can put 10,000 hours into and end up right where you started.

And so due to this combination of demographic shifts between men and women and just the fact that women are doing so well financially, they don't need it. And I think many of them do still want it, but they're not willing to settle for something that they think is just going to hold them back.

The share of single women ages 18 to 40 who are single, and here we're defining single as either married or cohabitating with a partner that data doesn't look at whether somebody's actively dating or not. And so that number was 51.4% in 2023. which is up from only 41.8% in 2000. So that's just a huge, huge jump in only a couple of decades.

And that just has so many implications for how we live our lives.

Yeah, it's interesting. So I do think that the data shows us that men have moved further right, and that includes the idea that they are embracing more of these kind of traditional normative gender roles.

And I think that there are lots of reasons that that's happening, but the way that it plays out in relationships is you have people like Alicia, who I spoke to who was making 50% more than her partner, but... He expected that if they got married and had kids, she would be the one to take a step back from her career, and she just wasn't willing to abide that.

And in fact, even though she was living in D.C., which is pretty liberal, she said that she had trouble finding a man who – shared her vision of the future. And men's and women's political views just really have in the past four years moved so much further apart. And that makes dating really tricky because it's not just about who you voted for. It's how you live your life and your values.

So I do think that many young men are facing a very real crisis of purpose.

Thank you.