A Vox reader asks: Why are young men struggling or failing to date/engage in romantic relationships more so than their female peers?
In a recent conversation, a new acquaintance of mine recounted an exchange he’d recently overheard. A man turned to his female friend and exclaimed, “I’m not going to go to a bar and just start a conversation with a woman. Who wants to be picked up?”
“Me,” the woman replied.
One quip doesn’t account for the entirety of men’s experiences, of course, but it does speak to the challenges men seem to be facing recently in dating.
If dating is a numbers game, the numbers don’t appear to be on the men’s side. According to a 2022 Pew Research Center survey, 63 percent of men under 30 said they were single, compared to only 34 percent of women in the same age cohort. These single men are more likely to be looking for love, too: Half of single men in Pew’s survey reported looking for a committed relationship and/or casual dates, while only 35 percent of single women said the same.
This discrepancy could be for any number of reasons, says Richard Reeves, the president of the American Institute for Boys and Men and the author of Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It. Perhaps young men and women differ in their definition of a relationship or perhaps women are dating older men and other women at higher rates than previous generations.
But Reeves posits that there’s another reason that men, and in particular straight men, are struggling with dating, and it has to do with the way that the rules of romance have changed.
A recent YouGov poll found that 57 percent of women said they’ve been on a terrible date — only 44 percent of men can say the same. With many women no longer willing to accept ghosting, noncommitment, and harassment, men may be forced to change their ways or face being shut out of the dating pool. By and large, Reeves says the men he has spoken to understand this; they know what not to do — “don’t mansplain, don’t mansplain, don’t be toxic, don’t be a predator … don’t be a creep” — but they’re at a loss for what is acceptable when trying to date.
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“You can see a little bit of risk aversion among young men,” Reeves says. “Partly because they are largely, and I think incorrectly, worried about the risks that are going to come from putting yourself out there.”
All social interaction carries some form of risk, a potential for rejection, but the alternatives to dating available in the modern dating landscape make putting yourself out there even less appealing. One factor to consider is the easy accessibility of porn. A 2020 study found that 91 percent of men between the ages of 18 and 73 consumed porn within the last month, compared to 60 percent of women. When a sexual experience — mediated through a screen, no less — is a click away, why risk any potential discomfort?
Ideological and political differences may also be driving singles apart: According to a recent American Perspectives Survey from the Survey Center on American Life, 52 percent of single women say they would be less likely to date a Trump supporter, compared to 36 percent of single men who say they wouldn’t date a Trump supporter. Sixty percent of single women feared that women would be worse off under another Trump administration whereas only 47 percent of single men felt the same. Given that young men appeared to favor Trump in the 2024 presidential election, this may impact their overall prospects.
When politics looms too large in singles’ lives, and every choice, including who to date, carries significance, relationships can suffer, Reeves says.
How do you build trust in modern dating?
The problem, then, is how to encourage men to get out of their comfort zones, to feel comfortable with risk, without feeling entitled to a woman’s time. Women carry some responsibility, Reeves says, to offer kind rejections and to not assume the worst of men. Men, of course, must also act in good faith and graciously accept a rejection. Dating has always required, and will always require, people to place some amount of trust in each other.
A total lack of trust and good faith has consequences. If your prevailing notion is that all men are dangerous misogynists or all women are boring and cruel, how can anyone reasonably date? “There’s a bit of a trend right now to start to think the worst of each other,” Reeves says. “It’s really hard to have a good dating market if both the men and women are tending to think the worst of each other in advance. And I see a lot of that on both sides.” Of course, there will always be bad actors, Reeves says, but, by and large, most people fall somewhere in the middle.
The only real way forward, according to Reeves, is to assume that the vast majority of potential prospects aren’t trying to be creeps and aren’t trying to harm one another.
“This whole enterprise needs a lot of grace,” he says, “and a lot of forgiveness and a lot of accepting people in good faith.”
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