“American Women Are Giving Up on Marriage” (WSJ):
The 29-year-old always thought she’d have found her life partner by now. Instead, she’s house hunting solo and considering having kids on her own.
“I’m financially self-sufficient enough to do these things myself,” said Vorlicek, a Boston-based accountant. “I’m willing to accept being single versus settling for someone who isn’t the right fit.”
American women have never been this resigned to staying single. They are responding to major demographic shifts, including huge and growing gender gaps in economic and educational attainment, political affiliation and beliefs about what a family should look like.
“The numbers aren’t netting out,” said Daniel Cox, director of the survey center at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a conservative think tank. He ticked off the data points: More women than men are attending college, buying houses and focusing on their friendships and careers over dating and marriage.
A 2022 Pew survey of single adults showed only 34% of single women were looking for romance, compared with 54% of single men, down from 38% and 61% in 2019. Men were also more likely than women to say they were worried that nobody would want to date them.
Coaching from mom:
Last year, Michele Kirsch told her three adult daughters she wanted them to have “boyfriends by Christmas.” She had a dream, she had told them, that each of them was standing in front of the lit-up tree next to “a hunk who liked to ski and went to a good school.”
“went to a good school” means “makes a well-above-median wage”?
Many of the men Katie [one of the adult daughters] met, she said, either seemed turned off by her ambition or weren’t career-oriented enough for her.
“weren’t career-oriented enough” means “makes a well-above-median wage”? Here’s an example female who is upset that she can’t find a man who out-earns her:
A similar anecdote:
Rachael Gosetti, a 33-year-old real-estate agent in Savannah, Ga., said she broke up with her boyfriend, with whom she shares a 5-year-old son, over a year ago because she was tired of doing most of the child care, cooking and scheduling while also earning almost double her boyfriend’s salary. She has yet to date anyone else in part because she worries about living in a red state with a six-week abortion ban. “I have a child that I can’t leave behind to drive to Virginia if I had a pregnancy scare, and I definitely can’t afford another child as a single mom,” she said.
The last part is curious. Virginia allows abortion care only up to 27 weeks of pregnancy, unlike in Maskachusetts, where it would be legal at 37 weeks if a single doc believes abortion care would help the patient’s mental health. If Ms. Gosetti didn’t learn about her pregnancy until the 36th week, for example, she could fly from Savannah to Boston, receive abortion care, and return home by air.
My thoughts on the above… first, it shows that accessing a high-income man’s income/wealth is much more practical via a casual sexual encounter (perhaps Clomid-assisted; see “Child Support Litigation without a Marriage”) than by trying to persuade one of the male unicorns to commit to marriage. Second, the article is consistent with the idea that men have essentially no inherent value to the typical woman. The man who earns $500,000 per year and is pursued by various females would not be desirable if he lost the job and all of his savings.
The man who earns $500,000 per year and is pursued by various females would not be desirable if he lost the job and all of his savings. Yes!
proverbs 31:10-31 provides the ideal of woman. She seems a lot like contemporary woman’s ideal for men : a generous and industrious helpmate.
Is not the ideal man a free man, who depends not on unction to succeed?
My last unpaid, intimate encounters with women of any fitness ended over 15 years ago. Suspect the difference in men & women seeking romance is because of polyamory. There’s less stigma against paying for access to women than there was 30 years ago & porn is a lot easier to access for that many men to be seeking romance.
“The man who earns $500,000 per year and is pursued by various females would not be desirable if he lost the job and all of his savings.”
Reminds me of the old joke.
Rich old man to gold-digger girlfriend: “Honey, would you still love me if I lost all my money?”
Gold-digger: “Of course! And I’d miss you, too.”
This reminds me of the starting point of Billy Bob’s ex-marriage in Landman.
The social and cultural changes in Europe and the U.S. over the past half-century have been dramatic, particularly regarding marriage, long-term relationships, and natality. In many European countries, more than half of all births now occur out of wedlock. Women’s increased participation in the workforce and their rising social status have diminished the perceived value of low-income men for women seeking to marry up. (Surprisingly, it is easier than ever for men to find wealthier more educated women).
Education and income do not protect men from trouble…
https://nypost.com/2021/07/26/nyc-surgeon-beauty-queen-wife-settle-divorce-amid-hooker-allegations/
Lots of women seem have absorbed the prevalent misandry in our current dominant culture. Lots of women asking “what good are men”? (with the rich or good-looking ones having obvious temporary utility). If you ask them how it would sound if you gender-flipped the things they say, you are a suppressive person and deserve to be shut up.
If a man can identify as a women, then can a man identify as a $500k earner? Would liberal women accept him?
I’ve had two long-term committed relationships ending in unsuccessful engagements (age 22 and 28). And a few shorter-term relationships in the 30+ years since then. At about age 50, I realized the “juice isn’t worth the squeeze.”
Hollywood and social influencers play a significant role in today’s society. Add to that the rise of social media, with its short-form posts and videos, and you have the perfect recipe for weaker family structures and social dysfunction.
There was a time when women maintained order within the home-hold (i.e.: internal minister) while men upheld structure outside of it (external minister). Families gathered around the dinner table every very much every evening, sharing meals and discussing their lives and politics. Those days are largely gone.
Do you remember when political candidates used families discuss their hardship around dinner table to make their candidacy point? When was the last time you heard a candidate mention that?
This blog has become old men bitching and moaning about strong and independent women and how women destroyed family values and caused social /family dysfunction. This reminds me of Al Bundy and NO MA’AM (National Organization of Men Against Amazonian Masterhood). I love it.. keep it up.. cheers..!
Al had nothing to complain about, Peggy was hot.
The original post was intended to be descriptive rather than normative.
To the larger point you’ve raised… women are the majority of American voters so I guess it is fair to say that we live in a society designed by and for women. We are living contradictions of academic sociobiology, I think. We’d expect women with jobs or a tap into a male income to try to keep their resources away from female competitors. Instead we have a system where a woman who succeeds in getting $100k/year that she could use to rear children of her own will be forced to give away a substantial percentage to female competitors who have migrated to the US recently or who are here on the “single mom” welfare career track.
https://www.lwv.org/blog/report-women-voters-numbers
@phil. I understand and I fully agree with you. For men the struggle is real. We have been squeezed by strong and independent women, skilled/unskilled legal and illegal immigration. So what do you suggest we and younger men do or take steps to take the society back to male centric and to a male-centric family structure? I would like to hear your ideas. Let’s make men great again.
Anon: I am not a believer in effecting change in a world of billions of humans (nobody knows how many; see https://www.sciencealert.com/earth-could-have-billions-more-people-than-we-ever-realized ) or a country of 335-360 million, depending on how the undocumented are tallied. Better to ask “What are some effective life strategies for young American men?”
Let’s assume that the goal is a stable marriage to a female and children.
Based on the WSJ journal article cited, the first thing that the man needs to do is earn as much money as possible, e.g., by moving to a high-pay part of the U.S. and living in a shoebox to maximize savings. When it is time for marriage and kids, though, the man needs to move to a part of the country or world where the culture supports stable marriage. Note that planning for this strategy requires choosing a career that is mobile, e.g., healthcare (people in healthcare can make money anywhere in the U.S.).
A core element of early feminism was no-fault (“unilateral”) divorce, in which the female heroically frees herself from the domination of the oppressive male. Later feminists tweaked this to “no-fault profitable divorce”, in which the strong and independent woman got half of what the male oppressor had saved and half (or more) of what the male oppressor would earn going forward. In a state or country where feminism prevails, therefore, the woman who files a divorce lawsuit will get support and reinforcement from all of her friends and neighbors (this can be quite explicit; a friend in Maskachusetts who got sued by his wife was admin of the Windows machine that she used for email and was therefore able to see all of the “you go, girl!” messages of encouragement that his wife received when she told them of her plans to free herself from an entirely nonviolent husband (admittedly, his personality is rather large and he is best appreciated in smaller doses of time!)).
In our old neighborhood in suburban Boston, a healthy fraction of the houses were occupied by successful divorce plaintiffs living their best lives on Tinder while taking care of their kids 50-66% of the time and banking weekly child support checks from their former sex partner. In our Florida neighborhood of 130 houses I can’t think of even one house that is similarly occupied. So at least for this corner of Florida there wouldn’t be any cultural reinforcement for breaking up a child’s home. You saw my previous post, I hope, about a friend who moved to a small city in Spain after early retirement. I do think that is conducive to a long-term stable marriage compared to if he’s stayed in NYC where divorce lawsuits are common and celebrated by the local newspaper (see https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2024/02/21/cougar-tale-in-the-new-york-times/ and https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2025/02/18/valentines-day-post-3/ (“In 2019, I divorced, at age 46, and went on to have more and better sex than I ever would have thought possible.” reports the NYT))
Today’s television lineup includes shows like The Bachelorette, The Bachelor, Desperate Housewives, Gossip Girl, Wife Swap, The Kardashians, Hell’s Kitchen, and Big Brother, and the list goes on. Each of these is far more damaging than the shows of the ’70s, ’80s, or even ’90s, such as Married with Children, The Benny Hill Show, The Dukes of Hazzard, Happy Days, All in the Family, etc.
And if that weren’t enough, social media platforms like Facebook, TikTok, and even mainstream news media are flooded with even more harmful content.
Given meteoritic rise of AI and shock and disruption it will bring to economy and society clever women should start looking for boyfriends with future warlord potential.
I earn more than my husband but he’s a lot better looking than I am(in addition to being a wonderful human being).
We’re roughly equal in intelligence.
I don’t mind being the high earner because I get to be with a gorgeous man and have a lovely child.
Women value beauty and aesthetics just as much as men but it’s only recently that wealthy women could marry handsome men while the reverse has been true since millennia.
You’re doing it wrong. You’re supposed to marry rich and bang the hotties on the side.
I agree with you that men have inherently no value for women. But I would add they never did. It was always the marriage or synergy that women (and men) valued. More analytically, there always exited a set X which if removed from a man rendered him valueless to women. These days it’s money, previously it might have been physical strength, etc.
The tragedy is that women are not able to see/find the value in the synergy which a marriage can provide. I think the same thing can be said about men too, except that men might see more value in the synergy.
As someone said, “why get remarried when I can just find a woman I don’t like and give her a house?”
Also, experience seems to show that the strong independent wage earners in practice don’t actually like their husbands staying home and take care of the baby and perhaps try becoming a painter or musician, while they slave away in the DEI mines.
They may not enjoy doing their part of the house chores either when they come home. Or having the husband get the house, half, custody, perhaps alimony, and so on when things blow up.
Phil, i have to disagree with you about that a man needs to “move to a part of the country or world where the culture supports stable marriage”. Maybe another country would work but there is no place in the USA where this is true and even if it was there is nothing to stop the wife from packing up everything and moving to another state and getting a divorce there. I have seen it happen to a good friend of mine. He left for work one morning and came home to an empty house that night. His wife moved to another state took the kid, cleaned out the bank accounts etc. Nobody cared, courts did nothing to her. He ended up losing all access to his kid and got stuck with $2k/month in child support.
Surplus men aren’t needed until the elites engage in an existential war. Then, they are very useful in keeping the elites alive. They are sort like any sort of security, it feels like you don’t need them, and next thing you know you’ve been Ghengis Kahn-ed.