A dating crisis that’s even worse than it may seem
After Donald Trump’s reelection, a lot of women were angry: at the result, at what Trump’s return to office could mean for their lives, and at the many people who voted for him—especially the men. In the ensuing days, some of these women began suggesting, half-jokingly or in total earnest, a radical kind of recourse: a sex strike.
As a reporter covering modern dating, I’ve spoken with a lot of men and women who have reluctantly given up the search for love. I believe that people can have rich, fulfilling lives with or without partners; I also know that courtship has never been easy. But research supports the idea that, in recent years, the U.S. has seen a particularly pronounced crisis of faith in romance. The Pew Research Center, in an analysis of census data, found that as of 2019, 38 percent of adults were unpartnered—that is, not married or living with a partner—compared with 29 percent in 1990. In a survey Pew conducted that same year, half of single adults said they were not seeking dates. When Pew divided that result by gender, it found that 61 percent of single men said they were looking to date or find a relationship while only 38 percent of single women said the same.
In other words, straight partnerships seem to be going out not with a 4B-style bang but with a whimper. And however subtle the shift might seem, it has huge implications for men and women: how they treat each other, whether they’re willing to trust each other, and how they’ll build their futures—together or apart.
That search resulted in his 2015 book, Date-onomics: How Dating Became a Lopsided Numbers Game. His main takeaway was that college-educated women were competing for a shrinking number of similarly educated men, and that given this “man deficit,” they were facing a demoralizing dating scene. Starting in the 1970s, the share of bachelor’s degrees awarded to men began to drop; more recently, the number of women enrolling in and completing college has surpassed the number of men to a significant extent.
