Demographics is always destiny, and macro always eventually dictates the micro.
Women now substantially outnumber men on university campuses and outpace them in degrees earned, yet the preference for husbands who match or exceed a wife’s income and education has not correspondingly relaxed. The result is a radical market mismatch.
Daniel Lichter, Joseph Price, and Jeffrey Swigert constructed statistical profiles of the husbands that today’s unmarried women would marry, based on the actual husbands of demographically comparable married women. These “synthetic husbands” have incomes 58 percent higher than the real unmarried men available; they are 30 percent more likely to be employed and 19 percent more likely to hold a college degree. The men whom women are prepared to marry bear little resemblance to their struggling real-world counterparts. The few who shape up to the fantasy are snapped up quickly.
For a regular man, this implies that becoming marriageable now requires clearing exceptional bars: a degree (with the debt that comes attached) and an income well above the male median (also — 6ft, muscular physique, etc. etc.). Likewise social media has raised the expectations against which men are measured to make-believe levels. A working man in 1965 was marriageable by default in a way that his grandson is not. Again, all of this leverages tremendous economic pressure on men to overperform.
There are two solutions. Either female nature magically transforms itself or society starts instituting structural affirmative action in favor of men.
That’s it. There are no other options.
And transforming female nature is never going to be an option because women are so immune to reality that they are genuinely shocked to discover the vast majority of men are not six feet tall.