Is There a Young Male Singleness Crisis?
And is the singleness gap caused by chad stealing the women?
A statistic which has had an enormous impact and become another staple in the ‘male loneliness’ discourse comes from a Pew survey which showed that while 34% of young women reported not being currently in a committed relationship, 63% of young men did—almost twice as many.
This unsurprisingly blew up on social media and triggered a slew of alarmist articles.
In the 2019 Pew survey, 51% of young men and 32% of women reported being single. This means that while there was a 12% rise in singleness among men, there was only a 2% rise among women, for a 10% wider gap. “Who are all the young women dating?”, everyone wondered.
How consistent is this finding?
It’s always advisable to attempt to cross-reference with other sources to get as accurate a picture as possible. Are these seemingly extraordinary findings corroborated by other surveys?
The American Perspectives Survey found that contrary to the gap widening, it was reduced from 21% in 2020 to 12% in 2022, with 2% less young men and 7% more young women reporting being single.
The General Social Survey in the last two surveys in 2021 and 2022 has shown a gap of around 10% between young men and women, and likewise shows no sign of a widening gap.
While the Pew and APS surveys employed a representative online panel, the GSS uses random cluster sampling. There may be a selection bias in the people who join and participate in online panels which make them more likely to be in relationships12, and which may explain why there are generally more single people in the GSS samples.
The sample sizes between the surveys are relatively comparable. In the Pew survey, there were 330 men and 553 women aged 18-29, in the APS: 298 men and 281 women, in the 2022 GSS: 267 men and 337 women, and in the 2021 GSS: 200 men and 261 women. So if you combine the 2021 and 2022 GSS surveys together, you’d get a sample size larger than the Pew survey. It’s worth mentioning that there was an oversample of LGB in the Pew sample too, though this shouldn’t in itself compromise the results after weighting the data.
The fact that other sources show significantly smaller gaps along with the fact that online panels even if recruited through probability sampling may be less representative of the general population than actual probability samples is good reason to be skeptical of the Pew results.
The chad of the gaps
The manosphere was highly enthusiastic about this finding as it was of course taken as validating the chadspiracy theory whereby ‘chads’ are forming ‘soft harems’, leading to a situation of ‘de facto polygamy’ under which the majority of men are excluded from the dating market.
The narrative which has developed around this Pew finding suggests that women are unwittingly ‘sharing chad’ while under the false impression that he’s committed to them alone.
We do have a prominent example of this ‘plate spinning’ in the recently exposed Andrew Huberman, but is this really such a widespread phenomenon? It seems especially hard to believe in a world where everything is broadcast to social media. Let’s not forget that Huberman is a neuroscientist, either.
Luckily there is a way that we can put this theory to the test. In the Pew report, people were simply split into ‘in a committed relationship’ and ‘single’. However, ‘committed relationship’ can refer to multiple different arrangements. The options in these surveys are married, cohabiting, or a more vague ‘committed relationship’. The chad harem hypothesis would of course predict a disproportionate number of women selecting the third option which is the only one which allows for the secrecy required for it to function.
You may have noticed that the APS broke the results down by relationship category. The singleness gap in these surveys appears to have been caused primarily by more young women than men reporting to be married or cohabiting: in 2020, 2% more men were in a non-marital and non-cohabiting relationship, while 11% more women were cohabiting and 11% more women were married. In 2022, 4% more women were in a non-marital and non-cohabiting relationship, 5% more women were cohabiting, and 5% more women were married.
The 2022 APS also included ‘casually dating more than one person’ as an option for single people’s dating status. Overall, 1.3% of 18-29 men and women were both single and selected this, so unless these harems rival those of Chinese Emperors…
The same organization, the Survey Center on American Life, conducted another survey in 2021 using a different panel. This one included 384 18-29 men, more than Pew, and 461 18-29 women. 86% of the 15.4% gap was caused by a surplus of married or cohabiting women.
Another survey from the same year shows no gap in the non-cohabiting category.
I also downloaded the raw data from Pew to see if the same thing applies there. For the most part yes; 71% of the gap is caused by a surplus of married and cohabiting women.
Is this really a new phenomenon?
The implication tends to be that most young men being single is some crazy unprecedented scenario. What if we take a look at some older data though, were things really drastically different in the past?
In a 2005 Pew survey, half of young men and 32% of young women were single. There was about a 13% gap in being married, and 4% in ‘living as married’, which must have meant a legal civil union since so few selected it.
The four GSS surveys which asked about relationship status prior to 2012 show young male singleness rates between 46% and 63%, and an average gender disparity of 16.5%.
Using US Census data from 1900 I found that 50.7% of young women compared to 30.5% of young men were married. Taking a trip back to 1950 America where I hear you were guaranteed a hot tradwife after turning 18, even here we see that actually about half of young men were unmarried (which in this time period effectively means single).
The average gap in median marriage age was only slightly higher in the 50s, so it shows how sizeable gaps in singleness are possible even with modest average age gaps.
Are these men seeking relationships?
Should we assume that all single men are desperate to find a romantic partner but are ‘insing’, or are a good chunk actually MGTOWs (men going their own way) or otherwise not looking to date?
A graph produced by Pew showed that 50% of single men reported being uninterested in dating, up from 39% in 2019, while the rate for women remained similar at 65%. This included all ages however. If we instead look at the percentages for young men and women, they drop to 41% for men and way down to 36% for women, so older single women were substantially driving up the percentage. When including those who were only interested in casual dates, 55% of single men weren’t looking for committed relationships.
These figures are quite close to those seen in the 2019 survey where 35.4% of young single men and 39.3% of young single women reported being uninterested in dating, and the difference doesn’t appear to be statistically significant. In the 2005 Pew survey, 38% of 18-29 singles were uninterested in dating. So it doesn’t seem like there’s a strong trend here either.
We also have to remember that a lot more young men reported being single, so more young women’s desires to be in a relationship were being fulfilled. If we instead look at how many young men and women were both single and uninterested in dating from the overall sample, we come to 26% of men and 12% of women.
Among young singles in the 2022 APS, 34% of men and 43% of women reported being uninterested in dating, amounting to 19.7% of young men and 19.4% of young women overall.
48% of single men and 61% of single women stated enjoying being single more as a minor or major reason for being single. 17% of men and 24% of women stated it was a major reason. Difficult to meet people, more important priorities, people don’t meet expectations, and other’s aren’t interested were other common reasons selected by both men and women. Some weren’t ready after a break-up.
So going by these figures at least, there are a substantial number of men who aren’t looking to date at all. It’s difficult to say though how many are for ‘MGTOW’ related reasons such as feeling that ‘the juice isn’t worth the squeeze’. Some people would assert that many of these men saying they’re uninterested in dating are just ‘coping’ by framing it as a deliberate choice when in reality they’re without options, but we won’t speculate here.
Conclusion
Firstly, we found that the young singleness gender gap in other surveys was significantly lower than that seen in the Pew survey. This is a reminder that we shouldn’t take the results of a single survey as gospel truth. If anything there is an inverse correlation between a statistic’s accuracy and its viral potential. If it’s headline grabbing and fits a popular narrative it won’t take long to spread to every corner of the internet and become an incontrovertible truth which shows up in virtually every discussion around the pertinent topic while less exciting data lingers in obscurity.
Secondly, the bulk of the gap is a result of more women than men reporting being married or living with their partners. Unless chads (and women) are converting to Mormonism at record numbers, polygamy doesn’t seem like a likely explanation. It’s not easy to get reliable figures on the prevalence of polyamory—especially since it’s often lumped together with other forms of consensual non-monogamy such as open relationships, but from the data that is available it still seems quite rare, and also not practiced more by women than men (contrary to the notion that it represents a form of de facto polygyny). This leaves little room for sneaky chad ninjas to spin their plates, as the only category under which this is at all feasible is the more amorphous non-marital and non-cohabiting relationship.
Thirdly, there is nothing new about a large portion of young men being single. You could’ve probably written the same headline that ‘Most young men are single. Most young women are not' throughout most of the last century and beyond. If it wasn’t an urgent crisis 10, 25, 50, or 100 years ago, I’m not sure what should make it one now.
There is also little evidence for a widening gender gap, which would indeed be tricky to explain. Another overlooked shift appears to be that 10% less 65+ women reported being single in the 2022 Pew survey, yet 4% more 65+ men did, for a 14% narrower gap. If you assume that the 18-29 shift is real you also have to explain this peculiar change. Who are these grannies shacking up with all of a sudden? More likely is that both are simply meaningless fluctuations.
Finally, a good number of men say they aren’t too eager to begin a relationship, whether it’s because they’re too busy on the grind, have foregone real women for AI gfs and onlyfans, just want to date casually before deciding to settle down, etc. It’s not clear how much of a change this really is though. How actively the they are searching is another question; it could be that dating apps are having the effect of creating complacency.
So how about the gap that does exist?
It’s possible that if so-called ‘situationships’ are on the rise there could be more disagreement between men and women as to whether or not their situation constitutes a ‘committed relationship’, though again at most a small portion of the gap exists in the relevant category.
The simplest explanation is that the women are dating men outside the age bracket. A more realistic gap somewhere between 10-20% could reasonably be explained this way. Women tend to state a preference for men around their own age to slightly older while men prefer progressively wider age gaps the older they get3 (which is probably why age gaps have shrunk with time; men have less leverage on the dating market owing to women’s economic empowerment). It also might be the case to an extent that they emerge not from a direct preference for older men, but for example men who are higher in status. The reason we don’t see a reversal of the gap in the 30-49 age bracket (which also seems a bit higher in the Pew survey than other surveys) is because of the counterbalancing effect of women there dating 50+ men.
The male surplus which exists in the younger demographic (there are about 105 men to every 100 women in the 18-29 age bracket) can also help close the gap by a few percentage points.
It might sound like a bit of a cop-out, but the reason why this finding seems so crazy and impossible to explain may simply be because it’s not true. Anomalous outcomes like this do happen, perhaps due to sampling bias, random error, or some combination, and when they do they are the ones which attract the most attention, and that’s all that matters to the media and grievance grifters. I don’t have anything fundamentally against ‘male issues’ getting attention of course, but this doesn’t seem like much more than another manufactured ‘epidemic’.
Bosnjak, M., Haas, I., Galesic, M., Kaczmirek, L., Bandilla, W., & Couper, M. P. (2013). Sample composition discrepancies in different stages of a probability-based online panel. Field Methods, 25(4), 339–360. https://doi.org/10.1177/1525822X12472951
Tsuboi, S., Yoshida, H., Ae, R., Kojo, T., Nakamura, Y., & Kitamura, K. (2015). Selection bias of Internet panel surveys: a comparison with a paper-based survey and national governmental statistics in Japan. Asia-Pacific journal of public health, 27(2), NP2390–NP2399. https://doi.org/10.1177/1010539512450610
Kenrick, D. T., & Keefe, R. C. (1992). Age preferences in mates reflect sex differences in human reproductive strategies. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 15(1), 75–133. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00067595
Fascinating stuff. I wonder you can say or write something on stats reportedly showing that young women are far more Progressive than young men on something on the lines of a 80-20 split.