Men are struggling to find love. Here's why...

MEN are disappointing. I’ve heard it from so many of my female friends that I’ve lost count.

- SHADI HAMID

The data backs it up, too: Men are falling behind women on most of the metrics that matter, whether it’s being employed, graduating from high school and college, or just having friends.

My friend Richard Reeves wrote a whole book, which I strongly recommend, popularising this view of what he calls the “male malaise”.

The picture of a lonely young man playing video games in his parents’ basement is, by now, a cliché, but it’s one of those clichés that speaks to something true. Women, for their part, are growing increasingly frustrated that men aren’t showing up—in a quite literal sense.

But this paralysis isn’t limited to the stereotypical underachieving male. Even men who are professionally successful or otherwise “together” find themselves frozen by the overwhelming complexity of modern relationship choices. In the 1970s and 1980s, the percentage of men who weren't married by age 40 was in the single digits. By 2021, that number had increased, remarkably, to 28%.

The topic has gained fresh urgency, with a spate of viral essays examining the perils of modern dating dynamics. The problem with men is getting worse. Or at least that’s what several pieces in the New York Times seem to suggest.

At a party recently, I found myself embroiled in a long debate about “heterofatalism”, drawing on a long essay by the writer Jean Garnett, which provoked duelling reactions from both sides of the gender divide.

In her article, Garnett recounts a promising first date with a man. A week later, he pulls back from her, with

the admittedly lame excuse that he is going through “some intense anxiety” and needs to “lay low”.