Why Are There So Many Single Men and Women? | Girls Chase

Why Are There So Many Single Men and Women?

Chase Amante

Hey! Chase Amante here.

You've read all the free articles I can offer you for this month.

If you'd like to read more, I've got to ask for your help keeping the lights on at Girls Chase.

Click a plan below to sign up now and get right back to reading. It's only 99¢ the first month.

Already a GirlsChase.com subscriber? Log in here.

Chase Amante's picture
so many single men and womenThere are 4x as many unmarried 40 y/os today than there were just 3 decades ago. What’s happened, and why are so many men and women single and alone?

In the same forum thread that inspired my last article about men who resent women, a separate forum member commented to ask:

Does this still apply when women reject all of their suitors to end up single? Many of the women who rejected me over a year ago are still single. This description could well apply to many single women above 33, say. Can we then declare that the woman's standards were unrealistic or that the criteria that she used to reject were unreasonable and harmful (to her own happiness)? Or would you still argue that she rejected all of those guys and ended up single because she has expectations for men based on her experiences with men the past and she didn't see comparable quality with any of her suitors? This could be a past chad boyfriend but even if she's a virgin it could be male figures in her family e.g. a woman might want a guy to be taller than her baby brother. In that case, would you make the argument that the suitors who got rejected failed to effectively compete with the guys/male figures of the past or would you concede that the women can be blamed here for their standards?

It's true; there are lots of single older women, and more all the time. There are also lots of single older men. There are lots of people in general who are not having committed long-term relationships, and even more of them (single and attached) who do not reproduce.

All this – people remaining single, even while older; people eschewing committed relationships; people remaining childless – are part of a broad sociological trend throughout modern societies. It is not just a Western phenomenon; the same phenomenon is occurring in East Asia, which has a very different society but the same exact issues.

If we want to understand the explosion of older single and childless people, we need to look beyond individual cases and examine broad civilizational trends to grasp what is really happening in human societies.

 

Most Theories Can’t Hold Their Water

Before we dive into what IS driving singledom and childlessness, let’s look at what isn’t!

Here is the stuff you will commonly hear is CAUSING these phenomena in the West:

  • The birth control pill
  • Women’s liberation
  • Cultural Marxism
  • The sexual revolution
  • Rampant homosexuality
  • Social disintegration
  • Modern divorce laws
  • Social media
  • Dating apps
  • Feminism
  • Rape hysteria / #MeToo
pro-abortion protestersIs this why everyone is single?

These hypotheses can seem like they explain part of the picture, but they can never explain it all. For instance, feminism has liberated women from the household! Now women are free to make their own choices. So their choices have been to… fail to secure a reliable mate and let their genes die out of the gene pool? Why? Also, they are doing this en masse because… well, women’s natural programming is just THAT full of bugs that without men there to guide them they commit mass genetic suicide?

You need to really be willing to stretch your logic to follow this hypothesis to its zany and hard-to-swallow conclusion.

Or how about social media driving people to have inflated egos, which leads to them thinking they’re worth more than they are, leading to them holding out forever, leading to them dying old, single, childless, and alone? This can account for a few especially vain people here and there, but I don’t think these sorts needed social media to get there. By the same coin, if you believe you can explain whole swaths of the human population as being so weak-minded and so easily evolutionarily cul-de-sacced that they can be wiped out by a little bit of fake glowing screen popularity, you are (I should very much say) giving people a lot less credit than they’re due.

Here's what you will realize the more you study mankind: humans, like all animals, are remarkably resilient, and very, very difficult to totally pull off their programming. That programming pretty much inevitably leads to mating, which leads to reproduction – in the past century 90% of people married and 85% of them reproduced. Of course, you have the odd ones out, who have physical problems or mental quirks or childhood trauma that made intimacy with other humans or the production of new life impossible… but they’re a tiny minority.

They’re still a minority today – but that minority is rapidly increasing in size. 25% of 40-year-old American Millennials have never been married, and the vast majority of those live alone. By comparison, the rate of unmarried American 40-year-olds was about 6% from the 1960s through the 1980s.

I’m a 40-year-old American Millennial. I’ve been married… well… several times… the first time at 24. But among my friend groups I’m the outlier. Most of the guys I know around my age are unmarried and have never been married. Considering my line of work, you can probably figure the circles I run with are going to be a bit more prone to enjoying lengthy bachelorhoods. However, it’s more than that – many of my friends are ambivalent about ever marrying or having children. Some of them have vasectomies.

It's fairly safe to say if she’s a woman and unmarried and childless at 40, she’ll probably never have kids – it’s also less and less likely with each passing year she’ll marry. If you haven’t done it by 40, what are the odds you’ll do it by 60? 80? 100? If you haven’t met someone compatible enough in four decades on the Earth, well, let’s just say I don’t like your odds. They’re not zero, but they’re not that great either. The odds fall for men as men age too. I have a friend who had his first kid in his mid-40s, and now has four children. Most guys who make it to their mid-40s without kids won’t have kids though.

Whatever the cause, the rate of unmarrieds has more than quadrupled since the 1980s. We can try to explain that with societal changes – but what you will notice, more and more as you study civilizations, is that social changes go hand-in-hand with other social changes; in other words, there’s a correlation there, not a causation.

If all these symptoms (both social changes and a decline in marriage and reproduction) go hand-in-hand then, and are related but not causally so, what’s the ACTUAL cause?

 

Constriction Causes Collapse

A few years back I covered John B. Calhoun’s rat utopia experiments. For this article, I dove deeper than any of the articles or videos you can find on it elsewhere do – I read all the way through all the papers Calhoun published on his experiments. The result was I discerned a number of unnerving similarities between the behavior of Calhoun’s rats and mice and what we’re seeing in heavily industrialized societies. Calhoun sounded the alarm on these similarities decades ago, but no one much paid attention.

READ MORE: Mouse Utopia: Are We Living in the Human Version?

mouse utopiaHow organisms behave with abundant resources but limited space.

What Calhoun found was that despite the fact that food and water was effectively infinite for his subjects, and there was plenty of nest space for the mice and rats to use in theory, it did not matter – they became incredibly dysfunctional, reproduction failed, and their populations crashed every time. What was going on?

In theory, the mice had plenty of space. They didn’t even use most of it – most of the mice crowded together in small parts of the mouse utopia, leaving large other areas abandoned. But in reality, mice do not gather together like this in nature. They have larger ranges and live farther apart. When you push them together in great abundance, they become dysfunctional.

There’s a thread on Reddit where various Millennials (my age or younger) discuss why they’re single, why they’ve dropped out of the dating pool, why they have vasectomies, and so on. It pretty much all boils down to:

  • “I’m not successful enough.”
  • “I don’t have the money to date/marry/have kids.”
  • “I’m still living at home with my parents.”
  • “I wouldn’t be able to give my kids the kind of life I had.”
  • “I dread the economic woes coming in the future.”

The minority of people commenting on that thread who are married with kids either say they can easily afford them or waited until they could, or they can’t and they regret having them.

To quote Bill Clinton’s famous back office campaign slogan from his 1992 presidential run, “It’s the economy, stupid!”

Bill Clinton pointing at budget deficit chartHint: it’s always the economy, stupid.

People who can afford dating, marriage, and children do those things. People who can’t avoid them. It’s not a one-to-one correlation (there are financially comfortable people who avoid romance and/or reproduction, and there are welfare queens and deadbeat dads with legions of bastards), but it’s a strong one. Partnered adults are 41% more likely to have a college degree and earn 40% more on average than adults who are single. They’re also 14x less likely to be living at home. This is all much different than decades ago.

Yet, in many Eastern European, South American, and Southeast Asian countries, people live at home until marriage… but they still marry anyway, and they still have kids. Why then are so many Westerners not?

Objectively, Americans live in a land of plenitude. They are extremely far from starving. Compare the poorest people in Yemen with the poorest people in America. Yemen’s poorest are emaciated mummies on the verge of death from starvation. America’s poorest are obese.

But people don’t respond to OBJECTIVE measures. They respond to RELATIVE ones.

What happens when, relative to what you have always known, things appear to be getting worse? You move into austerity. You cut back spending, lower your sights, reduce your goals and aims, even give up your dreams.

The more hemmed in people feel, with less space, fewer options, and less hope for the future, the more likely they are to give up on life’s great pursuits. Not just people – the mice in the mouse utopia study did it; animals in captivity often do too.

It is famously difficult to get animals in captivity to reproduce. The animals have all the food, water, and shelter they could possibly want. They have access to medical services their wild peers do not. They are safer than animals in the wild, and live much longer on average. Yet when presented with mates and ample opportunity to mate they… infrequently produce offspring, and often do not mate at all.

Constriction causes collapse in mating and reproduction – and not just in animals.

It happens in humans, too.

 

Everyone Is So Hemmed In

I did the whole 9-to-5 thing for four years. The job I was promised when interviewing sounded fun and exciting, like I’d be working on great projects and jetting all over the country. I mostly ended up on dead-end projects doing work a high schooler could’ve done (easily), and most of the business travel I did didn’t come until my final six months with the company. When I finally left the white collar world, I was such a soulless husk it took me a year to get back to the spirited, productive, go-getter attitude I’d had prior to working for a Mega Corp.

Toward the end of my 9-to-5 tenure, I got a girl I was with pregnant, and just about died. She was an awesome girl, but my whole life flashed in front of my eyes: a working stiff, never able to quit or continue my travels, because I’d have a responsibility to pay off a mortgage, car loans, and Little Johnny’s school costs. A lifetime of domestic drudgery, with the zombie glaze the 9-to-5 had placed into my eyes there forever.

zombie working at computer in office cubicleHow I imagined my future during those brief, stressful weeks.

When the girl miscarried, I felt tremendous relief. I left the corporate world – and indeed the whole continent – under a year later.

I’m not against kids. I’m decidedly pro-kids. But I for sure was not READY for kids, in that situation. I had a stable job, a comfortable life, and I… felt trapped in that situation.

I think that hemmed-in, boxed-in feeling is one people are experiencing en masse. Many of them say it outright. Others you can see it in their eyes. They are comfortable, of course. Everyone is comfortable. There’s tasty food to eat, captivating diversions to lose yourself in on your screens, and plenty of causes to argue about with other people to make you feel like you’re making a difference, fighting for the side of righteousness. But deep down, everyone sort of feels trapped. And if you take on more responsibilities, that just means you’re trapped even more.

I’ve spent a lot of time reading about courtship in prior decades and centuries. Women would sometimes get cold feet before marriage, fearing a similar kind of ‘trapped’ phenomenon. The way women used to feel it was that they felt free living with their parents, able to do what they pleased, and knew that once with a husband they’d be responsible for taking care of the home and rearing the children. It seemed intimidating. Men, on the other hand, rushed headlong into marriage, thrilled at the chance to have a wife, dreaming of the families they’d raise. Even the women, when not experiencing their cold feet, shared this excitement. Reading the enthusiasm in love letters from bygone ages, you realize how absent that is today. Does anyone know anybody who feels like that now?

Well, I know SOME people. My sister attended a Catholic university, and some of her classmates were extremely eager to marry and start making babies. In my travels it seems like a lot of folks who are more religious and more out in the countryside are this way. But not so in the cities.

In the cities, they’re too hemmed in.

There is something I think is inherently missing from modern Western life. I noticed it when I worked in the corporate world, and felt the difference when I left to start my own businesses. That is this: a ‘plot of land’ that is YOURS. Where is your stake? In agrarian societies, everyone owns a plot of land, that is his land, and its proceeds are his. He can invest in his land, improve it, raise its yield through irrigation and fertilizer and better tools. He can change crops or raise livestock. Getting a wife to help him, and children to help out on the farm, contributes more to that.

Decades ago in the West, a man could have a job and know it was his for life. He could be a company man, gradually improving his lot within the company, certain that he’d be taken care of in old age – the company was his plot of land. And of course he had his home, a place that many men worked on to improve with their own hands, making additions and improvements, even as their wives did the same, kitting the home out with appliances, carpets, wallpaper, and nice little decorative touches.

Today, what plot of land does a man have? People work at corporations that can lay them off at will – and often do. Many own small condominiums with no yard and brutal HOAs that block even tiny improvements. One friend of mine has a totally paid off studio apartment in New York City where he pays DOUBLE per month in taxes and HOA fees than what I pay to RENT (albeit in a different – though equally urbanized – city). 57% of Millennials do not own their own homes. Meanwhile, every time the government prints money, Wall Street buys up single-family homes (the big banks, after all, need a place to park those freshly minted greenbacks as the money printer goes brrrr), jacking their prices up sky-high; by 2030, the big banks may own 40% of U.S. single-family rental homes.

When people, just like wild animals, just like the rats and mice in John B. Calhoun’s experiments, begin to feel hemmed in, they lose interest in mating, stop taking mates, and cease reproducing.

man in claustrophobic conditions surrounded by people“Hey buddy, you wanna meet a girl, get hitched, and have kids?”

We can see this happening everywhere that people are squeezed together in tight urban environments working for large companies where they have no power or ownership; take a look at East Asia, with a completely different culture than the West, and far less-to-none of the societal trends that get the blame out West (feminism, gay stuff, Cultural Marxism, casual sex culture, etc.), but the same exact outcomes: marriage rates in steep decline, birthrates plummeting.

The one common factor is this: people filling up the space that people are in, having less and less control over their own spheres, and feeling more and more hemmed in and hopeless.

Even though, just like in Calhoun’s mouse utopias, most of the space is empty.

Most of the world is totally bereft of people; just empty wilderness for miles and miles, as pristine as it ever was, even as everyone crams into cities and despairs.

 

A Cycle that Repeats Again and Again

This cycle we’re witnessing is an ancient one.

In 18 B.C., Augustus Caesar, fighting the collapsing marriage and birth rates in heavily urbanized Rome, the most powerful city in the world, passed the lex Iulia de maritandis ordinibus. Among other things, the law:

  • Offered rewards to those who married.

  • Added the “Law of Three Sons” elevating the status of couples who produced three male heirs.

  • Penalized people who remained unmarried.

  • Blocked marriage-age singles and young widows who refused remarriage from receiving inheritances or attending public games (the YouTube/TikTok/professional sports of the time all rolled into one – quite a penalty!).

  • Made adultery both a public and private crime.

  • Limited marriage across social class boundaries (so people would have to marry their own).

Augustus Caesar at RomeAugustus telling all these women they’d better start making babies.

27 years later, in 9 A.D., Augustus added the lex Papia Poppea to further expand on the law. It included revised provisions and new incentives/disincentives, such as:

  • An individual of marriageable age who was unmarried could not receive his inheritance; HOWEVER if he married within 100 days of becoming eligible for an inheritance he could still receive his inheritance (otherwise, the government claims the inheritance).

  • Married men from age 25-60 and married women from age 20-50 who had no children were eligible to receive only half of any inheritances they were due to receive. Adoptions (used previously by Romans to evade laws such as this) no longer counted.

  • A man reaching 60 and a woman reaching 50 were not subject to these penalties any longer… unless they had ignored them while of marriageable age, in which case they were bound by the penalties forever.

  • Men with three children in Rome (the big city), or four in Italy (suburbs), or five in the provinces (countryside) were excused from holding certain public offices that most people did not want to be called to hold.

Obviously, ancient Rome didn’t have Tinder or Instagram to deal with. There was a feminist-like movement and some degree of homosexuality in Rome (though far less than what Ancient Greece saw). But the real cause was the same one we see now: people were becoming too hemmed in, and the general trajectory of society was downwards, rather than up.

Rome had been on an upswing for centuries until the time of Augustus. But the Social Wars racked Rome, as people angry at the crushing debt and bad economy they were experiencing backed populists who tried to wrest power from the oligarchy. And all the while, in this degrading economy, in the crowded city, and even in the suburbs, even in the countryside, marriage rates plummeted, and birthrates collapsed.

By the time Rome finally entered its twilight years as an empire, the once populous countryside was deserted, and the cities had dramatically fallen in their populations. Entire cities became unpeopled ruins, and Rome itself – the urban center of an empire that boasted a million inhabitants at the height of the Empire – eventually crumbled to a population of just 12,000 souls living in villages built among towering ruins by the year 1000 A.D.

The cycle of declining marriage and birthrates has continued over and over throughout history. Constantinople, just like Rome, saw its population plummet long before the city fell. The Turks entered its walls to discover small villages set up amongst the ruins, just like Rome, with only a more urbanized cluster around the eastern palace.

Is this what will become of London and New York City a few centuries from now? Villages carved out among the crumbling, empty skyscrapers and rewilded streets of their earlier golden ages?

The English passed the Marriage Duty Act in 1695 that taxed bachelors over the age of 25 and childless widowers. At the time, up to 27% of the English never married, mirroring American Millennials today; elite Englishmen were particularly disinterested in marriage. Old, unmarried women became so common that the term ‘old maid’ (i.e., old unmarried woman – maid being short for ‘maiden’, an unmarried woman… not a housekeeper) entered the English lexicon.

At the same time, across the English Channel, the French fretted over their country’s low birth rates. Infant mortality was pegged as the cause – whether it was or wasn’t is not clear – and nationwide campaigns began to improve midwifery to help more infants survive their births. One has to wonder though, if lack of properly trained midwives was really the problem, how come low birthrates hadn’t been such of an issue in France in the past, when midwives were presumably no better?

The economic and living conditions of the English and French of the late 17th and early 18th Centuries included cities that were so crowded, unsanitary, and with so much infighting and political persecution that many people gladly fled to a barbaric New World across the Atlantic with vague hopes of starting fresh without so many people around. Native Americans, on first contact with Europeans, were disgusted at how dirty and unhygienic the barbaric Europeans were. They were used to living in their own filth. In 19th Century London, conditions were so bad that childhood mortality was 67% by age 5. At the same time Europe was dealing with these crowded, dirty, sickly conditions, Europeans were also marrying far less, and having far fewer children.

It seems clear that every time a civilization reaches a point where people feel hemmed in and constricted, less free, less hopeful, with less autonomy and less under their control, the age of first marriage rises, the number of never-marrieds skyrockets, and the birth rate plummets.

There’s usually social conflict and social unrest – but these are just other symptoms; they are not the causes.

 

So What Can You Do?

About your society?

Nothing.

It will survive. It won’t go extinct.

But a lot of people aren’t going to marry, and a lot of folks won’t have kids. That’s just the reality of the situation. Just like animals in captivity that don’t take mates and don’t produce issue, and rat and mouse populations in crammed ‘utopias’ that surge then die out, people living in these crammed, crowded societies where they don’t own land, don’t own their own means of subsistence, don’t have much of a stake in the future, become less motivated to mate and less likely and motivated to reproduce.

man standing in infinite sea of cratesWhat’s your stake in all this?

For your own part though, you can buck the trend. If you KNOW the trend, you can buck it – if you want to. Of course, maybe you don’t. We are, after all, products of our environments. Sometimes it is hard to see ourselves from any other perspective than the one our society enforces upon us.

Yet you can be aware of environmental constraints that direct your own mindsets and activities. You can be aware of how the environment around you shapes your wants, dreams, ambitions, and motivations.

If you aren’t in the environment you want, change it.

You can:

  1. Move out to the countryside. Land is CHEAP and you can build your own thing in the countryside of pretty much any country. You might be shocked how cheap land gets once you get away from civilization. You can buy an acre of land in various places throughout the US for under $10K. How about an acre of land in Brewster County, TX, for $1125? Most people are all trying to live together, clustered in a few small islands of civilization in the great wilderness of the world, tripping all over each other to buy up expensive small slices of ground in the places everyone else is. You could even live temporarily in the city… while owning your own big parcel of land in the country you’ll retire to once you’re done with living fast, loose, and single and you’re ready to take the girl you’ve got and move to that next phase of life.

  1. Switch locations. Not every place is as crowded and hemmed-in as others. Many places have slower paces of life, more space, more ownership, and are out of the rat races. That could be somewhere within your state, province, or country, or it could be a different country altogether. There’s only one way to find a place like this: you need to go traveling around and exploring and look for it (well, you can also ask people. That can work too! Use the grapevine – or do some Internet research).

  1. Get rich. Easier said than done for some people, but if you have the skills and motivation you can do it. It’s certainly possible to get yourself to the point where you have the financial freedom to do whatever you want. If you’re on that path to it, it can also help liberate you in your personal life… because even if you’re not there yet, if you’re confident you can get there, you can start making decisions today based on your confidence of where you’ll be tomorrow.

I’m not going to tell you it isn’t hard. It is. As societies complexify, their mating markets do too… and marriage rates and birth rates take a heavy beating.

READ MORE: As Mating Complexity Increases, Do Reproductive Returns Diminish?

mating complexityMore complexity = more problems.

You CAN do it – but you’ve got to be able to pull yourself out of the rut the rest of the folks around you find themselves stuck in in your society.

Also, there’s one thing I’d like to address in this piece, sort of a tangent, but it’s something I think is interesting nonetheless. There are all kinds of theories about the selfish gene, or the selfish individual, and how these are programmed to reproduce at all costs. But look what happens in times and circumstances like these, where people increasingly swear off dating, swear off mating, swear off marriage, swear off reproduction. Hordes and hordes of people simply opt out of reproduction – and it’s not just people; animals in captivity, and rats and mice in Calhoun’s utopias, all do it too.

 

A Brief Aside Before We Wrap

How could this be evolutionarily adaptive? Shouldn’t previous genetic bottlenecks have weeded out the non-reproducers, in captive animals and hemmed-in people alike? If you don’t reproduce you can’t leave behind children who won’t reproduce, so you’d think natural selection would select for people who make babies even when times are tough… right?

The answer, I believe, is that when you get to a complex system like a brain, there are limits to how totally evolution can shape certain behaviors. At a certain level, the learning machine that the brain is needs to be able to follow patterns and arrive at conclusions, and it becomes too big a tradeoff trying to evolve in different failsafes against various potential reproductive dysfunctions. Hardcode a “reproduce even in difficult times” failsafe into the brain, and you get organisms that behave equally dysfunctional, just in a different direction. Think “couple that is starving to death but decide to get pregnant rather than wait a year for the famine to end.”

Anyway, this seemingly anti-Darwinian behavior of curtailing reproduction – even to the point of species extinction, like in the case of rare captive animals that just won’t breed in captivity – as a response to feeling hemmed-in seems to point to emergent properties of the brain that evolution has a hard time with… or perhaps it simply hasn’t had enough “hemmed in” genetic bottlenecks in nature to really shape it in most species.

Humans, however, have had a lot of these bottlenecks (as evidenced by how often governments throughout history have needed to try to fight low marriage and birth rates), so you’d think we’d be better adapted to still keep our mating and reproduction up despite ‘mouse utopia’ scenarios.

Maybe we are.

Maybe if you plunged rhinos or pandas into crowded, privacy-devoid, economically unstable settings like modern humans live in, their populations would’ve just completely collapsed long ago – and we humans are just better adapted to be able to keep the show going much deeper into all this shrinkage and constriction.

Certainly, while Rome and Constantinople became ghost towns, no such thing happened to London or Paris – indeed, their populations today are greater than ever. Scientists say mankind has been evolving faster in the last 10,000 years than at any point in human history… perhaps we’ve evolved to be better at not utterly collapsing in dense, constrained conditions.

man and woman holding daughter's hands on city streetMaybe our past urbanization bottlenecks have already selected us to be more resistant to hemmed-in conditions than many other species.

Anyway, if you’re someone who wants to buck the trend, and get yourself feeling a lot freer, in your personal life, professional life, in every way in life, look for ways to remove yourself from a constricting environment – even if you’re only just removing yourself from it mentally.

Whether that’s life on the open range with a parcel of land that’s yours, or self-made wealth that lets you live relatively carefree even within those big, constricted cities, or it’s just a move to another part of the world where you feel freer, you will find, as you change environments, an opening up of possibilities in life; that things that for many people seem undoable even become quite easily doable – for you.

You can’t change the world.

You can only change your environment.

Merry Christmas and good will to men (and women)!
Chase Amante

SHOW COMMENTS (12)

One Date girl next to the number one

Get The Girl In Just One Date

It only takes one date to get the girl you want. Best of all, the date's easy to get… and girls love it.

Inside One Date, You'll Learn

  • How to build instant chemistry
  • Ways to easily create arousal
  • How to get girls to do what you want
  • The secret to a devoted girlfriend

…and more great Girls Chase Tech