Are Dating Woes Reshaping Society?

This Thanksgiving, I spent the day with my family—big, loud, cousins everywhere, aunts and uncles filling the house, and conversations overlapping at full volume. The age range spanned decades, but many of my cousins are now in their early 20s. At some point, the topic shifted to dating.

"It's all messed up," one cousin said, and the others chimed in. "Nothing feels easy anymore."

I nodded. "Yeah, I know. Being a guy in your early 20s? That’s the toughest age in the dating game." Why? Young men face steep competition. Women their age have options: older men or peers their own age. But most older women rarely consider dating younger men, especially those still in their early 20s.

Older men have more money, more experience, and more stability. It’s logical. Ask any man about his past relationships, and the biggest regrets often stem from something youth driven, impulsive, inexperienced, unsteady decisions. Age brings perspective. By their 30s, men have often learned to avoid or minimize those mistakes, which explains why age-gap relationships are becoming increasingly normalized.

I told my cousins it gets easier after 30, as long as you’ve got a job and live in a city. The dating market shifts. A whole new set of options opens up. In the meantime, you can read books like this, but only take 30% of it seriously.

Dating is hard now. It’s a strange, turbulent time, and anyone in the dating market deserves some sympathy. The world feels unsteady, like it’s in the middle of an upheaval. It’s a non-lindy domain, nothing stable, nothing tested.

Just take a look at what people have to engage with:

The Dating Environment

1) Settling down for many people doesn’t even begin until people hit their 30s. In coastal, high-education areas, your 20s aren’t for building a life, they’re for "gaining memories" and collecting experiences. But that choice shortens the timeline for finding a partner and starting a family. It creates a logjam. What used to be 20 years becomes 10, or less.

2) People think they need far more money to settle down than they actually do. Influencers on Instagram and TikTok showcase glamorous lives, coastal areas, extravagant vacations, that distort what’s realistic. This breeds strife and indecision, making the already difficult path to building a life together even harder to navigate.

4) Online dating and modern life have turned relationships into a market, but maybe we were never meant to live this way. People keep trading up, treating settling down as a bigger deal than ever, because settling now feels final. Dating has become transactional, and the market is becoming brutally efficient. This infinite access to potential partners creates something new, a paradox of choice that makes commitment harder, not easier. The game has changed. Options are limitless.

There’s also digital literacy of dating people have to learn. Navigating photos, likes and comments on social media. Flirting has gone digital.

5) Being Single is Optimized. Whole industries, I would say, even our whole society caters to single people at this point. You can live a great life in a city perpetually single. Travel, hobbies, pet ownership, there is no judgment for single people anymore. It’s just fine. People can get comfortable in an optimized world that won’t push them. This means relationships have to be good enough to beat a society optimized for people who are single.

@clairahermet

I’m almost 41, I’m single, childfree and I’m happy… some men on the internet don’t like this but I don’t care 😂😂😂 #womensupportingwomen #w... See more

6) Women are very succesful now. Women don’t like to “date down”. Men are generally less choosy about partners. The more succesful a woman is, the less pool of available dating partners she is willing to consider.

It leads to situations where beautiful, high earning women are single for a long time. Which is very common in urban areas of the United States

More Single People Than Ever

But it got me thinking. How much of our society is changing because we now have a huge number of single people? Relationships are getting harder to form and this is spilling out into how we are organizing life. It sounds glib, but I’m being serious. The number of single individuals has reached unprecedented levels in recent years. This is the first time in history this has happened.

In 2022, approximately 49.3% of Americans aged 15 and over were unmarried, encompassing those who have never married, as well as those who are divorced or widowed. This marks a significant increase from previous decades. Here’s one effect from it. The number of single-person households in the U.S. rose to 38.1 million in 2023.

In This Newsletter

If people are struggling to pair up, marry, and have kids, how does this shift impact the broader world? We’ve long lived in a society where relationships were the norm. Now, with a growing number of people remaining single, the ripple effects are profound. Here are some of the ways this shift is reshaping society:

• The Single Voter The divide between single and married individuals is influencing political affiliations and priorities, further polarizing societal debates.

• The Pressure to Be 'Beautiful Forever': There used to be an expectation for women to be beautiful in their 20s (and 30s). But now that the dating market is always ever present, the expectation is to be beautiful until you die.

• The Boom in Pet Ownership: With fewer people starting families, pets are filling the companionship void, driving a cultural shift and booming industries centered around pet care.

• Fertility Drops: The less people in relationships the less people procreating.

Each of these trends highlights how the personal difficulties of modern dating are creating societal challenges that extend far beyond the realm of relationships.

The Pressure to Be Beautiful Forever

Ever notice women are more beautiful than ever now? All of them, really. Even the ones who are in their 30s, 40s, and 50s.

It’s not just actresses or movie stars either. Look around. Especially in cities. Women are attractive. It’s a combination of being healthier, working out more, skin treatments, surgeries. There is no stigma to any beauty enhancing tactic anymore.

In my opinion it’s a side effect of dating and relationships forming later in life, and everyone being in the dating market is you have to look good for a long time. This hits women harder than men since women’s value is greatly seen in their appearance in the dating market. Women have to look beautiful until the end now. That’s a tough standard.

There’s a new movie about this called Substance starring Demi Moore

Unlike previous generations, where dating pools were more localized and age-segmented, today’s dating market is global and ageless. A 45-year-old might find themselves competing for attention with someone decades younger, fueling pressure to defy aging.

Historically, beauty was often associated with youth, while power was tied to age. For example, older women in pre-modern societies wielded authority within their families or communities. Modern society, with its fixation on youth and visual appeal, has eroded this duality, forcing older individuals, especially women, to maintain youthful beauty to remain visible and influential.

Platforms like Instagram and TikTok turned beauty into currency. Likes, followers, engagement, they all reward good looks. Staying "ageless" isn’t optional; it’s expected. The algorithms only make it worse. They push the most striking, the most perfect, always favoring youth. And so the cycle continues. If you’re not keeping up, you’re invisible.

New Construction in Cities is Mainly for Single People

Subscribe to Premium to read the rest.