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Notes -
You might be interested in this Pew study of American dating from 2020. Subsequent statistics taken from the second page about single Americans.
One result that jumps out is single women over age 40 are not very interested in dating (71-29 against dating). In the 18-39 age range the interest is pretty comparable across sex. 67% of single men and 61% of single women are interested in dating. Who is single is also very stratified by age. 51% of men aged 18-29 are single while only 32% of women in the same age range are. Meanwhile 49% of women age 65+ are single while only 21% of men in the same age range are. There's an interesting asymmetry where men are more likely to be single when younger while women are more likely to be single when older. Likely a reflection of men's preference for younger partners. It also seems to indicate that if young men were willing to address the other side of this asymmetry (by dating older women) those women are largely not interested in dating them!
At least according to Pew 22 year olds of either sex seem pretty interested in forming committed relationships. More generally there's a kind of tension here. We often want young people to learn from the wisdom of their elders but it's often not clear which things from their elders are useful wisdom.
The Pew study counts widows and widowers who haven't found a new partner as single, which completely explains this statistic. Women outlive men. Unmarried men die even earlier than married ones, but women outlive them all.
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I suspect this, like the bitter comments of venerable ladies above, is rationalized hopelessness. "It's impossible to get what I want, so I don't want it." In young men this manifests as MGTOW.
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