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Notes -
Maybe I'm just surrounded by giga-chads but that has not been the issue for any of the men around me IRL, whether they found their partner the old fashioned way or through online dating, but it's a complaint I hear repeatedly online. Then again, people in places like the ww threads here and elsewhere frequently have bizarre stories of their issues dating which suggest to me that they are not just slightly below the median in mate attractiveness but very much so.
I think the issue here is that the internet amplifes the voice of the bitter losers that always have had issues, but were just invisible before. People like to trot out the graph of recently increasing sexlessness among young men but that has since rebounded.
As for why people don't have kids, I always come back to historic fertility trends and note that urbanism killed fertility a hundred years before feminism or modern dating markets, and it's remained remarkably consistent throughout time and place and the primary thing that has changed is the rate of urbanisation.
It seems to me that some combination of children being a major economic drain rather than a boon, delayed pair bonding, higher cost of living (particularly sufficiently large housing in safe areas with jobs), access to entertainment and maybe female labour force participation (lots of evidence against this being a major factor though) are the real culprits.
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