Paul Eastwick, a professor of psychology, directs the Attraction and Relationships Research Laboratory at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of “Bonded by Evolution: The New Science of Love and Connection.”
People on the left and right rarely agree about the meaning of cultural trends. But when it comes to the decline in men’s education prospects and the relationship recession, progressive and conservative commentators alike have achieved a rare consensus: They say the first trend explains the second one — because when men are less successful than women, they won’t fall for each other.
According to this view, men are intimidated by high-powered women, and women aren’t attracted to men who earn less than they do. Men marry sideways and down; women marry sideways and up. These gendered mating dynamics are theorized to be as ancient as Homo sapiens itself.
I’m sorry to spoil the bipartisan party, but there are three glaring problems with this take.
First, the past two decades of research on romantic attraction have upended classic assumptions about gender differences in the traits that people find to be desirable. Speed-dating studies have repeatedly shown that attributes like ambition and earning potential are aphrodisiacs, regardless of gender. Studies of romantic couples have repeatedly shown that it’s good to believe your partner is an ambitious person, regardless of gender. But the size of a person’s salary has tiny effects on romantic appeal and marital well-being, regardless of gender.
Second, although it was once true that couples were (slightly) more likely to get divorced if the woman outearned the man, this trend vanished in the 1990s. As it became common for a woman to earn more than 50 percent of the household income, her success stopped being a marital liability. It may actually help to keep a marriage going by contributing to the couple’s economic stability. The risk of divorce is slightly lower to the extent that both partners are well-off.
Third, now that women earn more college degrees than men, highly educated women are more likely than highly educated men to marry partners without bachelor’s degrees. Put differently, when married couples have mismatched levels of education, the wife is likely to be more educated than her husband. And once again, there’s no evidence that couples who fit this pattern are at any elevated risk of divorce. In fact, couples these days are less likely to share similar education levels than in the recent past.
In short, ambition and education are nice attributes to have, but there’s nothing particularly gendered about them. The average man is perfectly comfortable dating or marrying a woman who is more successful than he is.
So how might men’s lower educational prospects be related to the rise in singles? The far more likely explanation is this: Less educated men have retreated from society. Women would like them, but they’re not meeting them in person.
Two contemporary trends back this up. Trend number one is the rise of online dating. Online dating has done a lot of good for a lot of people. But one major problem with the apps is that this form of mate-seeking overemphasizes what people think they want in a partner. And sometimes what people think they want is quite different from what they actually want once they meet prospective partners face-to-face.
Women say that they desire ambition in their partners more than men do, and their swiping behavior on the apps mirrors this belief. But a recent survey of 10,000 people from 43 countries found that women’s stated preference for ambition overestimates the extent to which they actually like ambition in real life (rather than virtual or prospective) partners. On the flip side, men tend to underestimate the extent to which they actually like ambition in a real-life partner. In essence, daters’ incorrect personal theories about their likes and dislikes shape their behavior on the apps, which then artificially restricts whom they get to meet in person.
Trend number two is that these days, people with less formal education have fewer close friends. Since 1990, the well-publicized “friendship recession” has primarily been borne by folks without a bachelor’s degree. Fewer close friends means fewer casual hangouts with a broader social circle, fewer parties, and fewer late nights at the bar. It means fewer opportunities to meet friends-of-friends-of-friends and less “let’s see where the night takes us” energy.
If educated women could meet these less educated men — preferably while socializing with friends rather than as the target of a pickup line — I guarantee that many of the pairs would find things to connect over. The insinuation that women might need to “dumb themselves down” to spark romance is a deeply misguided, faux-bipartisan hot take. The real answer is sitting in plain sight: Dissimilar people can come together by ditching the apps and actually getting to know each other.
All of this is good news. Reversing men’s educational decline is a heavy undertaking, and it will take some time to implement the right solutions. While we wait, let’s presume that the so-called “marriageable men” still exist; they are not an endangered species. The problem is that too many of them are glued to an addictive dating simulator on their phones. They spend hours swiping away, feeding a market that unfairly penalizes them.
The solutions are simple: more parties, more mixers, more classes, more coed sports leagues, and more incentives to congregate with mixed-gender acquaintances. When young people spend time together in person — preferably with the same people on repeat occasions — relationships will form. It is a natural reality as ancient as Homo sapiens itself.