At my first professional job as an accountant, I walked back to the accounts payable department where young women performed clerical work. A beautiful young woman was bawling her eyes out because her new husband would go out drinking with his friends until midnight – every night – leaving her home alone. This young woman had married an immature slacker. She was not alone: young male slackers have become a cultural phenomenon.
The conventional wisdom is that men themselves are to blame for being slackers, while others blame society. Both can be true. Writing in the Deseret News (with a similar article in the Institute for Family Studies), journalist Maria Baer writes:
From Matt Yglesias at Slow Boring arguing “the weak link in convincing more people to settle down earlier is, in fact, men” to Anna Sussman lamenting “the state of men today” in The New York Times to The Atlantic’s Olga Khazan opining on X that “I truly think the decline in marriage is really a problem of men failing to launch,” the idea that America’s retreat from marriage is all about male malaise, especially among working-class guys, is clearly popular on the left.
It’s not just working-class men. Women on college campuses are finding a shortage of quality men to date, lamenting where have all the good men gone? The ratio of men on college campuses has fallen to nearly 40% compared to 60% women. Female students also complain that men they meet in college are not as focused on academics as women. About half of women graduate in four years compared to 40% of men. The men women meet in college are not interested in a committed relationship as soon as women are.
A common theory is young men are failing to launch because the well-paid manufacturing jobs that non-elite males had traditionally filled are mostly gone. Nowadays marriages are romantic and financial partnerships, with both partners expected to earn an income. Thus, men are no longer discriminated against by outdated cultural norms of hypergamy, where women are only willing to marry up the social ladder because they’re stuck at home raising kids. Women began entering the workforce in greater proportions decades ago to help prop up household finances. In 1950 only one-third of women worked outside the home, compared to 86% of men. Nowadays 57% of women work outside the home, but only two-thirds of men.
Another common theory is that too many men grew up in households without a father figure to train them how to behave. Baer and her colleagues at the Institute for Family Studies have another plausible theory. The dearth of marriageable men is due to easy access to low-cost sex outside marriage, saying:
Marrying young—in your 20s—is no longer aspirational, let alone normal. Waiting until marriage for sex is stranger still.
So while it may be true that many young women still say they hope to marry and become mothers, they don’t want to marry young and few forgo sex until after marriage. Yet those two habits, were they once again normalized on a cultural scale, would not only increase women’s odds of marrying but would almost certainly improve the quality of their dating pool. Men are more likely to commit and embrace mature adulthood when that is what society expects them to do.
Men are much less likely to level up and embrace committed love when they have ready access to low-cost or no-cost sex, including internet pornography.
In other words, men don’t have to get an education, gain job skills, and win the affections of a wife before having regular sex. While women are waiting for Mr. Right, they can date a slacker, Mr. Right Now.
Research has found that average women can attract higher status men for short term relationships, whereas men in search of casual encounters must settle for women less attractive than themselves. However, men and women looking for long term relationships tend to match with people of similar attractiveness. A creator on YouTube, who goes by the handle PsychoMath, posits a theory that when women of average desirability hookup with elite, handsome men for casual encounters, it recalibrates their expectations such they mistakenly assume they can also attract elite males for long term relationships. That belief reduces the pool of potential matches and inhibits the odds of pair bonding. There are other, actual psychologists, who also posit that women are fickle and sabotage dating prospects by elevated expectations.
The easiest explanation of why young men are failing to launch on time, nor flying as far when they do, is simply: because they don’t have to.
Read more at the Institute for Family Studies: Why Are Men Less Marriageable Today? Cheap Sex and Porn.