Posted on 09/16/2026 9:48:38 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
The Institute for Family Studies (IFS) recently estimated that the gap between unmarried and married men under the age of 40 continues to widen—with 15 million more bachelors than husbands between the ages of 20 to 39 in 2025.
The gap has widened by 12.4 million since 2000, when the gap between married and unmarried stood at 2.6 million.
IFS also reports, according to a General Social Survey, 11 percent of young adults in the early 2000s said they were “not too happy.” That percentage is now at 26 percent. During the same period, the number of married men ages 20–39 dropped by 15 percent.
Leading the unhappiness charge are single men, who are either postponing or rejecting marriage, or not perceived as a suitable marriage partner by single women because of various societal changes.
This is a serious problem for American society.
In his book, “Men and Marriage,” (an expanded edition of his 1973 work “Sexual Suicide”) George Gilder wrote: “Men lust, but they don’t know what for; they wander, and lose track of the goal; they fight and compete, but they forget the prize; they spread seed but spurn the seasons of growth; they chase power and glory but miss the meaning of life.”
Brad Wilcox of IFS agrees with Gilder: “Such men are more likely to be lonely, prone to deaths of despair and unhappy. It’s never good for a society to have large numbers of unattached, dispirited, and unhappy young men.”
A Wall Street Journal article from last year titled, “American Women are Giving Up on Marriage,” touches on several reasons why women are not getting married—whether it be trouble finding a suitable man or choosing a career over marriage.
Disillusioned with the current state of what they perceive to be suitable and available men, they say they are more content with singleness than their male counterparts. A commonly heard complaint is that in their search of a suitable man to marry, they are only finding a world of “man-children.”
So, why has this happened? Why are there so many unmarried young men and why are women having a hard time finding a suitable partner in what would seemingly be an abundant harvest?
First, many of these young men have no idea of what it takes to be a husband or father because they had no one to model that for them. This is just another symptom of the breakdown of the family, a culture of divorce, and a society that has economically awarded single parent families while placing financial burdens on traditional two-parent families.
Secondly, especially among working class men, the jobs that would have traditionally provided for a family have either not kept up with inflation, or in some cases, simply disappeared. In addition, our educational system is no longer providing the needed training for these men to enter the workplace and succeed. Meanwhile, the number of men attending college, the ticket to good paying and stable jobs, continues to decrease.
Finally, numerous voices in our culture have sent a message that women can succeed without having a husband—“A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle,” as the saying goes. But when men are not marrying, there is a ripple effect that impacts all aspects of our society.
For example, according to the Centers for Disease Control, the percentage of children born outside of marriage has risen from 33.2 percent of all live births in 2000 to 39.5 percent in 2024. This means a much higher percentage of young people are growing up in single parent households. And single parent households are often more dependent upon government assistance, with boys who grow up without a father often ending up failing socially and economically.
Those numbers also indicate that we’re hurtling toward a demographic disaster. Married couples not only provide a nurturing environment for children but also are more likely to have children.
It is not that young men have given up on marriage. Pew Research reported in 2023 that 74 percent of teenage boys want to be married someday. The problem is that many have no internal road map or GPS to help them get there.
As a society, we need to equip these young men with the skills, personal discipline, and sense of purpose to make them “marriage material.” It is a time for us, as a society, to return to a time when men have purpose—to be faithful husbands, loving fathers, and good providers.
This is going to be a long process, and it will require a long-term societal investment in affirming healthy, traditional two-parent families with engaged fathers who model such discipline and purpose to their sons. Boys do not have a choice when it comes to the families they are born into, but adults can make the right choices to help them flourish and thrive.
Men, women, and our society will be much better off as a result.
Yes they do, nothing is more pathetic than a male afraid of females and pretending to be uninterested in them because he is too weak to face rejection.
My brother is a good man. He did nothing to deserve his divorce, but his wife took him for about a million dollars.
It isnt the women. It is the system.
The risk is all on men and only women get rewarded for marrying. Men always lose now when it comes to relationships.
There is no upside to marriage for the man.
How old is your son?
Regards,
Regards,
You don't get it, do you?!
Women didn't pick the "he must be over 6' tall"-criterion out of a hat! What they really mean is: "He must belong to the top 10% in height." In other words: Women "grade" on a curve!
As - over the millennia - taller men are selected for and 6'4" becomes the "new norm," women will adjust their demands accordingly: "He must be over SEVEN feet tall!"
Regards,
Let's call it by its proper name: You are both referring to r/K selection theory.
Regards,
Why only seven feet?
We can all tell horrors about divorce, and the system is barbarism unmatched by anything else in modern civilization, so bad that our personal tales don’t come close to effectively describing its brutality and destructiveness to the male, to the concept of family, to children, and societal structure and its cause as a decline in the human condition for everyone and as a root cause for the collapse of Western Civilization.
But...the reality of these threads is that they are mostly about males who don’t do well with girls and are trying to rationalize their seeking the comfort of not trying to make it with females, it takes big balls to walk across that room a 100 times to occasionally score because you actually tried to strike up a conversation, and conversation is what leads to male/female relationships.
While complaining about the marriages that fail are a part of the threads, they are really about guys afraid of women and blaming women for not seeing how wonderful they are and them not doing the pursuing, in other words the females should walk across that room in their fantasy world that includes nonsense like you have to be taller than the poster to have relations with women, or that you have to have more money than the poster, or a better car than the poster.
Human fitness (survival chances x reproductive success) in relation to height follows a bell curve to some degree, as does height itself. Too short is seen as unmanly and unattractive, but true giants, i.e. people over 7 feet tall, often have health problems - bad joints, heart failure at a young age, etc (you may have noticed how many celebrity giants have died in their 30s or 40s in this way). So no, female preference for tall men isn't going to result in a race of 10 foot tall giants anytime soon.
There's also the fact that true outliers in any direction just seem freakish and weird to most people rather than attractive.
Spot on fringe people looking for a cause
I strongly suspect that Jonty30 was being facetious (as was I with my initial comment).
You ought to get that Asperger's looked at. /humor
Regards,
Another part of the r strategy (which obviously interfaces with producing large numbers of low quality offspring) is reaching sexual maturity and reproductive age earlier. Sure enough, the fraction of black, Arab, and Central American girls who reach puberty before age 13 is much higher than for Europeans or east Asians.
DEI applies to quota female hires just as it applies to quota racial “minority” hires, even if it means hiring completely unqualified women or “minorities” for a position.
Yeah, every Christian male thinks like you that it is the man’s fault, until it is he who is getting the divorce and having to go get another job because thevsystem demands youbare forever married financially. But she is not obligated to you in or out of marriage.
Hypergamy, a gift from God to allow women to marry the best male thay can has becime a mental illness because it has been twisted and corrupted by Satan’s minions.
Yeah, every Christian male thinks like you that it is the man’s fault, until it is he who is getting the divorce and having to go get another job because thevsystem demands youbare forever married financially. But she is not obligated to you in or out of marriage.
Hypergamy, a gift from God to allow women to marry the best male thay can has becime a mental illness because it has been twisted and corrupted by Satan’s minions.
LOL, that was plain goofy, you must have posted that silly made up post to the wrong person because it sure wasn’t a response to what I’m posting.
I was being a little bit facetious, but if you have paid attention as to what females are saying, when you add up all the qualities they are looking for, only the top 0.2% of males can qualify.
So, you can be sure that there are some women who may consider 6’0 to be a short king.
I was being a little bit facetious, but if you have paid attention as to what females are saying, when you add up all the qualities they are looking for, only the top 0.2% of males can qualify.
So, you can be sure that there are some women who may consider 6’0 to be a short king.
It isn’t made up. That is how divorces are going these days. The woman can leave, but the man still has to pay the bills for the rest of his life.
Your comment indicates that you don’t know what is going on in the world today. I say that respectively, because the rest of us can tell and have been telling you, but it’s unbelieveable to you.
I have no idea what you are rambling about in regard to post 148.
You read this and think it doesn’t understand divorce?
“We can all tell horrors about divorce, and the system is barbarism unmatched by anything else in modern civilization, so bad that our personal tales don’t come close to effectively describing its brutality and destructiveness to the male, to the concept of family, to children, and societal structure and its cause as a decline in the human condition for everyone and as a root cause for the collapse of Western Civilization.”
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