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.
When you blame the males for protecting themselves by avoiding marriage or that they became divorces, I am going to stand my ground.
Women are choosing divorce 80% of the time, unless they became boss babes and then it is virtually 100%.
The divorce exist to punish the males and force them to pay support for a life time to a woman who is no married to them at such exorbitant rates that the male likely has to get a second job or more to meet the obligated upon by the courts, just to survive.
If you make statements to dump on males for their relationship avoidance or blaming them for the divorce, I’m on good grounds to state that you don’t have the level of understanding of the issue that you should have.
Men are better off to serve themselves and be charitable socially and avoid marriage altogether. That is where we are at. Males have gotten the message, because there are tons of videos of females asking where the men are.
The men have gotten smart.
You can’t be drunk this early in the morning, but you are bizarre.
I have no idea how your strange posts have anything to do with what I’m posting.
It is easy to see why you must do so terribly with females, you live in your own little weird world.
Your chance of finding women are nil, because hypergamy has become a mental illness instead of God’s gift.
I agree that there are solid mates, but it is difficult to find them. Even if a woman does all the right things to indicate that she is a solid mate, there is no guarantee that she will be one.
You can only do everything as best you can to weed them out.
Yes, there are lots of young men who are unemployed, underemployed, still living with mom and dad into their 20s or even 30s, addicted to porn and gaming, etc.
However, putting all of the blame on the fraction of loser men misses the obvious point that lots of young women these days aren't exactly prize pigs themselves thanks to feminist ideology, strange behavior, extreme narcissism encouraged by social media, and hookup culture (which takes two to tango). Add to that a legal system and social stricture that favors women in a boy-girl conflict, and there are plenty of reasons for why this isn't a "where have all of the good men gone" problem alone.
Same here. She puts most of the net into Roth IRAs.
I gave the most powerful condemnation of the divorce system that most of us have ever seen, in post 148.
What bothers me on these threads is learning that the males aren’t getting laid and don’t care about it, and they sure don’t know how to get laid, so it looks like they are finding ways to console themselves about their timid, ways.
Divorce laws are about elections and legislation, but this fear of women thing is deeper than the possibility of divorce, they aren’t even banging chicks for fun.
It does seem that way. He’s the bad guy somehow. I hope and pray for my children. My sons, that they will find a truly good woman; and my daughters, that they will be good women.
I thank God every day for the woman I have. She may not be perfect, but neither am I!
I'm not convinced that having even more young people engaged in hookup culture and one night stands would result in stable marriages and families. You might want to screw some hyper-promiscuous party girl at the local bar, but you probably wouldn't want to marry her.
How do you think most relationships start, the guy is out looking for females and the female is out wanting to see what happens in her life.
Males and females can’t meet unless these guys get off their couches and go out to meet girls, the sex drive is supposed to make them overcome their fears and doubts and dislike of the humiliating snubs.
With your sensitivity to boys and girls meeting each other out in public, what is the morality of the boys sitting at home with their porn, avoiding females and instead constantly whining about the inadequacies of females? What does that lead to? A life of bachelorhood and isolation, and bitterness?
The males need to beat the bushes for female company and let nature take its course, it is how humans operate and how we find our wives.
Quite true! And my billionaire friends relaxing on their yachts anchored in the bay of Monaco also have no trouble!
But for the vast majority of regular joes, it is a problem!
Regards,
Actually, it takes only one or two "elite-looking" guys (i.e., Chads) and 50 to 100 delusional women.
Regards,
Women can’t stand whiners, your loser attitude toward life is your problem.
“Women can’t stand whiners”
Ain’t that the truth!!
So according to you, today’s state of affairs with our epidemic of broken families, single mothers, etc is entirely the fault of “loser men”, with women never guilty of any wrong-doing and never having any individual or collective responsibility for their behavior and actions? Gloria Steinem would have approved your message.
With the sexual revolution and its removal of any and all opprobrium associated with promiscuity, these average-looking young women instead become the playthings of higher status males who use them for sex but have zero interest in committing to them.
After about a decade or more of being a plaything and then used up and tossed away like an empty beer can (often with some bastard offspring in tow as a single mother), these women then start looking for a mid-status male as a long-term provider for themselves and their bastards. Then, when they realize that almost nobody wants someone else's leftovers (particularly when saddled with someone else's spawn, often from multiple partners), these oblivious women shriek, "Where have all the good men gone?!" - and journalists on the political left and right compose self-important op-eds devoted to the same so-called question, as if women had no responsibility or agency at all in society.
““Women can’t stand whiners”
Ain’t that the truth!!”
Sounds like permission to resume the beatings, take the shoes away and hold the voter registration card in the safe.
All permissible under Sharia law -just so you know
Ever been to Malaysia? I have. Intact families everywhere. Kids playing in parks. No freaks. Families together in restaurants, open air markets and malls.
Don’t worry. In 75 years the Gender-Marxists will be gone and those who rejected their ideology of conflict and hate will be here to carry on. Did you realize that that’s the point of gender Marxism? To exterminate the target population it’s directed at.
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