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.
“You guys need to rediscover individualism and a desire for females.”
Is this a joke? Are you a college student? This is the most immature and impractical opinion on men and dating. And it is also the most wrong.
Men build things. Got it? Men build relationships, careers, families, homes, assets and wealth. Why would they want to risk any of that on the ‘hookup mindset’ you’re pimping here? They don’t. And they won’t.
The divorce industry waits for all women to capture a man so they can get access to his capital and resources for themselves. You have been well trained to promote the ‘hookup mindset’ which 20 years ago, was used to secure assets for their industry.
Pay attention:
What man in his right mind is willing to give up half his property, his house, his children, and the assets he saved to support him in old age to support an evil predatory industry, government mandates and their legal representative, his ex wife, the woman he trusted to build a family with?
No man.
It’s disgusting. You’re their MARK advocating for them.
I can only hope you’re Indian as they are newcomers to this scheme and have not yet been fully subverted by nefarious interests which predominate the now-subversive Western culture.
Rediscover individualism and a desire for females is great advice, think for yourself and leave the porn screen to meet and converse with real females.
You are condemning romance, marriage, and families, for a life of solitude, porn, and masturbation, crazy stuff for the mentally ill.
Anti-God messaging heavy on material goods.
“””””Yeah, only the top 20% of males are considered acceptablefor married in the 20’s.”””””
I guess that sums up the incel victims, in-between porn they read an occasional article about sweeping generalities or some typical bs modern statistics and use it to justify being too shy to talk to the girl at work and to ask her over to his place for dinner.
Think for yourself, quit making excuses, and get out and meet girls.
You are fixated on sex as the object of a relationship. Wrong move. That’ll only secure you men with no assets as all their previous hookups and baby-mommas took them. If they have any children in their wake the man is nothing more than an indentured servant to the courts and their financial obligations. A Dalit.
The men who built assets clearly aren’t buying from you -and wont. You can take that to the bank. You’re going to have to build your assets yourself. Possibly w/o using sex to acquire them.
Where do you get your bizarre interpretations and fake misreads of my posts?
Your obsession with watching porn instead of talking to females has totally twisted you and it is reflected in the darkness and confusion and revulsion at life that you keep posting.
Turn off your porn, talk to women, tell them some jokes, get to know some, it will result in a better quality of life, perhaps some romance, maybe falling in love, and perhaps even marriage and a family.
Actually, my response was quite valid and quite honest.
The original article posted and many reader responses dealt with the fact that the decline of marriages and families in America are attributed to dysfunctional male behavior. The article and most other posters (myself included) acknowledged that such behavior (i.e. unemployed basement-dwellers) exists and is a problem. However, it also underscores the fact that a big reason for the decline of traditional families is dysfunctional and obnoxious female behavior - feminist ideology that teaches them to resent men, malignant narcissism egged on by social media, sexual promiscuity, etc.
Your retort was that no, the problem is all due to loser men who don't appreciate and don't attract women, with the implication that female behavior might also have something to do with it. Not many men would want a relationship with someone absorbed in posting instagram selfies, subscribes to feminist ideology, or who has slept with half the town and had children by 3-4 different men.
When I and other posters point out these things you just return to your mantra that only pathetic losers and grouchy old misogynistic bachelors fail to appreciate and be fascinated by what has unfortunately become all too common behavior among young women. As another poster pointed out, you seem to accept the liberal premise that to clean up society, it's (solely) men who need to change their behavior, not women.
This isn't quite true. While it is the case that the elites are happy to see zero or negative population growth in America and Europe, they also want a huge pool of cheap and pliant labor, i.e. coolie IT employees from India and China, farm and unskilled manual laborers from Latin America. So they're all for a world overrun by billions, as long as those billions are Third World people who obediently work a plantation for peanuts.
“”””Your retort was that no, the problem is all due to loser men who don’t appreciate and don’t attract women, with the implication that female behavior might also have something to do with it.””””
LOL, there you go again, you made that up, what is with you guys and your making up false posts to respond to, I didn’t say anything about the article and haven’t, yet you have me launching into it.
Over and over you guys just make up fake posts and fake positions to respond to.
Not something a "democratic" society can ever change - it's a one-way slide. But an Islamic revolution can change it pretty effectively - and that's exactly what we will get if we continue on the same path.
You change the subject, and like a parrot, keep repeating that men need to go out and meet women for random hook-ups, which would do nothing to alleviate the decline of marriage and traditional families in America. So you ignore the article and its subject (which - to repeat once more - is about the decline of marriage, not the decline of hookup culture, which is alive and well), and then claim that other people are making up false posts about you.
Rather than continuing your nonsense, look at my first post on the thread and what it was responding to, and then continue looking at those first posts, and then look at the made up nonsense and lying you have been posting at me.
Yes, it is true. They do not need billions of low IQ wage slaves as you claim. They have stated the 500 million number many times.
If you are reading my posts it isn’t marriage I’m pushing
And yet the topic of this thread is the decline of marriage in America, not the decline of hook-up culture, so who is the one whose posts are really irrelevant and not on-topic?
You change the subject from the decline of marriages and traditional families to say that we need more random pick-ups and hook-ups. The point is, hook-up culture has probably done more to harm traditional marriage and family in America than the all of the dysfunctional male behavior that feminists, the media (and you) like to harp on.
If the world population dropped to half a billion, there wouldn't be enough wage slaves to prop up an economy in which trillionaire oligarchs are possible. If they really wanted smaller population sizes, they wouldn't be advocating free HIV and malaria drugs (at US taxpayer expense) to the Third World, or bringing in millions of Third World people into first world economies and welfare states in which many more of their children would survive than would in their native lands.
I pray for a relgious revival in the USA.
And for the members of the moslem cult to be deported.
Good gosh, you are hopeless.
I am pushing that you people talk to females, other than addressing modern divorce very effectively in post 148 I am focused on the incel porn obsessives talking to females, not on marriage, I am focusing on the baby step of interacting with females, the initial human contact long before marriage, but something that these guys need to start forcing themselves to do as you can see from their posts, they are a long way from marriage, they first have to be willing to walk across that room to talk to a female.
You guys keep making up fake posts about “hook-up” culture something that I am not talking about.
Talking to women, pursuing relationships with women, interacting with women is healthy and normal, as you guys keep defending the anti-female porn and masturbation culture you act like just talking to a human female is something dirty.
Evolution will work its magic here
Are we not men? We are DEVO!
“I WAS MARRIED FOR TWO F_____ YEARS!” HELL WOULD BE LIKE CLUB MED!”
Language Warning
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhiWwa69YBg
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