The missing men of the American marriage market

National Public Radio ^ | May 19, 20266:30 AM ET | Greg Rosalsky

[thecodont]

It's a bit weird to think of dating or marriage as a market — but this is a newsletter that tries to make sense of the world through economics. And, like any market, shifts in supply and demand can reshape romantic outcomes in pretty profound ways.

First, a dating story that illustrates this dynamic. Then we'll get to a fascinating new study that may help explain why getting married has become harder for many American women.

But first, the story. If you haven't heard of him, Jack Antonoff is a musician and super-producer. He, for example, produced a slew of blockbuster albums for Taylor Swift and co-produced nearly every song on Kendrick Lamar's most recent album GNX. I assume he gets invited to great parties.

[...]

Economists and other social scientists have long studied how gender imbalances can dramatically reshape dating and marriage markets, which can help the romantic prospects of some while hurting the prospects of others.

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TOPICS: Business/Economy; Culture/Society; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: bluehairedwomen; economy; facetattoos; marriage; men; nprwomen; piercings; women

[TonyM]

Men are fed up with spoiled lazy American women!

[Angelino97]

Economists and other social scientists have long studied how gender imbalances can dramatically reshape dating and marriage markets

Without reading the article, I assume by "gender imbalance" they mean many women versus few men who meet their high standards.

I doubt there's much of a "gender imbalance" between men and women. It's just that, many women have long lists of demands, and don't consider most men to be "marriage material."

[alexander_busek]

It's a bit weird to think of dating or marriage as a market [...]

Right out of the gate: FAIL!

Throughout 99% of human history, marriages were viewed chiefly as an economic model, and as a means of sustaining biological legacy. They were transactional.

Most marriages - even among commoners - were rationally negotiated by the parents, usually with emphasis upon achieving economic stability (which might entail joining estates, etc.). Even today, for billions of people, arranged marriages - often in which the newlyweds had previously spoken to each other only once or twice - are the norm.

The vile fiction of "Romance" didn't rear its ugly head until much, much later - and even then, it was usually tropified in Literature as a discordant factor that threatened to endanger bloodlines, disrupt the established social order, thrust unwary lovers into poverty, etc. That made it a useful literary trope - and one that fiction writers gradually shifted from a negative to a positive.

Unsupervised "dating" is an extremely recent invention. Courtship - if it was allowed at all - was a heavily ritualized and strictly regulated performance.

Disneyfied Romance - in which transient personal "fee-elings" trump ALL - represents the sorry end-state of these developments.

Regards,

[alexander_busek]

Then we'll get to a fascinating new study that may help explain why getting married has become harder for many American women.

Another "droves of men dying in war - women hardest hit"-article, eh?

Will read solely for the purpose of amusement.

Regards,

[SaveFerris]

I would change that to:

Men are fed up with spoiled brat American women!

We Men, of course, are perfect 😉😉😉

😃😀😅😂🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

[Angelino97]

Another "droves of men dying in war - women hardest hit"-article, eh?

From the article:

One influential study looked at what happened in France after much of the male population was killed during World War I. The authors found that the men who remained in France tended to "marry up," pairing with women from higher social classes "that would have been inaccessible before the war." In a sense, the value of French men in the marriage market seems to have increased because men were in short supply.

[wardaddy]

Far fewer white women in the traditional age range care about it anymore
Completely brainwashed

Labradoodles and Bernese “children” on leash while living in daddy’s condo and working from home on your “career” is the route

Men are for take out food orgasms you meet online and to be exploited for paying for stuff

Marriage and children are you kidding lol

Stay at home mom?

You’re certifiably pops

[FreedomPoster]

Very well put, +1.

[alexander_busek]

The linked article is a hoot! Highly recommend that you all read it!

Economists refer to this as "assortative mating," and they've found it's one important driver of growing inequality. Educated people with high earning potential tend to get hitched to other educated people with high earning potential [...]

But for college-educated women hoping to pair off with similarly educated, high-earning men, demographic trends have increasingly made that more difficult, with women now substantially outnumbering men on college campuses.

"And so if you're a woman and you have a four-year degree, today there's just fewer men relative to the number of women with four-year degrees," Chambers says.

[...] In her new study, Chambers and her coauthors [...] find that for college-educated women, the marriage rate has actually declined only modestly.

[...] In contrast, the marriage rate for women who didn't go to college fell off a cliff. For those born in 1930, about 78.7% of non-college-educated women were married at age 45, slightly higher than among college-educated women. Now the two groups look wildly different. For those women born in 1980, only about 52.4% of them were married at 45.

"The decline in marriage rates that we've seen in America is really concentrated among Americans who aren't going to college," Chambers says about this data.

[...] "And what's left is a pool of non-college-educated men who are really struggling," Chambers says. "And that makes up the market of available men for non-college-educated women, which we think might be why they've seen such steep declines in marriage rates over this period."

So? Shouldn't the non-college-educated women naturally pair up with the non-college-educated men? Wouldn't that perfectly align with the "assortative mating" described at the beginning?

The article no where even mentions the dread word "HYPERGAMY."

Would like to take particular issue with the central thesis that, "...educated people with high earning potential tend to get hitched to other educated people with high earning potential." - Has that been true throughout the majority of human history?! Was it true even in 1920s England or America? Nonsense! And besides: Such people were statistical anomalies! The vast majority were "Joe Lunchbox" and "Suzy Homemaker."

A deceitful article based on false premises! GIGO! ("Garbage In, Garbage Out").

And, just as I predicted (even without first looking): The article's fundamental tenor is: "Men dying / struggling / falling behind - Women hardest hit!"

Regards,

[Salvavida]

Gee, you don’t think divorce court has anything to do with it?

[alexander_busek]

Gee, you don’t think divorce court has anything to do with it?

The terrible inequity of present divorce laws is certainly to be decried - but, honestly, I don't believe that star-struck young men are going to allow themselves to be influenced by it. In other words: I doubt that young men with raging hormones who've stumbled upon a halfway decent marriageable woman ever stop to first review the divorce statistics. Honestly! If they are even aware of those stats, they will assiduously try to sublimate that knowledge. The attitude of "It can't / won't happen to me!" will instead prevail.

That narrative is propagated chiefly by already-divorced men, and may indeed have come to dominate the discussion. But young people in love aren't participating in that discussion.

The sober realization that the divorce game is rigged in favor of women doesn't "sink in" until long after the wedding occurs. Usually about the time that the marriage crashes and burns.

That eventual realization probably does impact, somewhat, the rate of second marriages - but that's an entirely different discussion.

Regards,

[woodpusher]

However, the economic and educational trajectories of men and women have increasingly diverged, with a large swath of men falling behind.

For example, women are now more likely to graduate from college than men. In recent years, female students have made up almost 60 percent of undergraduate students, and outnumbered men on college campuses by more than two million, according to one government estimate. Meanwhile, many men who didn't get a college education have been struggling economically, and have been much more likely to end up on drugs, in prison, and unemployed.

Despite the claim that men are falling behind on their economic trajectory, they miraculously continue to make a significantly higher median income than women.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/03/04/gender-pay-gap-in-us-has-narrowed-slightly-over-2-decades/

Gender pay gap in U.S. has narrowed slightly over 2 decades

By Richard Fry and Carolina Aragão

The gender gap in pay has slightly narrowed in the United States over the past 20 years or so. In 2024, women earned an average of 85% of what men earned, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of median hourly earnings of both full- and part-time workers. In 2003, women earned 81% as much as men.

As has long been the case, the wage gap is smaller for workers ages 25 to 34 than for all workers 16 and older. In 2024, women 25 to 34 earned an average of 95 cents for every dollar earned by a man in the same age group – a 5-cent gap. By comparison, the gender pay gap among workers of all ages that year was 15 cents.

While the gender pay gap has not changed a lot since 2003, it has narrowed considerably when looking at the longer term, both among all workers 16 and older and among those 25 to 34. The estimated 15-cent gender pay gap among all workers in 2024 was down from 35 cents in 1982. And the 5-cent gap among workers ages 25 to 34 in 2024 was down from a 26-cent gap.

The U.S. Census Bureau has also analyzed the gender pay gap, though its analysis looks only at full-time workers (as opposed to full- and part-time workers). In 2023, full-time, year-round working women earned 83% of what their male counterparts earned, according to the Census Bureau’s most recent analysis.

[...]

[alexander_busek]

Despite the claim that men are falling behind on their economic trajectory, they miraculously continue to make a significantly higher median income than women.

Don't be coy! Please continue that thought! You make a brilliant observation, but neglect to follow it up!

Your statistic pretty much obliterates the article's basic thesis, nicht wahr?

So what conclusion would you now care to draw for us?

Are you saying that the problem the author points out simply doesn't exist - or that it exists, but has other causes?

Don't hold back!

Regards,

[FLT-bird]

There is no gender imbalance. What there is is decades of feminist indoctrination. This has affected the way schools teach (ie sitting still inside a classroom suits females. It does not suit males).

Feminism has also told women to use their 20s as "me time"....to travel, spend it on education, play the field, etc and not think about settling down until their 30s.

Now combine that with hypergamy...ie women's not preference but insistence on marrying men who make as much as they do or more and often who have as much education as they do if not more.

What is the result? Women feeling there aren't enough men who have enough education and earn enough money. Men who still have a very strong biological preference for younger women looking at 30 something women and not being attracted to them.....particularly if they've got a high body count from playing the field for a decade and a half. Also, women file for 70% of all divorces and that rises to 80% if the woman has a college degree and divorce courts are still heavily skewed in women's favor (a legacy of the old patriarchy).

The result is vastly lower rates of marriage and a collapsed birth rate. Women with more education and who earn more think they should get men higher up on the scale than previously and men who don't find older women attractive and who increasingly view marriage as a very bad deal for them (especially if the women available to them have none of their youth left). The end result is everybody is unhappy. This is what feminism achieved.

[Uncle Miltie]

NPR created these women, so …

[Uncle Miltie]

American women want 666:

Figures
Feet
Inches

That describes fewer than 1% of American men.

[spetznaz]

Exactly.

[ClearCase_guy]

Average and below average men realize that they are not going to date a Supermodel. Men typically try to date women who are roughly at their own level in terms of looks, education, and status.

On the other hand, average and below average women insist that they deserve a man in the top 10%. Very tall, very rich, very fit, perfect in every way. Some 33-year-old woman, with 2 children from different baby daddys, a woman who is 5 foot 4 and 175 pounds, who does not cook -- she expects to marry a 6 foot 3 inch CEO of a tech company. All of the other men, who fail to measure up to her standards, are "invisible".

[pierrem15]

The statistics cited merely show that men, especially those not going to college, simply cannot earn enough money to be considered marriage material by more and more women.

Deindustrialization and flooding the labor pool with women has removed the incentive for marriage among women by significantly reducing men's wages and shrunk the environment in which women are willing to bear children.

It also does not seem to have made women any happier.

It has, however, significantly increased the return on capital and lowered the proportion of national income going to labor.