There are several factors at work here. First, both sides have unrealistic expectations for what they think their partners should look like. Second, the media has spent the past 20-plus years portraying men as bumbling idiots, so women are less likely to be actively looking for partners, because they don’t want to end up with a dud. Third, popular culture has told women that they have no responsibilities, so there are many young women who have become shallow and self-centered. It has become a major gamble for young men to get into relationships, because they are risking their future wealth by doing so. Fourth, the current state of the culture, with video games, smart phones, and other entertainment, has resulted in far fewer opportunities for both sexes to develop appropriate social skills. Girls are naturally more social, but tend to stay in groups of girls, and so rarely interact with the few boys who aren’t at home playing XBox. Boys don’t even have that level of interaction; their main social contact is swearing at strangers in online games. Fifty years ago, both sexes would be going out on the town as their only entertainment, where they would build same-sex peer groups and would regularly come in contact with the opposite sex outside of controlled environments like school.
With all of these hurdles, it is no wonder the sexes have drifted so far apart. Some of these are fixable. Some cannot be fixed without major cultural changes.
50 years ago, odds are you weren’t going to move from where you were born, so the pickings for potential mates was limited, basically as soon as you found somebody “good enough”, you knew to get married, or else you might not find anything better.
Fast forward to today, Online dating, mobility create the illusion of “many fish in the sea”, so if someone isn’t “perfect”, no big, it’s easy enough to find someone who is.
Of course, life doesn’t work that way, and people find that out too late.