Most Replayed Moment: Chris Williamson Explains Why Finding Love Feels Harder Than Ever.

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One of the biggest levers, in fact, the single biggest predictor of your health outcomes in life are the number of close connections that you have.

It's more than quitting smoking.

It's more than going to the gym.

It's more than stopping drinking.

50% of men say that they are not looking for a relationship.

When they say aren't looking for a relationship, do they mean I'm not looking for a woman or I'm not looking for commitment?

Not actively pursuing any kind of interaction with women.

Oh, where did we go wrong and how do we go right?

Okay, so 50.1% of women for the first time in history

are

mothers, there are more childless women at 30 than there are women with children, right?

So for almost all of human history, more women had kids under the age of 30 than over, and now it's switched.

There's a study from Morgan Stanley that says by 2040, 45% of 25 to 45 year old women will be single and childless.

If online dating was creating this perfect facilitation for relationships to start,

how are we ending up with all of these

outcomes?

It's a question.

What's wrong with the outcomes?

What do you mean, why should people care about being single?

All the stats you just said,

I could look at them and say they're just sort of objectively neutral.

Like, there's no adverse consequence to society or the world.

It's fine that people aren't having kids.

It's fine that people aren't having sex.

I'm playing devil's advocate here, but like,

what is the negative consequence of all of those outcomes that you've described, in your view?

There are people for whom a life without a partner is the right choice.

That's absolutely something that I'm prepared to accept.

But it's not most people.

It's...

One of the biggest levers, in fact, the single biggest predictor of your health outcomes in life are the number of close connections that you have.

It's the number of friends.

It's more than quitting smoking.

It's more than going to the gym.

It's more than stopping drinking.

It's the number of close friends that you've got.

And a relationship is a big close friend.

Robin Dunbar says that in order to get into a relationship, you have to sacrifice two friendships because you can have around about five very close friends.

If you want to get into a relationship, you need to get rid of two of them because there is a minimum time investment.

So people that are in relationships have better health outcomes.

They have onset of dementia later.

They have Alzheimer problems later on in life.

They are less lonely.

That seems pretty uncontroversial.

And yet, both sides of the aisle, both men and women, are retreating from relationships and finding ways that they can justify this.

You know, boss bitch culture and sort of the lean in women's mentality or men going their own way and incel culture and the black pill for guys are both ways that each sex is trying to deal with the challenges that are coming out of the mating market.

Both sexes are saying, I don't want to be a part of this anymore.

I'm finding it so painful and difficult to be in this world that I'm just going to cast off any of it altogether and then retroactively come up with a lot of explanations that can justify why they didn't need to be in a relationship in any case.

And for some people that's true, but for most people that's not

Dating apps are clearly not, you know, as you say in your own words and previously, aren't the only causal factor.

So my question to you is, where did we go wrong and how do we go right?

Okay, so I think challenges in the mating market are coming from many directions.

One of the main ones that will be pertinent to the people that are listening is the increase in female achievement in education and employment.

Now, about 50 years ago when Title IX came in, there was a 13 percentage point swing in favor of men to women in universities.

There were significantly more men than women.

What's Title IX?

It was an affirmative action policy that helped to get more women into higher education.

50 years later, 2023, it's a 15 percentage point swing between men and women in university in the other direction.

There are two women for every one man at a four-year U.S.

college degree around about by 2030.

Women on average between the ages of 21 and 29 earn £1,111 more than their male counterparts.

Women are roughly twice as likely as men to say that they will value financial prospects in a partner.

About 78% of women say that a stable job is something that is important for a partner to have, whereas around about only sort of 45% of men say the same thing.

For a man to increase his rating on a 10-point scale by two points, he requires around about a ten-fold increase in his salary.

For a woman to achieve the same two-point improvement on a 10-point scale, her salary would need to increase by 10,000 times.

My point being that women are

they

are concerned about a partner's socioeconomic status significantly more than men are.

Now, you can start to see that if you have a world in which women are attending university at high rates, they are achieving more success in employment, at least in that sort of 21 to 29 range, which is when most people are perhaps looking for potential partners.

And yet, the socioeconomic status of a partner to a woman is a big determinant of their level of attraction, you can start to see how this imbalance could cause a problem.

Similarly, when we talk about education,

A man with a master's degree on Tinder gets 90% more right swipes than a man with a bachelor's degree.

So, for all of the guys that are considering going and getting a master's degree, even if you think it's going to be useless, at least accept the fact that you'll get 90% more right swipes for the rest of your life.

Or just lie about your master's.

I don't know.

All of this rolled together describes something called hypergamy, which is the female tendency to date up and across.

On average, women want to date a man who is as educated or as employed as they are.

Now, in a world in which, quite rightly, women have finally been able to achieve parity in education and employment and status and have independence and not be financially reliant on their partner, all the rest of it.

That's great for them.

But it does cause some challenges for their dating.

And this is what I've called the tall girl problem.

So everybody knows what it's like to have a girlfriend who is six foot without heels.

If you want to wear heels, you're looking at professional athletes because on average, women want to date a man who is at least as tall or a little bit taller than they are.

So as women rise up through their own competence hierarchy in education and employment, they further shorten down the potential pool of eligible men that are as educated or more educated and as employed or more employed than they are.

This is a challenge.

This is just a straight-up imbalance, right?

What this causes is a very large group of men toward the bottom of this distribution to be essentially invisible to women.

It causes a very large number of women, an increasing cohort, to compete for an increasingly small group of turbo-chad super performers at the top.

These guys, the super high-value guys, guys, have a wealth of options, so they are commitment averse.

Why would they decide to sit down with one girl for the rest of time when they have this wealth of options, which can cause them to

use and discard many of these women, which then causes most of these women to resent men overall?

And then the guys that were forgotten at the bottom that say, well, hang on a second.

I didn't use and discard you.

I haven't even been seen by you.

No, no, all men are

whatever it might be, right?

That they are users and abusers, that we don't need them.

That where all of the good men are, etc., etc.

So, a big group of men that feel like they are good men that are invisible.

There's a big portion of women who have finally managed to achieve educational and employment independence that are chasing after a smaller group of guys.

These guys are commitment averse.

I don't think it's necessarily good for them either.

It's the child with the ice cream, right?

Like, guys being able to keep it in their pants when there's a lot of options on the table is going to be difficult for them, too.

This is one of the main drivers.

This

tall girl problem is a a massive change, I think, in the dating dynamics.

It obviously begs a question, Chris, which is

if everything you've said is objectively correct and spot on and supported by the data, then how does, if I make Chris Williamson the prime minister or president of the world and I say your first job is to fix this challenge,

what do you do?

The first thing that you don't do is roll back women's education and employment.

And this is one of the the problems with this discussion, right?

The things that I've just said there are borne out in pure research data, Morgan Stanley results.

Like these are incontrovertible facts, right?

They are there.

And any girl that is listening who earns more than £50,000 a year and has got a master's or above-level education and is toward their late 30s or in the toward their late 20s or in their 30s knows this problem.

You know the fact that you are struggling to find a man that you feel is eligible for you, right?

That needs to be out there.

The problem that happens around this discourse is that it posits men and women as adversaries and competitors of each other, right?

As enemies,

this means that worthwhile compassion, which is needed to both women and men, if you're a woman who has gone through your education, you've dedicated yourself to achieving a degree, you know, your mother's generation wasn't able to achieve this, and you're the first person that's maybe gone to uni or got a bachelor's or got a master's or got a PhD, and then you spend some time in a career grinding away, and you now earn 150 grand a year.

You think, right, I'm 31, I'd love to settle down, this would be amazing for me.

Where are all of the men at?

Hang on a second.

And what you realize is that not only now are you competing with all of the other increasing cohort of women that are high achievers with status, employment, and education, but you're also competing with a 21-year-old barista who still lives at home with her parents for this small cohort of guys.

That requires sympathy for women.

Okay, that is not a good position for women to be in.

At the same time, this huge cohort of sexless men, 30% of men haven't had sex in the last year.

50% of men say that they are not looking for a relationship.

You are a man.

You have been through your 20s.

You know the power of the male sex drive between the ages of 18 and 30.

Can you imagine getting yourself into a situation where you say, I'm not bothered about pursuing women?

That is an unbelievably extreme statement for men to make.

and they're self-identifying as this in pure research data.

This isn't on incel forums, this is pure research.

50% of men aren't looking for a relationship.

When they say aren't looking for a relationship, do they mean I'm not looking for a woman or I'm not looking for commitments?

Not actively pursuing any kind of interaction with women.

Oh shit.

Casual included.

50%.

You're juggling a lot.

Full-time job, side hustle, maybe a family, and now you're thinking about grad school?

That's not crazy.

That's ambitious.

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