Why So Many Men Struggle To Attract Women

Is the mating game rigged against men?

I feel that most women are desired by at least a few men, while with men, that is not the case. As a result, more men have very little dating success. At least that is the case in my circle of friends.

Is this impression deceptive or are women really that much pickier? Is the game rigged against us men? Are there biological, evolutionary reasons for this?

I’m pretty sure that women actually are choosier. Besides the subjective perception that girls my age almost always have more dating options than men, I have found some statistics that speak the same language.

Women Have Always Had A Higher Chance Of Reproducing

What do you think the ratio of male to female ancestors of our current population is? What do you estimate?

If I had been asked that question, I probably would have said 50–50. That’s intuitive since every child has a father and a mother.

In fact, we have twice as many female ancestors as male ancestors.

Wait. How the hell does that work? If you don’t understand how this can work, imagine the following situation: Every woman has a child. Half of the men father 2 wives from 2 different women. The other half of the men do not get to reproduce.

This New York Times article confirms this. Here is a meaningful passage:

The “single most underappreciated fact about gender,” he said, is the ratio of our male to female ancestors. While it’s true that about half of all the people who ever lived were men, the typical male was much more likely than the typical woman to die without reproducing. Citing recent DNA research, Dr. Baumeister explained that today’s human population is descended from twice as many women as men. Maybe 80 percent of women reproduced, whereas only 40 percent of men did.

Why is that? Probably not because half of the men did not want to reproduce.

I guess this is more likely because women have always been more selective and rather had sex with an attractive man who also fathered children with other women than with an unattractive man.

Online Dating Apps Provide Revealing Data

Nowadays, a big part of the dating market is placed on the Internet. Thanks to dating apps like Tinder, we can discuss topics like this one using data from the real world. These two points in particular give the strong impression that women are indeed generally more selective than men.

• Men swipe right on 46% of women, meanwhile, women swipe right on only 14% of men.
• the bottom 80% of men are fighting over the bottom 22% of women and the top 78% of women are fighting over the top 20% of men

You can find more Tinder stats here.

Parental Investment Theory

If we believe Darwin, the reason why women are choosier than men is evolutionary. It can be said that men and women have different strategies to achieve their biological goal of producing healthy offspring, which in turn have a good chance of reproducing.

After all, men can father a lot of children, while women are very limited in this respect due to the long duration of pregnancy. This is why women tend to prioritize quality. This makes them picky.

As explained in this Psychology Today article based on scientific studies, men generally have a greater desire for a variety of sexual partners than women. When women engage in short-term mating, on an evolutionary psychological level this is usually motivated by the quality of the partner. Or in a more Darwinian sense by the quality of his genes.

Of course, it is usually not the explicit goal of the woman to have a child, but it is certainly the biological goal of a woman which guides her instincts and desires.

The Parental Investment Strategy describes the influence of the necessary investment of one sex of a species in case of producing offspring on its sexual strategy. The main message is the following:

The sex that has to invest more in its offspring is typically more choosy in selecting a partner. For us humans, this is clearly the female.

Parental investment theory, a term coined by Robert Trivers in 1972, predicts that the sex that invests more in its offspring will be more selective when choosing a mate, and the less-investing sex will have intra-sexual competition for access to mates. This theory has been influential in explaining sex differences in sexual selection and mate preferences, throughout the animal kingdom and in humans. — Wikipedia

What To Do As A Man?

Well, I think you could say that the game of love love is indeed rigged against men. The only thing we can do is probably to become the best version of ourselves in all regards in order to maximize our chances in the dating world.

If you take the following article seriously, you should be well on your way.

Thanks for reading!

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