The big winners of the loneliness epidemic: nice guys with jobs

This past summer, I experienced a modern-day miracle: I matched on Hinge with an attractive guy, with an interesting job and hobbies, and he messaged me. He asked me on a date, planned it, and showed up (and was actually over 6 feet tall, as advertised). He asked me on a second date the next day, then a third. All seemed to be going well in a dating world defined by ghosting and low-effort meetups.

That all changed when I saw his apartment. A futon was scattered on the floor in pieces. He quickly assembled the body, but it had no legs (I didn’t get a clear explanation as to what had happened to them). In lieu of a TV, a laptop was perched precariously near the futon shambles. A naked light bulb hung from the ceiling, giving the space an interrogation-room vibe. Most concerning was a plaid shirt, disembodied into three pieces and strung across a window as a makeshift curtain, a horror my best friend later named The Shirtain™.

I spent the two days after moping around my curtained and couched apartment, thinking about what could have been but knowing that I was not willing to become an unpaid interior decorator for a man in his mid-30s. It was another disappointment in a string of bad dating luck. An ex-boyfriend who refused to keep his apartment clean told me “I just saw you as a whole person for the first time” only after we broke up. An attractive, highly educated, highly paid consultant ghosted me twice, telling me between the first and second offense that A) the 40-minute subway ride between us was too long and B) he had experienced a recent glow-up and was feeling overwhelmed by the amount of attention he was receiving from women.

Maybe it wasn’t just bad luck. At happy hours, on TikTok, at sociology conferences, and in the board rooms of dating app companies, it’s a common refrain among women, and there’s data to show it: The average man is not keeping pace with the average woman. In 1995, one-quarter of both young men and young women held bachelor’s degrees, an analysis of population data by the Pew Research Center found. The analysis also found that by 2024, 47% of women ages 25 to 34 had one, compared with 37% of men. Single women own 2.7 million more homes in America than single men, a Lending Tree analysis of US Census Bureau data found. Even if a man and a woman match up on paper, the social divides and expectations between them can make partnership feel uneven. In couples where both the man and the woman work, women still do the bulk of domestic labor and childcare. Women are more likely than men to seek out mental health treatment and less likely than men to die of a drug overdose, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Women are also more likely to have close friends with whom they talk about personal topics like their work, families, and health than men, a 2023 Pew Research Center survey found.

If dating is a numbers game, the math isn’t adding up.

There’s been much talk of a “male loneliness epidemic” — the idea that men are becoming increasingly isolated and lonely, particularly as marriage rates fall to record lows. There’s reason to question whether men really are lonelier, as a recent Pew Research Center survey found that men and women reported similar rates of loneliness but that women were more likely to turn to their family, friends, or mental health professionals for emotional support. Still, vibe shifts are leading some young men to turn toward a growing number of content creators in the misogynist manosphere online. In a 2023 Survey Center on American Life survey, almost half of young men said they faced discrimination. Young men are becoming more conservative as young women become more liberal. All this mismatch is frustrating the remaining single ladies who are looking around and deciding not to settle.

Jason says he’s casually seeing two to three women and had to postpone a call for this story because he unexpectedly had a woman sleep over and was taking her to get breakfast.

But as many women are ready to throw their phones out and swear off dating, a winner of the male loneliness epidemic is emerging: men. In today’s dating world, men who are 1) employed and 2) meet baseline social skills seem to be cleaning up, having their pick of attractive, successful, and smart women to sort through. Niko Emanuilidis, a dating coach and TikToker who goes under the name The Daddy Academy, tells me that while many men have turned inward and isolated themselves amid criticism of men and masculinity, those “who are comfortable in social situations” and confident “basically have skyrocketed ahead of all the rest.”

Among these men embodying what Emanuilidis calls the “winner effect” is Jason, a 34-year-old who works in management consulting and asked me not to publish his last name. He tells me wants to meet a “nice Jewish girl” and settle down, but in the meantime, there are other “brilliant, smart, funny, often attractive women” he casually sees amid his search for a long-term relationship. He’s learned to communicate what he’s looking for in both serious and casual dating situations. Jason says he’s casually seeing two to three women and had to postpone a call we scheduled to chat for this story last weekend because, as he texted me, he unexpectedly had a woman sleep over and was taking her to get breakfast.

It’s rough out there, but some nice guys with jobs are suddenly drowning in women.

There has always been a set of Most Eligible Bachelors, but the qualifications for a husband have changed. Where men were deemed marriage material for their income, and women for domestic labor and child rearing, shifts in gender roles are “creating a situation in which there is this disconnect, and you have a marriageable pool that isn’t on an equal footing among men and women,” says Jess Carbino, a former in-house sociologist for Bumble and Tinder.

The heterosexual women I spoke with for this story all want basically the same general thing: a man who is smart, kind, and emotionally intelligent, and has friends and hobbies — plus a spark. Haleigh, a 33-year-old who works in marketing, tells me she’s looking for a man who’s employed, kind, and independent. But those three requirements increasingly feel like a Venn diagram that’s hard to connect: “You always have to pick two of the three; you can’t have it all.”

Jana K. Hoffman, a 39-year-old writer, feels the pool of men who meet her preferences is small, particularly because she does not want kids. But in the past few years, she clicked with two guys who checked her boxes — until both courtships fell apart unexpectedly and suddenly, she says. The first was a man who told her he realized he actually didn’t want “a woman with her shit together.” The second, after about a month of dating, decided their different cuddling preferences were a dealbreaker. “They’re choosing these very strange things to pick at,” Hoffman tells me. It’s been sad and discouraging, but she says the bigger problem comes not from realizing these individual relationships weren’t going to pan out but from realizing it’s a pattern that makes her feel reluctant to be vulnerable again. “I used to be upset over the guy,” she says. “Now I just feel upset over the fact that it happens.”

The demand for these high-value, highly educated men in the dating marketplace outstrips the supply.Chandler Willison, a research analyst at M Science

The mismatch problem plays out on the dating apps — even though most have more male than female users. Women are more likely to report finding not enough “high-quality” matches and getting way too many likes from men they aren’t interested in, says Chandler Willison, a research analyst at the research and analytics firm M Science. Many men, conversely, report that they get lost in the crowd and have few to no matches. “The demand for these high-value, highly educated men in the dating marketplace outstrips the supply, and so you’re inevitably going to end up with women who are not going to be able to be in a relationship with these men,” Willison says. “There’s inevitably going to be that sort of mismatch between the men’s qualifications and the women’s desires at large.”

Meanwhile, the men I spoke with for this story are going on lots of dates that start on the apps. Mo, a 43-year-old who works in tech and is looking for a serious relationship, has his dating app strategy solidified: He reopens his Hinge account for about two to three weeks and then works through the matches he has. He shifted his strategy after continuously swiping when he was in his mid-30s and found that he passed up getting serious with some great women because he was wondering: “What if there’s somebody better than who I just met now?” Since opening up Hinge in the past month after getting out of a relationship, Mo says he has been on nine first dates and a handful of second dates, and already has one woman he is particularly interested in pursuing — maybe Hinge really is “designed to be deleted” for some of these top-tier men. “The whole point of a date is to have fun,” he tells me — even if it’s not a perfect match, he usually meets an interesting woman. “I don’t think I’ve ever not enjoyed any dates that I’ve been on.”

Some of the women I spoke with say they had fun dating in their 20s but now feel mostly frustrated by the apps. There’s a crop of smaller alternatives to the likes of Hinge and Tinder that are trying to fix that, but they still run into vast differences in how men and women want to date. On Fourplay, an app that allows friends to date in pairs, 85% of users are women, say Fourplay’s cofounders, Danielle Dietzek and Julie Griggs. They also tell me that men who started to sign up but never added a friend often said they didn’t have a single guy friend who they felt comfortable seeing them in a dating environment — and they worried about how their friend would act on a date.

Some women also feel like there’s confusion between men and women about expectations. Emily Azrael, a comedian and writer in Brooklyn, tells me that she once dated a man who offered to make her breakfast, but asked for her credit card to buy butter — since she would be the one keeping the leftover sticks. Azrael says it can feel like she’s not on the same page as men on dating roles, like who plans a first date. More communication, she hopes, could turn the problem around. “Let’s talk to each other and close the gap so we can speak the same language,” she says.

Most of the public conversations about the gap between men and women in dating are playing out on social media, where a misandrist slant isn’t helping. If you scroll through TikTok, it’s easy to find women who say they hate men and who call men trash. There are dating coaches who give black and white advice, telling women to pull back and manipulate men into chasing them. They give broad, evergreen descriptions of attachment styles that help jaded daters pathologize former matches, blurring the line between who’s a sadist and who just wasn’t that interested in them. People are more concerned about “engagement on their content than they are about the effect that content will have on the greater society,” Griggs says. “When you put out content that is hating on men,” she says, “it’s not helping the cause.

Emily Azrael, a comedian and writer in Brooklyn, tells me she once dated a man who offered to make her breakfast, but asked for her credit card to buy butter.

Emanuilidis of The Daddy Academy thinks there aren’t as many manipulative, toxic guys as social media would lead one to believe — the ones who play games have dated so many women that they have an outsize place in the conversation. But he worries about videos and posts that trash-talk men. “There’s this group of men who, their winner effect is already low, and then now take all that negativity on top of it,” he says. They have a “victim mindset” and turn inward, he says, adding: “There needs to be more male role models online that are speaking to the types of men.” Scott Galloway, whose recent book, “Notes on Being a Man,” focuses on modern masculinity issues, has a similar solution: “We don’t need the S&P and the Dow to hit more highs; we need more men who have the relationships and the strength and the will to go have those conversations with other young men,” he said on a recent podcast.

For the men I spoke with, dating has gotten more fun, in part because they’ve learned to be candid and decisive. In his 20s, Jason tells me he would casually date and hook up with women and not communicate his intentions well. It led to drama in his friend group when he hurt acquaintances’ feelings, and he tells me dating is better now that he sees women he actually likes to hang out with, even if it’s just casually. Now he lays out what he’s looking for early on, whether it’s a serious partnership or something casual. He says he’s baffled by the lack of respect other men have for women. “It’s a fairly basic thing: If you treat someone with respect, they’re going to give you respect,” he says. “It just naturally goes positive places from there.”

His advice for guys who want to rise up in the dating pool is simple: “Be better, men. Get her a bagel in the morning and hang out with her.”

Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.

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