Do Young People Suck?
An exploration of a theory of marital decline
Marriage rates are declining, and this is a key part of why fertility is declining.
But why are marriage rates declining? Many people have theories. One theory you often here is “Because the other sex sucks.” The men are all porn-addled, the women are depressed, the men are gambling their savings away, the women are obese, etc, etc, etc.
I think this is a bad theory, but a lot of people believe it. This article is responsive to online discourse provoked by Patrick T Brown , but specifically responding to Leah Libresco Sargeant ; Ivana Greco joined the party as well, I suspect Cartoons Hate Her will enjoy it, and Derek Thompson is favorably cited, so there, tags.
In this post I will explore to what extent the youths really do suck.
Do Young People Feel Like They Suck?
Young men believe that young men suck. Here are some graphs from a recent IFS report:
Young men mostly feel they don’t know what it means to be a man, and that manhood is viewed negatively.
42% of young men describe themselves as failures. Education, work, and family status all feed into that.
So on its face, “young men suck” is, according to young men, a fairly decent thesis.
What about young women? I don’t have comparable data on hand for that, but the sex-biased rise in depression and anxiety is well-known, and this graph from Jean Twenge on rates of hospital admission for self harm I think basically answers what young women think of themselves compared to prior generations:
So I think it’s safe to say young men and young women agree with a relatively negative view of themselves, at least compared to prior generations.
If you think that self-assessment is decently accurate, then young peoples’ assessments of themselves is consistent with a declining mate quality thesis. They think they themselves kinda suck!
How Are The Youths Doing Economically?
Here’s real median income (note: median, not mean, so this isn’t skewed by a few high performers!) by sex for ages 22-30 over time:
You can see that young men’s income vs. young women’s (the gap) had a relative peak in 1970. But today the relative income gap between men and women is about what it was in 1940. The generation that got a seriously rough time of it was those in their 20s between 2007 and 2015, i.e. certain cohorts of Millennials including some whose names rhyme with Shmyman Shmone, but the Zoomers are by and large pampered brats who have had nothing but steady growth their whole privileged lives, except a brief COVID interlude.
Okay but I’m cheating here, right? Because there’s a difference between “we both earn real money but one earns $7,000 more” and “one earns zero, the other earns $7,000.” And yes, there’s been ~zero growth in earnings for men ages 22-30. That stings. And I think you can make a totally lucid argument there was a genuine qualitative change in the relative income balance between men and women between 1970 and 1990.
But I don’t think you can make that change for more recent years! If you want to argue “men aren’t as valuable as they were in 1960,” sure, no dispute. But we’re talking about a fertility decline beginning around 2007-2010, people. The societal difference between the median man making $11,000 and $7,000 more than the median young women just isn’t a big deal, and for the last 14 years of data there’s been no change at all. We have no reason to believe men ages 22-30 have seen a diminishment in economic standing since 2010 vs. young women or vs. prior young men. Rather, young men in 2024 saw their highest inflation-adjusted earnings since the 1970s!! It hasn’t been this good to be a young man in a long time! This, despite the fact many more young men are in higher education than in, say, 1950, and so have temporarily low or zero earnings.
The idea that young men present weak economic prospects at the median is wrong, and the idea there’s been some seismic change in the gender balance of earnings in the last 10, 15, 20, 25 years, is also wrong. The economics of dating are what they have been for a whole generation.
To the extent what men have to offer as high quality mates is “earnings,” their bid is as good as it ever was. The economic data doesn’t point to any decline in mate quality.
Are The Youths Criminals?
They are not. A brand new paper explores this very well at least through the 1995 birth cohort!
White and black men alike have seen major declines in felony arrests in particular, and no increase of note for others. White women have seen no change in felony arrests, black women have seen a decline. Hispanic criminality may be rising, but remains at rather moderate levels. On the whole men are a lot less criminal than in the past, women are maybe ~unchanged.
I’ve recently argued that young men today are as murderous as some very murder-ey times in the past and I stand by that, but murder is a very small share of serious crime; the other crimes seen to have declined quite a bit. So if what people want in a spouse is “someone who doesn’t have a criminal record,” you’re in luck, you have more good spouse options in recent cohorts than ever before! Mate quality has improved!
Even on murder, we can just ask, “What are the odds an ever-married man or woman is murdered by a current or former spouse?” We can do this because the Supplemental Homicide Report data includes data on relationship of offender. It has missingness, but we can adjust for that in plausible ways, and then divide by the ever-married population. Here’s the odds your current or former spouse murders you in a given year:
This is coded by sex of victim by the way. As you can see, the odds a woman is murdered by a current or former spouse is way below historic highs, and still falling. Meanwhile, the odds a man is murdered by a current or former spouse is way below historic highs, but perhaps rising, though this could be an artifact of some data quality issues.
I had Claude look up general non-homicidal IPV rates. They’re down too:
So it seems like in terms of violence and criminality, the youths really are all right. You have less cause to worry your spouse is gonna murk you than ever before.
Are The Youths Porn Addicts?
Many people say young men are so porn-brained that they don’t make good mates anymore.
Here’s the share of GSS respondents under age 30 by sex who had used porn in the last year:
You can see men’s porn use is indeed near record highs.
So is women’s!!!
The absolute gap in porn use is about stable around 10-25%, oscillating year by year, but there’s nothing in that graph that screams “There has been a unique male-biased surge in porn use.”
In 2022-2024 GSS added better porn questions. Here’s the actual frequency of use:
Men use more porn than women. gasp
But acting like heavy porn use is just a male thing is wild! About 15% of women are making ~weekly or more use of porn; that’s not nothing not even close to it. “Habitual” porn users, i.e. those using literally every week or more, are indeed heavily male biased, but I the novel change in porn in the last 15 years isn’t that men are using it so much more, it’s that women are.
And of course women are porn addicts for a different kind of porn: book porn. The stuff women read is wild. Speaking as a Christian, I don’t think you can draw any distinction between the sex scenes you read and those you watch; and speaking as a sociologist of family and fertility, the idea that sexually stimulating literature is not functioning for women in a very similar way as porn does for men is pretty clearly nonsense.
So maybe the youths are porn addled, but they seem pretty equivalently porn addled. Mate quality may have declined if you think porn reduces mate quality (it probably does), but it’s declined symmetrically, and it’s kind of weird to think that people using porn are declining mates because those mates use porn.
Also, to be clear, porn is a lot worse than real sex, and most people basically know this, and so you’d think people who can get real sex will prefer it, and so porn would tend to select out the worst mates, not the best ones.
Are The Youths Hot?
Most people prefer beauty over ugliness. Are young people getting more beautiful?
On the one hand, we might imagine the answer is yes. Plastic surgery rates have exploded, skincare products continue to see an ongoing technological revolution, pharmacological options for managing various aesthetic issues proliferate. Dress norms for both sexes are more and more pervasively about sex and sexual display instead of formal wear, work wear, etc. Every time I fly somewhere I’m kind of surprised by how people dress; men and women alike are often in basically “gym wear,” which is designed to display their form. This would seem to increase the perceived mate quality I would imagine.
But on another level, it’s obvious the youths have gotten less sexually appealing!
Men’s rise in obesity has been a bit bigger, so maybe men’s mate quality declined more, but women arguably care less about looks than men do, so it probably matters less.
On the whole, sure, rising obesity probably means declining mate quality on some level.
But to do the other-other hand… okay, maybe obesity rose, but must of the saddest Sad Singles I know are not obese! I know lots of very attractive singles! I simply don’t believe that all the hotties are marrying fine and it’s just fatties not marrying; I know too many guys with good jobs and regular workouts who are semi-permanently single and too many attractive women in the same boat to believe that marriage decline is reducible to changed physical attractiveness. We all know friends who wish they were married, perfectly reasonably attractive, and cannot find love! This suggests we probably shouldn’t be blaming declining attractiveness, even if attractiveness may have declined. Though if you take the cosmetic changes I mentioned above, it’s possible to imagine we’ve seen a radically shifted distribution of attractiveness. Attractiveness may be higher-variance now, such that “Median” attractiveness now seems relatively worse vs. “Maximum” than in the past. But I would be surprised if “Median” only indexed against “Maximum” and not also “Minimum.” A world of surgically altered Instagram models setting the top of the scale might make Normie Attractive People seem ugly by comparison; but surely a world of 30% obesity makes Normie Attractive People seem exceptionally attractive!
Are The Youths On Drugs?
Drug use is unappealing. If drug use is rising, mate quality would be falling. So what’s happening with drug use?
Well, here’s drug use by teenagers:
It’s going down, not up. The kids are doing less hard drugs.
Even the potheads are in decline!
Are you worried your partner will be an alcoholic? That’s less likely than ever before!
Do they smoke, maybe? Nope!
This is all teenager data, but sources like NSDUH show similar trends for adults. Society is beating substance abuse!
Since substance abuse is a huge mate quality issue, this tells us that mate quality on average is probably improving.
Are The Youths Inveterate Gamblers?
A lot of people are worried about the rise of online gambling. I am too. It’s a scourge.
But let’s take a step back and just be honest here. The total amount of money involved is pennies in the broad scheme of things. Not even pennies, in terms of GDP %. And it’s not as sex-biased as you may imagine. Here’s Pew data on gambling:
Men gamble more… but not, like, an order of magnitude more. And in fact men have more hostile views towards gambling than women!
The rise of gambling may have made young people into worse mates, and there may be some male bias to that, but we shouldn’t overstate the scale here. Both sexes are gambling more, but most people still aren’t gamblers, and while gambling is a serious problem for many people, we’re still talking about a small share of a rounding error of the total economic resources of a generation. “Online gambling is why people aren’t getting married” no, no that isn’t true.
Do The Youths Want Weird Sex Stuff?
Many people think young people are weird sex fiends who want weird sex stuff vs. olds, who enjoy only totally normal sex stuff. I’m not convinced. We don’t have great data on this, and anecdotes about “the weirdest thing somebody asked me in bed” are not reliable.
The best source here, alas, may be Aella’s Big King Survey. Here’s her estimate of the number of “uncommon fetishes” people of each age had:
There’s growth in early adulthood probably related to sexual discovery, but there don’t seem to be any really big or meaningful differences between the early 20s and the early 30s. I don’t think this supports the idea young people today are inhabited a newly bizarre sexual environment vs. 10-20 years ago.
Here’s bondage interest:
Same story.
Here’s male vs. female interest in “brutality” in sex:
Check the scales. Teenage girls who took Aella’s survey probably aren’t representative, but it seems there’s disproportionate interest in violent sex among teenage girls, and then it settles down to a quite rare fetish that has little age variance and similar interest across sexes.
On choking specifically (one that comes up a lot in mate-quality conversations), estimates are all over the map. Some sources claim 70% of young people have been choked during sex. The best estimates are from this paper. Here’s the table for women’s responses. Notice the choking results.
And here’s men:
Again, notice the choking results.
Now let’s compare those.
Compare “men choked partner” to “woman was choked.” Notice the bars… don’t match. A lot of women are being “choked” when men don’t think there’s any choking happening. You might say, oh, it’s men misreporting. Maybe!
But... probably not. It’s likelier to be women misreporting. And not because women are unreliable in some general sense, but for a specific statistical problem you can spot in the data pretty easily. Look at the men who report being choked vs. women who report choking. WAY more women report they choke their partners than men report being choked. So women over-report being choked and also over-report doing the choking. If it’s just men didn’t want to admit to choking girls, you’d only see the 1st. Maybe there’s also a male-specific taboo against reporting being choked? But I think we just should take all the choking stuff with a grain of salt.
What’s going on here, I suspect, is just the downstream cascade of redefinitions of sexual assault, sexual consent, sexual violence, harassment, etc. A lot of women increasingly use relatively extreme and violent language to describe behaviors men do not perceive that way, or that women 20 years ago did not perceive that way. There probably has been a rise in sexual choking, but it’s nowhere near as prevalent as women’s reports suggest, and we know this because when those women think they’re choking their male partners, the guys don’t even seem to notice in the survey data, which suggests the female-normative definition of choking is a behavior many men do not even notice happening, not a dude getting off on throttling a woman. You can see this kind of phenomenon many areas; most famously in the Korean case, where Korean men and women have massive gaps in what kinds of behaviors they think are sexual harassment.
And this is the key thing to recognize: we have to distinguish between actual changes in mate quality and changes in perception of mate quality which may have nothing to do with the actual mates. Korean men are a lot less violent than American men and on many measures a lot more gender-progressive, yet a lot of Korean women report preferring American men based on the perception that Korean men are risky/reactionary! What’s going on there is not an actual chasm in mate quality, but a chasm in public relations.
There has probably been some rise in unconventional sexual behaviors among heterosexuals, including choking, and that could impact mate quality (unless you’re into that). More broadly, increasing heterogeneity in sexual activities could just make sexual matching harder even if no specific change is reducible to a change in “mate quality.” It’s possible that it’s getting harder to find a good lover even if all the lovers are better than ever, if the space of what you want from a lover is narrowing, or if the market is segmenting, or if potential lovers have a lot of bad press.
So If You’re So Smart…
I could go on. But the logical question here is, “So Lyman, if the potential partners are so good, why do people feel like they’re so bad?”
Good question. Great question. There are two reasons.
The vibes are bad. People are getting sad and miserable. “If partners are so good, why do they seem so bad” is the same question as “If the economy is so good, why does it seem so bad” or “If life expectancy is rising so much, why is everybody acting like we’re dying of microplastics” or just “Why is everybody so doomerish.” I won’t belabor this, I’ll just say, we live in an age of bad vibes. You have a choice to either let the bad vibes steal your life from you, or heroically insist upon good vibes. You should simply heroically insist upon good vibes. When things go badly, it is not because doom is at hand. It is usually for mundane and often solvable reasons. Civilizations that catastrophize end in catastrophes. Simply stop being depressed. Simple As. Easy!!!
But the bigger factor is nobody is hanging out at all. Here, I shall belabor.
Derek Thompson has a great piece on this. I think these graphs tell the story:
Dating is a matching problem. To find a good match you have to usually sort through some bad matches. In fact, usually a lot of bad matches. The usual way you do this is not by fucking them. The usual way you do this is by chatting with people at parties and events and in real life, and by rapidly filtering through a large number of potential matches and narrowing down. Over the course of my collegiate career, my university had about 600 girls in an age band where they might have been reasonable spousal candidates for me. Make it about ~300 when you rule out those with very few times they weren’t already dating somebody. Of those, I probably had some direct interaction with at least 200 because I had a public-facing job interacting with ~all the students on campus.
But realistically I probably had substantive conversation, discussing homework, talking in class, being at some social event, or an extracuricular, with maybe 100-150. So my pool to filter through was about 100-150. I did indeed filter through. Ultimately, there were probably ~25 women over the course of my collegiate career for whom I may have felt some momentary flicker of, “Oh, I wonder if there might be some interest here, or if it it could be created?” Of those, I considered perhaps 6 women with any seriousness. Of those, I dated 2, and of those, I married 1. She’s fantastic! I love her so much! Love is a numbers game. If you’re not starting from a big pool at the top end, you never end up with anybody at the end.
The key thing is you narrow down by the high-dimensional information gained by socializing. You talk. You see how they talk to others. You see how they move in the world. Things they do. Their friends. Not just their Tinder pic. The “relationship stuff” may be how you work down, in my case, from 6 to 1, but you get down from 150 to 6 just by talking to people, hanging out, meeting people. If you’re not posting numbers on meeting people in the real world, your odds of the final 1 are gonna be lower.
Consider this graph:
So meeting online is doomed, yeah?
No.
The thing you have realize is at the same time that couples meeting shifted online the total number of couples forming declined. I don’t have perfect data on this so can’t fully calculate it, and In that data above I can’t separate out marriages from dating, but to a first approximation what really happened is the raw number of couples meeting online probably only moderately rose 2010-2024, but the raw number of couples meeting offline is plummeting, and so the online share spikes. It’s key to realize that there are just fewer couples forming, so even if people are not really meeting online very much, the online share can be booming.
The point is, nobody just meets a cute girl or a handsome guy anymore! That isn’t what people do! And that’s a huge problem because the high-dimensional signaling of in-person social environments is the entire ballgame! It’s what your entire psychology evolved to navigate! It’s how humans make good matches!
This has downstream effects. As life moves online, society polarizes, often around sex. Politics is more and more sex-polarized, and that makes matching harder, even if it would be weird to say political preferences actually reduce mate quality. The decline of in-person socializing is leading to ever-more-polarized gender norms.
In other words, it’s not that mate quality has declined.
It’s that the in-person socializing which allows people to find good mates and which draws the sexes together to compromise has collapsed. That’s it. That’s the whole story. Relationships are declining because nobody is partying. There’s no story here about mate quality. For mate quality some variables go up, some go down, but basically it’s not the problem.
It would actually be shocking if, in a world where every other kind of socializing fell by 20-80%, relationship formation didn’t fall by a similar amount! That would be statistically bizarre!
To solve fertility, solve marriage. To solve marriage, solve dating. To solve dating, solve socializing. To solve socializing, plan parties and institute immediate capital punishment for anybody posting too much on social media. Oh no. Wait. No. Please. No I didn’t mean, I didn’t—
Young people aren't pairing up anymore because they're too busy reading substack articles
So we need to party more. Make America Party Again!