“We are not a classic pair-bonded species. We are not a polygamous, tournament species either…. What we are, officially, … is a tragically confused species.” (Robert Sapolsky)
The first two decades of the 21st
century have come and gone and while dating has never been completely effortless,
the mating market is in a mindboggling mess like never before. One might think with
no forced marriages, a relatively liberal ideology and dating websites finding
a partner should be easier than ever before. The opposite is true. It looks
like Tinder and co. make finding the soulmate not easier, but harder than ever before.
In the western world between 10-15% of all women remain unmarried throughout their lives. While there have always been men who remained single and couldn't attract a partner, this has not been true of women in human history. In ancient forager, farmer and herder societies basically all women got married by the time they reached adulthood and none remained single. The same isn't true for men due to a certain amount of polygyny, which usually had the lowest levels in hunter-gatherer societies and the highest levels in farmer-herder societies.
One obvious problem is the paradox of
choice. The more choice the harder to choose. In small hunter-gatherer bands (30-50
member), in which the majority of people were not part of the potential mates (too
old, young, or simply to closely related) mate choice was fairly restricted and
after having tried out two or three partners, you generally could be pretty
certain who was the best partner for you. There are literally no singles in
hunter-gatherer societies – by the time girls are grown-up they have a partner
and biological reproduction begins. If you have millions of mates to choose
from, when is the optimal number of trying out reached and it is best to settle
down? For some people obviously never.
Adding to the confusion is that some people
have far more sexual partners than in the past, whereas more and more males are
becoming incels and more and more women are deciding to remain single. An estimated
50% of American single females have resigned and decided to stay out of the mating
market.
In order to understand the current mess, we have to understand our evolutionary roots. Societies have changed, human
nature has not. The most common form of partnership nowadays is serial monogamy,
which is effectively a form of polygamy. The most common form of marriage in
ancient egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies was monogamy, polygamy was more
common in highly stratified farmer (e.g. Zulus) and herder (e.g. Datooga)
societies, as polygamy, relies heavily on unequal wealth distribution. We have,
to a large extent, inherited our ancestors evolved temperaments: forager,
farmer and herder. Of course, nowadays we are very much a mixed society, but
the phenomenon of assortative mating made sure that people often have strong
tendencies towards one of these three types. Farmer types tend to attract women
with money, herder types with muscles and the best that hunter-gatherer types,
who generally don’t play mating games, have to show off: a PhD. diploma.
The biggest losers in the mating games nowadays are kind gatherer type males
(think Ed Sheeran, who fortunately made it) and highly intelligent hunter type
females, who seem to be in low demand on the mating market (think Hillary Clinton).
The biggest losers in this game are also
the children. The system produces more cads than dads and the Western World is
following America in the “Father Crisis”. Fewer and fewer children are growing
up with a father by their side, and those who do often barely see them as they
are away making money for the family. Famer types are the ones who still have
children, but herder and hunter-gatherer types are having fewer and fewer.
Herder types often lack children due to commitment problems and hunter-gatherer
types often due to prioritizing self-actualization. Hunter-gatherers practise alloparenting
(it takes a village to raise a child) and it is typically hunter-gatherer type
females who struggle most with bearing all the burdens of child-rearing. My hunch
is that most cases of postpartum depression are female hunter-gatherer types
who lack a strong social network. Cases of postpartum depression have been
soaring during the Covid lockdown. Also,
hunter-gatherer females are the ones who are most likely to remain single
mothers after divorce, whereas farmer and herder type females have the tendency
to reassemble quickly into patchwork families.
Last, but not least, the growing qualifications
of women leave many men out of the mating market. The more status-oriented farmer
and herder type females certainly do not want to marry beneath their status,
and the more sapiosexual hunter-gatherer female find it hard to marry beneath
their level of education. The biggest problems for women is to get their
desired mates to commit. In a sexually liberally society, where sex is easy to
have and cheap to buy (pornography and prostitution) there are increasingly
fewer incentives for men to commit.
Read more in my latest book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08PY27YDY
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