What the fuck is going on with single men?
A singles night has to use a $50 bounty to get men to sign up.
Over the past two years the male loneliness epidemic has taken up a lot of server space on the internet. Many men report having 0 to 1 close friendships in their lives. Women are staying single, waiting longer for partners, or even have kids without a partner. Women can do this because they are outpacing men in education, increasingly becoming the breadwinners, and buying houses in higher proportion.
The framing of this trend has irked many women both online and off. Like the headline of this Wall Street Journal article, American women are giving up on marriage, the tone of these articles seems to scold women for being too picky or for removing themselves from the dating pool.
But based on my anecdotal experiences, and now some concrete numbers thanks to the CEO of a singles events company, I can say the reality is just the opposite — it’s the men who are opting out of dating, not women.
“Something that has been known for a long time in heterosexual dating markets, is when women come, men typically follow,” said Liesel Sharabi, an Arizona State University professor and dating app researcher. This is why clubs and bars host ladies' nights, waiving cover charges for women under the assumption that if women show up, men will too. But that might be a remnant of the ‘90s and the 2000s.
Tommy Flaim, the CEO of the sports singles event company, Silly Pickles, told me that convention is now wrong. The company hosts speed dating cornhole leagues and singles pickleball leagues in 35 cities across the country. And the women’s side of his roster fills up instantly.
To fill up the men’s side he had to put out a $50 bounty for anyone who could get a man in his late 20s or early 30s to join.
“Even though men and women have similar negative views on speed dating, women are still willing to sign up in large numbers,” he said. “They are willing to swallow their pride and be vulnerable. The men are very reluctant.”
The cost to acquire one woman for his league was $10 of marketing spend (also known in business circles as the CAC or Customer Acquisition Cost.) For one millennial man the CAC was $100 and for one Gen Z man it was $60. It was 10 times more costly to find a man who wanted to put themselves out there to find a romantic relationship compared to a women. That doesn’t sound like women are the ones giving up on dating to me.
Flaim said he has to be very careful and specific with the marketing of his events and leagues because of the male fragility. He can’t label the meetups as singles events or speed dating. Instead he has tried to brand them as clubs that happen to have girls there.
In his competitive research he found that many other singles events are having the same trouble attracting men. The only one that is an exception and has a 50/50 gender split are run clubs — which, despite not marketing themselves as singles events, have been labeled the replacement for dating apps.
“The reality is we have to cater our marketing towards men at the moment,” Flaim said.
When I heard Flaim talk about his business struggles attracting men and then getting the hard numbers, it affirmed a feeling I’ve had since the pandemic. The single women I know are awesome, smart, beautiful and working so hard to find partners.
On the other hand, here are some quotes from 30-something single men I’ve heard in the past six months. I will keep them anonymous for their own protection but these are verbatim.
“I would rather Venmo you $50 instead of signing up for that league.”
“Dating is so exhausting and I can get most of what I want from just going home and masturbating.”
“I liked her but didn’t text her for a date because I was planning a vacation and had work. ”
Men are the ones not participating in the dating market.
There are plenty of theories as to why and they probably all play a role. Dating apps have made it easy to feel like you’re putting yourself out there without ever leaving your apartment and many people are just generally burnt out from them. Many platforms use mutual-match algorithms that essentially engineer rejection out of the process — a feature that helps a generation growing more sensitive to rejection and can’t be recreated IRL.
The COVID-19 pandemic also normalized isolation; it made all of us a little more hesitant to leave the house and more tolerant of alone time. Of course these affected both gender’s equally, but for some reason it has caused men to put much less effort into finding a woman to have sex.
According to Pew Research, single-and-looking women were far more likely than single-and-looking men to say that they had trouble finding someone.
“The effort gap is insane,” Flaim said. “There’s so much coaxing and convincing [of men] that had to be done behind the scenes.”
Hence the $50 bounty, that he mainly awarded to women who got their male coworkers, guy friends and brothers to sign up.
According to Sharabi, the whole premise of evolutionary psychology behind mate selection is female choice. Women can typically be more selective because there are a lot of men who are courting them and women are seen as the gatekeepers of sex. The men have to compete harder. But in 2025 that is no longer the case.
The dynamic has flipped. Women are the ones crowding into singles nights, but the men are not following. Men have effectively removed themselves from the dating pool by not putting in the effort and there are fewer desirable men as women are outpacing them.
“It’s switched from there being a scarcity of women, to now there is a scarcity of what we deem as quality men,” Flaim said.
We have entered the era of male choice. But the culture hasn’t caught up. Women don’t want to chase men and men don’t really want to be chased. We are at an impass.
So women have started moving on alone, many times spurred by an evolutionary clock that can’t wait much past 35. Faith Hill wrote an article in the Atlantic, The people who quit dating, where she quoted five people who decided to give up on dating. Four of them were women who along with quitting dating were deciding to buy houses, write books, freeze or inseminate eggs and adopt children on their own. The one man she interviewed? He said he doesn’t smile at women at concerts anymore.
Because this is a newsletter I can say this: Come the fuck on.
I think Flaim said it best: “If you consider yourself to be part of the male loneliness epidemic, put in more effort.”
From my archives
Spring climbing season is upon us and I was in Red Rock last week before I started my new job so figured it was apt to highlight one of my old favorites I wrote for Climbing Magazine in 2021.
When Climbing and Condors Clashed, These Two Biologists Helped Save Both — Climbing Magazine
What I’m reading
The World Porn Made — The Atlantic
Lately, all favorite podcast hosts and Substack writers are focusing on the same topic: kids and teens are being exposed to hardcore porn on their phones. There’s a push and pull between what counts as healthy sexual exploration, what’s the result of algorithms pushing explicit content to children as young as third grade, and whether we should be imposing age restrictions on porn sites — a stance that’s traditionally held by conservatives. The pros, cons and “what would I dos” have been swirling around in my head. And I don’t even have children.
What I’m listening to
The new Japanese Breakfast album For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women), of which I am both.
See you in the wild,
Jesse