Why Aren't Young People Dating?

My father had some very distinct ideas on what a man's role in life, society, and family were. Now, a finer man never lived than my Dad, so when he spoke, I listened to him, even when I was young enough to still think I knew everything. His lessons still stick with me today, and among these lessons were these words about a man's place in a family: A man works, a man provides, a man protects, a man produces value.

Dad had nothing against women working; my Mom was a farm wife for many years, and if you ever would have referred to her work in those years as "housewife," she'd singe your ears with stories of throwing 75-pound hay bales into a wagon with a baby strapped to her chest. She also worked in a local credit union for years after that. That's all fine, but as Dad believed and I do now, when times are bad, when things are tight, a man should be prepared to do anything necessary to keep house and hearth going, and if that means shoveling manure, then that man better be prepared to start shoveling.

Right now, young men, and young people in general, are either putting off dating, marriage, and family, or are opting out entirely. That's troubling.

This featured column by Stephan Kapustka at Chronicles details some of that problem.

Have you found a girlfriend yet, young man? I ask because people are pairing off at the lowest rates in modern history.
While many argue over the causes, everyone—both left and right—agrees on the culprit: men. The internet is awash in articles positing some variation of the title “Where have all the good men gone?”
On the left, one of the most prominent works on this question is the New York Times’ essay “Men, Where Have You Gone? Please Come Back” by Rachel Drucker. Leftists never consider the mess that is the modern dating world—or their role in creating it—and how it might incentivize the “good men” to go their own way.

If even The New York Times is bemoaning the loss of what we can only see as the decline in good and available men, then you know it's a real problem. And the current trends in dating are not helping. It wasn't always like that; even as recently as the 1970s, when I was coming up through high school, it was pretty routine to date through high school. Then when a young man graduated, his thoughts generally turned towards a job, a place of one's own, a wife, and some kids. That's the pattern life took in those days, and that was only a short half-century ago.

Enter online dating and the #MeToo movement. Online dating is bad enough; it places the courtship stage of a young person's relationships on a par with buying a new kitchen appliance on Amazon. Oh, there are some success stories, but they seem few and far between. Case in point: One of our daughters signed up, very briefly, for one of these online dating services, and she was deluged with contact requests from, as she put it, "guys named Mohammed who said they were looking for a mother for their ten children." Her words. She cancelled the online dating account, and the success side is that she's now married and has three kids.

But there's the other side of this as well:

Consider the #MeToo movement. After watching baseless accusations destroy the lives of countless powerful men, modest guys stopped pursuing women. When the media, divorce courts, and prospective employers decided to #BelieveAllWomen, young males afflicted by nothing worse than shyness backed off, because they didn’t want to become the object of social ridicule or make women uncomfortable. Courtship died.
Certainly, there are bad men out there, but rather than consider them an outlier, the left has encouraged young women to take a negative view of men in general.

Social media isn't helping. It's entirely possible now for a young man to be broken on social media over an ill-timed remark, an off-color comment, a glance, an accidental bump.

But there's another problem: Young men have, for years now, been told they aren't necessary. They've been accused of toxic masculinity if they hold to traditional values. As boys, if they showed the aggressiveness, the energy, the inquisitiveness, and the longing for adventure that we used to take for granted in boys, they were drugged. And now, we are told, they are being led to think that they can become girls if they want to.

Boys are being cancelled, and it's no wonder some of them are opting out. They are abandoning courtship, they are abandoning dating, and that's sad, because it's so much fun! In high school, I had a progression of girlfriends, most of which only lasted a few weeks, and the girls I knew had all dated other guys. Not "hooked up with" or "swiped right with," dated. A movie, a cheeseburger, a snuggle and a smooch on the second or third date. It was all so much fun! And now, young people, young men in particular, are opting out. Dating, courtship, is what leads to marriage and family, and we're losing our societal grip on it.

There's no easy way out of this. There's no easy way to impart to boys and young men that it's OK to be a boy or a young man, indeed that they should take pride in being boys and men. They should take pride in being productive. They should take pride in being husbands and fathers, in being providers, in producing value.

As my Dad put it: "A man works." And a man has purpose. There is nothing so detestable as a man with no purpose.

Likely, the only way out of this societal fix is through. And that may well happen the hard way. I've said and written for some time now that most of the Western world is in the last stage of this progression: