Why Men Are Choosing Singlehood
There are a lot of people who keep saying there’s a “male loneliness epidemic,” but could it be less of an crisis and instead more of an actual choice to stay single? Let’s break it down.
According to a video on X, a growing number of men aren’t dating less because they can’t find someone, but they’re purposely pumping the dating brakes because staying single has started to feel like the more rational option. The woman in the video states that men are “not settling anymore,” but that’s just skimming the surface of what’s really going on here. Men aren’t seeking some new, crazy standards that no woman can reach. They just simply want to be met on their level and stop feeling disposable.
Men are starting to articulate things that used to go unspoken: they want mutual effort, emotional stability at home, and financial adulthood instead of being viewed as a walking wallet. And these aren’t extreme demands. They’re baseline expectations that were treated as negotiable for far too long.
It’s clear that another factor adding a lot of fatigue to men in the dating pool is dating apps themselves.
They’re definitely easy to use, you know, a swipe here, a swipe there… and the options can feel nearly endless.
But unfortunately, both the ease and limitless options are leaving a lot of singles, men most notably, feeling like their efforts aren’t paying off, and many simply are throwing in the towel.
SOURCE
One major grievance is the sheer difficulty of finding matches. On many dating apps, men significantly outnumber women, creating intense competition. Globally, about 62% of dating app users are male, on some platforms the gender skew is even greater – Tinder’s user base is roughly 3 men to 1 woman. This imbalance means that women can afford to be highly selective, while average men may swipe endlessly with little success. Data on swiping behavior underscores the asymmetry: one analysis found women swipe right (i.e. “like”) on only ~5–8% of profiles, whereas men swipe right on 40–46% of profiles. In practical terms, the average male Tinder user gets only about 1 match per 130–140 swipes, whereas the average woman gets 1 match per 10 swipes. Men also tend to “like” a broad range of women but receive few return likes, while women filter for the most attractive or desirable men. A famous analysis of OkCupid data showed that women rate 80% of men as below-average in attractiveness, whereas men’s ratings of women follow a more typical bell curve. This means many ordinary guys find themselves deemed “not good enough” at first glance, often never making it past the swipe stage.
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Even when a man does get a match, meaningful conversation or an eventual date is far from guaranteed. A top complaint among men is the frequency of “ghosting” – when matches abruptly stop responding with no explanation. In general, ghosting has become endemic in online dating: about 30% of U.S. adults say they’ve been ghosted by someone they were dating or talking to, and that figure jumps to 42% among young adults (18–29) and 62% among people actively using dating apps. (Notably, men and women report being ghosted at roughly equal rates, so it’s a universal problem; however, men who have relatively few matches may find ghosting especially demoralizing, since each lost connection feels like a rare chance slipping away.)
DEBRIEFING
What this all captures isn’t male bravado or backlash, but it’s an overall shift in how many men are approaching romance, relationships, and dating.
That’s why singlehood is now becoming more of a choice instead of a failure. When the cost of “putting yourself out there” keeps rising while the likelihood of mutual return stays low, disengagement becomes the only logical choice for most. Especially men who are serious about finding a real partner, wife, or even the mother of their future children.
So the trend toward staying single isn’t necessarily men abandoning relationships. It’s men starting to get clear with what they want and what actually serves them.
NOW YOU KNOW
Men aren’t staying single out of fear. They’re staying single out of clarity.
https://www.cypher-news.com/2026/01/why-men-are-choosing-singlehood/