A Vox reader asks: Why are young men struggling or failing to date/engage in romantic relationships more so than their female peers?

In a recent conversation, a new acquaintance of mine recounted an exchange he’d recently overheard. A man turned to his female friend and exclaimed, “I’m not going to go to a bar and just start a conversation with a woman. Who wants to be picked up?”

“Me,” the woman replied.

One quip doesn’t account for the entirety of men’s experiences, of course, but it does speak to the challenges men seem to be facing recently in dating.

If dating is a numbers game, the numbers don’t appear to be on the men’s side. According to a 2022 Pew Research Center survey, 63 percent of men under 30 said they were single, compared to only 34 percent of women in the same age cohort. These single men are more likely to be looking for love, too: Half of single men in Pew’s survey reported looking for a committed relationship and/or casual dates, while only 35 percent of single women said the same.

This discrepancy could be for any number of reasons, says Richard Reeves, the president of the American Institute for Boys and Men and the author of Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It. Perhaps young men and women differ in their definition of a relationship or perhaps women are dating........

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