No, People Are Not Finding It Hard To Find Partners

One of the myths in my online echo chamber is that dating has become horrible and men and women in their 20's and 30's cannot find suitable partners. Marriage and partnerships are supposed to be on the decline. We are all doomed to atomised lives as single people. The claim is that this has been getting worse since the introduction of social media and online dating apps, which give women an inflated sense of their own worth, and that ol' devil online pornography, which gives men an unrealistic sense of what real women look like and will do in the sack. The Narratives pile up so fast...

The 2021 Census has some figures about living arrangements since 2002. This table is an extract from that report and looks at the 16-29, 30-34 and 35-39 year old cohorts of men by living arrangement in 2002 and 2021. Because the population grew in that time, we have to adjust the 2002 numbers by that growth to get the numbers on green, which can then be directly compared with the 2021 figures in blue.

The next table is a summary of the living arrangements for men and women.

The high proportion of Never-marrried 16-29's is due to the fact that almost no-one gets married before about 22 now. The average ago of marriage has been increasing steadily since the early 1970's - see this report.  (The 2019 version doesn't seem to have these useful time series. If you do take a look, notice that after all the social changes in the last sixty years, most women still want a man who is 2-3 years older.) Increasing age of marriage does not mean increasing age of finding a partner. That, to judge from the table, has remained about the same since 2002.

Cohort by cohort, almost the same proportion of men are in relationships in 2021 as in 2002. By math, it follows that almost the same proportion of men are not living in a couple in 2021 as in 2002. If we wanted to make a headline out of a one-percentage point(*) difference (and generally, we should not), slightly more men in 2021 were living in couples, and six percentage points more women were living in couples in 2021 than 2002.

There is only one genuinely significant change, in the proportion of divorced men and women living on their own: that has halved over the period. A greater proportion of people divorcing in 2020 had the next partner lined up than the divorcees in 2001.

So it's as easy - or as hard - for men and women to find a domestic partner in 2021 as it was in 2002. Despite social media, dating apps, more women having more education than men and earning more, job-for-job, than men, and all the other reasons it has supposed to be getting more difficult.

My take is that what we see in the figures is what happens when much of the social and institutional compulsion to "find a partner" is lifted. Most people still do. (Then four in ten split up within twenty years of swearing never to leave the other person.) Some people stay single by choice. The men who would have made reluctant husbands will not be disappointing their wives, and the women who would have made reluctant wives are spared the effort of trying.

What’s not to like?

Why the complaints about the lack of eligible men and women? I suspect this is an artefact of how the media works. Dog bites man is not news, man bites dog is. Attractive, ambitious, well-paid, well-educated woman in her early-thirties who can't find a suitable partner is news, because these are supposed to be the women who should have long queues of suitors. The Schadenfreude, for readers (and columnists) who lack one or other of the career girl's supposed advantages, is delicious.

(*) A percentage point is an additive difference of 1%, thus 35% to 36% is a one-point difference. A basis point is 100-th of a percentage point, this 4% to 4.5% is 50 basis points. Only people in finance use basis points.