Mating Crisis: Why The Rate Of Single Men Looking For Dates Has Declined | William Costello PT 1
William Costello, an evolutionary psychologist from UT Austin, discusses the modern 'mating crisis' with host Tom Bilyeu, exploring how women's educational and economic gains have skewed the dating market, reduced the pool of 'eligible' men by female standards, and created cascading effects including declining birth rates, relationship dissatisfaction, and broader societal instability. The conversation frames these dynamics through an evolutionary psychology lens, examining how ancestral mate preferences clash with a radically novel modern environment.
Summary
The conversation opens with statistics on male sexlessness tripling between 2008 and 2018, though Costello notes this has since partially reversed, with women now reporting higher rates of sexlessness post-pandemic. He argues the mating crisis is better understood not as mere sexlessness but as a structural imbalance in the mating market, rooted in an essay by his supervisor Dr. David Buss. Women's rapid educational and economic gains have combined with their evolved hypergamous mate preferences — the tendency to seek equal or higher-status partners — to shrink the pool of men women deem eligible. This scarcity makes the few 'eligible' men less willing to commit, creating a feedback loop of dissatisfaction for both sexes.
Costello discusses how women increasingly freeze their eggs in response to this shortage, and how hypergamy, while declining slightly, still dominates mate preferences. He cites a large EU study showing that relationships where women out-earn or out-educate their partners correlate strongly with higher rates of intimate partner violence, infidelity, anxiety, and depression. This is explained through evolutionary mate retention strategies: men who cannot provision benefits tend to resort to cost-infliction strategies, including emotional abuse, to prevent partners from leaving.
The conversation examines the 'all-or-nothing marriage' concept from Eli Finkel's book, noting that modern partnerships are expected to fulfill every emotional, sexual, and developmental need simultaneously — a historically novel and perhaps unrealistic standard. Historically, partners were 'role mates' chosen within limited local pools, not globally optimized selections via dating apps.
Dating apps are identified as a major accelerant of the mating crisis, reducing people to static data points like height and income, eliminating personality as a compensating factor, and amplifying hypergamous filtering. Costello cites the example that women setting height preferences to 6 feet or above on Hinge reduces their mating pool to just 3% of men. The 'female delusion calculator' data is referenced, showing that combining common female preferences yields a pool of less than 0.5% of men.
The podcast explores the evolutionary psychology of sex differences, noting that the desire for sexual variety is one of the largest effect sizes in psychology — comparable in magnitude to the physical difference in upper body strength between men and women. Women's greater obligatory parental investment historically made casual sex far riskier for them, shaping a more selective sexual psychology, while men evolved a stronger drive for variety.
Historical polygyny is discussed: roughly 83% of known societies have been polygynous, and a dramatic genetic bottleneck around 8,000 years ago saw 17 women reproducing for every one man. The rise of agriculture and resource stockpiling by high-status men created extreme inequality. The cultural norm of monogamy is presented as an adaptive response that redistributed mating opportunities more equitably, pacifying surplus young men and enabling societal flourishing — the basis of Jordan Peterson's 'socially enforced monogamy' argument, which Costello defends as mainstream in evolutionary literature despite public controversy.
The 'young male syndrome' is discussed — surplus unpartnered men historically being redirected into war, exploration, or monasteries. War is described as primarily motivated by the desire to acquire mates, citing the Yanomamo tribe as a direct example. Modern young men are argued to be pacified instead by video games and the internet, which, while problematic, may be preferable to real-world violence.
The episode closes with reflections on evolutionary mismatch: modern culture is changing faster than human psychology can adapt, and denying evolved nature produces predictable dysfunctions. Both host and guest agree the fertility crisis is real, that 80% of childless women are involuntarily so, and that culturally dismissing motherhood and traditional meaning-making without providing robust alternatives risks widespread loss of purpose and fulfillment.
Key Insights
- Costello argues that the mating crisis is not primarily about sexlessness but about structural market imbalance: women's hypergamous preferences combined with their rising educational status have shrunk the pool of men they deem eligible, making those men less willing to commit due to their scarcity value.
- A large EU study of over 21,000 women across 27 countries found that relationships where women out-earn or out-educate their partners are a major risk factor for all types of intimate partner violence, explained through evolutionary mate retention theory.
- Costello cites Pew Research showing that upward of 30% of men are not even seeking romantic or sexual relationships at all, suggesting withdrawal from the mating market is a more significant phenomenon than raw sexlessness statistics capture.
- Women setting height preferences to 6 feet or above on dating apps like Hinge reduces their eligible male pool to just 3% of men, and Costello argues dating apps exacerbate hypergamous filtering by reducing people to static, rankable data points that eliminate personality as a compensating factor.
- The desire for sexual variety is described as one of the largest effect sizes in all of psychology, approximately equal in magnitude to the physical sex difference in upper body strength, and Costello argues it is directly explained by the asymmetry in obligatory parental investment between men and women.
- A genetic bottleneck approximately 8,000 years ago saw 17 women reproducing for every one man, coinciding with the rise of agriculture, which allowed high-status males to stockpile resources and monopolize mates to a degree previously impossible.
- Costello argues that the cultural norm of monogamy evolved as a response to extreme polygynous inequality, redistributing mating access to lower-status men, pacifying surplus male populations, and enabling the societal flourishing observed in cultures that adopted it.
- Costello notes that 33% of women report having engaged in a 'foodie call' — misrepresenting romantic interest in a man in order to receive a free meal — which he argues contributes to male resentment and distrust in the dating market.
- The gender pay gap is characterized by Costello as primarily a 'motherhood penalty': women out-earn men in at least 22 U.S. cities up to age 29, after which the gap emerges precisely when women exit the workforce to have children.
- The Yanomamo tribe, when asked why they go to war, universally cited acquiring mates and brides as the motivation, and Costello argues this drive persists in modern contexts including gang culture and jihadist recruitment, which explicitly promises women to unpartnered young men.
- Costello argues that involved fatherhood's primary evolutionary contribution is risk-encouragement and world-navigation teaching through rough-and-tumble engagement, which he contrasts with female-typical safety-oriented parenting, and that the absence of this influence may contribute to modern youth's excessive risk aversion.
- Costello states that 80% of childless women are involuntarily childless by their own reported desires, reframing the fertility crisis not as a culture-war imposition on women but as a systemic failure to help women achieve what they themselves say they want.
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