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+--- Thread: [Hot] What single men want 2025 (/Thread-Hot-What-single-men-want-2025)
[Hot] What single men want 2025 - johnsi25 - Mar 7, 2025
Hello, visitor!
Article:
He didn’t. The Truth About Why Some Men Stay Single. The recent study of why men stay single is massively flawed.
Click here for what single men want
Why Relationships Matter Take our Relationship Satisfaction Test Find counselling to strengthen relationships. Key points. The top reason for a man being single could be that he simply prefers it. Certain factors can make it challenging even for men to find dates, such as local sex ratios. Attributing singlehood to factors as poor looks, low effort, and poor social skills could be victim-blaming. Suppose you came across a Reddit thread in which users with names such as “grilled_tits,” “McFeely_Smackup,” “novelty_bone,” bsickandlikeit, brocksampsonspenis, and Brexitmypants answered the question, “Guys, why are you single?” If you are not familiar with Reddit, take a look at Andrew Marantz’s New Yorker article. He notes, for example, that on Google, three of the top auto-completions for Reddit are “toxic,” “cancer,” and “hot garbage.” Presumably not all the Reddit threads are terrible, but the one in which users answered the question, “Guys, why are you single?” drew comments [edited here] such as: “Jesus t***y-f***ing Christ, this whole thread is depressing as f---. If you like being single you can stop reading.” “This thread is Reddit at it's finest.” [sic] Reddit threads can be quite misogynistic. The question about men staying single attracted plenty of comments that were free of bigotry but also pulled in nuggets like these: “I just don't want to date somebody that still gives a sh*t how many likes their duckface selfie gets and thinks they're hot sh*t for drinking infinite Starbucks.” “Some b*tch 'claimed' my free hugs shirt and you can't get other b*tches without no free hugs.” “Our Tinder is a sh*t show filled with single moms wearing a camo hoodie.” So back to my question. What would you do if you came across this thread? Find it amusing and keep reading? Leave immediately? Professor Menelaos Apostolou of the University of Nicosia in Cyprus thought the Reddit thread provided serious scientific evidence relevant to the question of why men stay single. The answer he expected to find came from his evolutionary perspective: In the past, marriages were arranged, so men did not have to have any social skills to have a mate. Now, however, “men who have difficulty flirting or are unable to impress the opposite sex may remain single because their social skills have not evolved to meet today’s societal demands.” Also important to Apostolou’s perspective is the assumption that men generally do not want to be single. The entire empirical test of those ideas was that one Reddit thread. In what strikes me as a very poor decision, the journal Evolutionary Psychological Science published Apostolou’s article. The title is, “Why men stay single? Evidence from Reddit.” (Yes, the scholarly journal put a question mark after a statement.) Springer, the publisher, was so proud of the article that they put out a press release: “Top 43 reasons why men remain single – according to Reddit.” (The press release was so misleading – largely because the study was so terrible – I could write a separate critique just of that.) That was it. Reporters were off and running, giving us headlines such as “Deficient social skills may hamper single men” and (from Newsweek ) “…men think they are too awkward and ugly for love.” A Google search for the key terms turned up so many media reports of this study that I had to walk away momentarily to regain my composure. Why Relationships Matter Take our Relationship Satisfaction Test Find counselling to strengthen relationships. Suppose we were to take the Reddit responses seriously, along with the author’s coding of them. Did the results really show that men generally do not want to be single? To come up with his 43 categories of reasons for being single, the author and his research team imposed their own order on the Reddit responses. Apostolou did not use any statistical techniques to try to determine objectively how many separate categories he really did have. Here are the four most popular categories of reasons for staying single, according to Apostolou’s coding, and the number of responses coded in each of those categories: Poor looks: 662 responses Low self-esteem, confidence: 544 responses Low effort: 514 responses Not interested in relationships : 424 responses. Looking a bit more closely at the list of reasons, I noticed other categories indicating that some men want to be single. One of them, #17, is called “ enjoying being single .” It has 217 responses. Adding those 217 to the 424 who said they were not interested in relationships gives us a total of 641 comments from men who seem to want to be single. That comes in a close second to the 662 who cited poor looks. I kept looking at the list. Another category is “ different priorities ,” meaning that the men cared more about other goals such as establishing their career or getting good grades. At least for the moment, they are not trying to become unsingle. If we add them to the 662, we would have 858 responses, and all of a sudden, the Number 1 reason for being single would be that the men want to be single . I’m not saying that’s the best way to code the responses. Other categories could have been combined, too, leading to still other conclusions. What I am saying is that the author’s insistence that single men are single mostly because of all their flaws and deficits, and not because they want to be, is not supported by the data as unambiguously as he seems to suggest. Are these the real reasons single men stay single? Apostolou sees the 43 reasons he describes as the real reasons single men stay single. There are two problems with this: (1) They may not be the real reasons. (2) They may not even be what men think are the reasons. In serious scientific research, participants provide answers independently of everyone else, so that they are providing their answers, uninfluenced by what other people think. Even in the best online forums, free of misogyny or singlism or any other bigotry, it is impossible for anyone but the very first person to participate without seeing what others are thinking. Reddit, of course, is not the best of forums. As The New Yorker noted, some people are expressing their true beliefs but others “are treating it more like a game – If I post this ridiculous or offensive thing, can I get people to upvote it?” When I checked out the thread, the very first answer to “Guys, why are you single?”—which probably set the tone for many more to come—was: “I don't try. That might just be me in denial, but I legitimately don't try.