https://usa-men.aangevinkt.nlhttps://usa-men.startbeurs.nlhttps://usa-men.starttour.nlhttps://usa-men.startclub.nlhttps://usa-men.startguide.nlhttps://usa-men.startvista.nlhttps://usa-men.startcentro.nlhttps://usa-men.onyourscreen.euFirst I want to (temporarily) table the question of a lop-sided college ratio. Yes, it’s an important fact, and maybe a sign of some terrible growing problem. But I don’t think the “answer” to why it’s happening will be well-contained in any short statement; queeninjun has offered a few causal ideas in the comments above, and as far as I can tell they make as much sense as any short statements I’ve seen from anywhere else.
The important point I want to make, is to de-conflate the two concepts you’ve mentioned here, namely the lop-sided ratio and the decline in propensity to marry: even if the college ratio were perfectly 50/50, any significant female hypergamy would still result in an impairment of marriage prospects. Yes, the lop-sided ratio will hurt things even further, but it is not itself the mainspring of a marriage-ability problem: female hypergamy, in an equalist society, guarantees that all by itself, and this is the truth that should be highlighted front and center.
To put it another way, (a) an equalist society (ie where men and women have equal opportunity to develop their talents), (b) significant female hypergamy, and (c) wide-spread happy marriages are a literally impossible combination to have simultaneously. As with so many of these tru-isms, you can have two but not all three; and American society seems to have gone from having (b) and (c) at the expense of (a), to having (a) and (b) at the expense of (c). Is there a possibility of having (a) and (c) but giving up (b)? Maybe, but not until we honestly recognize the fundamental incompatibility among them.
You identify hypergamy in comment #26 as “the elephant in the room”, which is a good start — and light-years beyond feminists like Coontz — but not nearly good enough. The important point to realize here, is that there is absolutely nothing men can do about this marriage problem while remaining honest human beings. If women are going to insist on both equality and hypergamy, then a large chunk of men are going to be un-attractive to the point of un-marriageable*, period, no matter what paths men take. The fundamental contradiction is housed entirely within women’s psyches, and change will have to come from within them.
[*] Yes, I know you disagree with the claim that large numbers of men can truly be un-marriageable, since so many men do eventually get married. However, I call your attention to the all-important word “eventually” there. Remember how the median age for men to (first) marry is now quite high, something like 28? That’s more than fifteen years past puberty for the later half, having spent perhaps the majority of their waking lives un-marriageable until the women around them obviated hypergamy, by either falling behind or wising up.
Here your reflexive, religiously observed even-handedness amounts to misandry: the marriage problem is made inevitable purely by women’s unresolved internal contradictions, and somehow attempting to paint it as a general societal problem, or a failing on men’s part, is to miss the all-important operative point.