Someone asked yesterday if men have it harder than women in dating because factors that make a man attractive (height, income, confidence, humor, talent) are difficult to fake while men don't care about the same factors in women. Instead, men care about factors that are usually changeable or easily faked (weight, n-count).

But all of these reasons are simply due to the fact that men have a higher sex drive than women do and find the majority of women to be at least average in attractiveness while women find only ~20% of men to be attractive.

Most problems in dating come down to this very simple paradigm; men have a higher sex drive than women and are therefore much more tolerant of women with undesirable characteristics than vice versa, especially in short-term relationships.

This situation is exacerbated with the rise of online dating and tiktok, which spread an ideal attractiveness standard for men (which is very narrowly-defined) and, to be fair, an ideal attractiveness standard for women (which is much more broadly-defined). But here again (and in most other situations) we see that it's just an exacerbated consequence of men's higher sex drive.