A very tiny number of the disparity in young male vs female relationships can be explained by excess same sex female relationships

There’s a claim that the pew survey with the bracket of 18-30 year olds having 34% males in relationships and 64% females in relationships is caused by women dating other women. Let’s see how many same sex couples there are in actuality.

According to the US census, there are 980,000 same sex couples, with 30.5% under 34. 53% are male and 47% are female. This number isn’t checked by age but stays consistent across married and unmarried couples who differ in age. So it stands to reason it won’t change much in the 18-34 age bracket. (source: gpt, you can probably find the exact numbers in the actual census data too)

In all likelihood there should be more men taken out of the dating market than woman in the age bracket, but for the sake of argument, let’s be generous and assume 60% are female and 40% male. That means there are 20% extra women taken out of the straight dating market. So 20%30%\980,000*2 = 117,600.

Out of the 86.9 million people in the age bracket (48.5% men) at most a mere 0.2% extra women taken out of the straight dating market. You could argue there are uncoupled women who only or mainly date men who are in this bracket, but since women dating women tend to settle down quickly and only 0.2% have settled, even with a ridiculous estimate like 80% of these women are dating but not couples (way higher than the number for gay men, 66%) it only amounts to 1% of the female population taken out of the dating pool.

TLDR: Excess women in the 18-34 range taken out of the straight dating pool is max 1%. So for the 34% male under 30 and 63% female under 30, only a difference of 0.2%, max 1% can be explained by LGBTQ preferences.

Caveat we also made a huge assumption that there are more female than male couples when in likelihood there are more male ones given there are more male ones overall, so if anything in reality this data makes the situation seem worse.