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The surprising reason so many young men are virgins

By Emily Hill 18 April 2021 • 6:00am

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a dating app must be in want of sex. As a single woman searching for so much more, you swipe and swipe and swipe, until you find some sociopath who plays you like a harpsichord until you go baroque on him – at which stage he points out you did meet on Hinge. Who the hell were you hoping to meet – Fitzwilliam Darcy?

Last year, I met a man in his mid-20s who told me that he’d slept with 50 women but had never had a girlfriend. He’d been so hurt by the last ghosting that he’d sent the young lady in question a handwritten letter, which he had me read. In that moment, I feared I’d met a beautiful soul who’d end up like all the age-appropriate ring-wraiths I’m forced to date if he carried on swiping for much longer. Human feelings are killed when you’re narcissistically abused like this, again and again.

Unbelievably handsome young men may know everything about sex – but they’ve never made love. Thanks to swipe culture, they have no intention of holding out for it, so a whole generation have no idea what they’re missing out on.

To have slept with 50 women may sound like an impressive score, but – I was assured – this was nothing. His fellow game players were averaging 150. Those who suck at the game (and might actually treat women better than batting averages and sexual trophies) aren’t destined to play. It’s survival of the fittest on dating apps, which means that unparalleled numbers of young men have never had sex at all. According to a General Social Survey published by The Washington Post, the share of men under the age of 30 and still virgins stood at eight per cent in 2008 – and had soared past 25 per cent by 2018.

Society blames this on porn, but porn has been around since Ancient Rome. It’s “hook-up culture” that’s new. When I look at the graph, I squint and notice how the line wiggles up from diagonal to vertical after 2012, when Tinder was unleashed on an unsuspecting world.

“There’s this impression that the dating industry overwhelmingly favours men, when actually the opposite is true,” explains Nichi Hodgson, author of The Curious History of Dating. “Women get up to ten times as many messages and interactions than men on the average major dating app, depending on their desirability, with a very few number of men sweeping up most of the women. Tinder originally matched people based on the Elo method of chess-ranking – where the best meet the best and everyone else falls to the wayside. This has certainly contributed to the frustrated incel movement, where men just can’t get interactions with women on many a dating app.”

In his book Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One’s Looking), Christian Rudder tracked messages to the most beautiful users of OKCupid and noted “beauty operates on a Richter scale. There is very little difference between 1.0 and 2.0, but at the high end a small difference has a cataclysmic effect. A 9.0 is intense, but a 10.0 can rupture the world. Or launch a thousand ships.” In real life, however, that doesn’t matter. On blind dates Rudder analysed, “the percent of people giving the dates a positive rating was constant” – no matter whether the “blind-dater was a knockout and the other rather homely”. Get us in front of them, and women are just as susceptible to baldies, fatties and shorties with all their sweetness, smarts and jokes – in fact, we probably prefer them.

For most men, online dating is like flying economy knowing a bunch of rich guys are popping their corks in business class. But even those you might imagine to be having the time of their lives aren’t having as much fun as you think. “If you’re a man and primarily on Tinder for sex, you can’t actually say that, otherwise everyone will ignore you. Therefore, you’re selling a lie to the women you talk to,” complains Robert, 30, from Cambridgeshire. “People who aren’t on Tinder think it’s hooking up left, right and centre. In my experience, it’s just spending more time looking at your phone and meeting nobody.”

Sensitive young romantics are suffering. “Lockdown has had a disproportionate impact on young single men,” 21-year-old student Harry Saul Markham tells me. “There’s this sense of feeling bad about ourselves because we’re not seeing people – psychologically it’s not been good and then you download these apps trying to connect with a girl and get endless swiping. Everything’s judged on looks – if you’re attractive go right, if you’re not go left. It’s unbelievably toxic. My generation is obsessed with ‘Me, myself, my looks’, when what’s best for us would be relationships in real life.”

Lockdown has accelerated our social isolation, but apps implemented it. “No one talks to each other in bars anymore,” my friend Laura points out. “Pre-Covid, I could go to a bar with six girl mates and not one of us would have any guy talk to us because we were there in real life. One bloke looked positively terrified when my friend started a conversation with him.” Those of us who lived in a pre-app world remember how much harder it used to be to meet a “member of the opposing sex” (as Harry puts it). Everyone was a human being with feelings, rather than an avatar to be ghosted.

“You’d meet a potential partner in a pub,” says Martin, 33. “She’d be reading. It would take six weeks of seeing her in the same pub with the niggling doubt ‘Is there something here? Am I reading this wrong?’ before you asked her out.” Everything now is based on the body rather than the brain. “The brickie lads I work with are on Tinder, Snapchat, Instagram talking to girls all the time – there’s no chat at lunch any more... I feel like there’s this ambition attached to short-term pleasure to hide a lack of meaning and replace what you really want with instant gratification.”

Social historian Hodgson argues that the situation we are currently in is unprecedented. In her close study of dating as it has evolved since the 1700s, she debunks the myth of the “Appy Ever After”, by which algorithmic matchmaking solves the relationship equation. “Most dating apps’ sole purpose is to keep you on the app for as long as possible in order to maximise their revenue,” she explains. “Many dating apps use a model that keeps a user active for around two years, during which the user will have a series of short-term relationships, always returning to the app for their next fix when it doesn’t work out... Love is the exception to the rule because you are playing an amorous slot machine where the payouts are rare and the house always wins.”

But as agonising as it is to be on Tinder as a heterosexual, try being a gay man on Grindr. “The world of dating has changed so much during the past decade, something I’m frequently reminded of by those who found love before the time of apps,” explains 30-year-old TV presenter Aidy Smith, who has Tourette’s syndrome. “Men constantly hop from one match to another as soon as they match with someone else who seems more exciting. No one is ever content, yet they complain they cannot find anyone. Spirals of conversations that just seem to fade out... and my issue is ‘When do I get to go on an actual date?’ The misconceptions of this disability end up in a ruthless cancellation.”

I talk all the time to women like me who are exhausted, demoralised and defeated by their efforts to swipe their way to a relationship, and my own theory is that dating apps have done to love and romance what the machines did to humanity in Terminator 2. My handsomest male friend doesn’t find this funny. He’s 45, I’m 37; we may be total failures when it comes to finding relationships and defeated by apps ourselves, but he insists we must preach to Generation Z the gospel of making love, before swipe culture swipes it from consciousness and memory.

“My godson is a gamer,” he says. “He failed his GCSEs because he racked up 80 hours a week on Call of Duty and he had trouble talking to girls as a result. So I told him he might be able to meet foreign girls online if he learned a language. To my astonishment, he downloaded Duolingo and spent 40 days in a row on it. Two months later, he announced he’d met a 19-year-old Norwegian gamer girl online and she was flying to England to stay with him. His parents were so astonished they agreed to pick her up from the airport. Lockdown rules, be damned.

“Was she pretty?” I asked. My friend, his father, described her as “an absolute smokeshow”. Now the lad is walking two feet taller. So, some apps work, just not the ones you think.”

Emily Hill is the author of Bad Romance (Unbound).

A guide to the top three apps – from a man’s perspective*

Tinder

The Tesco Express of dating apps. Does all the basics and has a decent dating selection. Something for everyone, regardless of what you’re looking for.

Bumble

Less like a supermarket, more like an exam. Women dictate admission to its hallowed hall of dating. Give her the wrong answer and she’ll fail you.

Hinge

Feels like a Hail Mary out of dating app hell and into heaven on earth. Here, women know exactly what they want – and that’s a relationship.

*Jonny, 29, Belfast


I have my opinions about this article that I’ll leave below. I wanted to know what my fellow FDSers think.