Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Mating Crisis: Why The Rate Of Single Men Looking For Dates Has Declined | William Costello PT 1
28 Feb 2026
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
There is something going on in the And there's no fast way to make up for the declining birth rate. This is something I was not paying attention to or taking seriously. But now that it's caught my eye, I'm telling you this really is something that I think that we need to pay a tremendous amount of attention to.
And William is probably not going to be the last person that I have on to cover this topic. Now I found William's evolutionary approach to this issue to be incredibly enlightening. And I am obsessed with viewing things, especially changes in society through the lens of evolution. I think you guys are going to get a lot out of this topic.
It will certainly uncover the way that the human mind works and how this important thing that we call sex is really beginning to change in this modern era. And we cover a ton of topics, including the startling new dynamics between men and women, the scarcity driven nature of the mating crisis, the grim consequences of sexual dissatisfaction,
and mind boggling shifts in the dating landscape that are going to leave you guys speechless. All right, buckle up for this one. I'm telling you, it's quite something. And while you strap in, make sure you head over to Amazon Music and subscribe.
Chapter 2: How has the pandemic influenced young men's dating behaviors?
Amazon Music is the platform that has over 100 million ad-free songs and now podcasts like this one, Impact Theory. So head over to Amazon Music now to satisfy your hunger for more episodes with yours truly. All right, let's get into William Costello. I'm your host, Tom Bilyeu, and welcome to Impact Theory.
I will start us with a Washington Post survey that shows that the rate of sexlessness among young men has tripled in the decade leading up to 2018. What in the hell is going on?
Yeah, so that was a big kind of statistic that was flying around there. There's some new statistics actually that show that that sexlessness uniquely being towards young men has actually reversed somewhat. And part of that might be that during the pandemic, young men might have been more risk taking and they'd be more inclined to go out. During the pandemic, they were taking bigger risks.
I thought for sure that number was going to go the other way. Right. Yeah. But young men would be less kind of disgust sensitive than women. So they'd be willing to maybe take the risk, especially for sex. So that has reversed somewhat.
Chapter 3: What is the mating crisis and how does it relate to education?
Why would that go up during the pandemic? That felt like a time where everybody was becoming more and more risk averse. So what about being isolated or clamped down on or even just the risk of literal death made them more risk taking?
So the sexlessness for men was going up up until 2018. But now the new statistics are showing that it's not uniquely men that are sexless. The women have actually overtaken them. And that's what we're saying might be a response to the pandemic, that women would be staying in more risk adverse comparing to men. Men would actually go out and take the risk to have sex.
So what I'm trying to wrap my head around is, is that a response to women pulling back, which then make men go harder? Is that what we're talking about?
Yeah, I think men typically will be more willing to take the risk. Women won't. There'll be fewer women who will take the risk and more men would be willing to have sex with them. That's just one theory.
The other idea could be that it's just a naturally kind of cycling back and forth that this unique spike in sexlessness for young men wasn't any major artifact at all and it's kind of evening out.
So if it went up, I think the stat was 28%. What's it down to now?
I can't recall the exact statistic now, but I know that it's reversed and that women have overtaken, that there's more sexist women.
Are we talking 26% or are we back down to like 10, 12%? I think it was around the 12% mark, 12, 15.
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Chapter 4: How do dating apps affect modern relationships?
So it properly just completely reversed. So mating crisis over, we're good.
Not necessarily. So, you know, I've spoken about that statistic on podcasts before as one kind of data point in what we call the larger mating crisis. But to think about it as a mating crisis, the evidence of young men reporting having sex within the last year, I don't think it's the best evidence of any phenomenon.
You can still have this mating crisis with a lot of dissatisfaction with the mating market from both sexes, for men and for women. And there's still a So, for example, new Pew research showed that upwards of 30% of men just simply aren't even seeking romantic relations at all, even for casual sex. They're just backing out completely.
So help me reconcile that we went from 20% sexlessness before the pandemic to its drop back down. We don't know the exact number, but more or less reversed back. but guys are pursuing sex less? How do I, I don't know how to make that make sense.
Yeah. So it's kind of just pointing to this having sex one time within the last year isn't necessarily the greatest kind of metric.
So they've had sex once, but like they're not pursuing it. Yes. Does that, like, does that... Can you define the, what is then, if you think there is a mating crisis, I thought the mating crisis was people are not having sex. So we're putting that on the shelf. So if it isn't that, what is the mating crisis?
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Chapter 5: What are the implications of the mating crisis for women?
OK, so the mating crisis can be traced back to an essay my supervisor wrote in 2016. So my supervisor is Dr. David Buss at the University of Texas at Austin, an evolutionary psychologist. And he wrote this essay saying the mating crisis among educated women. He talks about this mismatch between women beginning to outpace men in educational settings.
So he used the University of Texas at Austin as an example where women are beginning to outpace men in education at rapid rates. It's called the pink campus. And I know you've had Richard Reeves on to talk to you in the podcast, and he lays out all of those statistics in his book of boys and men.
Now, when you combine this socioeconomic success of young women in recent decades with their evolved mate preference for an equal or higher status mate, it just simply means that there's a skew in terms of the lack of eligible men that are out there. And when you have a skew in a mating market like that, so fewer eligible men for women to compete for, the market favors the scarcity.
So those few men at the top that women are interested in are less willing to commit to long-term mating because they're the scarcity and it becomes a problem. So women have a double-edged sword because highly educated women are competing with highly educated women and lower educated women for the same increasingly small pool of men that they're deeming eligible.
And, you know, you see articles every week about this, talking about how women are beginning to freeze their eggs at rapid rates in response to this lack of eligible men out there.
So I know you've already said it, but I think it bears, when you say eligible men... you mean women have a set of criteria on average. And given the only thing you've listed so far is college, but I'm guessing that there's going to be a broader set of things at play than that.
Yes.
But given that the women are just demolishing men in the educational realm, and that's one of the criteria that they use to determine eligibility. Yes. That they're narrowing the pool by being... I don't know how...
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Chapter 6: How do societal expectations shape male and female behaviors in dating?
I'm going to say too selective. You're going to have a problem with that and understandably so. But from their perspective, just from a numbers game, it's too selective if you want a broad pool.
Yeah, it is just literally narrowing your pool that you can choose from and broadening the pool.
That you're willing to choose from. Yes. That's the thing I don't want to get lost in this conversation just to make it nice and sticky.
Yes, absolutely. But yeah, when I think about it like that, I wonder what advice would I give to a sister of mine if I had one? I don't have a sister.
The perfect follow-up question.
Right. What I advise her, oh, just simply lower your standards. Marry a man less educated than yourself, even though you're not really sure that's what you want. I don't know if I could bring myself to give that advice. And there is some evidence that women are beginning to do this. And I think that's somewhat inevitable.
So the phenomenon or the mating strategy that I described there of women tending to mate with higher status partners is called hypergamy. And you probably heard a lot about that on Internet discourse all around the place. But it's a very real phenomenon.
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Chapter 7: What role does evolutionary psychology play in understanding dating dynamics?
And there is some evidence that hypergamy is in decline. Women are beginning to marry men less educated than themselves.
A little in decline or a lot in decline?
I can't remember the exact figures off my head, but a little in decline. It still tends to be the preference, but they're beginning to mate down, so to speak. But this comes with a whole host of other problems. So in those mateships where women are beginning to mate down, We see increased infidelity for both sexes, increased use of insomnia, anxiety, and depression medication among both sexes.
You see a massive prevalence of intimate partner violence. There was a huge study done on 27 EU countries with over 21,000 EU women, and it showed that the woman earning more or being higher educated than her partner was a massive risk factor for all types of intimate partner violence. Jesus.
which is kind of a really dark finding, but it makes sense from an evolutionary point of view, because in evolutionary psychology, we have something called mate retention strategies, and you have two strategies to mate retain, to retain your mate. You have the benefit provisioning strategy, which means you can provision your partner with so many benefits that she doesn't want to leave.
She's happy to stay. She gets a lot of benefits from you. Whereas if you don't have a lot of benefits to provide, you choose the cost infliction mate retention strategy. And that's the type of inflicting costs on your partner to lower her self-esteem so she doesn't feel like she can leave you. And in the most extreme circumstances, that even includes intimate partner violence.
So you might recognize that in the kind of abusive language of abusive men who might say, who would ever have you except me? You're lucky to have me.
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Chapter 8: How can individuals navigate the complexities of modern dating?
No one will ever have you. And you try and lower your partner's self-esteem or their sense of their own mate value so they don't leave you for someone else. And that makes sense.
If you think about a man who's suddenly threatened that his wife is earning more than him or has begun to earn more than him or is higher educated, she's spending her time around other high status men, more high status than you. She's away from you, even just from a proximity point of view. You are at risk, a bigger risk of losing her. So it is a threat to you.
So a lot of men do choose that strategy, which is a pretty dark strategy. dark finding but one we maybe need to reckon with as Richard Reeves points out women are beginning to outpace men so starkly so let's go back to your hypothetical sister what are we telling her
Yeah, I mean, it's just an artifact of the modern mating market that the sexes aren't really depending on each other as rolemates in the same way. If we think even ancestrally, two of the main things that women used to rely on men for are protection, the bodyguard hypothesis, protection from other men. and protection from the hostile forces of nature.
That's not really such a prescient factor anymore. And also, so protection and provisioning resources. If women are gathering their own resources, the state is protecting them as the bodyguard now, for a large degree. they might choose to, you know, to just go their own way kind of thing.
We hear about men going their own way, but it actually might be the case that women are beginning to go their own way. And, you know, it's just not obvious what a woman might get out of settling down. And it might just be a
bleak truth we have to reckon with that for the past number of decades maybe centuries women had been perhaps settling with men that they ordinarily wouldn't want out of strict economic necessity or strict monogamy norms.
Let me ask a really uncomfortable question. Go ahead. Were they settling for men that they didn't want or did that change the context enough that there was just a broader pool of men that they wanted?
Yeah, I think the latter is probably more true. I don't think we had generations of women who were like, oh, my God, what have I had to do? I hate my husband. I don't think that's the case. I just think we had very strict kind of, you know, stricter lines around role mates. And it was people were happy to kind of live in that world, you know.
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