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Culture — Dating — Family Studies

The Dating Recession Young Women Won't Name

The phrase lands like a diagnosis for a mood many women already recognize: not hatred of men, exactly, but a practiced shrug. Why swipe, why hope, why plan a life around a partner who may never show up as an adult?

Sociologist Brad Wilcox has been tracking that shrug into the data. In a post this week promoting a Deseret News essay with Maria Baer, he sketched what the Institute for Family Studies and others have been calling a dating recession—and the numbers are stark enough to deserve a second look.

5 min read
Two empty chairs at a cafe table near a window
Brad Wilcox@BradWilcoxIFS

"Growing numbers of young women are being tempted by heteropessimism."

✔️Only 24% of women 18–29 believe married mothers are happier than other women--lowest of any group

✔️Only 67% of HS girls now expect to marry, down from 80% in 2010

✔️39% of single women under 40 aren't even looking for a relationship

✔️80%+ of eligible women in their 20s-30s aren't dating anyone seriously

We're in a "dating recession" with a "growing number of young women seem content--or resigned to--going through life w/out a man."

My latest w/ @MariaBaerWrites @Deseret

Read as culture, the thread is less about one viral post than about a story young women are being sold: that strength means building a life that does not need a man—and that needing one is a kind of failure.

Wilcox and Baer call that story Amazonian detachment, after the myth of warrior women who kept no husbands. The modern version is softer—deleted dating apps, “boy sober” feeds, brunches that never leave the friend group—but the premise is similar. Pairing is optional. Guarding your peace is the point.

The counter-argument in their Deseret essay is not that every woman must marry. It is that heteropessimism can close doors quietly. By the time family ambition arrives in the thirties, the dating pool has narrowed, fertility is less forgiving, and a decade of independence scripts is hard to rewrite on command.

Whether you buy Wilcox’s prescription—marry youngish, date with intention, choose flexible work—matters less than whether the diagnosis is honest. If high-school girls expect marriage less, if most eligible women are not dating seriously, then “I am fine alone” is no longer only a personal vibe. It is a social pattern with downstream costs.

Sonar Mag will keep watching the dating recession as culture, not as a sermon. The interesting question is not whether Amazons were right. It is what happens to a generation that treats attachment itself as the riskiest bet in the room.

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