Who Has It Harder in 21st Century Romance: Men or Women?

Whose dating life is harder, men’s or women’s? The answer is nuanced… because there are different groups within both sexes.

Several weeks back, I wrote “Urbanization, Romantic Anonymity, and the Birth of Game.” This piece of writing was about how ‘game’ (conversational and logistical aptitude aimed at meeting, bedding, and dating women) is an organic outgrowth of complex, fast-paced urban societies.

The reason we fingered for the emergence of game was that urban societies present new opportunities for men (i.e., the ability to have sexual intercourse with lots of women), yet also new challenges (i.e., women are much more experienced with men, have many more options, and cut a lot less slack).

One of the things I mentioned in this article was that while men have it harder in urban environments, fear not – women have it harder too. Yet several commenters wanted to clarify: women may have it harder, but men have it far harder still.

Well, do men have it harder?

The answer is yes. And no.

I’m going to both agree and disagree with this “men have it harder” sentiment today. Don’t worry, if you’re currently feeling like it is far harder for you than it is for many women, I won’t be telling you you’re wrong. But I am going to show you why it is this way for you... but not for every guy in the city. Some guys have it the opposite way (i.e., it’s easier for them than it is for women).

We’re going to focus on three (3) elements of urban dating that make things harder or easier for various groups of men, as these men’s dating success compares with women’s. Those three elements are:

1. That men and women want different things
   
2. That men occupy the extremes
3. And that what men go for in cities vs. what they go for elsewhere are different

In the end, I expect you will have a far more nuanced view of dating and mating in large urban environments, the plusses and minuses therein, and who you have to be to become one of the men who has it easier than girls do, instead of being stuck being one of the men who has it harder than girls do.

Men and Women Want Different Things

What does a man in a city want?

Typically, he wants a few things:

• To get laid
• To get laid a lot
• To find an awesome girlfriend
  

What does a woman in a city want? Typically, she wants a few things:

• To get supporters
• To get lots of supporters
• To get commitment from an awesome boyfriend
  

Men do like to get attention (feels good when some chick checks you out!). And women do like to get laid. But these aren’t driving forces to the same extent. Most men aren’t attention hounds. And most women don’t have their antennae pricked 24/7 for new sexual opportunities.

Yet, the things men and women each want have a number of parallels between them. The parallels work like so:

Sex-Support:

• Men go out hoping to get laid. They meet girls who flirt with them, but ultimately often won’t go home with them

• Women go out hoping to get supporters. They meet guys who give them attention, but most of whom ultimately won’t support them without sex included

Girlfriend-Commitment:

• Men really want an awesome girlfriend (to be with and have sex with). Often it is hard to find this girl, and hard to get her

• Women really want an awesome boyfriend (to be with and get commitment from). Often she can find such a guy, and he’ll have sex with her, but getting commitment from him is another thing entirely
  

Both men and women experience continual disappointment in their searches. Men desperately want sex... And can’t get it. Women desperately want male support... And can’t get it. Men so want great girlfriends, but the girls they want elude them and won’t go to bed. Women so want great boyfriends, but the men they want play around and have sex, then keep moving.

Sure, you can bang a bunch of fat, ugly, desperate chicks. And she can get support from needy, chasing men. But this isn’t what either of you want. You want to sleep with attractive women. And she wants the support of attractive men.

Now. The desire for lots of sex with women (like the desire for lots of support from men) is one that is mostly an emergent factor of cities themselves. We’ll talk about that when we get to the section on what men and women want differing in cities vs. elsewhere. It’s important to realize this. Because often it is the case that men in cities are having more sex with more women than their ancestors could have fathomed... while lamenting that it is so much harder for them to achieve that sexual success.

If you’re a man, and you’re in your late 20s, and you’ve averaged at least one new lay per year the past decade or so, you’ve slept with far more women than almost all your male ancestors.

You are an über-pimp. Going by the standards that have been the norm throughout most of history, that is. While you doubtless have a few royal male ancestors with harems of tens or hundreds of women, the majority of your ancestors likely slept with one to three women lifetime. If you pass three girls in bed, you’re doing pretty good, historically-speaking. Likewise, women with even modest non-family member, non-partner male support have more non-partner, non-family male supporters than almost all their female ancestors could boast. Yet they still want more.

Of course, cities are different environments, aren’t they? And we don’t compare ourselves to our ancestors; we compare ourselves to our peers. Cities are the candy shop, and we’re all kids in them. Guys in cities see all the gorgeous women they’d love to stick their members into. Girls in cities see all the confident men they’d love to have commit to them. But it’s one thing to see these mate choices, and another to get sex or commitment from them.

You’re not going to commit to just any old girl. Especially not when there are so many other tasty women out there to try. And, likewise, she’s not going to just sleep with any old guy. Especially when this can impact her ability to gain commitment from another man... or even from you, if she jumps in the sack too soon.

Do Men Have It Harder Than Women?

One way in which (some) men indisputably do have it harder is where on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs your unmet needs fall:

Men’s and women’s unmet needs fall at different places on the pyramid.

In cities, men’s unmet needs are physiological – they’re at the base of the period.

Women’s unmet needs are one level up (or higher); they are safety-based.

This is why you see men behave in such desperate ways:

• Fighting other men over women
  
• Chasing after women who don’t want them
• Begging and pleading for sex
• Dropping into victim mentality when they can’t get it
  

The starving man who at long last sees a morsel of food may is capable of almost anything to try to get that morsel. If other men are run for that same morsel, he’ll attack them. If someone else is holding it, he’ll beg and plead him for it. If he cannot get it, he will curse the gods and drop into fatalistic sullenness. This is a physiology-based response; a normally strong, controlled man becomes a slave to his base needs when he feels near to a means to satisfy them, but has trouble acquiring that means.

You’ll see men behave in physiological ways regarding women outside of cities, too. If a man finds out his girlfriend has been sleeping with another man, for instance, often he won’t simply drop her and move on. She’s too hard to replace. Instead, he fills with rage toward the other man. This is an attack response to the threat of losing a needed physiological resource. This other man is trying to take sex away from him. The other man must be beaten, driven away, or killed.

Look at the responses in the comment section of my article on sleeping with girls with boyfriends. These are not men who have much choice with women. The angry, violent fear responses are responses to a physiological threat.

There may also be additional elements higher up Maslow’s pyramid that come into play here, too. For instance, that the other man who may sleep with his girlfriend is a threat to his resources/property (safety threat). Or this man is a threat to his respect by others (esteem). Yet these still tie back into physiological needs – if he loses his property, the woman, he loses sex; and if he loses respect, he may not be able to get sex from her, or from women of comparable quality to her, anymore either.

How about women? Their fears are in the safety level. They don’t fear not being able to get sex. They can get that any time. Their unmet needs revolve around not having men who will take care of them and not ditch them or abandon them.

This is where most guys say, “Yeah, but a woman can just lower her unrealistic standards and find a guy who will commit to her and not run off on her.” This is true. But we can say the same for you too, can’t we? “Yeah, but you can just lower your unrealistic standards and find a girl who will put out for you.” Surely, if you were willing to accept any woman, you could find one to hook up with today, right? There’s gotta be one fat, old, haggard chick in town who’ll be down for a pound if you ask, no matter how terrible your fundamentals and game. Heck, she might not even be that bad – maybe she’s just a bit below what you’d prefer to go for.

This is where the problem lies. Men want lots of success with a certain level of woman and up. Women want lots of success with a certain level of man and up.

Your average guy doesn’t want a bunch of hookups with fat, ugly, aged women. He just doesn’t want sex with them. Likewise, your average girl doesn’t want lots of support from broke, weak, needy men. She doesn’t want those guys around her.

So: some men inarguably have it worse than women. Inarguably. Not being able to get sex from a passable woman is worse than not being able to get support (but still being able to get sex) from a passable man. No two ways about it.

However, while the least successful men clearly have it worse than the least successful women, the story doesn’t end here. That’s because the male and female population is not only comprised of those unsuccessful in the mating game.

We must account for successful daters and maters, too.

Men Occupy the Extremes of Success / Unsuccess

Men have it the worst. The least successful men are the least successful humans, when it comes to mating. They are the humans trapped at the lowest point on Maslow’s pyramid. They’re exiled to the bottom, where unmet physiological needs cause them to respond out of unconscious need for women.

Now how about success? Do women have it better?

Look at all the attention women get on places like Facebook and Instagram! Men drool over them! They lust for them! These women can have any man they want!

Well, not any man. Remember: a woman is after support and commitment from men. A man is after sex (and maybe a girlfriend) from women.

Let’s see what this means.

Take 10 super hot girls with lots of fans and admirers. And now take 10 wildly confident men who sleep with lots of new girls. Will it be harder for the confident man to get the super hot girl into bed or as a girlfriend? Or will it be harder for the super hot girl to get the wildly confident man to pledge his support and commitment to her?

Women’s single most important indicator for male quality is preselection. The more other women like you, the more she likes you. Thus, the wildly confident man is the absolute top most desirable man out there. She can tell from his behavior that attractive women fall all over him. She may have seen attractive women fall all over him with her own eyes, even. She wants this guy. More than any other guy.

Men, on the other hand, have their standards for hooking up fall, the more sexually successful they get:

• If you are sexually inexperienced, you might look at an Instagram girl and say, “Oh my God, I would do anything to date that girl! She is soooo beautiful and special!”

• But by the time you’re doing pretty good with girls, you’ll look at her and say, “Man, she’s hot! I’d smash for sure. That’d be a good time!” You would not, however, be so quick to put a ring on her finger (unless Instagram girls are exactly your type of girl. Then maybe you still would. But only because you really, really dig this type of girl, and have enough of experience with her type to know it). Instead, once you’ve had sex, you’ll be trying to decide if this girl gets a spot in your rotation, if she is sane enough to continue to sleep with or not, and if the sex was good enough to warrant another visit with her another time or nah. Giving this girl your right arm and committing yourself to her body and soul are the farthest things from your mind.

Further, there are a lot of hot girls. The constraint isn’t even tied to genetic features; beauty is a skill set. There are far fewer attractive, dominant, confident men than there are hot girls.

Thus, the higher up you go in men and women, the easier it gets for the men to get the women they want – both quantity- and quality-wise – while the less women’s ability to do this increases. At some point, the success of men in their dating lives switches... from trailing far behind women’s ease and success at dating, to surpassing it.

Here’s a hypothetical graph to illustrate what I mean by this:

As a man’s attractiveness increases, he eventually surpasses women in his dating success.

These are not real numbers. Don’t put this in your dissertation. I’d love to see a study on this, but there isn’t one right now. This is me giving you a rough chart based on what I have seen, in the field, in a variety of cities across the world, over the past 12 years or so.

Male dating success at the lower levels is almost zero. It looks closer in the chart than it is; in this (hypothetical) chart, a woman who is a ‘1’ on the 1-to-10 rating scale has 10x the dating success of her male ‘1’ peer. Meanwhile, the ‘10’ male has about +70% more dating success than his ‘10’ female peer. That’s quite a bit more, but it’s a far cry from the +1000% boost the ‘1’ female gets over the ‘1’ male. ‘7’ is about the place where male success starts to outpace female success.

Now, it’s important to note, dating success here differs by the sex. What we count as ‘success’ for men and what we count as ‘success’ for women is different. Success for a man is sex with lots of attractive women, and the ability to get a great girlfriend. Success for a woman is support from lots of attractive men, and the ability to get commitment from a great boyfriend (it is not just the ability to get a great boyfriend. Because a great boyfriend may have 5 or 6 great girlfriends all at once – you can do that once you are ‘great boyfriend material’. The challenge for this girl is to get him to commit).

Further, the importance of each of these will vary by the individual, and the stage in one’s life the individual is at. Your average successful 22-year-old man puts a lot more emphasis on “bang a ton of girls” than he does on “find a quality girlfriend”; your average successful 22-year-old woman puts a lot more emphasis on “get lots of male supporters” than she does on “make a quality man commit.” Those priorities shift as men and women grow older, tire of the dating game, and advance to the next stage of their romantic lives.

Back to men passing women on that chart above.

If you are a male ‘7’ – reasonably attractive, but not super; reasonably confident, but not super; reasonably successful with women, but not super – you might think the female ‘7’s are kicking your butt: just look at all the male attention they receive! But attention does not equal support or commitment. Most of those guys just want to get in their pants, and are not going to hang around and keep supporting them anyway or be willing to commit to them just because. And the guys who are willing to do this often are not the level of quality this girl wants. Meanwhile, for you, you have reached a point where you are finally starting to get the quality of girlfriend you want, and you’re hooking up not-infrequently with fairly cute girls, too.

At ‘7’, the average ‘7’ guy is doing slightly better than the average ‘7’ girl.

As you continue to climb up the rankings, to 8, then 9, then 10, your success outpaces your female peers’ success more and more.

When you hear women complain that men have it so much easier than women do, these are the men they’re talking about: the men they see when they look up to the top of the dating success pile – the male 7s, 8s, 9s, and 10s.

If she’s an 8, and you’re an 8, you really do have it much, much easier than she does. Even if she’s a 5, if she lives in a city, she wants to date 8s, so this is who she talks about when she says men have it easier than women. She means those 8 males have it easier than her... and she’s often seen 8 males have it much easier than her 8 female friends, too. Men have it so much easier! Meanwhile, she ignores the 5 males who have it so much harder than her, because she’s still busy trying to date 7s and 8s.

When women say men have it so much easier than they do, they aren’t talking about the men stuck down in the dregs of the dating world. Those men do, indeed, have it (much) harder than they do.

Instead, they’re talking about those sexy, confident guys that even the hottest girls in town struggle to hang onto. Those guys really do have it easier.

What You Go for in Cities Differs from Elsewhere

Let’s change pace a bit, and talk about dating objectives, rather than outright dating success.

Men in cities go for different things from what they go for in any other environment.

Imagine a guy in a small town saying, “I want to hook up with 50 women!” While not entirely unheard of, it’s almost a preposterous goal there.

Meanwhile, in cities, there are men who feel inadequate if they can’t reach 100 women slept with. Most men in cities won’t get anywhere close to this number – most guys hit a certain number (15 or 20 or 30 lays), tire of the game, meet a great girl, and settle down.

But you can hit much higher numbers in cities, with a little elbow grease, plus time. Turn yourself into one of those top-tier men (the 8s, 9s, and 10s of the dating world), switch to a focus on asymmetric returns, and put the work in. You need to lay one new girl a month for a little over 8 years and you’re there. It’s a challenge, but not that much of a challenge.

Of course, what happens is once a guy is in that top tier of men and he is sleeping with lots of girls, he invariably sleeps with one who is truly awesome, and decides to pick her and hang up his spurs, so to speak, at least for a while. Nevertheless, this is wholly different from what most men in smaller towns do.

In smaller towns, most men may have a handful of hookups... maybe. Then have a girl they court for a while, and make her a girlfriend. Often men in small towns marry the first or second girlfriend they ever have. Why? Because there simply aren’t as many options. In a place with few samples to choose from, it takes fewer samples to figure out what kind of mate you should pick.

Prediction: married before you turn 24.

Thus, the problem most men face in big cities is an alien one to men in the rest of the world: how do I get laid a lot with a lot of cute girls? Most men outside the big cities don’t even think about this, at least not to the same extent, because it isn’t a realistic objective. There aren’t that many girls to sleep with, and there’s less hooking up going on outside the city.

Likewise, women’s objectives become more exaggerated in the city too; rather than relying on the support of a few friends and neighbors, they strive to replace organic social ties (family, lifelong friends, etc.) with men they meet who are supposed to provide support and protection, only to be continually disappointed because these men don’t care to provide those things unconditionally – they want sex.

We can think of men and women, then, as being on similar pages in small towns: he just wants to find a good girl, she just wants to find a good guy. Yet when they enter cities, their objectives diverge, amplify, and multiply, and suddenly they want and care about things that may not have even been an issue in a less densely populated locale.

Is this bad? No; the greater strains and stresses are products of greater competition, but also greater opportunity, too. You can find a far better matched mate in a city than you can out in the country; the odds you can find a girl who is your looks, intellect, and personality ideal is far higher, and your standards for what you want from a mate go through a great deal more refinement, too. If you’ve moved from a small town to a big city and started dating, you can probably look back after a few years and discover the girls you’re getting years in are much prettier, smarter, and more fun than the girls you got back in Smallville. However, when you were in Smallville, those girls you were dating felt like the cream of the crop. It’s only once you made it to the metropolis and gained exposure to a bunch more women – and dated a bunch more women – that your standards evolved.

Although, paradoxically, you may find you are less satisfied with your higher quality, better-matched mate you acquired after lots of dating around in the city, than the small town guy is with his small town gal, whom he chose because she was basically the only realistic choice for him to begin with. The Catch-22 of urban dating, I suppose: more choice, better quality... lower satisfaction. C’est la vie, non?

It is worth keeping in perspective that a lot of what men stress out about not being able to get in cities are things they don’t much concern themselves with outside them. Girls who would’ve been good enough to be a girlfriend (or wife, even) in a small town stop being acceptable for that role in a city. Men who would’ve been happy to have sex with three different girls lifetime, then marry, in a small town, become unsatisfied when they aren’t having sex with more than four or five girls a year in the city.

Conclusion

The easiest way to think of small towns vs. big cities is that cities are extreme environments. They produce big winners and big losers. There are plenty of men in the middle too. However, the men in the middle may feel like losers also, even if they’re doing better than men out in the country – for the express reason that they see the men at the top of the pile and feel pained they aren’t there.

In fact, I think that may be one of the hardest factors of life in the city for a lot of guys. Even if you’re sleeping with new girls every so often, and date some cute girlfriends, and do way better than guys in the country, and do about average for guys in the city you’re in... There still are some guys doing far, far better than you, both in terms of the number of women they sleep with and the quality of the girlfriends they get. And you see these guys and want what they have (and can’t seem to get it).

Thus, men in the middle feel like losers... Even though they are not losers at all. It is the perception that counts.

If you live in a big city and you are:

• Sleeping with two to three new girls per year
• Dating cute, good girlfriends at least some of the time
  

... even though this may feel unsuccessful, it is in fact average or better. If you’re single from 20 to 35, two new girls a year means 30 lays in that period. Three new girls in bed a year means 45 lays in that period. Even the highest surveys of male lifetime lay counts have the average American male at 17 lifetime sex partners total. Most average counts actually come up with a number closer to 6 partners lifetime for the average American man. If you sleep with two girls a year and stay single for 15 years, you’ll have somewhere between 2x and 5x the lay count of the average U.S.-based male.

None of this should discourage you from upgrading your game and fundamentals and aiming for those top tier results. But do keep it in perspective whenever you start to feel like you have it too hard and you’re too far behind.

When comparing yourself to women, also keep in mind those major differences between men and women, and between small towns and cities:

1. That men and women want different things
   
2. That men occupy the extremes
3. And that what men go for in cities vs. what they go for elsewhere are different

Men want for sex and good girlfriends; women want for support and commitment.

Men occupy the extremes: some men are a lot less successful in dating than women are, while other men are a lot more successful. Women tend to cluster around the middle; they don’t have it as bad as men at the bad end, but nor do they have it as good as men at the good end.

Finally, what men and women want in cities is exaggerated, amplified, and different compared to what they go for in everywhere else in the world.

Any time you catch yourself getting too down on dating, try to remind yourself of these things.

And if you really can’t get over it?

Well, then all the more reason to go make yourself the exceptional man whose results trump everyone else’s.

Chase Amante