Why Men in the Bay Are Single

I’m in The Commons. In front of me are three men, each potentially better looking, or richer, or more conscientious, and almost certainly a more stable person to live with than I. They have all come up to me after my 10 second pitch for my start-up, a way to find wives for single men in the bay. My girlfriend can scarcely believe these are what the leftover single men in the bay area look and act like. Men like this simply aren’t single anywhere else in the world she (or I) have been.

Why are these men single?

I, of course, can’t know for sure. But I think if i’m offering a solution, I have a responsibility to figure out why the problem can’t simply be solved by telling them to keep putting themselves out there. The traditional advice is to go to more meetups, get professional dating photos, work on your personality so that you’re more charming. One issue with this is that it assumes there are single women in the bay who would choose them if only they’d fix those things. But what happens if those women simply don’t exist?

So here is my gears level model as to why so many desirable men in the bay are single, and it might upset some women in the bay.

Aristocratic Female Dating Preferences:

It is sometimes quipped that we in 2024 live lives that would be the envy of 17th century monarchs. It seems we have potentially made aristocratc levels of comfort available to nearly 30% of the worlds human population. Certainly nearly every person in the bay who might be reading this lives a (material) life not only the envy of nearly all historic aristocracy, but might even be nearly a modern aristocrat themselves.

Two years ago I was visiting my best friend from high school at his house in Charleston, SC. He had an old book written by one of his great relatives (also from Charleston). In between chronicling a surprisingly nuanced view on the ups and downs of the civil war as it unfolded, the author dedicated a few pages to describing some relatives of his. Three sisters who had spent their lives in a mansion inherited from their father. None of them ever married, though some speculation was made about relations they might have had with their “servant” (author’s word choice).

My Aunt on my father’s side was also born in the purple to a fairly wealthy family. She is also one of the only women I know to have been fertile during the baby boom years who didn’t marry. These admittedly anecdotal examples make me think of what seem in retrospect some of the earliest precursors of how modern women talk about men. Here is one woman member of the 19th century landed gentry, Jane Austen: “I have no notion of treating men with such respect. That is the way to spoil them.”

One can’t help but wonder if what Jane Austen and modern women who regard men in much the same way have in common is that they live lives of aristocratic luxury.

Women often will only consider men who make more money than them (statistic(s) pending, I anticipate being proven very right about this). Is this why those three sisters and my aunt never married? Because they are so much harder to satisfy that constraint for?

My girlfriend and co-founder (Ngan!) spent a week in the Vietnamese ancient capital of Huế. During the tour we learned there was an old saying in the villages: “Send your daughter to Hue and she’ll never come back”. The king, like almost all ancient kings, had harems in the hundreds of wives. If dating preferences are at all heritable, there is likely to be a distribution in modern women for just how big of a differential in income preference each has. This has made me start to think that women (unfortunate enough?) to be born into or ascend into the modern aristocracy but with a phenotype that prefers to date only the king, will find themselves either unhappy in their partner choice, or permanently single, with that phenotype dying out.

So who are these very smart, very ambitious, very pretty women? This part is purely (unceratin) speculation. Likely, they are the (great grand) daughters of the exact kind of women who chased after the aristocratic genes (the aristocracy having the intellect and ambition to become aristocratic in the first place). And now they are in SF, fortunate to be in the century of greatest gender equality, making salaries merely 20% less than their fellow aristocratic SF men. They have no scarcity of resources, and those with the phenotype to be attracted to men significantly richer than them simply can’t find those men. Maybe some hold out hope to run across a super rich founder, but I think many are just content to cope with the same ideas that many aristocratic women in the past have coped with, something like: “men need to be better”.

Where does this leave all these aristocratic men?

The truly kingly of course have their choice, and Elon goes around impregnating some of these aristocratic women, but there are simply many more of that phenotype and life combo than there is demand from Elon to reproduce with them. The women left over have to experience the same harsh genetic pressures as the men around them, when competing for the attention of the kings in an age where polygyny is still culturally taboo.

But, the mere Dukes and even courtiers of the SF kingdom are mostly left single. This is exacerbated of course by the massive discrepancy in number of women compared to men in the dating age San Francisco aristocracy. These are men with net worths in the millions. People with top 1% global IQs. People with the proven conscientiousness to make it in San Francisco, doing highly complex technical work. People who are by all observations very mild mannered, very civil, and would make excellent fathers and husbands.

These men would be among the most desirable anywhere else on planet earth, for the local aristocratic women of countries whose GDP are dwarfed by even a single SF company. Those aristocratic women may yet be able to find a man far beyond her current status, he’s in SF! I’m talking about women from nearly every other country on planet earth.