“Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, the author of Why There Are No Good Men Left, discusses the challenges facing today’s single women, and argues that the contemporary courtship system needs to be transformed“. She essentially argues that social changes in recent decades have resulted in a deliberate choice to stay single longer. This, she says, is merely an incidental change with few consequences for men, but makes a profound difference for women because of the constriction of social opportunities to meet the right man and competition from younger women.

What needs to change, then, she suggests, is not the contemporary woman’s postponement of the search for a spouse, but the courtship system itself. A well-functioning courtship system, she emphasizes, should succeed in bringing a society’s eligible young people into appropriate partnerships. But today’s courtship system fails on that count, leaving singles who have aged out of the college scene to fend for themselves.

She expresses confidence, however, that given the urgency of the need, new courtship mechanisms—tailored to fit the needs of busy professionals with limited time (both in the day and in their window for finding appropriate partners)—will spring up to fill the void. The Atlantic Monthly

I’m not sure Whitehead has gotten at the heart of the asymmetry. She falls into the trap of many social historians, who consider only a one-way causal flow between social structures and individual psychology. For caring men, the difficulty meeting people once you are several years out of college is no less daunting than it is for women. The real asymmetry, it would seem, is in the socially-shaped differences in the value men and women place on intimacy and a loving partnership. Changing courtship structures in society won’t do much to change the male psyche, now that feminist consciousness-raising is passé.