One of the common myths about dating is that there's a soulmate out there for everyone. Dating services have made millions promoting the idea that your perfect partner is out there, you just need to try harder to find them. This seems to make sense since there are an equal number of men and women. The reality is that in promiscuous culture, a small percentage of men can monopolize sex with a majority of women. When this happens, the matching up process does not occur, and singles end up floating indefinitely around the dating pool.

The Attractiveness Hierarchy

In the monogamous marriage system of the past, the majority of men and women found mates and got married. In that system, singles knew roughly where they were ranked in overall attractiveness and married a mate of roughly equal rank as soon as they could, usually by their early 20's. There were strong economic and sexual pressures to marry early, and this motivated singles to quickly find a mate of roughly equivalent attractiveness rather than wait for their "perfect soulmate." In the monogamous system, if one waited too long, the pool of eligible mates shrank, and it became more difficult to find a quality partner. (See The Pill and the Decline of Dating and Marriage).

In today's society, birth control removes the incentive for singles to settle into their place in the attractiveness hierarchy. Because women freed from birth control can have sex without marriage, they can engage in temporary physical relationships that have no marriage potential while they wait and hope for Mr. Right. These strings of temporary relationships help women meet their short-term emotional needs but delay them from pursuing serious marriage partners. Men have a greater evolved desire for unfettered sex, and generally prefer more sex partners rather than a commitment to marriage and raising children. Because women are willing to have premarital sex, the attractive men who have ready access to many new sex partners have little incentive to pursue marriage at all. They generally prefer to circulate among women rather than settling down.

(Note: Robert Trivers' 1972 parental investment theory proposed that men's stronger sex drive and stronger desire for variety in their partners is the result of a basic biological difference between the sexes. In order to procreate, men need only invest the few minutes to have sex, while women must invest at least nine months of pregnancy to bear the child. From a biological standpoint, sperm is cheap and easy to produce, while wombs are much, much more valuable. Women possess the more valuable reproductive resource, so sex and pregnancy imply a much greater investment on the part of women.

A result of this investment differential was that before the invention of contraception, sex improved the reproductive potential of man much more than it did a woman. When a man had sex with more women, he could have more children. One prolific example, Moulay Ismail the Bloodthirsty, fathered 888 children out of a harem of 500 women. A woman, on the other hand, can have only one child per nine months no matter how many men she has sex with. Because of this differential, over the course of evolution, women became pickier about the quality of their sex partners while men became the more sexually aggressive and less choosy gender.)

Circulating around the Pool

The promiscuous system allows very attractive men to avoid commitment and be continually available for sex. Because these men can have more sex, women have sexual access to more attractive men than they would have been able to attract as marriage partners under the monogamous system. However, there is a downside for many women and men. For most men, it means that the few particularly desirable men at the top of the attractiveness hierarchy can monopolize many of the women. By having many relationships, many sex partners and even multiple wives in serially monogamous fashion, the most attractive men can consume the prime reproductive years of multiple women. For biological reasons, a woman's fertile lifetime is much shorter than a man's, making it even easier for some men to consume an unequal share of female reproductive resources. When some men consume more than their share of women, there will necessarily be other men, lower on the attractiveness hierarchy, who will have no suitable women available for marriage at all. This also means that all of the men who are not at the top of the hierarchy must lower their standards.

Most men don't realize that rampant promiscuity hurts them. They think that the pill and sexual revolution have brought them a sexual boon. They don't realize that promiscuity prevents them from finding high-quality women. The monogamous marriage system allowed a man only one woman, which meant that virtually all men got at least one woman. In the monogamous system, attractive women were more evenly distributed so the majority of men were able to attract more desirable women than they could attract under the promiscuous system.

For women, the transition to the promiscuous system has made it more difficult to find a marriage partner as well. The attractive men don't commit because they have new sex partners constantly available. Lower-status men shun marriage because they hope to gain more options as they gain status and rise into the ranks of the highly attractive. Women who are accustomed to having sex with highly attractive men also don't want to "settle" and marry the kind of less sexy man that would be willing to marry. Men don't want to to be settled for, either. This means that both men and women remain circulating in the dating pool for long periods without settling into marriage. Shows like Sex and the City and movies like Bridget Jones' Diary resonate because this experience is so common among modern metropolitan singles. As promiscuity increases, marriage declines and fewer singles can find lifelong partners.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2260104&forum_id=2#23228004)

she didn't "settle," nobody wanted her.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2260104&forum_id=2#23228010)