The Buyer's Market

Game continues to break into the mainstream, as evidenced by this piece in the Sydney Morning Herald, entitled Why women lose the dating game. It even features citations from Dalrock as well as Susan Walsh:

He barely had a date through much of his 20s and gave up on women. But then he spent time overseas, gained more confidence, learnt how to dress well and hit his early 30s. ''I suddenly started to get asked out by women, aged 19 through to 40. The floodgates burst open for me. I actually dated five women at once, amazing my flatmates by often bedding three to four of my casual dates each week. It is a great time as a male in your 30s, when you start getting more female attention and sex than you could ever have dreamt of in your 20s.''

That's when some men start behaving very badly - as the manosphere clearly shows. These internet sites are not for the faint-hearted. The voices are often crude and misogynist. But they tell it as they see it. There is Greenlander, an apparently successful engineer in his late 30s. In his early adult life, he was unable to ''get the time of day from women''. Now he's interested only in women under 27.

''The women I know in their early 30s are just delusional,'' he says. ''I sometimes seduce them and sleep with them just because I know how to play them so well. It's just too easy. They're tired of the cock carousel and they see a guy like me as the perfect beta to settle down with before their eggs dry out … when I get tired of them I just delete their numbers from my cell phone and stop taking their calls … It doesn't really hurt them that much: at this point they're used to pump & dump!''

It's easy to dismiss such bile but Greenlander's analysis is echoed by many Australian singles, both male and female.

''It's wall-to-wall arseholes out there,'' reports Penny, a 31-year-old lawyer. She is stunned by how hard it is to meet suitable men willing to commit. ''I'm horrified by the number of gorgeous, independent and successful women my age who can't meet a decent man.''

Penny acknowledges part of the problem is her own expectations - that her generation of women was brought up wanting too much. ''We were told we were special, we could do anything and the world was our oyster.'' And having spent her 20s dating alpha males, she expected them to be still around when she finally decided to get serious.

But these men go fast, many fishing outside their pond. The most attractive, successful men can take their pick from women their own age or from the Naomis, the younger women who are happy to settle early. Almost one in three degree-educated 35-year-old men marries or lives with women aged 30 or under, according to income, housing and marriage surveys by the Bureau of Statistics.

''I can't believe how many men my age are only interested in younger women,'' wails Gail, a 34-year-old advertising executive as she describes her first search through men's profiles on the RSVP internet dating site. She is shocked to find many mid-30s men have set up their profiles to refuse mail from women their own age.

Talking to many women like her, it's intriguing how many look back on past relationships where they let good men get away because they weren't ready. American journalist Kate Bolick wrote recently in The Atlantic about breaking off her three-year relationship with a man she described as ''intelligent, good-looking, loyal and kind''. She acknowledged ''there was no good reason to end things'', yet, at the time, she was convinced something was missing in the relationship. That was 11 years ago. She's is now 39 and facing grim choices.

''We arrived at the top of the staircase,'' Bolick wrote, ''finally ready to start our lives, only to discover a cavernous room at the tail end of a party, most of the men gone already, some having never shown up - and those who remain are leering by the cheese table, or are, you know, the ones you don't want to go out with.''

So, many women are missing out on their fairytale ending - their assumption that when the time was right the dream man would be waiting. The 30s are worrying years for high-achieving women who long for marriage and children - of course, not all do - as they face their rapidly closing reproductive window surrounded by men who see no rush to settle down.

One thing that tends to confuse those looking superficially at the matter is that most women, even in their late 30s, are able to find partners. But what tends to escape the attention of those superficial observers is that the men for whom the women are settling in their 30s and 40s tend to be of distinctly lower quality than the men that were pursuing them in their middle and late 20s. If you see a high caliber married man in his 40s or 50s who is married to a woman within a few years of his age, in most cases you will learn that they married when he was in his 20s. One seldom sees a high caliber married man that age who is engaged to a woman who is within five years of his age, as the statistics increasingly demonstrate.

This is why divorced men tend to do well among women approaching the Beauty Wall. Since divorce downgrades their MMV, they still have many of the SMV characteristics that women find attractive, but they possess lower marital value due to the greater baggage and higher relationship risk they represent. So, the older women retain access to the men their age the younger women find less interesting from the relationship perspective.