Men whose relationships keep falling apart are not losing out to a brutal dating market so much as to their own trouble keeping a partnership running, according to a new study of more than 1,000 adults in Greece and Cyprus. Each one-step increase in a man’s self-rated difficulty maintaining a relationship more than doubled his odds of currently being between partners.
The study, published in the peer-reviewed journal Evolutionary Psychology by researchers Menelaos Apostolou and Timo Juhani Lajunen, surveyed 1,099 Greek-speaking adults with an average age in their early thirties. Participants rated how hard they found it to keep a relationship healthy day to day, covering things like resolving conflict, sustaining attraction, and communicating needs. For men, each one-unit rise in that perceived difficulty was tied to a 2.36-fold increase in the likelihood of currently being between relationships, and roughly a 1.8-fold increase in the odds of being voluntarily single. Women showed a different, nonlinear pattern, suggesting the mechanism driving male singlehood looks distinct from what drives it in women.
The finding cuts against the popular explanation for rising singlehood, that dating apps and a thinning pool of options are mostly to blame. Pew Research Center puts the share of unpartnered U.S. adults at 42% in 2023, down slightly from 44% in 2019, and notes that dip was not driven by more people marrying. It came from a falling divorce rate, which hit a record low of 1.4% of married adults in 2023. Read together, the two datasets point toward the same conclusion: what keeps a lot of people out of a relationship is not a lack of candidates, it’s difficulty sustaining the one they already have.
photo credit: unsplash
Key Points
- In a study of 1,099 adults, each one-unit increase in a man’s difficulty maintaining a relationship was linked to a 2.36-fold higher chance of currently being single, per PsyPost’s coverage of the peer-reviewed research.
- Men showed a straightforward linear relationship between maintenance difficulty and singlehood, while women’s pattern was nonlinear, the study’s authors found.
- Separately, Pew Research Center found 42% of U.S. adults were unpartnered in 2023, a slight decline tied to falling divorce rates rather than rising marriage rates.
The researchers caution their sample was cross-sectional and drawn from one cultural context, so it cannot prove that poor maintenance skills cause singlehood rather than simply correlating with it. Still, the size of the effect for men is hard to ignore next to how often “there just aren’t good options out there” gets treated as the default explanation.
For men navigating a breakup or a long single stretch, the study offers an uncomfortable but useful reframe. Dating-pool complaints get all the attention because they require nothing of the person doing the complaining. Relationship-maintenance skill, the harder and more useful variable, is the one somebody can actually work on.
