One reductive way to view Western (straight) dating culture:

- the women are competing for top ~10% of men, who almost always will have multiple casual partners at any given time because of this

- the (other 90% of) men are competing for the top 50% of women

It's a mess of poorly defined and misaligned interests. This leads to tension and stereotypes ("all men are assholes! all women are harlots!") and sexual inequality.

There may be some situations where people want to rank potential partners desirability as though it was a scalar that everyone would agree on, but there is no requirement to participate in those situations.

For me, and I suspect most people, it seems much better to just do the things you enjoy, be friendly, and find people where there is some mutual interest in spending time together.

>find people where there is some mutual interest in spending time together.

Until the woman has to defend your eligibility against her female friends, comparing you to previous partners, current alternative suitors and male celebrities.

No doubt there are people in the world who do that stuff, but why spend your time with them?

>No doubt there are people in the world who do that stuff, but why spend your time with them?

Because the majority of women is like that and unicorns by definition are hard to find?

That's the secret sauce, but many people lead relatively isolated lives and downloading an app seems like the easy route.

The key part is "in their 20s." It's much more common for women to date someone older than them than vice versa.

Not just more common, it's somewhat taboo the other way around.

One of my brothers in his mid 20s briefly dated some girl a bit older than him, maybe late 20s/early 30s.

When my parents found out, he got chastised for it (in a somewhat playful way albeit). They did not necessarily like this, the kicker is they have an 11 year age gap themselves, but it's my father who's older.

Roughly the same discrepancy exists in those reporting they have a spouse (13.6% to 19.8%). Since I don't think polygamy is legal in Japan, this is likely an artifact of the fact they're only asking people in their 20s, and women in marriages and "lover" arrangements tend to be younger than the man.

A while ago I read a study where they looked at the matches of dating-apps and they found that women tend to concentrate on the most impressive (so best looking, successful) men available whereas men just try to get someone roughly comparable. This meant a huge imbalance and would example the discrepancy seen here.

Research hypergamy. It's a pretty well-established phenomenon across generations.

since the dawn of time there have been more single men than women

and Genghis Khans

I'd say men having multiple partners. Especially with the proliferation of dating apps which make it easier to play the numbers game.

A few men are taking all the women