“Dick is abundant and low value.”

In a Reddit forum deep dive as part of his PhD, this is the kind of language Dr Joshua Thorburn found on women-only “femosphere” forums such as “Female Dating Strategy”.

Men are sorted into “high value”, “low value” and “zero value” like stock on a shelf. While a significantly smaller community than that of the manosphere, Thorburn noted that both niches have dating guides that can mirror each other. Both advise their members not to talk too much on a date, because talking means showing weakness.

“I just like to imagine if those two people were ever on a date together,” he said to Farrago.

The humour masks a genuine concern. What Thorburn describes is a group of people who have absorbed a fundamentally transactional view of intimate relationships from the internet, from culture and from repeated disappointment.

They are not failing to find partners because they don’t want them. They are failing to find partners because the emotional infrastructure required to be vulnerable with another person has been replaced by strategic self-protection.

Beyond the extremes of Reddit forums, there is a quiet shift of relationship norms and values happening amongst young Australians. You have probably already seen statistics. Young people are staying at home, young people aren’t getting into romantic relationships, young people are lonely. 

The old escalator of dating, commitment, cohabitation, marriage and children is being quietly dismantled. People are partnering later, having kids later or not partnering at all. 

There’s a term for the mood this question is generating amongst young Australians: heteropessimism. Coined in 2019 by writer Asa Seresin, heteropessimism describes an attitude of disappointment, embarrassment or despair at the state of heterosexual relations.

Thorburn explained that while the manosphere gets the attention because it’s larger and its harms are clearer, an analogous “femosphere” has emerged, with its own hierarchies, its own transactional view of intimacy and a heavy emphasis on men’s main contribution being financial security. 

There are real shifts underneath this. Women now outpace men in tertiary education, and in a city with Melbourne’s university participation rates, that makes for a dating pool where plenty of women are better credentialed than plenty of men. Research co-authored by Dr Khandis Blake found that where women hold more economic resources, their preference for financially dominant partners weakens. 

But the adjustment is slow. “Educational hypergamy (dating up) is starting to erode,” Blake said, “but the income preference is still there to some degree while gender inequality in income remains.” Women are catching up inside a labour market that still pays them less, so the financial calculus of partnership hasn’t resolved. 

Committing to a partner carries financial stakes as well as emotional ones. Dr Maddison Sideris, a sociologist at Deakin University, tracked how young women navigate singlehood and framed it as arithmetic. “For some women now, remaining single isn’t simply about avoiding relationships,” she said. “It’s about weighing up whether relationships meaningfully contribute to their wellbeing, equality and emotional support.”

Sideris’s research followed women for 17 years, from their late teens to their mid-thirties. Her finding was that the “spinster stigma” hasn’t gone away—it has gone underground. Women who are single and content still get asked why. They still have to explain a life that looks, by most measures, perfectly functional.

“As much as we would like to think we are moving forward, I think for some women there is still a sense of internalising that stigma,” she said. But she also sees a shift in how some women respond to it: not by disproving the stigma, but by refusing its terms. “Singlehood is increasingly becoming understood as a meaningful social position in its own right, rather than simply a waiting room before partnership.”

Amelia has been celibate for nearly two years. A 25-year-old student at the University of Melbourne, she decided that she needed to take a long break from dating. “I found it really difficult to connect with anyone meaningfully,” she said. “Some guys were really nice, but I didn’t feel they added anything to my life. So, what was the point? I have enough friends that fill those needs for connection.” She added that she would be open to a relationship when she felt ready for it or when she met the right person who “I don’t have to sacrifice for.”

Despite the stigma, women like Amelia appear to have better social structures in place to handle being single and navigating relationships compared to their male counterparts. Michael Wilson, a men’s mental health researcher at the University of Melbourne, has studied what happens to men after breakups. 

The advice they get, he said, rarely helps. “Almost everyone I spoke to said the main advice they got was essentially just to get back out there and sleep with someone else as soon as possible.” It’s well meant, but it reinforces the myth that young men can simply get over it when, statistically, men after a breakup are at some of the highest risks of mental health deterioration and suicide. His alternative advice is borrowed from Brené Brown: empathy, not sympathy. Don't look down and say “that looks really sad”; climb into the pit and sit with them. 

Of course, there are alternatives to the conventional relationship for those who can hack it.

Sam, a journalism student, has been in a non-monogamous relationship for 10 years. Her rule is transparency. “We have a very open-book policy, talking about other dates and other partners and what we’re getting up to with people,” she said.

She rejected the idea that monogamy is more secure or healthier. “It kind of assumes that when you’re in a monogamous relationship, your partner’s just not going to leave you or not going to cheat on you.”

Sam’s openness is the exception. More common is the cynicism people show in public, which isn’t always what they want in private. It’s easy to mock romance online while quietly hoping it arrives for you.

Perhaps the real crisis in dating isn’t that men and women have become too demanding, too independent or too pessimistic.

Perhaps it is that we have become very good at asking whether someone is worth the risk, and very bad at accepting that love has always involved one.