Why Aren't Trad Singles Finding Each Other?

A FREE data-driven collaboration with Jeremiah Johnson of Infinite Scroll

Hello everyone! Today, I’m doing something a bit different. As many of you know, I’m a huge fan of

Jeremiah Johnson

of

Infinite Scroll

. You may know him as the creator of the Worst Tweets Bracket. I consider him an expert in weird online culture, especially Twitter, and I recommend subscribing to him if you haven’t already!

Anyway, for today’s post, I collaborated with Jeremiah to answer one simple question: why aren’t trad singles finding each other? Certainly, many of them are finding each other, but I feel like I regularly see self-described “trad” men and women lament a lack of suitable partners. I wanted to figure out if these people were just talking past each other, so I put out a survey for self-described trad singles. Jeremiah is a bit of a stats buff (I’m not) so he helped me to parse the results, including the long-form qualitative stuff. What he found was truly fascinating! Read on for our conversation—see it like a podcast interview, in written form (or use the Substack voice feature to listen to it…but sadly I don’t think it’s able to do male and female voices in one post.)

Cartoons Hate Her: Many of you are familiar with Jeremiah Johnson, who is the genius behind the very online publication Infinite Scroll, as well as the infamous annual Worst Tweets Bracket. But another really cool thing about him is that he knows his way around statistics. Today we're having a "digital conversation" of sorts about a topic about which we've both wondered: there are lots of men and women on Twitter who proclaim themselves to be "trad" (or exhibit trad-coded traits) but say they can't find anyone else to complete this lifestyle (a trad lifestyle isn't exactly trad without a spouse.) So are these singles finding each other? And if not, why not? Can a 23-year-old Roman Statue guy not find his based raw-milk-drinking wife anymore??

For this exercise, I put together a survey and blasted it to Twitter, and Jeremiah analyzed the results. So let's start with some of the basics. When it comes to the people we surveyed and their self-described reasons for being single or wanting a trad lifestyle, what did you notice? How was it different between men versus women?

Jeremiah Johnson: Unless you're still very young, it's a little bit of a contradiction to be a self-described trad and single - shouldn't you have settled down into a monogamous relationship already? So to unravel that mystery, the survey let people describe their own reasons for why they're currently single, in their own words.

I went through all the responses and coded each response as either having an internal or external locus of control. A typical internal locus of control answer would be something like "I'm really socially awkward and bad at dating apps", "I work too much" or "I am not attractive enough". It places the blame internally. By contrast, external locus of control answers would say things like "The men I meet are too immature to settle down" or "The economy is bad and dating apps discriminate against white men" or "Most women have loose morals". I was really interested to see whether our trads mostly internalized the situation or not.

Among women, the split was perfectly even. 34% had an internal locus of control vs 34% who had an external locus of control (side note - some respondents were either impossible to categorize or left no reason). But what surprised me was that men had a strong bias towards internal locus of control. 59% of male respondents blamed internal factors for still being single, while only 30% focused the blame on external factors. I was expecting men to be more focused on external blame, but that appeared not to be the case.

Reading through the responses, I'm curious what stands out to you CHH?

CHH: That's really interesting. When I was looking through the self-reported reasons, the main thing that stood out to me was that one guy just cited "the Jews." But I never parsed it the way you did, and that's fascinating to me. Honestly, I would have expected the opposite but I think there are a few factors that contribute to this breakout. For one, I think if men take the trad rhetoric literally, they shouldn't be blaming external factors for anything, because that's kind of unmasculine. I'm not saying I agree, by the way, but blaming external factors for one's personal issues seems to be something that feels--for lack of a better word--cuck-coded. Granted, I wasn't sure if trad men who filled out the survey would actually take this seriously, because I feel like on Twitter, far-right men are often very willing to blame "wokeism" and other similar cultural issues for their own problems. There's also something to be said for the men who follow me specifically. I write a decent amount about self improvement, and I wrote a three-part series on improving social skills which I think resonated with all genders but especially seemed to resonate with single men. So it could also be a sampling issue.

But also, I think it's important to analyze how men versus women define "trad." I had a question earlier in the survey that gave men and women the option to select multiple components of the trad label from a list. I wanted to understand if men and women were considering themselves "trad" for different reasons (ie: number of children, being part of a religious community, etc.) What did you uncover there?

JJ: I fully agree with your observation on trad men - an authentic trad mindset seems to me to be highly internalized and loath to blame others for personal failures, but 'modern internet trad' seems to be... more whiny? Kudos to most of these guys - nobody likes a whiner.

The survey offered five reasons for wanting to be trad, and respondents could choose as many as they liked. Overall, the big three reasons were religious views, wanting lots of kids, and wanting a relationship where the woman stays at home. Owning a self-sufficient homestead or living a rural lifestyle were not popular motivations compared to those three.

There was very little difference between men and women for most of these motivations. 54% of trad women responding wanted to stay home, while 59% of the men said they wanted a wife who stayed home. 48% of trad men and 56% of trad women cited religious views. Given the sample size, neither of those were statistically significant differences. What I did find interesting was the difference in kids.

Men were significantly more likely to cite wanting lots of kids as a reason for being trad - 59% of men said this vs 41% of women. Men also wanted more kids. Women were more likely to want 0-2 children whereas men were more likely to say they wanted 5+ children.

Perhaps it's easier for single trad men to casually toss around wanted 5+ children - they're not the ones who have to give birth to them!

CHH: So I think this makes sense and I'm not at all surprised that the men want more kids than the women do. I feel like it's important to note that the percentages of women who cited wanting 1-2 kids, 3-4 kids or 4-5 kids were very similar, whereas nearly half of men wanted at least four. This checks out with the fact that women bear the burden of pregnancy and childcare (not that childcare is a burden- it's basically my job and I love it- but if you're in a trad relationship the woman is the one doing most or all of it.) You already kind of hit the nail on the head there. Even if you love children and parenthood, it's very difficult to be the main caretaker to four children, especially if they're all very young. I also wonder if some of these women imagine themselves homeschooling, which would compound how difficult it would be to raise 4+ kids.

So another thing I really want your take on is the type of people that these trad singles are seeking. Just from observing trad Twitter (and I acknowledge I may be observing a great deal of bots and satire accounts) it seems like the men are specifically seeking out a type of woman who may not really exist--and I mean that literally. A lot of the aspirational photos they post are AI-generated. But generously assuming these photos were of real women, it seems to mostly be about age (very young) and looks (very hot) which makes them more or less indistinguishable from horny gooners, while slapping a big disclaimer sticker on the gooner behavior that says "Family Values." But maybe the guys who filled out this survey had more criteria for a wife--after all, if family values are your main Thing, one might expect that you'd be very serious about vetting a partner and mother of your children.

I'm also curious to know what the women valued in a male partner. Presumably, they'd want a provider and a good dad, but I also feel like there might be a disconnect between trad guys and trad women where the men believe that the ideal marriage includes a massive age gap and the women want someone around their own age. Again--I may be basing all of this on trolls! So what does the data really say?

JJ: So the women who took this survey were asked which was closer to their preference - "Marrying a man my age and both of us working until he makes enough money for me to stay home" or "Marrying a man 10-15 years older than me, and I don't have to work". Only 23% chose the second option of wanting to marry a significantly older man, while 77% would prefer to marry a man their age and work for a while until their husband could provide for them.

When men were asked about the ideal age of their partner, 59% said they'd prefer a wife within 5 years of their age. 33% said they'd prefer a wife 5-10 years younger than them, and only 7% wanted a wife more than 10 years younger. Given that this is a self-described 'trad' group of people, that still seems like a pretty ordinary distribution. Men tilt slightly in the direction of younger women - this may scandalize the audience, but apparently youth is prized as a standard of female beauty! - but overall it still feels mostly ordinary.

This doesn't surprise me all that much, because assortative mating seems to be increasing over time. People are increasingly marrying people like themselves socioeconomically. It used to be more common to have large age gaps or class gaps, with the classic example being a rich executive marrying his younger secretary, Mad Men style:

This just doesn't seem to happen much any more. People with college degrees are more likely to marry other people with college degrees, and around their same age. The days of marrying someone with a serious 10-20 year age gap don't seem to be coming back, even in the trad community.

CHH: Great callout, and I've noticed that too. My parents had a class difference (albeit not an age difference) and today I almost never see that. As an aside, were 10-20 year age gaps ever that common? My grandparents were also close in age, and I feel like before it was common to marry someone you met in college, it was high school. Granted, I could be totally wrong here. I know that wasn't part of the survey, but have you looked into that data at all?

Anyway, back to the survey. We presented a few hypotheticals to the singles: dating someone who was divorced, dating someone who had kids from a previous marriage, dating an atheist who otherwise had trad values, and having casual sex with a hot person with no risk of STIs or pregnancy. What was the degree of openness for men and women, and what can this tell us about the different priorities (or similar priorities) they may have?

JJ: I don't think large age gaps were ever the majority of marriages, but they definitely used to be more common than they are now. Here's some data I found that stretches back to 1880:

You can see that the share of marriages where the husband is 3+ years older has steadily declined over the last 150 years. This data doesn't have a further category for large gaps of 10+ years, but I'd be shocked if they hadn't also declined. Wikipedia says that currently about 8% of American marriages feature a 10+ year age gap, so in 1880 we can guesstimate that they'd be 15-20% of marriages.

Wrapping up the analysis of these folks with a big revelation: Men are morally flexible horndogs. When asked if they would have risk-free casual sex with an attractive stranger, 43% of men said they would while only 15% of women would. I'd of course invite you to speculate on whether they're being fully honest, but this seems pretty cut and dry. Men were also more likely to be accepting of an atheist partner who otherwise shared their trad values (57% vs 46%).

Interestingly, this higher male acceptance of 'imperfect' partners did have an exception - sexual purity. Trad men were less likely than trad women (43% vs 49%) to accept a divorced partner, and also less likely to accept a partner with previous kids (31% for men vs 40% for women). To me these factors all point in the vague direction of purity culture, where female (but not male) virginal status is highly prized. Even trad women themselves seem to think this way - they're far less likely to engage in casual sex, even with the stipulation that there's no risk of pregnancy or STIs.

One more interesting tidbit for you - people who responded that they are 'saving themselves for marriage' are slightly more likely to be accepting of previous kids, which is not what I'd expect.

As we wrap this up, any final observations on your end? What do you think you learned about the trads from putting this together?

CHH: That's super interesting about the age gaps. For some reason I assumed they've always happened as often (or as little) as they do now. I wonder if any commenters have data on the big ones, like 15-20 years.

Anyway, I think the hypotheticals weren't super surprising to me with the exception of the one you noted about those saving themselves for marriage being more open to partners with kids. Traditionally, step parents were a big part of family life, mostly because it was common for a parent to die young (childbirth, war, etc.) Obviously, most step parents today aren't marrying widows and widowers, but perhaps to someone with a very traditional background (saving ones self for marriage is pretty uncommon) this is seen as traditional as opposed to modern. I also wonder if they had stipulations- for example, open to dating a widow/widower or a divorced person but not someone who had a child out of wedlock. I recently posted about this on Twitter and a lot of people said that they saw being a step parent to a child of a widow to be materially very different from a child who came from a divorcee or a never-married person.

Overall, I'd say that the biggest takeaway is that self-styled "trad" people are more open-minded than I expected, and trad men aren't necessarily the super porn-brained guys that people sometimes imagine (although I'm sure SOME are.) From the qualitative answers about why they're single, I think being trad might be associated with a meeker personality for both men and women, and shy or soft-spoken people tend to have a harder time meeting each other simply because they're not as outgoing. I wonder if that's the biggest missing piece here- maybe lots of these people would date each other if they were able to actually meet. I've also seen some data that Catholic churches are skewing male, while some other churches are skewing female, so even religious services might not be a good meeting spot for some of these folks. And then the other ways to meet singles, especially dating apps, might turn them off. So perhaps community is the missing piece, or getting more young people to go to religious services.

JJ: The meek/soft-spoken thing is an interesting hypothesis. I suspect there are a lot of vaguely conservative leaning people who could be trad-ish, but they're also highly confident and actually got into successful relationships early and never identified as 'trad' because they're too busy leading their actual lives. They have kids, go to church, manage their homes, etc, and don't need to put a label on it or post on social media about how they're following the trad trend. They just do it. Maybe 'trad' is a bucket to catch all the people who want to be doing that but aren't suave enough to have gotten there yet. As the Bible says: "Skill issue tbh".

I think trad is ultimately part of a larger trend where everybody wants to put a cutesy label on things. Everybody is desperate to fit into a category. When you and I were in school, people slotted into fairly large categories like the nerds, the jocks, the popular kids, the goths, the skate punks, etc. But now everybody online has to be some TikTok hashtag. You don't just like floral prints, you are doing Tomato Girl. Instead of saying "I think that house design is cool" you label yourself as a farmpilled cottagecore girlie. The desire to fit into increasingly niche and esoteric faux-communities is strong, and I think trad is ultimately another one of those - albeit with more staying power because of the ties to religion and conservative politics.

CHH: Yes, as Gracie Abrams would say, that's so true- many "trad" people who don't use that label might not even have considered filling this survey out, and those might be the people more likely to be out there making connections in real life. On a personal note, I am the exact type of person who does NOT make connections in real life so my new years resolution is to see friends at least once a month (the bar is on the floor for me.)

Well, thanks so much for having this conversation! I loved going through the data with you, and as always, I am such a fan of your extremely unique (and extremely funny) work on the wild world of Twitter and the Internet at large. Thank you!!