What Is Happening With Modern Dating? - Vincent Harinam
Vincent Harinam (guest), Chris Williamson (host)
In this episode of Modern Wisdom, featuring Vincent Harinam and Chris Williamson, What Is Happening With Modern Dating? - Vincent Harinam explores modern Dating’s Collapse: Hypergamy, Simps, Incels, And Vanishing Monogamy Chris Williamson and data scientist/criminologist Vincent Harinam unpack how evolutionary psychology, female hypergamy, and modern technology are reshaping dating, sex, and marriage. They argue that female educational and economic overperformance, combined with globalized online dating, is funneling women toward a tiny pool of high‑status men while leaving many average men sexually and romantically excluded.
Modern Dating’s Collapse: Hypergamy, Simps, Incels, And Vanishing Monogamy
Chris Williamson and data scientist/criminologist Vincent Harinam unpack how evolutionary psychology, female hypergamy, and modern technology are reshaping dating, sex, and marriage. They argue that female educational and economic overperformance, combined with globalized online dating, is funneling women toward a tiny pool of high‑status men while leaving many average men sexually and romantically excluded.
This imbalance fuels simping, OnlyFans, incel culture, and a retreat by many men into porn and video games, while also leaving growing numbers of high-achieving women single, childless, or forced to “settle” for partners they’re not attracted to. Both sexes, they suggest, are being pushed by culture away from stable pair-bonding and toward short-term gratification.
They discuss how traits like disagreeableness and dark triad characteristics benefit men in both economics and short-term mating, but make long-term relationships unstable unless balanced by responsibility and provision. The conversation ends with a call to re‑valorize marriage, family, and “celebrated monogamy” as a cultural counterweight to these trends.
Key Takeaways
Simping and OnlyFans are maladaptive responses to male loneliness and fear of rejection.
Harinam defines simps as pliable men trying to buy affection with gifts and praise instead of genuine emotional connection; OnlyFans industrializes this, monetizing men’s desire for attention while letting them avoid the discomfort and growth that come from real-world rejection.
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The sexual marketplace is increasingly ‘winner-take-most,’ favoring a small elite of men.
Data from Tinder and Pew show many young men are single and sexless while women, aided by globalized dating apps, concentrate their interest on the top ~10% of men by looks, status, and income, leaving average men pushed out and many women chasing a tiny pool of suitors.
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Female educational and economic success often backfires in the dating market.
Women now outnumber men in universities and often outearn men in their 20s, yet studies show each 16‑point IQ increase boosts men’s marriage prospects by 35% but cuts women’s by 40%; high-achieving women frequently face a shrinking pool of men they find acceptable and end up single or needing to ‘settle’.
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Masculine traits like controlled disagreeableness and ‘dark triad’ edges are attractive—if balanced.
Women are drawn to confident, boundary-setting men with a hint of danger, but long-term success requires combining those traits with the “three Ps”—provision, protection, and parental investment—creating what Harinam calls the “dark gentleman,” not an unrestrained psycho ‘Chad’.
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Culture is discouraging the hard work of long-term commitment in favor of short-term gratification.
Memes like “boss bitch,” “don’t settle,” and hookup culture, combined with porn, games, and casual sex, erode the willingness of both sexes to endure the inevitable discomfort and sacrifice of building families, despite evidence that premarital promiscuity and unstable pair-bonding predict worse marital outcomes.
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Large numbers of sexually and romantically excluded men pose a genuine social risk.
Harinam warns that historically, surplus young men without partners correlate with unrest and violence; rising incel culture, combined with labeling and ostracization, may radicalize some of these men rather than integrating them, creating a slow-burning stability problem.
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Re‑valorizing marriage and family may be the only scalable, non-coercive remedy.
Since we can’t easily reprogram hypergamy or attraction, they argue that shifting cultural admiration back toward nuclear families and “celebrated monogamy” could realign incentives for both sexes, making stable pair-bonding aspirational again instead of an afterthought.
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Notable Quotes
“OnlyFans is the industrialization of simping.”
— Vincent Harinam
“A man who is too ingratiating is ultimately a man who is too desperate.”
— Vincent Harinam
“Women hold the keys to sex, but men hold the keys to relationships.”
— Vincent Harinam
“For every 16 point increase in a man’s IQ, his prospect of marriage increases by 35%. For every 16 point increase in a woman’s IQ, her prospect of marriage decreases by 40%.”
— Vincent Harinam (summarizing UK multi-university study)
“We have ancient ideas in modern skulls.”
— Vincent Harinam
Questions Answered in This Episode
If hypergamy and male desire for youth are so deeply rooted, is there any realistic way to make average men and high-achieving women better matches for each other?
Chris Williamson and data scientist/criminologist Vincent Harinam unpack how evolutionary psychology, female hypergamy, and modern technology are reshaping dating, sex, and marriage. ...
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
How could parents and educators socialize boys and girls differently to reduce fear of rejection, entitlement, and the extremes of incel or hookup culture?
This imbalance fuels simping, OnlyFans, incel culture, and a retreat by many men into porn and video games, while also leaving growing numbers of high-achieving women single, childless, or forced to “settle” for partners they’re not attracted to. ...
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
What specific policies or cultural campaigns could genuinely re‑valorize marriage and family without sliding into coercion or moralizing?
They discuss how traits like disagreeableness and dark triad characteristics benefit men in both economics and short-term mating, but make long-term relationships unstable unless balanced by responsibility and provision. ...
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Is it possible to design dating apps or platforms that counteract winner-take-all dynamics and encourage more balanced pairings, or is that fundamentally against user preferences?
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
At what point does labeling incels or similar groups as extremists do more harm than good by pushing already isolated individuals further toward radicalization?
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Transcript Preview
There was a study conducted by four universities here in the UK, and it was found that for every 16 point increase for a man in IQ, his prospect of marriage increases by 35%. But for every 16 point increase in a woman's IQ, her prospect of marriage decreases by 40%.
(wind blowing) Vincent Harnam, welcome to the show.
Chris, thanks for having me, buddy. Really appreciate it.
My pleasure, man. So your writing is some of the favorite stuff that I've read on the internet over the last couple of years. You don't write regularly, but the stuff that you put out is bomb. However, what you do during the day, you're like a, like a, a hyper-nerd by day and then you write about social dynamics and trends in dating and culture and stuff. Talk to me about how those two things blend together.
Okay. Well, one correction there. I'm not a hyper-nerd, I'm a hyper-geek. (laughs)
Okay. (laughs) Sorry.
There's, there's a slight difference between... No, no, don't apologize. Don't apolo- It's like this, this typology that I've created to separate geeks, dorks, and nerds.
What's the difference?
We can talk... Okay, so I've, I've, um, I've came, I've come to the conclusion that in order to be one of these things, you have to have or don't have to have either intellectualism or functional utility. So a geek is a person that has, is, that is intellectual but also has a, a level of functional utility. So a coder, for example, does something which, which actually helps people. But there's some intellectual rigor required there. A nerd has intellectualism but lacks functional utility. So reading a book on 14th century poetry doesn't really help a lot of people, right? There's no societal benefit to that sort of thing. And a dork has neither, neither functional utility nor intellectualism.
All right, so that's the matrices that you've put together that, uh, explains the-
Yes.
... what would you say, the computerly-inclined, uh-
Yes.
... modern man.
And the poetically-inclined.
Yeah. Okay. Okay, cool.
Yes.
Right. So talk to me, what's this marriage between these two worlds?
Well, for me, I... All the articles that I write, I do in my free time. It's not something that I think about necessarily on a daily basis or I even do for my day job. So what I do is that I, I, maybe I have an interest, an idea, or, or something that I wanna pursue further, and then I accumulate as much data as I can and I apply the sort of research skills that I have as a data scientist, uh, a data analyst, and I try to take a complex idea and then simplify it as much as I can. So papers on white privilege, um, sexual dynamics, simping, these are all things that I think people find interesting, but there isn't really any empirical rigor behind any of it. And so my job, I think, as, as an intellectual per se, or, or a person that, that does data analysis, is to try to break it down such that people understand it in a cogent way.
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