For most of my life, the cultural script was simple. Women wanted the ring. Men wanted to be left alone. Every sitcom, every rom-com, every nervous best man speech ran on the same joke: he got dragged to the altar, and she did the dragging.
The data just killed that script. And I have to be honest with you, after 12 years of running a luxury matchmaking firm, I saw it die in real time.
The numbers nobody expected
The Institute for Family Studies released research showing that 68% of unmarried young men say a definite yes to marriage. Only 11% say they don’t want it at all. Meanwhile, the share of young women who want to marry has been falling for three decades. Monitoring the Future data shows the percentage of 12th-grade girls who say they want to marry dropped from 83% in 1993 to 61% in 2023, while boys barely moved. Between 2019 and 2023 alone, the share of women who said marriage was not important for a fulfilling life jumped from 31% to 48%.
The parenthood numbers tell the same story. In a 2024 Pew survey, 57% of single men said they eventually wanted children. Only 45% of single women said the same.
Read those numbers again. The gender most likely to want marriage and kids right now is men. Not by a little. By a gap wide enough to reshape the entire dating market.
What the intake calls told me first
Researchers found this in survey data. I found it in my calendar.
When I founded Lyons Elite in 2014, the classic inquiry from a successful man went something like this: “I’m busy, I don’t have time to date, find me someone great.” Marriage was implied at best. Usually it wasn’t mentioned at all. It was my job to gently pull the timeline out of him over two or three conversations.
Somewhere around 2021, that flipped. Today, the men who call us name marriage in the first meeting, unprompted. They bring timelines. They talk about wanting a family with the same directness they’d use to describe a business goal. The stereotype of the commitment-phobic bachelor still exists on television. He has almost stopped walking through our door.
The women changed too, and this is the part the headlines get wrong. The accomplished women we work with have not stopped wanting love. They’ve stopped wanting a bad deal. They watched their mothers carry marriages that ran on one person’s sacrifice, and they’ve decided the institution has to earn them back. When a woman tells me she’s “not sure about marriage,” what she almost always means is “I’m not sure about the version of marriage I’ve seen.”
Those are two completely different problems. And the dating market is now full of both.
The real crisis is an intent mismatch
Here’s the insight I think everyone covering this research is missing.
The story isn’t that men are romantic heroes and women are cynics. The story is that the dating pool now has a structural mismatch in intent. Millions of men are dating to marry while a growing share of women are dating to evaluate whether marriage deserves them. Both positions are rational. Both are honest. And when they meet on an app, with no one in the room to name the gap, they grind each other down.
He reads her caution as rejection. She reads his urgency as pressure. Two people who might genuinely be right for each other walk away convinced the other one “wasn’t serious” or “wanted too much too fast.” I have heard both halves of that exact story, from both sides, hundreds of times.
This is why the app era feels so brutal right now. Apps match faces and résumés. Nobody is matching intent. And intent is the thing that actually decides whether a relationship survives its first hard conversation.
What we changed because of it
At Lyons Elite, this shift rewrote our intake process. The question we press hardest in a first consultation is no longer “what’s your type.” It’s “what do you actually want this to become, and by when.” Then we make sure the person across the table from you has answered the same question honestly, before you ever meet.
When one person walks in wanting marriage and the other is still deciding, someone has to hold both truths at once. That’s the job now. Matching intent first, chemistry second. The couples that last are almost never the ones with the most in common on paper. They’re the ones who wanted the same thing at the same time and had the courage to say so early.
What this means if you’re single right now
If you’re a man who wants marriage: you are not desperate, you are not behind, and you are statistically the norm. Stop apologizing for clarity. The right woman will experience your directness as relief, because she has spent years dating men who couldn’t finish the sentence.
If you’re a woman who’s uncertain about marriage: your caution is data, not damage. But be honest with yourself about whether you’re rejecting marriage or rejecting the version of it you’ve witnessed. Those two answers lead to very different lives.
And if you’re either one of them: the numbers say the person you’re looking for exists in large supply. The problem was never scarcity. The problem is that the market lost its ability to sort by intent, and most people find out what someone really wanted about a year too late.
The reluctant groom is dead. The question is who’s brave enough to say what they want while it still counts.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do men want marriage more than women now?
According to Institute for Family Studies research, 68% of unmarried young men say they definitely want to marry, while the share of young women who want marriage has declined roughly 20 points over three decades. For the first time in the modern era, men’s desire for marriage now measurably exceeds women’s.
Why are fewer women interested in marriage?
Research points to diverging life priorities, career focus, and skepticism about whether traditional marriage serves women’s wellbeing. In practice, many women haven’t rejected partnership itself. They’re holding out for a version of marriage built on genuine equality.
How does a professional matchmaker handle couples with different timelines?
At Lyons Elite, intent-matching comes before chemistry-matching. We establish each client’s honest timeline and goals during intake, so no one is introduced to someone whose intentions fundamentally conflict with their own.
Is professional matchmaking better than dating apps for people who want marriage?
Apps match profiles. Matchmakers match intent. For people who are clear about wanting marriage, working with a matchmaker removes the single biggest source of wasted time in modern dating: discovering months in that the other person never wanted the same thing.
Emily Lyons is the founder and CEO of Lyons Elite, a luxury matchmaking firm serving successful singles across North America for 12 years.
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