The Rise of the Passport Bro
I caught up with a friend at a park the other day and we sat nearby a bunch of moms having a toddler meet up.
The moms were mostly white, in their mid to late 30s and wearing expensive Alo yoga gear that had magically de-aged their bodies. While their toddlers stared off into space, they sat there and complained about their significant others.
· “Steve orders things on Amazon same day delivery and he’s never there to pick these things up.”
· “I keep telling Ian that he needs to go see a therapist to unpack his childhood but he ignores me.”
You could have mistaken the cacophony of sounds they were making with a herd of geese.
As they waxed lyrically about their male tribulations, a South American woman – who looked like she had just made her way through the Darien Gap and then the US/Mexican border – was in the process of setting up a mango stand. She did this with an infant glued to her front. In contrast to the Manhattan moms, the mother and her infant were totally silent as they went about their business.
The Manhattan moms were oblivious to this South American mom, and she was oblivious to them.
As we watched this mom juxtaposition unfold, my friend who is nearing 40 and is still single – turned to me and said “I would rather shoot myself in the face than spend a day married to those yoga women.”
“Would you marry the mango stand lady” I asked him.
“In a heartbeat” he said.
His response turned my mind to something that has troubled me for a while – that is this growing disconnect in the marriage market in this country - people, especially educated people, are not getting married and not having kids.
While this affects both sexes, it has a more exquisite effect on women.
I have got many female friends who are beautiful and smart but somehow entering their late 30s and still single and it confuses me and it confuses them.
This phenomenon is clearly present in the data. In 1990 only 8% of women at age 40 had never been married. Today roughly 25% of women have never been married by age 40. That number is expected to double in the coming decade.
In my friend’s response was perhaps the seeds of why this disconnect was occurring.
So I pressed him further – “Would you really want to be married to a women who probably has a sixth-grade education over a girl who speaks the same language, went to the same schools and probably has 20 friends in common with you.”
He took a drag of his cigarette and thought for a second and said -
“Yes, I would take mango girl because she seems nice and appreciative and that wins over some over educated chick who went to Barnard and complains about Starbucks coffee and would be overjoyed if my kid turned out to be transgender.”
He took another drag of his cigarette and went on –
“Women in this country have been spending the last 50 years achieving all these things that men secretly don’t care about. We pretend to care that you went to a good school or that you have a nice career, but we don’t. And you get angry that we don’t. You want talk about how independent you are, great go be by yourself. If I get married, it is going to be to some chick from wherever that South American lady is from. She will be nice and appreciative.”
My friend was in other words dead set on becoming a “passport bro.”
This would have seemed like a laughable idea a generation ago – but today it is doable. 28.2% of all US employees now enjoy a hybrid work model - 85% within the tech space. Combine this with the discoverability inherent in dating apps, and you’ve got a much more fluid dating market.
A whole manosphere subculture has sprung up giving guidance to young American and Western men on how to go abroad and land an attractive “traditional” girl.
Given “passport bros” origins in right wing reddit, it has also generated its own counter reaction from progressives who take umbrage that men would do such a thing, calling the movement chauvinistic and exploitative (see here).
But the reality is that young men in the West today face a very different dating market than they did a generation ago.
For starters, women now think very differently from them politically - while male political views have stayed roughly the same, women have grown stridently more liberal.
Women also look a lot more different - the average American 30-year-old female weighed 144 lbs. in 1980. Today, they weigh 170 lbs.
They are getting more educated too - women now graduate from college at higher rates than men. But that in turn has lead to increasingly unrealistic expectations of what an ideal partner should be.
The viral TikTok song – I am looking for a man in finance, trust fund, 6’5, blue eyes – was meant to parody this. The influencer came up with the catchy hook after hearing her friends complain about the dating market in New York City.
However, as this follow on video shows, the odds of finding a man with all four of those qualities is unbelievably low – roughly 6 men in total in all of America would qualify.
While most women probably don’t have that specific a criterion, the vast majority of women are probably unaware of how high their standards are relative to the pool of available men. If you want a guy who is at least 6’0” (15% of the male population) and makes $100k (less than 10%) - you are looking at a cohort that comprises only 2% of American men.
You can see these very high standards play out on dating apps.
As this post points out, 20% of men are getting 78% of the swipes.
Given men in general are 6.2 times more likely to like – this means that there are small cohort of guys with a big pool of matches and a much larger cohort of men who have essentially no matches.
The chart below demonstrates how extreme the male disadvantage is all ends except the high end.
When all the women go after the same small group of men, you end up with a miserable dating market.
Rather than let my human intellect tell the story – will let ChapGPT do it….
The average American girl today is 5’4’’ and weighs roughly 170 lbs. This is how she looks.
She won’t settle for anything less than the rich tall finance bro.
But he has twenty versions of her and treats her terribly.
So the dating market ends up being some super depressing version of the below with people on dating apps going on unfulfilling dates. No one really connecting as expectations and reality are so mismatched.
If there was a way out of this hellscape you would undoubtedly take it – and some American men are. And they end up like this happy guy marrying a Ukrainian girl who wants a green card. Here at least, reality and expectations match on both sides.
Family formation is the most important hallmark of a well-functioning society. 2010s had the lowest household formation in recorded history. We have to start talking about the problem without either sex blasting the other.