Some of it is economics but some of it is the structure of relationship choice. Feminist scholar Eva Illouz in Why Love Hurts talks about the reasons why women find it hard to get into committed relationships where they feel safe having children:

https://www.amazon.com/Why-Love-Hurts-Sociological-Explanati...

Not least the idea that if you keep dating you can find somebody better than you've found so far -- a problem that's worse in large cosmopolitan cities where the dating pool is large and perceived to be large.

Her worst crackpot idea was the "date-me experiment" where, looking for a long term partner, she got roughly 10⁴ guys to fill out a form, scored them, dated a few from the very top, and decided that they were not keepers.

It goes against everything we know about love. Stendhal, who was no monogamist, wrote that falling in love was a process of "crystallization" in his classic On Love [1] in which case the person you are falling in love with seems absolutely singular [2] If, on the other hand, you are looking at it from the viewpoint of this is a selection process that is a long and wide funnel, you will never feel this person is singular.

Authors like Slater [3] and Illouz [4] agree that the problem with online dating is that, like Aella, you imagine you're selecting people from a vast pool and that you could always find somebody better if you just sampled more -- so you never fall in love.

Aella's popularity is an interesting question, as I've observed her over time my impression of her intelligence and judgement has gone down as she keeps falling into the most obvious traps, but the rationalist movement she's associated with is selected for incredulosity (e.g. making a Harry Potter fanfic a canon work will do that) and there is not a lot of quality information about sex out there. (When my evil twin went looking for answers in the stacks of a big academic library we were convinced that those answers were not there.)

[1] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/53720/53720-h/53720-h.htm

[2] as that state of limerence is a temporary thing nothing stops you from feeling it for different people at different times while still harboring less intense feelings for one or more of them (the point is not mono vs poly but rather Aella is far beyond poly)

[3] https://www.amazon.com/Love-Time-Algorithms-Technology-Meeti...

[4] https://www.amazon.com/Why-Love-Hurts-Sociological-Explanati...

That's kinda unfair to the incel. (Musk has like 12 kids now, doesn't sound like an incel to me!)

If you are neurodivergent and were bullied in elementary school, dating in high school is a retraumatization where nothing seems possible and you might find that when you "grow up" there aren't any places to meet people your own age (e.g. go to a "rock concert" and you just meet boomers)

Feminist scholar Eva Illouz points out that many women chase men they find "easy to love" who have no interest in committing to them because they don't have to

https://www.amazon.com/Why-Love-Hurts-Sociological-Explanati...

meantime a lot of guys who have challenges get bitter and sucked into toxic social movements.

See what it is like from a women's perspective

https://www.amazon.com/Why-Love-Hurts-Sociological-Explanati...

PG's talk about it reminds me of Rush Limbaugh talking about Net Neutrality. I disagreed with Rush about most things but most of the time I thought Rush had some understanding of the issues he talked about. His opposition to Net Neutrality came across as completely ignorant, he didn't seem to know what it was, he was just against it because the phone company told him to be against it, the same way that my son's trans friend hates J. K. Rowling because somebody told them to.

Unlike PG I can point to specific men and women, some trans, who have been hurt by it. That's a step up in evidence.

I've spent plenty of time looking at conference proceedings, review articles and such in the social sciences. If a literature search turns up a conclusive conclusion about anything it's because somebody wrote one paper and nobody followed it up for 20 years.

Also see

https://medium.com/@gettingfrankpodcast/kings-of-the-hill-ho...

and the problem that women often aren't attracted to men who will commit to them until it is too late, see

https://www.amazon.com/Why-Love-Hurts-Sociological-Explanati...

Woman, as they get older, find that “good” men are hard to find, see

https://www.amazon.com/Why-Love-Hurts-Sociological-Explanati...

the problem has a nearly straight line relationship with many men feeling shut out of dating at an earlier age, and if more men withdraw into fantasy women will only suffer for it later on.

The conventional analysis is that this is the worst possible way to look for love.

(1) Eva Illouz in

https://www.amazon.com/Why-Love-Hurts-Sociological-Explanati...

and many other modern authors will say that the longer of a list of lovers you have to choose from the less likely you will choose any of them. Whether you are evaluating a large number of prospects with a large list of criteria (Date me) or evaluating a large number of prospects based on photos (Tinder) the key thing is that the more people you look at the more choices you imagine you have, the more you believe you’ll find somebody better if you look a little longer and the less likely you are to pick any of them.

(2) Stendhal in his classic “On Love”

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/53720/53720-h/53720-h.htm

describes how falling in love involves a process of “crystallization” in which your love object appears to be singular and absolutely unique. The process of evaluating a long list is the opposite of this. Even if you are polyamorous and believe you can maintain multiple love relationships over time, that part of it where you are head over heels over someone (e.g. “new relationship energy”) is something you feel for one person at a time.