Bed Over Backward

I'm a female college freshman. I was always told that college was the ideal place to find a partner. Disappointingly, there are many more women than men in my year. I want to date a guy and get to know him before having sex, but most of the women seem to hook up right away. I worry that I can't compete with them, as I'm not comfortable with that trend of behavior.

--Old-Fashioned

Your body is your temple! Unfortunately, much of your female competition on campus sees theirs that way, too -- only their temple's Angkor Wat, where there's a dude outside admitting the crowds with a clicker. Colleges have become degree-granting hookup-aterias. There are a number of reasons for this, but you point to a biggie in your email: Over the past 40 years, there's been a growing imbalance of women to men on campus. At the end of the 2020-21 academic year, women made up 59.5% of college students -- "an all-time high" -- to men's 40.5% (per The Wall Street Journal). That's almost three women for every two men...on average. Some campuses have an even worse guy-girl gap. Though we're all walking around with pocket supercomputers (which women can use to click their way to home delivery of reliable birth control), our psychology is still tuned for an ancestral world. For ancestral men, hooking up was evolutionarily optimal in a way it was not for our prehistoric lady ancestors. (Guys only get pregnant from sex in creepy sci-fi movies.) The ancestral Adonis with all the notches in his spear handle would likely have left more surviving descendants to pass on his genes. Sexual "economics" work like the monetary kind. An oversupply of women to men gives men the upper hand: transforming the mating "market" into one where men's evolved preferences rule. In short, women respond to the campus man famine (or more technically, the biased "sex ratio") "by offering sex without requiring high levels of commitment," explain evolutionary social psychologists Justin Moss and Jon Maner. Assuming you continue to give hooking up the thumbs down, you might shop for potential partners off-campus (at events or via dating sites), where male-female ratios are less imbalanced. This should keep you from needing to make certain sacrifices to compete for men -- like offering really great sex and throwing in a kidney. ... For pages and pages of "science-help" from me, buy my latest book, "Unf*ckology: A Field Guide to Living with Guts and Confidence." It lays out the PROCESS of transforming to live w/confidence.