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# Where Have All the Single Men Gone?
- URL: https://www.odeesy.com/where-have-all-the-single-men-gone/
- Published: 2026-08-10T11:57:54.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-24T15:15:19.000Z
- Description: After 40, plenty of women still want to meet someone. A good man. Single, emotionally available — preferably all three at once. So why do they seem increasingly difficult to find?
- Author: Odeesy
- Tags: Dating

*After 40, plenty of women still want to meet someone. A good man. Single, emotionally available — preferably all three at once. And yet, listening to them, this particular species can seem surprisingly difficult to encounter in its natural habitat.*

Lately, I've been talking about love with women over 40 living in different parts of Europe. Different cities, different lives, different ways of meeting people — and yet, after dozens of conversations, certain frustrations begin to sound remarkably familiar.

Some of these conversations started online, others happened more informally. They don't constitute a survey, and I'm certainly not suggesting that a conversation in London tells us what women in Copenhagen, Barcelona or Milan are experiencing. But when women who don't know one another, living in different places, start asking variations of the same question, it becomes difficult not to get curious.

**Where are the men?**

Not men in general. They still exist. A brief visit to almost any European café terrace should provide sufficient evidence.

The men these women are talking about are single men, roughly their age, emotionally available, attractive to them and genuinely interested in building something with a woman like them.

And that, apparently, is where the search becomes complicated.

## “I'm not exactly asking for George Clooney”

Let's call her Murielle. That's not her real name, and her story brings together several experiences women have shared with me.

She's in her fifties. Her children are older. She has friends, a career, a social life and no particular desire to be rescued by anyone. She'd simply quite like to meet someone.

Not necessarily the love of her life by next Thursday. A man she'd actually want to have a second drink with would already feel like encouraging progress.

The problem, she tells me, is that she no longer really knows where to look.

The men in her social circle are mostly married. The activities she joins tend to attract considerably more women than men. And on dating apps, the promised abundance can sometimes resemble one of those enormous buffets where, inexplicably, nothing looks particularly appetising.

There are the men looking primarily for sex. Those who begin a perfectly ordinary conversation before making a surprisingly athletic turn towards their anatomy. Those who vanish. The fake profiles. And then there are the men whose relationship status turns out to be rather more nuanced than the little “single” box initially suggested.

Murielle isn't desperate. She's puzzled.

And she is clearly not alone.

## What women's profiles tell us

There's something fascinating about reading dating profiles. They tell you what people want, of course. But they also tell you, indirectly, what they've encountered before and have absolutely no desire to encounter again.

On the profiles of many women over 40, certain words appear again and again: **honesty, loyalty, fidelity, respect**.

And occasionally, something considerably less romantic:

> **“No married men.”**

Or:

> **“If you're not actually single, please move on.”**

When you see it once, you barely notice. When you start seeing variations of it repeatedly, it begins to tell a story.

People generally don't write “please don't bring a llama” on their dating profile. It simply isn't a sufficiently recurring problem to warrant the warning.

If women feel the need to specify that they're not interested in married men, presumably enough of them have encountered one for the subject to be more than anecdotal.

That doesn't mean dating apps are populated by an invading army of unfaithful husbands. These are observations from conversations, not a representative survey.

But they raise a question Odeesy will certainly want to explore:

**What are men who already have someone doing on dating apps?**

The obvious answer is sex.

I suspect it's incomplete.

## Being loved isn't always the same as feeling desired

This is where the subject becomes less comfortable — and much more interesting.

A relationship can be loving and still become predictable. Two people can love one another and miss the intensity of the beginning. They can build a family, share thousands of meals, holidays, illnesses, projects and the Wi-Fi password, and still reach a point where one or both realise that nobody has looked at them like a stranger across a bar in a very long time.

And then there is sex.

Sex can become less frequent, more predictable, occasionally scheduled or sometimes disappear altogether. The reasons are many and concern women just as much as men. But the desire to feel desired doesn't necessarily disappear when sex within the relationship does.

Perhaps that's where seduction re-enters the picture.

A match on an app doesn't require anyone to actually do anything. At least, not yet. It simply says: *someone I don't know looked at me and chose me.*

For somebody who hasn't felt seen that way for a long time, that tiny movement of a thumb can be surprisingly powerful.

None of this excuses deception or infidelity. Understanding a behaviour isn't the same as absolving it. But if Odeesy is going to talk honestly about modern relationships, these are precisely the uncomfortable places worth exploring: the places where love, desire, loyalty and frustration stop lining up quite so neatly.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/be/f4/bef4a99f-df89-43c1-be29-c2f62951e375/content/images/2026/08/single-guy.jpg)

Photo by [John Lord Vicente](https://unsplash.com/@john%5Fvicente26?utm%5Fsource=unsplash&utm%5Fmedium=referral&utm%5Fcontent=creditCopyText) on [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/photos/a-man-standing-on-top-of-a-rock-near-the-ocean-i8f6-%5FEJ5Fs?utm%5Fsource=unsplash&utm%5Fmedium=referral&utm%5Fcontent=creditCopyText)

## So where are the single ones?

Because they do exist.

The more interesting question may not be where *men* have disappeared to, but why available women and available men seem to have such difficulty finding one another.

One possible explanation is simply age.

At 25, life does a surprising amount of matchmaking for us. We study, change jobs, go out more, meet friends of friends, share flats, move cities and travel on very little money with a heroic tolerance for terrible mattresses.

Twenty-five years later, our lives may be more comfortable, but they're also considerably more organised.

There is work, family, perhaps children every other week, long-established friendships and routines we've spent years perfecting. We tend to know people who know roughly the same people we already know.

And nobody rings the doorbell at 8.15 on a Tuesday evening to introduce us to the next great love of our life.

Technology was supposed to solve this.

In theory, it has done so brilliantly. Within minutes, a dating app can introduce us to people our ordinary lives would never have allowed us to meet — across neighbourhoods, cities and sometimes borders.

But it has simultaneously created something else: **the perception of almost infinite choice**.

The person in front of us is no longer being compared with the three eligible people we happened to meet this month. Consciously or not, they're being compared with the hundreds waiting behind them on a screen.

One minor imperfection can be enough to wonder whether somebody slightly taller, funnier, more interesting or simply better at choosing profile pictures might be only three swipes away.

## And then there's age

This may be one of the more sensitive parts of the conversation.

Several women I've spoken with believe that men their age are often looking for younger women.

Is that actually true? How widespread is it? Does it vary between countries, cities or dating cultures? And if it is happening, why?

For now, I'd rather leave those questions open than turn a few dozen conversations into a universal truth.

But if the phenomenon is real, it inevitably creates a particular imbalance. A 52-year-old woman hoping to meet a man between, say, 48 and 58 isn't quite searching in the same pool as a 52-year-old man whose dating preferences are set between 35 and 49.

We'll need to ask men what they're actually looking for — and perhaps be prepared to hear their answers without immediately judging them.

We also need to understand what dating apps feel like from their side. The male experience of online dating can be radically different from the female one. What many women experience as an abundance of often disappointing attention may, for some men, look more like very few matches, very few replies and a considerable amount of rejection.

Two entirely different frustrations can coexist perfectly well on the same app.

And this is one of the questions that becomes particularly interesting when looking across Europe. Do people date differently in London and Lisbon? Does approaching someone feel different in Copenhagen than in Milan? Are dating apps filling the same social gap in Amsterdam, Berlin or Barcelona?

Perhaps the frustrations are remarkably similar. Perhaps they aren't.

That's something worth finding out.

## Perhaps we've become harder to meet, too

There's one final possibility, and it's a little less comfortable because it means we can't blame everything on apps, men, women or the modern world.

At 40, 50 or 60, few of us arrive at a new relationship empty-handed.

We bring a history, habits, perhaps children, an ex-partner, a geography, a preferred side of the bed, friends we love, a lifestyle, opinions, a sexuality, favourite ways to spend a holiday and occasionally a remarkably firm conviction about the correct way to load a dishwasher.

More importantly, we know far more clearly what we don't want anymore.

That's probably a good thing.

But it changes the nature of meeting someone. It may no longer be enough simply to like them. We also need to imagine how this person could fit into a life that already works reasonably well without them.

And suddenly the apparently simple idea of a “good man” becomes surprisingly sophisticated.

Good, certainly. But also single, attractive, interesting, stable, funny without being exhausting, independent without being distant, affectionate without being suffocating, sexually compatible, geographically convenient and, ideally, entirely free of neuroses while remaining deeply understanding of our own.

At this point, George Clooney is beginning to look like the pragmatic option.

## So, where have all the single men gone?

I don't have the answer yet.

And I rather like it that way.

Odeesy shouldn't become a place that explains to women “how men work”, or tells men what “women really want”. Anyone who claims to have reduced four billion people to ten simple principles probably deserves a little healthy distance.

I'd rather go and look.

Listen to women, certainly, but also find the men: the ones who are single, the ones who divorced and no longer want to live with someone, the ones who left dating apps altogether, the ones who would like to meet someone but no longer approach women, the ones who prefer younger partners, the ones who are perfectly happy alone, and the ones who have been searching for years and are equally mystified about where all the women who supposedly want to meet them have gone.

And I'd like to do that across borders. Because if Odeesy is going to explore modern love, it shouldn't assume that a woman in Stockholm, a man in Madrid and a divorced parent in London are necessarily navigating the same romantic landscape.

Occasionally, we'll probably need to talk to the people who aren't single at all, too. Because they may have something important to tell us about desire, relationships and what human beings continue to look for after they're supposed to have already found it.

Somewhere between what women imagine men want and what men are actually experiencing lies a territory far more complicated than the few inches of a phone screen.

That's the territory Odeesy wants to explore.

**So let's start here. If you're a single woman over 40, where do you still try to meet men? And if you're a single man over 40: where are you — and what are you looking for?**

*Some names have been changed and some experiences combined to protect the anonymity of the people who shared their stories.*

**What about you?**

What does dating look like from your side? Where do you meet people today? What are you looking for — and what makes it difficult?

Whether you're single or in a relationship, a woman or a man, we'd love to hear your experience. Your answers can remain anonymous and may help shape future Odeesy articles.