The Marriage Recession: When Dating Became a Market — and the Market Stopped Working

Field notes from three weeks of conversations in Addis Ababa, Nairobi, and what economics, biology, and African philosophy have to say about a society quietly forgetting how to form families.

By Dr. Julius Kirimi Sindi — The Daily Pulse | Tuesday, 26 May 2026

For three weeks, I have been listening.

In Nairobi sitting rooms, at WhatsApp-organised brunches, on the edge of conferences in Addis Ababa, in the spaces between two glasses of wine, I have been hearing one quietly devastating sentence in slightly different costumes:

"There are no long-term good men. And the ones available are wasting our time."

The women saying this are not bitter. They are not lazy thinkers. They are accomplished. They are kind. Several of them are in their early thirties, a few in their forties; some carry doctorates, some run companies, some run NGOs, some run households. They have done what their grandmothers were told to do — go to school, work hard, build yourself — and they have done it well. And now, at the supposed reward window, they are looking around the room and discovering that the men have either disappeared, downgraded, or decided that adulthood is optional.

It is tempting to laugh this off as a Dakar, Addis, Nairobi cocktail-circuit complaint. It is, in fact, a global signal flare. From Kigali to Kinshasa, Lagos to Johannesburg, Accra to Cairo, Dakar to Lilongwe — and well beyond Africa — the same conversation is taking place in the same hushed tone. Something has gone wrong in the great market in which human beings find one another, decide to stay, and build the next generation.

And it is, indeed, a market. Pretending otherwise is the first mistake.

This essay is an attempt to take that complaint seriously — without flattening men into Homer Simpson or sanctifying women into Marge — and to ask the harder question hiding behind it: is the social fabric already torn, and if so, what do we owe the family of the future?

Love was always a market. We just decorated it.

For most of human history, marriage was not a romantic project. It was an economic infrastructure. Families married for land, protection, labour, inheritance, alliances, social mobility, and survival. Love often arrived later, sometimes never, and the elders did not pretend it was the point.

In African tradition, this was not a scandal — it was sacred administration. Bride price, lobola, mahari, ruracio — these were not crude commerce; they were communal underwriting. Two families were entering into a contract with witnesses, obligations, and recourse. The aunties were the due diligence team. The uncles were the credit committee. The clan was the regulator. The community was the enforcement mechanism. When a marriage cracked, there were people whose entire social function was to make repairs more affordable than divorce.

Then came prosperity, the city, and the smartphone — and we proceeded, over two short generations, to dismantle every one of those institutions while keeping the expectations they used to underwrite.

What changed in modernity was not human nature. What changed was that prosperity allowed us to romanticise what had always been economic. Beneath the wedding playlist and the Instagram reels, economics never left the building. Research across cultures consistently shows that, on average, women place a higher weight on financial stability and ambition in long-term partners, while men weight physical attractiveness and youth more heavily. This is neither women's greed nor men's superficiality. It is the residue of a million years in which pregnancy, child-rearing, and social vulnerability imposed greater biological and economic costs on women — and in which youth and health were the most legible signal of male reproductive fitness for men.

Women did not evolve to optimise for romance. They evolved to optimise for survival. And in a continent where the social safety net is still mostly a sister-in-law or relative with a working M-Pesa account, that evolution remains rationally up to date.

The Akerlof problem at the pub

Now place those ancient instincts inside a smartphone.

In 1970, the economist George Akerlof published a small paper that won him the Nobel Prize. It was called The Market for Lemons, and it argued that when buyers cannot tell the difference between a good used car and a bad one, the market collapses inwards: sellers of good cars exit (because they cannot get a fair price), buyers become suspicious of everyone, prices fall, quality falls further, trust evaporates, and eventually you have a market in which only the lemons remain.

This, my friends, is what has happened to dating.

The smartphone era has created a courtship market with catastrophic information asymmetries. A profile photo lies about age, lighting, height, and the year. A bio lies about ambition and hobbies. A first date lies by performance. WhatsApp lies by curation. Instagram lies by aesthetic. Everyone is selling. Almost no one is being inspected.

In Akerlof's car market, the rational buyer assumes the worst and lowballs every seller; honest sellers withdraw, and the market is left with lemons trading at lemon prices. In the dating market, the rational woman assumes the man is wasting her time until proven otherwise, and the rational man assumes the woman is shopping until proven otherwise. Both are correct often enough to keep the suspicion alive. The serious people — and they exist, in significant numbers, on both sides — retreat, exhausted. The market for marriage thins. The market for situationships thrives.

Add a few more economic features, and the picture sharpens:

Search and matching costs (the Nobel-winning work of Mortensen and Pissarides on labour markets translates almost verbatim to romance) have collapsed thanks to apps — which sounds good but is not. When search is cheap, people search forever. When the next option is one swipe away, the current option is always provisional. Economists call this the "option value of waiting." Single women call it "he hasn't introduced me to his mother in two years."

Signalling theory (Michael Spence's Nobel work) says that in markets with asymmetric information, costly signals are how the honest separate themselves from the cheap. A degree signals diligence. A ring signals commitment. A wedding signals intent witnessed by the community. The crisis of modern dating is that almost every traditional signal has become free or counterfeit. Anyone can buy flowers, drive a Kadudu car. Anyone can text "good morning, love." Anyone can post a couple selfie. Cheap signals do not separate the serious from the playful. They merely lengthen the audition.

Hyperbolic discounting (the human tendency to over-weigh immediate rewards versus future ones) explains why a man with two perfectly viable options for life will often choose, this Friday, the third option whose only virtue is novelty. The future wife is abstract. The current vibe is vivid. We are wired for the vivid.

Dating apps did not invent any of these problems. They industrialised them.

Why women are right to worry about time

Here is where I must defend, against the prevailing internet noise, the rationality of the women I have been listening to.

Time is not gender-neutral. It is the single most asymmetric variable in the entire dating equation.

A woman's fertility window is roughly two decades long, and it tapers — gently in her twenties, less gently in her thirties, sharply after thirty-seven. A man's fertility window is, biologically, much longer, though we are now learning it is not infinite. His market value in the modern dating economy, however, tends to rise with age — income, status, confidence, social proof — well into his forties.

This produces an economically perverse outcome: as a high-achieving African woman ages from 28 to 38, her biological clock tightens and her pool of available equal-or-higher-status men actually shrinks, because the men her age either (a) are already married, (b) are still chasing the version of her she was at 24, or (c) have discovered that being a "high-value man" is a hobby with no closing date.

Meanwhile her own perceived market value, measured by the cruel metric of how the market actually behaves, peaks and starts to decline precisely as her readiness, wisdom, and clarity peak. The market punishes maturity in women and rewards immaturity in men. This is not a feminist slogan. It is an arbitrage opportunity that we, as a civilisation, have decided to tolerate.

When a woman says, he is wasting my time, she is not being dramatic. She is doing actuarial science.

Why men are stalling — and what "wasting time" actually means

To balance the ledger, let us also tell the truth about men.

A great deal of what looks like "wasting time" is, on closer inspection, a man who genuinely does not know if he is ready, cannot afford to be ready, and has not been told by anyone in his life that he should hurry up. The institutions that used to push men toward commitment — fathers, uncles, churches, mosques, employers offering family-friendly career ladders, communities that gave you a slightly disapproving look when you turned thirty-three with no wife and no plan — have largely gone quiet.

In African cities, this stalling has a particularly sharp economic edge. Between 8 million and 11 million African youth enter the labour market every year, while only about 3 million new formal wage jobs are created annually. Only nine percent of young people in Africa have completed tertiary education as of 2025. A young man in Nairobi, Kampala, or Kinshasa is being asked to perform the role of provider in a labour market that has, for two decades, refused to pay him a provider's wage. He is then expected to raise the ruracio, fund a wedding, secure housing, and convince a bride's family he is a safe bet — all on an income that may not cover a single quarter's rent.

So some men stall because they cannot afford to stop stalling. Others stall because the dating market itself has taught them that being non-committal is profitable. Why marry one woman when seven will accept a "we'll see"? Let us follow the rave.

Both stories are true. Both lead to the same outcome — a generation of women who can hear their own clocks but cannot find a partner whose watch is set to the same time.

But let us also be honest: a meaningful slice of men are not stalling because of structural pressure. They are stalling because the market has handed them an asymmetric option and they are exercising it. Women who say this are not slandering men. They are reading the residuals.

The pool is smaller than the slogans admit

In the Western and some countries in Africa, like Kenya, the version of this conversation, the simple story is that women have surged ahead educationally and economically while men have stalled, producing a "shrinking pool" of acceptable partners. In Africa, the story is more complicated and, in some ways, more brutal.

Sub-Saharan Africa still has the lowest tertiary enrolment in the world, at just nine to ten percent, compared with a global average above forty percent. Sixty percent of young people in SSA who are not in education, employment or training are women, and female graduates face higher unemployment rates than their male counterparts. In South Africa, young women are seventy percent more likely than young men to have a degree, yet their unemployment rate is fifty-seven percent versus forty-nine percent for men, and they earn roughly six percent less when they do find work.

In other words, the African dating market is not just a story of women winning and men losing. It is a story of both facing brutal labour markets, with women paying a double tax: they study more, they earn less, they are unemployed at higher rates, and they carry the caregiving expectations of an entire continent. The "shrinking pool" here is not principally a male-failure story. It is a structural-economy story in which both genders are being squeezed, and the dating market is simply where the squeeze becomes legible.

This matters because the policy implication is not "women, lower your standards." It is: fix the labour market, fix the housing market, fix the cost of forming a household, and the dating market will start producing families again. Romance is a downstream phenomenon.

The trust recession is the real crisis

Underneath the data sits a quieter collapse: people increasingly do not trust each other.

Men fear being valued only for the wallet. Women fear being valued only for the body. Both fear being used. Both fear being replaced. Social media monetises that fear daily, because outrage out-performs nuance on every algorithm yet designed. So instead of honest conversations between flawed adults trying to build something durable, we get ideological tribalism — "all men are trash," "women only want money," "feminism destroyed relationships," "masculinity is toxic." None of these slogans has ever built a family. None has ever raised a child. None has ever held a hand at a hospital bed at 3 am.

And here, Africa carries a specific wound. We used to outsource trust to the community. The auntie network was an information clearing house with century-long memory and zero diplomatic immunity. If a man was a known philanderer in Kakamega, the women in Nakuru somehow knew within a fortnight. The pastor knew his deacons' households. The chief knew whose family had a habit of beating their wives. This was not a perfect system — it could be cruel, intrusive, gendered, gossipy — but it was an information system, and it dramatically reduced the lemons problem.

Urbanisation, migration, and digitisation have dismantled that information system without replacing it. We now date strangers in apartment blocks where we do not know our neighbours, in cities where our parents have never been, vetted by Instagram captions and Bumble bios. We have all the freedom our grandmothers never had, and almost none of the information they took for granted. We took the auntie network offline and called it progress.

What Africa is quietly losing

The marriage recession would matter even if it were only a private sadness. But it is not private. It is fiscal, demographic, and civilisational.

Kenya's total fertility rate has dropped to 3.21 children per woman in 2024, well below historical levels and on a clear downward trajectory; urban Kenyans already have meaningfully lower fertility than rural Kenyans. Across Sub-Saharan Africa, nonmarital childbearing is rising significantly, signalling a structural shift in how families are forming — or failing to form. In Nairobi specifically, registered marriages have risen — from 3,796 in 2020 to 5,826 in 2024 — even as anecdotal evidence suggests informal and customary unions are weakening. The picture is not a simple collapse. It is a sorting: those who marry now marry formally and visibly; those who do not, increasingly do not marry at all.

The economic implications are uncomfortable. Africa's social safety net is, overwhelmingly, the family. Pensions are thin. Long-term care is virtually nonexistent. Children remain old-age insurance. When marriage rates fall, when fertility falls, when household formation falls, we are choosing to face old age without the institution that historically carried us through it. And we are doing this just as the West, having tried the experiment for fifty years, is now staring at care-home crises, demographic decline, and a loneliness epidemic its medical establishment now classifies as a public health risk equivalent to smoking.

We are walking, in real time, into a wall that other civilisations have already hit, while telling ourselves we are too modern to notice the wall.

Is the social fabric torn? A Sankofa reply.

This is the question I keep being asked over the third glass of wine, when the laughter is done and the women lower their voices: Sindi, are we cooked? Is this it?

I do not think we are cooked. But I think we are unserious in a way we cannot afford to remain.

The Akan have a wisdom older than our economics textbooks. Sankofa — "go back and fetch what was forgotten." It is not a call to return to the past. It is a discipline of returning to retrieve what was true, so that we may carry it into a future the past could not have imagined.

What we forgot was not patriarchy. We are not — and must not be — nostalgic for forced marriages, cleansing rituals, or the kind of marital arithmetic in which a woman's silence was an admission charge. What we forgot is the architecture of mutual obligation. We forgot that family is not a feeling. It is a contract witnessed by a community, sustained by daily choice, defended by reputation, and bound by something larger than chemistry.

Ubuntu — "I am because we are" — is not a slogan for tourism brochures. It is the most demanding moral philosophy on the continent. It says that personhood is not a private project. It is a relational achievement. You become a full human being not because of what you have, but because of how you are bound to others.

A dating market that produces only situationships is, by this measure, producing only partial people. Not because being single is failure — it is not — but because a culture that systematically blocks people from forming durable mutual obligations is starving them of a primary route to becoming who they are.

A negotiated partnership

So what does the family of the future look like, if it is not the rigid script of the past and not the algorithmic chaos of the present?

I think it is what I will call negotiated partnership: two adults sitting down — early, often, and without performance — and acknowledging that attraction matters, money matters, emotional intelligence matters, stability matters, ambition matters, kindness matters, timing matters, fertility matters, faith matters where it is shared, family matters, and that character matters most when life becomes difficult. Because life will become difficult. Every marriage eventually meets unemployment, sickness, aging, betrayal of one form or another, sacrifice, and grief. At that meeting, abs do not show up. Instagram aesthetics do not show up. The TikTok dance does not show up. What shows up is character — yours, his, hers — and the silent infrastructure of obligation you both built when no one was watching.

This is also, by the way, a policy agenda, and we should stop pretending otherwise. African governments that want healthy families should think hard about housing costs, youth employment, the absurd expense of weddings, the disappearing institutions that used to scaffold young couples, the absence of family-friendly workplace policy, the under-regulation of dating-app design, and the moral economy of fatherhood. Family formation is the cheapest social safety net any society can build. Letting it quietly collapse is the most expensive policy error any society can make.

But governments cannot do this alone. Faith communities have a role. Aunties have a role. Fathers have a role. Friends have a role. The boys' WhatsApp group has a role — and a particularly underused one. A culture that decided to gently shame men out of "wasting women's time," and to gently shame women out of holding men to standards they themselves have not lived up to, would do more for African families in five years than any policy paper.

After the algorithms

After the swipes, the filters, the curated photos, the bios optimised for engagement, the situationships rebranded as freedom, the gender-war content optimised for outrage, the dating coaches selling courses, and the third glass of wine at a Nairobi sitting room where another accomplished woman is quietly saying I am tired — after all of it, human beings are still searching for the same ancient thing.

Someone safe enough to build a life with.

Someone who will show up when the diagnosis is bad.

Someone who will not disappear when the bank balance is lower than the rent.

Someone who will be a witness to your existence, and ask to be witnessed in return.

We are not going to algorithm our way back to that. We are going to Sankofa our way back to it — by retrieving the parts of our oldest wisdom that were always true, dressing them in clothes the twenty-first century can wear, and being adult enough to say what every grandmother on this continent has always known:

A family is not a feeling. It is a covenant.

And a covenant, unlike a vibe, is something you can pass on.

Dr. Julius Kirimi Sindi writes The Daily Pulse on African development, economics, policy, philosophy, and the institutions that quietly hold our societies together. Subscribe and join the conversation.

About the Author

Dr. Julius Kirimi Sindi is a global expert in research funding, policy impact, and donor relations. With extensive experience in analyzing philanthropy, business, and science funding, Dr. Sindi fosters sustainable and inclusive research ecosystems. He has facilitated international business relationships across Africa, Europe, and Asia. His upcoming book, "The Blueprint of Life Well Lived," explores successful strategies for navigating complex business environments while achieving sustainable growth. He is the author of an upcoming book "How Societies Change and Why Most Reforms Fail," which introduces an African Theory of Scaling rooted in emotional truth, political safety, and system coherence. I hope to publish "CHANGING THE BATTERIES - How to Renew Purpose, Growth, and Connection When Your Light Grows Dim" as soon as possible. He is also the creator of The Daily Pulse, a widely read LinkedIn newsletter offering sharp, human-centered analysis of policy, politics, and development.