Male shortage in Eastern Europe is reshaping the dating market

Moldova has 85 men for every 100 women: the male shortage in Eastern Europe explains dating behaviours that seem baffling from a Spanish perspective.

English · Original discussion in Spanish · Published

Why Eastern Europe has too many women and too few men

Why can an ordinary woman attract dozens of suitors on the other side of the former Iron Curtain? The most common answer in dating debates has nothing to do with beauty, but with a decidedly unsensun population table: demographics.

Men per 100 women: the figure that explains it all

The data are stubborn. In Moldova, there are 85.2 men for every 100 women. In Russia, 86.4. In Ukraine, 86.5. Belarus holds out with 88.0. The female share ranges between 53% and 54% across Eastern Europe as a whole. In other words: millions of women of dating age grow up in an environment where men are, literally, a scarce commodity.

That imbalance fuels two opposing readings. The first: male scarcity drives up a man's value, but it also leads many Dimitris, Artioms and Vlados to consider options that in Spain would be off their radar. The second, based on the same figure, argues exactly the opposite: when there is a female surplus, it is the women who compete for the man, and the dynamic works the other way around. Both rest on the same table; the upshot of the debates is that behaviour in the East is not a cultural mystery, but a reflection of the sens ratio.

Meanwhile, in Spain the conversation about why dynamics are different "over there" keeps ignoring the basic number: men per 100 women. The rest is bar-room psychology; the ratio, however, does not lie.

Also available in: Deutsch

Summary of a discussion on Burbuja.info - Foro de economía, actualidad y política., translated from Spanish and reviewed before publication. Read the full discussion (49 replies).

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