In today's society in first world countries women are increasingly holding all the cards. The dating game - or courting, as it were - had passed from generations largely unchanged for centuries. Much less time for romance when your time is split between farming and praying. Fighting off illnesses were a full time job, and your levels of success depended upon how many, out of the kids you could knock out, would survive. So get busy! Then there are the steady increments of modernisation through the Industrial revolution; mostly for the rich who could now afford a couple's retreat for two in some remote Victorian health spa, whilst I can only imagine the urban slums made for a bountiful breeding ground.
Then in the last 50 years... bang. Permissivity was one huge bomb, just chucked into most societies of the first world during the 60s. Game had changed; well, sort of. Whilst women still had to be kept white for their wedding day, a bachelor transformed from the sad and lonely image of a romantically inept, socially desolate pitiful loner into a mischievious jack-the-;lad, a coming of age process, an enviable cad, top points scorer in the game of 'manhood'. Then, a much slower burn, you get the equalising of women's rights. Now, just try and marry the traditional concepts of the male and female; men as protectors, providers, owners, landlords, financiers, directors, commanders, foundations and thus supreme head of their housholds to the rather unimportant job of unwanted sperm donor. You take away their control or at least their powerful infliuence and men no longer control relationships at all. It's hard for plenty of men to make sense of their position in a bewildering landscape.
If women are forging their own careers and recently for the first time ever more women are in higher education and employment, meaning women on average as a whole will be the better employed, higher skilled, higher paid and more important component of the workforce, and that given all the dangers of nature both human or otherwise are kept at all times at by by various mechanisms of safekeeping, then men have nothing to protect from and lesser means to provide for. It also leaves women in a bit of a fix. They *desire* the old school take-charge rough and tumble, but in reality they need someone who functions in this new arena, and it's not really possible to have both.