Women Are Choosing Virtual Boyfriends Over Real Men. And Honestly, Are We Surprised?

Welcome! I’m Ash BG, a toddler mum, writer, and founder of You Wanted This, a publication about modern motherhood, the mental load, and what relationships really look like after kids. I’m also the founder of Tether: The Mental Load App that helps make the invisible labour in your household visible. If you’re new here, I’m so glad you could join us. Pull up a chair. You don’t have to pretend you’re fine here.

Have you heard? Real boyfriends are out. Virtual ones are in.

Last year Vogue went viral for declaring that boyfriends were cringe and the internet erupted with outrage.

What do you mean women don’t want boyfriends??

Our brains could not comprehend the shift, considering women had spent thousands of years in competition for the safety, security, and social legitimacy that came with being chosen by a man.

Men were offended. Women were, depending on who you asked, either finally telling the truth, completely liberated or utterly unhinged.

And then a billion-dollar mobile game about falling in love with virtual men quietly proved that maybe Vogue had a point.

That’s right. Love and Deepspace popped up in 2024 and has made more than a billion dollars from tens of millions of players worldwide since.

Yes, it’s a video game, but more specifically it’s a romance simulation where women are falling in love with virtual men who are attentive and emotionally available and who never ever ask what is for dinner. The women playing don’t nag their virtual boyfriends, but they do throw them birthday parties, buy them drone light shows, and spend real money (no I mean significant money) on the experience of being with someone who actually notices them.

And, I’m sorry, but am I the only one who is not even remotely surprised by this?

So much of the conversation around Love and Deepspace has revolved around what on earth is wrong with the women using it. But I think this is absolutely the wrong line of questioning.

Because what if nothing is wrong with them? What if they are just the first generation of women with both the technology and the economic independence to vote with their wallets on what they actually want from a relationship?? And what if what they are voting for tells us something both devastating and really fucking important about what real relationships have been failing to provide to women?

The decentering of men

For the past several years a movement has been quietly growing online that I could not be more on board with.

Decentering men.

Women are now obsessed with removing romantic partnership from the centre of their identity, their plans, and their sense of what a successful life looks like and it’s a whole vibe.

The men who encounter this content tend to find it threatening, of course, but the women who discover it enjoy a collective exhale.

And the data suggests it is not just a social media phenomenon but it’s actually a demographic one.

In Australia, the marriage rate has more than halved since 1971, dropping from 13 marriages per 1,000 people to 5.5. The proportion of women without children has nearly doubled, from 8.5% in 1981 to 16.4% in 2021. Thirty percent of Australian women have never been married. Women are marrying later, divorcing more often (and on their own initiative) and increasingly choosing de facto arrangements or, heaven forbid, no partnership at all.

Globally, the picture is similar. In South Korea, where the gender equality conversation has been particularly spicy, young women are part of a movement called the 4B where they are openly rejecting dating, sex, marriage, and childbearing with men entirely. South Korea’s fertility rate has dropped to 0.75, the lowest ever recorded for any country.

Women are not fleeing relationships because they do not want connection. They are finally putting themselves first and negotiating their own terms. Because, surprise surprise, for a growing number of them, they’ve realised the current terms are not worth it.

Do women actually need men?

I will not deny that for a lot of human history, it would appear that women needed men for survival. For financial security, for physical protection, for the social legitimacy that came with a husband’s name. A woman without a man was sadly both economically vulnerable and socially suspect.

That has changed. No, not completely, not everywhere, not without ongoing structural barriers. But it has changed significantly.

Women in Australia now earn more bachelor’s degrees than men. They make up nearly half the workforce. They can own property, access credit, and build careers independently. They can have children without a partner through IVF and donor conception.

The fertility industry has changed the game dramatically. A woman in her thirties with financial stability can access donor sperm, IVF, and in many cases become a mother entirely on her own timeline, on her own terms, without negotiating with a partner about any of it.

Single mothers by choice are one of the fastest growing family structures in the Western world.

The freedom is liberating. The technology exists. The social acceptance is growing. The economic barriers, while real, are no longer insurmountable for many women.

Which brings us to the question that nobody quite wants to say out loud at a dinner party….

What, exactly, are men bringing to the table?

The case for real partnership

This is the part where I should mention that I’m happily married. Many people may find that shocking considering I spent a lot of my time on here complaining about marriage, but just because I believe that modern relationships should be better, fairer and more sustainable, doesn’t mean I don’t think happy relationships are possible.

In fact, that’s the whole point. I think it is attainable and I want to help people… attain it.

Studies consistently show that people in equitable, mutually supportive relationships report higher wellbeing, longer lives, better mental health, and more financial stability than people who are single.

But, and this is a big BUT, those benefits accrue most strongly when the partnership is genuinely equal, and when both partners contribute meaningfully to the emotional, domestic, and cognitive labour of the relationship.

Research also shows that married women have shorter lifespans than single women, that women initiate the vast majority of divorces (around 70% in Australia) most commonly citing emotional unavailability, lack of support, and feeling unseen. And then there’s the fact that women’s mental health consistently improves after divorce while men’s deteriorates.

I don’t know about you, but it’s pretty fucking obvious which of the sexes has historically been serving whom in the so-called sacred institution of marriage.

The case for real partnership is compelling, sure. But the case for the specific arrangement that most heterosexual relationships have defaulted to, in which she carries the mental load, the emotional labour, the domestic management, and the invisible infrastructure of two people’s lives, is considerably less so.

Are we really surprised?

So, honestly, are we really surprised that women are turning away from real relationships? Knowing everything we know??

We know that one woman is killed every week in Australia by a current or former partner. That the person most likely to kill a woman is not a stranger, but the person she lives with. The person she decided to build a life with.

We know that 349 women have been killed in domestic violence homicides in NSW alone since the year 2000 and that women who leave violent relationships are at the highest risk of being killed in the period immediately after leaving.

We know that the most dangerous thing a woman in an abusive relationship can do is try to escape it.

And then we ask, with genuine bewilderment, why women might be drawn to a relationship that cannot hurt them?

Really?

Perhaps because a virtual boyfriend cannot follow her. Cannot isolate her. Cannot monitor her phone or control her finances. Cannot kill her for leaving.

Of course it is appealing. The real version has a body count. The virtual one does not.

What women are actually paying for

Any sane person can see that women are not paying a billion dollars for romance, per se. They are paying for attentiveness and for the specific, daily experience of being noticed by someone who does not need to be asked to notice them.

The virtual boyfriend tracks her cycle and knows when her period is due. He prepares for her pain before she has to announce it. He remembers the small things. He shows up for the unglamorous moments of her life without being prompted.

This is not a fantasy about passion. It is a fantasy about the mental load being shared. About not having to manage someone else’s awareness of her. About existing in a relationship where she is not simultaneously the person who needs something and the person responsible for communicating that need clearly enough that someone else can respond to it.

Women are paying a billion dollars for the relief of not having to do that.

If that does not tell you something about the state of heterosexual relationships, I don’t know what would.

The uncomfortable question

We have a lot of language for what is wrong with virtual relationships. We say they are not real, they cannot grow, they cannot hold you close. They are a product designed to maximise your spending, not your wellbeing.

All of that is true, yes.

But why do we not apply the same rigorous scrutiny to real relationships that are also failing women? The real partner who does not track her cycle, does not notice when she is in pain, does not remember the small things, does not show up for the unglamorous moments? The real partner whose emotional availability requires her to do the invisible work of prompting it.

We do not ask whether that relationship is real in any meaningful sense either.

The virtual boyfriend remembers her period.

Does yours?

What men need to understand right now

(I hate that we have to explain this, but you know how fragile they can be.)

So to be clear, the decentering of men is not man-hating. It is not a gender war. It is a market correction.

Women are simply increasingly unwilling to subsidise men’s emotional underdevelopment with their time, their energy, their careers, and their safety. They are opting out of arrangements that cost them more than they deliver. They are choosing (and this should be a big wake up call to anyone who cares about the future of heterosexual relationships) to meet their needs elsewhere. Through friendships, through community, through the companion economy, through solo motherhood, through simply being alone.

The research on what makes men attractive partners to modern women is consistent yet still largely ignored. Women want emotional availability. Genuine partnership. Shared domestic labour. A man who notices without being asked. A man who contributes to the invisible work of a shared life rather than waiting to be assigned tasks from it.

These should not be impossible standards because they are the baseline that women have always provided consistently but so rarely received in return.

Remember that research on egalitarian men, the kind who genuinely share the mental load and show up fully in their relationships, shows they are happier, their partners are happier, their children have better outcomes, and their relationships are more stable.

The path to making real partnership competitive with the alternatives is not complicated.

It just requires men to show up in ways that women have been asking for, if they would just finally listen.

The question worth asking

I have no doubt that Love and Deepspace will keep growing and that the companion economy will keep expanding. And at the same time solo motherhood will keep rising and the marriage rate will keep falling.

And the response to all of this cannot simply be moral panic about women choosing pixels over people, or choosing themselves over partnership, or choosing donor sperm over a man who does not do his share.

The response has to be the harder question.

What would real partnership need to look like for women to choose it over all of the alternatives that are becoming increasingly available to them?

The answer is not complicated. Safety would be a good start. Equal. Attentive. Present.

The virtual boyfriend is not the competition.

The competition is the version of themselves that women are discovering they can be when they stop organising their lives around someone who was never organising his life around them.