I’m afraid it’s a common misconception that it does support it, when in fact it shows something completely different. The best way to think about is like this. Imagine there are one hundred people, imagine eighty of them are male and twenty of them are female.

Imagine all of them signing up to a dating app, inevitably, what will happen is that the top twenty of the eighty men will have a high probability of succeeding with the twenty available women, the next ten men below that will likely have a chance of competing. The rest of the men pretty much have no hope because there are not enough women available for them to connect with in the place they are looking.

That’s where the myth of the 80/20 rule comes from. The real problem is simply the fact that dating apps are not female-friendly so women don’t sign up to them in anywhere near large enough numbers, but real-life meets are not very male-friendly so men don’t approach women as much in the real world any longer.

This creates a situation where the majority of men and the majority of women are simply in a situation where it is difficult to form romantic connections simply because it is difficult to find people to connect with romantically.

In a way think of it like this, eighty percent of men are looking online while eighty percent of women are looking offline. Considering there is 50–50 split between men and women, it’s a fair bet that you end up with a situation where it’s difficult for men and women to connect when there is such a disparity between the numbers of people hoping to connect in different places.

So, the reason it is difficult to find people to connect with romantically, is that the majority of men and women are predominantly hoping to meet people in different places to each other. Men on dating apps, women in the real world.

This creates an imbalance where the men and women who are skilled at dating do really well while everyone else really struggles.