The problem goes back to how children are raised. Segregating genders, and when they are integrated, working them hard with some task to prevent socialization, is turning into a disaster.
If you keep a dog separated from other dogs as a puppy, when it grows up, it will still want to mate, but it will see other dogs as “the enemy”, not of their pack. Why should children be appreciably different?
The cultural norm is segregation until age 18, then children are expected to suddenly date, find a compatible partner, get married and have children.
No way this is going to happen.
“But don’t children get socialized in school and church?” Absolutely not. They are kept busy doing other things.
There actually *isn’t any* chaperoned social situation in much of the western world for children for any significant length of time, that also discourages voluntary gender segregation, over the course of more than a decade.
This means things get extremely difficult when children get adolescent urges to exhibit mating behavior. Girls inherently know to “show off” to attract boys, and boys know they are supposed to pay attention to girls doing this, but that’s about it. They have no idea how to interact with each other, though they want to.
And then, cultural perversity and pornography makes things much, much worse. If you were to poll high school students, they would be almost certain that their peers are having sex in healthy social relationships. A total lie, which they have been propagandized with their whole lives.
The truth is that even in high school, the relatively few children who are very sexually active were likely molested by relatives as young children. Their hopes for a happy, normal sexual life have pretty well been ruined. But the vast majority are intensely neurotic about it, thinking that they are uniquely ugly and unattractive.
If society wants happy marriages that produce cared for children, it is essential that boys and girls must understand each other like brothers and sisters. They must know how to work with each other, play with each other, intellectually and emotionally communicate with each other, know the others general strengths and weaknesses, and be willing to talk to each other.
Right now, men don’t want to court women because they think they are crazy, which they often appear to be because they don’t know what behavior is attractive. Women are frightened of men because men only know how to act around other men.
One of the best icebreakers I know is for a couple to know and practice therapeutic (healing, not erotic) massage on each other. And while it is a start, it is like trying to become literate as an adult, when you missed out on your education because you were illiterate. Once you are literate, you are still unlearned, but you might be able to make up for lost time. Yet you will never be as educated as someone who started as a child.
You make some good points. Our problems are foundational.